The Game Must Go On: Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, and the Great Days of Baseball on the Home Front in WWII by John Klima (review)

Its ambitious canvas sets The Game Must Go On apart from previous histories of baseball during World War II. Chronologically framed by the attack on Pearl Harbor and the conclusion of the 1945 baseball season, the book, through telling detail, captures the ambiance of wartime baseball from the perspective of playing fields, fandom, newspapers, and executive offices. John Klima also gives equal attention to baseball as game and symbol to American combatants on land, sea, and air. Interpretively, Klima’s thesis is that World War II constituted the transformative event that created modern baseball.

To buttress his thesis, Klima enlists Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack. Mr. Mack, as he was universally called, possessed a unique prestige in the game’s annals. Giving lesser priority to the 1919 Black Sox scandal, the reign of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Babe Ruth’s home runs, and Branch Rickey’s farm system, Mack, according to Klima, believed, “The war changed everything, broke the game down and reinvented it” (302). Emphasizing baseball’s response to its wartime labor shortage, Klima attributes many of the central features of post–1945 baseball—the ascension of black and Latino players, air travel, relocation and expansion of franchises, construction of new ballparks, the amateur draft, unionization, free agency, television revenue—to World War II.

Through assertion, telescoping chronology, and good writing, Klima sometimes renders juxtaposition equivalent to causation, obscuring the historiographic debate over whether the war constituted a social watershed on the home front or a continuity of long-term trends. For example, years before Rickey signed Jackie Robinson, rival barnstorming squads of white all-stars and Negro Leaguers competed during the off-season, and the absence of any black player on the Boston Red Sox roster until 1959 underlines the measured pace of baseball integration.

The experience of women in World War II baseball, a topic surprisingly absent from The Game Must Go On, further challenges Klima’s watershed interpretation. Much like women in wartime factories, the players of the All-American Girls Baseball League reflected the contemporary labor shortage, rather than a watershed transformation in gender relations. Postwar neo-Victorianism largely conscripted wartime women of the factory and ball field to 1950s motherhood and domesticity.

Other omissions punctuate the volume. Moe Berg, the enigmatic catcher turned wartime spy, eludes consideration. The addition of tables would facilitate discussion of age distribution and medical deferments on team rosters, player performance, team standings, and ballpark attendance. The absence of endnotes obscures the source of some materials, as does a bibliography that lists newspapers consulted without notation of article titles and dates.

Nonetheless, Klima’s compelling narrative trumps caveats. Seamless transitions and observant connections link a myriad of baseball and military venues. Authenticity animates descriptions of airplane cockpits, infantry companies, ship decks, POW camps, hospital wards, press boxes, the trajectory between the pitcher’s mound and home plate, dugouts, and grandstands.

Although the book skillfully introduces a large cast of eponymic and hitherto forgotten figures, three protagonists—Hank Greenberg, Pete Gray, Billy Southworth Jr.—center the narrative. Billy Southworth Jr. was “Billy’s Kid” to his father’s “Billy the Kid.” Noted for his savvy and rapport with players, Billy Southworth Sr. led the St. Louis Cardinals to three wartime pennants. A journeyman minor-league outfielder, Billy junior enlisted in the Army Air Corps. Dashing, heroic, and handsome, he piloted twenty-five bombing missions over the skies of Europe. Back in the United States, he perished on a training flight over Flushing Bay when a fireball engulfed his B-29. Bringing his Cardinals to a series in Brooklyn, close to the site of the tragedy, Billy senior “rented a rowboat and went out many times, searching for junior’s body” (274).

Before Billy junior’s overseas deployment, he had...