LAWRENCE KATZ - BASEBALL

This work revises the earlier work through the 2020 season and features a complete and current appendix, including statistical summaries of the year and lists of award winners, current though 2020.

 

"Twenty-five years have passed since Baseball in 1939: The Watershed Season of the National Pastime was published, and though the voices that spoke to me then – like Hall of Famers Bob Feller, Ernie Harwell, Charlie Gehringer and Monte Irvin -- have been silenced by time, I still hear their voices loud and clear. The passing of another generation has brought us more war, more dissension, more technological change, and more opportunities to improve the human condition. Their stories of struggle and success remain as relevant today as they were back then.." --

 

Lawrence S. Katz

 

As the 1939 baseball season swung into full gear and the game prepared to celebrate its Centennial Year, the New York World's Fair opened under the banner, "Dawn of a New Day." The future was at America's doorstep.

 

With drums of war beating around the world, this was a moment of quiet before the storm. The Roaring Twenties was a distant memory and Babe Ruth was retired and out of baseball. The Japanese had not yet attacked Pearl Harbor and Jackie Robinson had not yet sparked the integration of major league baseball. Something spectacular was about to happen.

 

America's national game had planned a Centennial Celebration in honor of its 100th birthday. Depression weary Americans embraced baseball's announcement of a series of parades, parties and ceremonies throughout the summer of 1939, culminating in the grand opening of a permanent shrine to the game and its luminaries on June 12, in the Village of Cooperstown, New York. A nation facing mounting economic and social challenges would have a respite from its long festering woes.

 

In the midst of the celebration the country would learn that the legend of Abner Doubleday's 1939 invention of the sport was pure mythology.

 

On the field this was a special time, when players who broke in just after the game's deadball era played alongside the future superstars of the Golden Age through the new medium of television.

 

It was the year Yankee "Iron Horse" Lou Gehrig was struck ill and forced to retire, while Red Sox rookie Ted Williams introduced a new offensive approach to the game.

 

This is the story of a summer of change -- and a transitional year in U.S. history -- as seen through the eyes of a baseball fan.

 

 

Review of Baseball in 1939: The Watershed Season of the National Pastime

“[Baseball in 1939: The Watershed Season of the National Pastime] is
partly a traditional kind of history culled from a wide collection of previously
published sources, but it also is, at times, an oral history of the game in which
Katz draws on the memories of the greats of the game....

“One of the strengths of his book is that Katz understands his scope to
be wider than baseball....

“Katz...has produced a serious and richly detailed history of the year that
’bridged baseball’s Golden Era through the Great Depression and the wartime
years, to a new time of growth and strength in the last half of the Twentieth
Century.’”

Aethlon: The Journal of Sport Literature,
XV:2/Spring 1998, pp. 218-219
Jim Hull

***********

John Thorn, Official Historian of Major League Baseball, described “Paul
MacFarlane and the Preservation of Baseball’s Nineteenth Century History.”
Nineteenth Century Notes, Society for American Baseball Research, Nineteenth
Century Committee. (Summer 2020): 5-8, as ‘[v]ery fine indeed.”