Here is the exciting story of baseball during and after World War II—when clubs still traveled by train, when night games and artificial lighting began to replace hot afternoons at the ball park, when the major leagues finally took on the talent that had been restricted to the Negro leagues, and when baseball started to become big business. In this companion volume to Baseball When the Grass Was Real, also available as a Bison Book, Donald Honig collects the reminiscences of nineteen players, including Robin Roberts, Raph Kiner, and Enos Slaughter, who lay their careers on the line and also talk about the likes of Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, and Ted Williams.

    Donald Hall's forceful, yet elegant, prose brings together all the elements of Dock Ellis's story into a seamless whole.  The two of them, the pitcher and the poet, give us remarkable insight into the customs and culture of this closed clannish world.  Dock's keen vision, filtered through Hall's extraordinary voice, shows us the hardships and problems of the thinking athlete in an unthinking world.

    

    

    

    The story of the first one hundred years of baseball's National League, describing how the League got started, some of the major developments in the game of baseball, the equipment used and each of the member teams.