With own interviews of avid gamers and proprietors and with over twenty years of analysis in newspapers and records, invoice Marshall tells of the gamers, the pennant races, and the officers who formed probably the most memorable eras in activities and American history.

At the tip of worldwide conflict II, infantrymen arriving from in a foreign country hungered to renew their love affair with baseball. Spectators nonetheless pointed out with gamers, whose salaries and low season employment as postmen, plumbers, farmers, and coverage salesmen resembled their very own. It was once a time whilst young ones performed baseball on sandlots and in pastures, fanatics the sport at the radio, and tickets have been reasonable. the phenomenal play of Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Don Newcombe, Warren Spahn, and so on ruled the sphere. yet probably no functionality used to be extra vital than that of Jackie Robinson, whose front into the sport broke the colour barrier, received him the honor of hundreds of thousands of american citizens, and helped set the degree for the civil rights movement.

Baseball's Pivotal period, 1945-1951 also files the try to arrange the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Mexican League's good fortune in luring gamers south of the border that ended in a sequence of complaints that nearly undermined baseball's reserve clause and antitrust exemption. the outcome used to be spring education pay, uniform contracts, minimal wage degrees, participant illustration, and a pension plan―the very concerns that might divide avid gamers and proprietors nearly fifty years later.

During those years, the sport was once led via A.B. "Happy" Chandler, a hand-shaking, speech-making, making a song Kentucky baby-kisser. most householders suggestion he will be simply manipulated, not like baseball's first commissioner, the autocratic pass judgement on Kennesaw Mountain Landis. as an alternative, Chandler's sort led one proprietor to bitch that he used to be the "player's commissioner, the fan's commissioner, the clicking and radio commissioner, everybody's commissioner however the males who pay him."