Book Review

Canada and the United States

Like a quickly paced, mid-season game on a sunny summer afternoon, Charles C. Alexander's book provides another comfortable examination of the national pastime. As he has previously done in biographies of John McGraw, Ty Cobb, and Rogers Hornsby, and in a fine single-volume history of baseball in America, Alexander demonstrates a thorough command of the narrative nature of the game itself and a solid ability to find meaning in the play of men.

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His subject this time—a period from the onset of the Depression to the brink of American entry into World War II—is more focused than his previous works, but he still manages to balance effectively descriptions of play on the field, the business of the game away from it, and the ways with which the game's principal constituencies—players, owners, fans and the sporting press—coped with the anxieties and austerity of a terribly challenging era in American history. Although Alexander's emphasis is on the sixteen clubs that comprised the major leagues during these years, he takes brief forays into other aspects of the game, especially the baseball world of African-Americans, the so-called Negro Leagues, and the lower levels of organized baseball, that is, the minor leagues. These elements of his study, however, are strictly sidebars and are not particularly illuminating. His coverage of the Negro Leagues is a familiar story of failed franchises, limited interest outside of African-American communities, barnstorming antics, and lamentation over the conditions and attitudes that prevented such players as Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Judy Johnson, Josh Gibson, and Buck Leonard from competing at the highest levels of the game.

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