Baseball

The Turbulent Midcentury Years

By: Steven P. Gietschier

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain

Baseball explores the history of organized baseball during the mid-twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures—among them Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, Hank Greenberg, and Ford Frick—whose stories figure prominently in baseball's past and some of whom are still prominent in its collective consciousness.

Combining narrative and analysis, Gietschier tells the game's history while simultaneously exploring its politics and economics, including how the game confronted and barely survived the US's entry into World War II; how owners controlled the players; and how the business of baseball interacted with the federal government. He reveals how baseball handled the return to peacetime and the defining postwar decade, including the integration of the game, the demise of the Negro Leagues, the emergence of television, and the first efforts to expand into new markets. Gietschier considers much of the work done by biographers, scholars, and baseball researchers to inform a new and current history of baseball in one of its more important and transformational periods.

©2023 The Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska (P)2023 Tantor

A Grand Slam!

This is one of the best baseball books I've ever read. Focusing, mainly, on the years 1930 to 1960, this well-researched book covers a great number of topics. Not just on the field, but off the field. To a lot of people, this may seem like a time when nothing much happened except the post-WW 2 Racial integration of baseball, which he gives a comprehensive account of. But many other things were going on, including the birth of the All-Star game (originally a one-off), the advent of radio (many owners were firmly against it), TV (ditto), night games (again ditto), early attempts at unionizing the players, the adjustments made (and not made) to keep baseball going during the Depression and World War 2, declining attendance after TV became a common household appliance, the evolution of the style of play from the plodding power-ball style of the '30s and '40s that changed with the increased presence of Black and Latino players, the beginnings of expansion and franchise moving, and much, much more. All of it with extensive behind-the-scenes information. I learned so much reading this. Kudos to Mr. Gietschier for the years of research he obviously undertook to present us with this book. He's also a marvelous writer,

TL;DR --Anybody who loves baseball and enjoys its rich history will enjoy this. It's an outstanding read, Mike Chamberlain does a superb job of narration. Highly recommended.