Baseball in '41: A Celebration of the "Best Baseball Season Ever

Viking Books, 1991. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. A clean well preserved 1991 Viking Books hardcover in a fine tight binding. Dust jacket has faint tanning outline the edges. Red paper and blue buckram over boards with gilt lettering along the spine. Text is bright and free of marks or underling. A great reading or research copy. Fast shipping in a secure book box mailer with tracking. Robert W. Creamer, the acclaimed biographer of Babe Ruth and Casey Stengel, was eighteen years old at the beginning of 1941. Creamer remembers listening to the war news, wondering when the United States would be drawn into it. But mostly, he remembers 1941 as "the most rewarding baseball season of my lifetime."

For it was the year that Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 straight games... the year Ted Williams batted .406... the year the Dodgers and Yankees met in the World Series for the first time...and more, too. There was old Lefty Grove, struggling to win his 300th game; young Bobby Feller, winning 25 and then enlisting in the Navy; Dodger rookie Pete Reiser capturing the battling championship; MVP Hank Greenberg being hounded by the press about his draft status before becoming the second big leaguer to go into the army.

The Cinderella team of the year was Brooklyn's darlings, led by a fiery young manager named Leo Durocher. The Dodgers shook off their reputation as baseball's Daffiness Boys to beat out the St. Louis Cardinals in a great season-long race. Then came a moment that will live forever in the annals of baseball: a game-ending third strike skipping past Dodger Catcher Mickey Owen, opening the way for yet another World Series championship for the indomitable New York Yankees.

Creamer skillfully intertwines all these epochal baseball happenings with an informal history of a pivotal period in American life, and with his own memories what it was like to be eighteen and a baseball fan when a looming war and the game he loved vied for his attention. This is a book that will bear comparison to David Halberstams's The Summer of '49 and Roger Kahn's The Boys of Summer, it is a splendid fiftieth-anniversary commemoration for all who love baseball. Ball in '41 makes it clear why the game is still the purest representation of the American dream.