Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951
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- $59.99
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- $59.99
Publisher Description
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, 1945-1951 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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In this captivating narrative of baseball's evolution from small-town sport to big business, Marshall touches all the bases. In 1944, baseball saw the death of Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who had rescued baseball from the ignominy of the Black Sox scandal and ruled the game with an iron fist for 24 years. Landis was followed by a former U.S. senator from Kentucky, Albert C. "Happy" Chandler, whose term would be packed with controversy. First there was the question of the Mexican League, which lured players away from the major leagues with inflated, tax-free wages. Next came the organization of players into a union and the establishment of a players' pension system. Chandler then suspended Brooklyn Dodger manager Leo Durocher for his unsavory gambling connections. Finally and most importantly, Jackie Robinson shattered baseball's version of apartheid. When some of Robinson's teammates signed a petition stating their refusal to play with him, Marshall writes, the soon to be suspended Durocher responded with some immortal words that did not go down in American history: he said "they could wipe their ass with the petition." Marshall also looks at the various pennant races, teams and famous moments: the 1945 Chicago Cubs; the Philadelphia Phillies' "Whiz Kids" of 1950; Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard 'Round the World," which won the pennant for the 1951 New York Giants. Personality plays a prominent part in the book, including profiles of Cleveland owner Bill Veeck; "The Great Triumvirate" of DiMaggio, Musial and Williams; and Yankee manager Casey Stengel. Photos.