Baseball and Other Matters in 1941
What a year! Joe DiMaggio's streak would blossom, Ted Williams would conquer the elusive .400, and Stan Musial would take his first cuts in a Cardinal uniform. It was the year the Dodgers awoke from their long slumber: Pete Reiser began banging into outfield walls, Red Barber commenced his incumbency "in the catbird seat," and--to finally burst Brooklyn's miracle bubble--Mickey Owens dropped that called third strike in the World Series. Lou Gehrig died. Hank Greenberg was drafted. Meanwhile, as war raged in Europe, the Yankees would notch their ninth world championship, their fifth in six years. Two months later, the Japanese would bomb Pearl Harbor, and America would never be the same.Such was the state of the game--and the world--the summer thatBob Creamerturned 19. For a baseball fan, so much was happening, you hardly knew where to look. Over the next half-century, Creamer would emerge as one of the game's most respected and astute writers, a longtime fixture atSports Illustratedand biographer ofBabe RuthandCasey Stengel, but in this thankfully resurrected memoir--originally published in 1991--he was just a fan growing up and trying to make sense of things. In1941, he doesn't so much look back on this pivotal year as take us back to relive it with him by interweaving the marvelous, improbable, and memorable events on the field with the darker threads being manipulated off of it by Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler, and Mussolini. For a 19-year-old, this was a heady, thrilling, and scary time. Creamer not only reports it, he helps us experience it--with immediacy, passion, insight, perspective, and, indeed, a fair share of youthful exuberance and awe.--Jeff Silverman