"This is a baseball book, but whether Creamer intended it or not, it's much, much more."-Sports Illustrated. "[Creamer] recalls this momentous year in baseball and world history. He reprises Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, Ted Williams's .406 batting average, Hank Greenberg and the draft, the furious Dodgers-Cardinals pennant fight, and the ensuing World Series. All this is portrayed against the looming U.S. entry into World War II."-Library Journal. Robert W. Creamer, one of the best and most perceptive writers on baseball, remembers the baseball-and other matters-of 1941 in a tribute to the game that is also part memoir. Creamer was a long-time writer and editor at Sports Illustrated. He is the author or coauthor of numerous books, including the following Bison Books: Stengel: His Life and Times, Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat, Jocko, and The Quality of Courage.

“A must-read book that explores a vital pre-war effort [with] deep research and gripping writing.” —Washington Times In The rise of the G.I. Army, 1940–1941, Paul Dickson tells the dramatic story of how the American Army was mobilized from scattered outposts two years before Pearl Harbor into the disciplined and mobile fighting force that helped win World War II. In September 1939, when Nazi Germany invaded Poland and initiated World War II, America had strong isolationist leanings. The US Army stood at fewer than 200,000 men—unprepared to defend the country, much less carry the fight to Europe and the Far East. And yet, less than a year after Pearl Harbor, the American army led the Allied invasion of North Africa, beginning the campaign that would defeat Germany, and the Navy and Marines were fully engaged with Japan in the Pacific. Dickson chronicles this transformation from Franklin Roosevelt’s selection of George C. Marshall to be Army Chief of Staff to the remarkable peace-time draft of 1940 and the massive and unprecedented mock battles in Tennessee, Louisiana, and the Carolinas by which the skill and spirit of the Army were forged and out of which iconic leaders like Eisenhower, Bradley, and Clark emerged. The narrative unfolds against a backdrop of political and cultural isolationist resistance and racial tension at home, and the increasingly perceived threat of attack from both Germany and Japan.

Tells the stories of players who did their best despite personal adversity, including Joe DiMaggio, Phil Rizzuto, Roger Maris, Roy Campanella, Ted Williams, and Jimmy Piersall

A history of baseball as a sport and business during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the game on and off the field and tracing its development within the broader contours of American history.

In the summer of 1932, at the beginning of the turbulent decade that would remake America, baseball fans were treated to one of the most thrilling seasons in the history of the sport. As the nation drifted deeper into the Great Depression and reeled from social unrest, baseball was a diversion for a troubled country—and yet the world of baseball was marked by the same edginess that pervaded the national scene. On-the-field fights were as common as double plays. Amid the National League pennant race, Cubs’ shortstop Billy Jurges was shot by showgirl Violet Popovich in a Chicago hotel room. When the regular season ended, the Cubs and Yankees clashed in what would be Babe Ruth’s last appearance in the fall classic. After the Cubs lost the first two games in New York, the series resumed in Chicago at Wrigley Field, with Democratic presidential candidate Franklin Roosevelt cheering for the visiting Yankees from the box seats behind the Yankees’ dugout. In the top of the fifth inning the game took a historic turn. As Ruth was jeered mercilessly by Cubs players and fans, he gestured toward the outfield and then blasted a long home run. After Ruth circled the bases, Roosevelt exclaimed, “Unbelievable!” Ruth’s homer set off one of baseball’s longest-running and most intense debates: did Ruth, in fact, call his famous home run? Rich with historical context and detail, The Called Shot dramatizes the excitement of a baseball season during one of America’s most chaotic summers.

The first Japanese American jockey, Kokomo Joe burst like a comet on the American horse-racing scene in the summer of 1941. As war with Japan loomed, Yoshio Kokomo Joe Kobuki won race after race, stirring passions far beyond merely the envy and antagonism of other jockeys. His is a story of the American dream catapulting headlong into the nightmare of a nation gripped by wartime hysteria and xenophobia. The story that unfolds in Kokomo Joe is at once inspiring, deeply sad, and richly ironic and remarkably relevant in our own climate of nationalist fervor and racial profiling. Sent to Japan from Washington State after his mother and three siblings died of the Spanish flu, Kobuki continued to nurse his dream of the American good life. Because of his small stature, his ambition steered him to a future as a star jockey. John Christgau narrates Kobuki s rise from lowly stable boy to reigning star at California fairs and in the bush leagues. He describes how, at the height of the jockey s fame, even his flight into the Sonora Desert could not protect him from the government s espionage and sabotage dragnet. And finally he recounts how, after three years of internment, Kokomo Joe tried to reclaim his racing success, only to fall victim to still-rampant racism, a career-ending injury, and cancer.

