Kirjahaku

Winner of the 2024 Seymour Medal Finalist for the 2023 CASEY Award Named a Best Baseball Book of 2023 by Sports Collectors DigestBaseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years explores the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business within the broader contours of American history. 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, Ford Frick, and several others-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 across more than three decades while simultaneously exploring its politics and economics, including, for example, how the game confronted and barely survived the United States’ entry into World War II; how owners controlled their labor supply-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 move franchises and 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.

A fascinating examination of the Korean War years and its impact on Major League Baseball Although baseball’s history in the immediate post-World War II years has sometimes been characterized as a “golden age,” such was not the case. By the time North Korean troops crossed the 38th parallel in June 1950, Organized Baseball was still struggling to re-integrate returning veterans into its labor force, fight off an attempt at unionization, and deal with a competing major league south of the border. In Warm Summers and Cold Winters, historian Steven P. Gietschier carefully examines four baseball seasons—1950, 1951, 1952, and 1953—set against the background of Cold War America and the Korean War, a “forgotten war” that is often overlooked and underappreciated for its impact on US and baseball history. These four seasons saw exciting pennant races, the success of the Philadelphia Phillies’ Whiz Kids in 1950; the “shot heard ‘round the world” in 1951; the debuts of Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle; and the tenure of Bill Veeck as owner of the St. Louis Browns. On the warfront, the hostilities in Korea stand as the first time the United States tried to fight a war with one hand tied behind its back, attempting to fight a limited war without disrupting civilian life. Simultaneously, the United States’ limited military commitment meant that the war imposed peculiar challenges and uneven pressures upon individuals and institutions throughout American society, including Organized Baseball. Providing rare insight into how baseball responded to the unique situation the country found itself in during the Korean War years, Warm Summers and Cold Winters will be of interest to baseball and military historians alike.

The study of baseball history and culture shows the national pastime to be a forum of debate where issues of sport, labor, race, character and the ethics of work and play are decided. An understanding of baseball calls for consideration of different perspectives. This very readable textbook offers insights into baseball history as a subject worthy of scholarly attention. Each chapter introduces a specific disciplinary approach--history, economics, media, law and fiction--and poses representative questions scholars from these fields would consider. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.