| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Breaking the Slump: Baseball in the Depression Era. By Charles C. Alexander. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. xiv, 337 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-231-11342-0.)

Charles C. Alexander is perhaps the best active practitioner of the art of narrative baseball history. The author of highly regarded biographies of Ty Cobb, John McGraw, and Rogers Hornsby and the one-volume overview of the sport, Our Game (1991), Alexander now turns his attention to American professional baseball during the arduous years of the Great Depression. 1

Like the author's previous works, Breaking the Slump is baseball history written in a lively, traditional narrative style rich in colorful illustrative anecdotes. Save for the introductory overview chapter and two later chapters on the lives of white professional ballplayers and on the Negro Leagues, the story unfolds in straightforward chronological progression. Alexander's aim is to present depression-era baseball for the first time as a distinct unit of the game's history and to relate in reader-friendly fashion what the sport was like and 'what happened with and within the sport' in those years. The book points out that many important developments in baseball history-- night games, radio coverage, farm systems, and such popular attractions as the all-star game and the Hall of Fame--either originated or mushroomed in the 1930s. . . .

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