"This is a surprising book, a terrific book. It's not about boxing, but about an odd, demanding world in which boxing is the thread, the key to existence. Wiley deftly broadens the delineation of this world and its people. Perceptive reporting is the foundation and perceptive reporting is rare enough. Wiley enhances it with clear, quick writing laced with humor and with a sensitivity that lends brilliance to this impressive work."-Robert W. Creamer, author of Baseball and Other Matters in 1941. "Ralph Wiley, with Serenity, has produced an original book about the ring. . . . He can dig beneath the surface and show us what really happened in a bout: why Thomas Hearns, with too much faith in his powerful right hand, lost to Sugar Ray Leonard in their first match. . . . Or why Roberto Durn was acting out of prudence, not cowardice, when he quit in his second fight against Leonard. . . . Yet the book is not really about boxing. Boxing in Serenity is what T. S. Eliot, speaking of plot, called the meat a burglar brings to distract the watchdog. The book is really about growing up in a world where you had to defend yourself physically to survive."-New York Times. "Wiley's rapport with boxers is profound."-Publisher's Weekly. "Wiley is one writer who really knows his way around a boxing ring. . . . [He writes] with passion and understanding about complex, violent men and their oddly redemptive sport."-Booklist. Ralph Wiley is the author or coauthor of several works, most recently Born to Play: The Eric Davis Story.

Joe McCarthy was headed towards a career as a plumber--until the parish priest intervened, and convinced McCarthy's mother that he could make more of himself in baseball. She relented, and Joseph Vincent McCarthy embarked on a career that ranks him among the greatest managers ever. In 24 years his teams took nine pennants, seven World Series titles, and never finished lower than fourth. This biography of Joe McCarthy details the 90-year life of one of the greatest managers in baseball's history. Baseball was McCarthy's ticket out of a working-class existence in Germantown, Pennsylvania, taking him to college, the minor leagues, managerial stints in baseball's backwaters, and on to remarkable years with the Yankees, Cubs and Red Sox--years filled with triumph and heartbreak. Seven championships and the highest managerial winning percentage ever earned him entry to the Hall of Fame, but McCarthy will always be remembered for his deft handling of his players. McCarthy's ability to handle even "unmanageable" players won him the respect of all. His effect on the lives of his young charges was, in his mind, his greatest legacy.

While most fans know that baseball stars Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg, and Bob Feller served in the military during World War II, few can name the two major leaguers who died in action. (They were catcher Harry O'Neill and outfielder Elmer Gedeon.) Far fewer still are aware that another 125 minor league players also lost their lives during the war. This book draws on extensive research and interviews to bring their personal lives, baseball careers, and wartime service to light.

From the introduction of the reserve clause in 1879 to the lockout and new basic agreement of 1990, baseball players have been engaged in one of the longest and most colorful labor struggles in our nation’s history. The Imperfect Diamond tells the stories of the players and their opponents, the powerful owners: how John Montgomery Ward led the Players League Rebellion of 1890; the rise and fall of David Fultz and the Baseball Players Fraternity (1912–18); the iron-fisted regime of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis; the case of Danny Gardella vs. Happy Chandler and the blacklisting of the players who jumped to the Mexican League; the founding of the Baseball Players Association in 1953 and the tempestuous but triumphant reign of Marvin Miller; the struggles of Curt Flood, Andy Messersmith, and Dave McNally, and how they brought about the demise of the reserve clause; the unprecedented midseason strike of 1981 and the collusion cases of the late 1980s. In the epilogue for this Bison Books edition, Lee Lowenfish guides the reader through the turbulent 1990s and first decade of the twenty-first century, covering expansion teams, the monumental 1994 strike, and performance-enhancing drugs. Listed by the Society of American Baseball Research as one of the fifty essential baseball books, The Imperfect Diamond will stand for years to come as the source for the real story behind America’s national pastime.