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Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951 (Hardcover)
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Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951 (Hardcover)
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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. (Kirkus Reviews)
"With personal interviews of players and owners and with over
two decades of research in newspapers and archives, Bill Marshall
tells of the players, the pennant races, and the officials who
shaped one of the most memorable eras in sports and American
history. At the end of World War II, soldiers returning from
overseas hungered to resume their love affair with baseball.
Spectators still identified with players, whose salaries and
off-season employment as postmen, plumbers, farmers, and insurance
salesmen resembled their own. It was a time when kids played
baseball on sandlots and in pastures, fans followed the game on the
radio, and tickets were affordable. The outstanding play of Joe
DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Don Newcombe,
Warren Spahn, and many others dominated the field. But perhaps no
performance was more important than that of Jackie Robinson, whose
entrance into the game broke the color barrier, won him the respect
of millions of Americans, and helped set the stage for the civil
rights movement. Baseball's Pivotal Era also records the attempt to
organize the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Mexican League's success in
luring players south of the border that led to a series of lawsuits
that almost undermined baseball's reserve clause and antitrust
exemption. The result was spring training pay, uniform contracts,
minimum salary levels, player representation, and a pension
plan--the very issues that would divide players and owners almost
fifty years later. During these years, the game was led by A.B.
""Happy"" Chandler, a hand-shaking, speech-making, singing Kentucky
politician. Most owners thought he would be easily manipulated,
unlike baseball's first commissioner, the autocratic Judge Kennesaw
Mountain Landis. Instead, Chandler's style led one owner to
complain that he was the ""player's commissioner, the fan's
commissioner, the press and radio commissioner, everybody's
commissioner but the men who pay him.""
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