Baseball

It is rare to find a book that condenses hundreds of scholarly monographs and journal articles, adds a few new or underutilized primary sources, and tells a familiar story with a level of specificity that makes it feel just a little new. These tomes are often about wars or presidents, and they sometimes win Pulitzers. Steven Gietschier's Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years is that kind of book. Gietschier consciously builds on the trilogy of early baseball history by Harold Seymour and Dorothy Seymour Mills and carries the story into the period of 1930–1960. This historiographical synthesis ties together hundreds of specialized monographs to trace baseball's development over a span of history that is dominated by the Great Depression, World War II, and societal transformations wrought by postwar prosperity.Christy Mathewson is occasionally credited with describing baseball as a thinking man's game, and this characterization lives on. Mathewson debuted for the New York Giants in 1900 at a time when ballplayers were known for being rough around the edges. As class president at Bucknell University and a keenly pious Christian in that early twentieth-century way, Mathewson was different. Gietschier writes for people like him, not the center field “bleacher creatures” at Yankee Stadium. This book has pictures and there is praise, but it is not a coffee table book or a hagiography. It had to be this way. Gietscher spent more than two decades working in the archives at Sporting News during the heyday of print journalism, and his unique access to that material allowed him the unique ability to tell this story in a way that few other writers could. This is the kind of scholarship one would expect from a previous winner of the prestigious Henry Chadwick Award from the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). If you've never heard of Steven Gietschier, that's okay. The prose flows smoothly and encyclopedic details are presented in relation to one another, not as arcane trivia. The nearly one hundred additional pages of notes are a veritable reading guide for further study, and the index is sensibly specific. This is especially important for readers who will use this important book for further research or to put together presentations. Each of the fourteen chapters has a player, manager, or owner around whom that section's narrative is built. Some of the standouts include Branch Rickey, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Hank Greenberg, Tom Yawkey, and Bill Veeck. These names point toward a pattern of elevating the management class, and for good reason. Gietschier is well aware of ownership's attempts to control their labor supply through the reserve clause, but he does not take sides or judge. Baseball during this period was influenced by cigar-smoking men who owned and operated franchises that have proven to be durable brands for more than a century.Readers of this book will encounter a familiar game with a few unrecognizable aspects. Chapter 1 describes Connie Mack's unprecedented fifty-year run of managing the Philadelphia Athletics (A's). Wearing his signature suit in the dugout, Mack presented a version of professionalism that is long gone from the game and will likely never be seen again. The same can be said for his Hall of Fame roster loaded with collegian stars including Eddie Plank (Gettysburg), Eddie Collins (Columbia), and Mickey Cochrane (Boston University). Baseball was a very different game back then, but today's A's fans are surely familiar with that franchise's cost-cutting boom-bust cycles of player development and its nomadic tendencies. This example illustrates how Gietschier's attention to detail is part of what makes this book special. He covers how the Athletics won pennants in 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914 before finishing last in 1915 at 43-109 before home crowds of barely two thousand fans per game. Facts matter, and this book is loaded with them. Gietschier connects these facts to offer instructive lessons, and here is one in which there is a tension between teams wanting to win and ownership prioritizing profits by slashing payroll. As a rare manager-owner, Mack sits at an uncommon nexus between these worlds.One of the book's strengths is how Gietschier ties together ways that major shifts in American society impacted the game. Economic downturn in the 1930s drove down salaries and profits across the board and wiped out entire leagues in the minors. With athletically able-bodied men being conscripted in World War II, the quality of play was impacted so severely that the lowly St. Louis Browns made it to their only World Series and fifteen-year-old Joe Nuxhall became the youngest player to appear in a Major League Baseball game. With World Series games regularly ending after 11:00 p.m. eastern standard time, it's easy to forget that part of Franklin Roosevelt's famous “Green Light Letter” prodded Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis to increase the number of night games so that day-shift workers in the arsenal of democracy can “see a game occasionally.” African American ballplayers integrated and dominated. As many New York City–based fans from the 1950s heartbreakingly knew, population shifts to the suburbs influenced where stadiums got built and how much land is needed to accommodate parking. The demographic rise of the Sun Belt gave birth to franchises in new markets. Short-sighted team owners resisted innovations like radio and television because they feared for their bottom lines. We now know that these technologies have grown the game's popularity and expanded profits, but they've also shaped how we remember the sport. As Gietschier points out, voices like Red Barber and video of Bill Mazeroski walking off Game 7 of the 1960 World Series with his improbable home run are as much of baseball lore as any artifact held in Cooperstown.In sum, Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years succinctly tells seemingly everything known about the period being studied, a model for how to tell a nuanced story without getting bogged down in arcane minutiae, and a hefty book with scholarly staying power

Art · Geography · Meteorology · Turbulence · American Sports and Literature · History · Sports Analytics and Performance · Sports, Gender, and Society