High-Flying Birds: The 1942 St. Louis Cardinals (review)

One could make the case quite easily that there is a good book, a very substantive book, buried within the context of the 1942 season. The National League enjoyed a spectacular pennant race, the American League saw the New York Yankees win what would become the second of four consecutive pennants, and baseball as a whole confronted the ramifications of the United States’ entrance into World War II head on. In 1991, journalist Robert Creamer published Baseball in ’41, his stunning memoir that contextualized the season immediately preceding Pearl Harbor, so a similar book or even one approaching it in style and content would have been most welcome.

Alas, High-Flying Birds is not that book. Jerome M. Mileur is emeritus professor of political science at the University of Massachusetts–Amherst and a former co-owner of a minor-league baseball team, but this book is informed neither by his academic training nor his involvement in the business side of the game. It is rather a product of the fact that he was an eight-year-old in 1942, growing up in Murphysboro, Illinois, not too far from St. Louis, and that he went to a pair of Cardinals games that year, including Game 2 of the World Series. “The genesis of this book,” he writes in his preface, “therefore lies in the desire to relive one year of my childhood” (xi).

Book reviewers often earn scorn for wishing that an author had written a book other than the one he or she did. That is a fair salvo, and thus it is equally fair to say that Mileur has accomplished his goal very well. The 1942 Cardinals were a fine team, perhaps the best the franchise has ever produced. More than worthy of his admiration as a fan, they were home-grown, young, and fun to watch. They captured the pennant by engineering one of baseball’s greatest stretch runs, coming from ten games behind the Brooklyn Dodgers to win forty-three of their last fifty-one and clinching the pennant on the season’s last day. From August 14 on, St. Louis played at a .843 clip, but it was their five wins over Brooklyn in August and September against only one loss that sealed the deal. Neither team lost a game during the season’s last week with the Cardinals taking both ends of a doubleheader on the last day to finish with 106 wins to 104 for the Dodgers. They won the World Series, too, subduing the New York Yankees in six games, one of which was the 4–3 win that Mileur and his grandfather saw.

Mileur has divided his study into a dozen chapters: two on the pre-season, eight on the regular season with an understandable emphasis on September, one on the World Series, and one, in summary, on the post-Series celebration. His research was both extensive and intensive, and he demonstrates not only a firm grasp of the secondary literature but also deep reading in six daily newspapers, three published in St. Louis and three in New York. For nearly every Cardinals game, Mileur has written a concise, informative, and detailed summary, highlighting the offensive and defensive plays that determined the outcome. No one who reads this book thoroughly could thereafter claim lack of knowledge about how nearly every run was scored from the beginning of the St. Louis schedule to its triumphant end.

Cardinals fans, even those who do not remember 1942, may be enchanted by Mileur’s relentless enthusiasm, but other readers, less passionately devoted to the Redbirds’ cause, may see problems with his approach. In the first place, the level of detail—microscopic is not too strong a word—tends toward the tedious. A blow-by-blow account of one significant game played sixty-seven years ago might hold our interest, but 154 such summaries can strain almost anyone’s endurance. One has to compliment Mileur’s dedication to the task...