Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951

by William Marshall

With personal interviews of players and owners and with over two decades of research in newspapers and archives, Bill Marshall tells of the players, the pennant races, and the officials who shaped one of the most memorable eras in sports and American history.

At the end of World War II, soldiers returning from overseas hungered to resume their love affair with baseball. Spectators still identified with players, whose salaries and off-season employment as postmen, plumbers, farmers, and insurance salesmen resembled their own. It was a time when kids played baseball on sandlots and in pastures, fans followed the game on the radio, and tickets were affordable. The outstanding play of Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Don Newcombe, Warren Spahn, and many others dominated the field. But perhaps no performance was more important than that of Jackie Robinson, whose entrance into the game broke the color barrier, won him the respect of millions of Americans, and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement.

Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951 also records the attempt to organize the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Mexican League's success in luring players south of the border that led to a series of lawsuits that almost undermined baseball's reserve clause and antitrust exemption. The result was spring training pay, uniform contracts, minimum salary levels, player representation, and a pension plan―the very issues that would divide players and owners almost fifty years later.

During these years, the game was led by A.B. "Happy" Chandler, a hand-shaking, speech-making, singing Kentucky politician. Most owners thought he would be easily manipulated, unlike baseball's first commissioner, the autocratic Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Instead, Chandler's style led one owner to complain that he was the "player's commissioner, the fan's commissioner, the press and radio commissioner, everybody's commissioner but the men who pay him."

Genres: Baseball

528 pages, Hardcover

First published February 25, 1999

About the author

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Reviews

[Mark Stratton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read several books about baseball by academics. Most have places where the prose becomes as arid as the West Texas Plains, but not this time. Marshall goes over the seasons in a short, year by year format and hits the highlights of that seasons World Series. The bulk of the narrative deals with the people running the game, and some of the players and their struggles with those same people.

This book clearly and entertainingly illustrates that The Lords of the Realm (the owners and the title of year another well done book) were complete idiots in that they were so guided by selfish, self-serving greed they killed the goose that was laying the golden eggs they were fighting so hard to keep a comin'.

I quite recommend this book to students of the game.

[Will G · Rating 3 out of 5]

I try to read one decent baseball book every few months and i saw this at a used book store and thought to give it a try as this was a very interesting period in baseball. overall the book was okay, but from a historical perspective the author's views are dated in light of the PED era and other changes in baseball since 1999. Also at times, it also reads more like a recitation of stats than a story, which is to it's detriment, still the period was interesting and made the book worth reading.

[Penrod · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.75 stars rounded up

I liked this book a lot. It is academic history with lots of footnotes, yet still attractively written and approachable by the lay reader. I do not know much about baseball, but I wanted to know something about the period right after WWII and this book did the trick and more.

[Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

Baseball navigated an unprecedented period of upheaval in the years immediately following World War II, confronting integration, labor unrest, television, legal threats to the hallowed reserve clause in players’ contracts, and a changing of the guard to more bottom-line-oriented club owners. The impact of this period is being felt to this day.

That’s the premise of “Baseball’s Pivotal Era, 1945-1951” by William Marshall, director of special collections and archives at the University of Kentucky Libraries and a Cleveland Indians fan during their ascendancy to the World Series championship in 1948. Marshall drew from more than 70 interviews and numerous other sources over a 20-year period to produce an exhaustive account of an extraordinary time in the history of baseball, both on and off the field.

The era coincides with the administration of Albert Benjamin “Happy” Chandler as baseball commissioner. Marshall is even-handed in his treatment of the former Kentucky governor and U.S. senato