Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years

Finalist for the 2023 CASEY Award

Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years explores the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century, examining the sport on and off the field and contextualizing its development as both sport and business within the broader contours of American history. Steven P. Gietschier begins with the Great Depression, looking at how those years of economic turmoil shaped the sport and how baseball responded. Gietschier covers a then-burgeoning group of owners, players, and key figures--among them Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, Hank Greenberg, Ford Frick, and several others--whose stories figure prominently in baseball's past and some of whom are still prominent in its collective consciousness.

Combining narrative and analysis, Gietschier tells the game's history across more than three decades while simultaneously exploring its politics and economics, including, for example, how the game confronted and barely survived the United States' entry into World War II; how owners controlled their labor supply--the players; and how the business of baseball interacted with the federal government. He reveals how baseball handled the return to peacetime and the defining postwar decade, including the integration of the game, the demise of the Negro Leagues, the emergence of television, and the first efforts to move franchises and expand into new markets. Gietschier considers much of the work done by biographers, scholars, and baseball researchers to inform a new and current history of baseball in one of its more important and transformational periods.

Author: Steven P. Gietschier
Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
Published: 07/01/2023
Pages: 624
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 2.20lbs
Size: 9.13h x 6.06w x 2.05d
ISBN13: 9781496235374
ISBN10: 1496235371
BISAC Categories:
- Sports & Recreation | Baseball | History

About the Author
Steven P. Gietschier is an archival consultant for The Sporting News. He taught American history, sport history, and the history and culture of baseball at a midwestern university before retiring in 2020, and prior to that he served in several roles for The Sporting News. He is the editor of Replays, Rivalries, and Rumbles: The Most Iconic Moments in American Sports.