BASEBALL'S PIVOTAL ERA, 1945--1951

Marshall delivers a thoughtful and detailed picture of the crucial postwar years when baseball rallied to win. Pro baseball was largely bush league in the slumping years of WWII, and it emerged facing a lineup of new adversaries like labor unrest, competing leagues, and a nascent desegregation movement. One of the war’s noncombat fatalities was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (brought in after the Black Sox gambling scandal), leaving the new baseball commissioner, Senator A.B. “Happy” Chandler, with the task of defending baseball’s antitrust exemption. Too much of the book, like too much sports news, involves contractual and salary disputes and other such economic intrigues, while Marshall is at his best analyzing the people and strategies of the game. For example, when flamboyant Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck wanted to fire his manager Lou Boudreau, who “often settled for one run at a time in situations where other managers would play for the big inning,” he relented after a firestorm of fan anger. (In the good old days, fans mattered.) Marshall also has a good eye for significant quotes, like Branch Rickey’s, “There is not a single Negro player in this country who could qualify for the American or National League.” Jackie Robinson’s entrance is rightly seen as one of the most pivotal in this era, enlivened by the likes of Campanella, Berra, and DiMaggio. The pivotal hit in this period was the dramatic home run by Bobby Thompson to put the Giants in the World Series in 1951—the year that saw the advent of a couple of kids named Mantle and Mays. Marshall, who is director of Special Collections and Archives at the University of Kentucky Libraries, concludes with the gloomy prospect that, with its aging fan base, baseball will never catch up to the popularity of football or basketball. Nonetheless, the Baby Boomers should keep baseball the sports reader’s national pastime with brave and broad books like this. (83 b&w photos)