The Victory Season: The End of World War II and the Birth of Baseball’s Golden Age by Robert Weintraub (review)

One popular way for authors to make a mark as they confront the imposing bulk of baseball history is to bite off a small chunk and write a book about a single season. Sometimes authors taking this route focus on an individual team, a player, or a pennant race. Sometimes they try to set a season within a larger context by talking about politics, the economy, and popular culture. Often they argue that the season under consideration embodies characteristics that set it off from others. Occasionally, authors will claim that their season is the “greatest,” the “best,” the “first,” the “last,” or more prosaically, “the season when I became a fan.” Thus, to name just a few, we have had Bill Fel-ber writing on 1897; Cait Murphy on 1908; Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg on 1921; Reed Browning on 1924; G.H. Fleming on 1908, 1927, and 1934; Talmage Boston on 1939; Robert Creamer on 1941; Red Barber on 1947; Kerry Keene on 1960; and Tim McCarver on 1998. Some much better than others, to be sure.

Freelance writer Robert Weintraub must like this format. The author of The House That Ruth Built (2011), a book that focuses on 1923, has fixed his gaze here on 1946, not only “the victory season,” but also “the birth of baseball’s Golden Age.” Weintraub has asserted both descriptors more than argued for them, but he has written an entertaining book. This is the “Greatest Generation” coming home from war, after all, and who wouldn’t want to read about that?

Weintraub’s strategy is rather simple. He tells his tale in forty short, readable chapters, arranged chronologically. Each of them is a self-contained essay, quite suitable for publication in a sports magazine if only we still had magazines devoted to this purpose. Often, to encourage the reader to turn the page, Weintraub uses an old trick: including a “hook” in the last paragraph of one chapter to connect it directly to the next. Thus, chapter one, on returning veterans, ends with “But two al teams, Washington and Philadelphia, could never fully clear their service lists. The only two major leaguers to die in combat in World War II represented those clubs,” (23) and chapter two covers those two players, Elmer Gedeon and Harry O’ Neill.

Over the course of forty chapters, Weintraub has room enough to discuss many topics. There are one or more chapters on Ted Williams, Larry MacPhail, Jackie Robinson with Montreal, Jorge Pasquel and the Mexican League, Bob Feller, Lucky Lohrke, and others. But sooner or later, the book settles down into the story of the pennant races, particularly the National League race that saw the Brooklyn Dodgers and the St. Louis Cardinals wind up in a tie that necessitated the first playoff in league history. The Cardinals won, of course, and went on to defeat the Boston Red Sox in a World Series remembered most clearly for Enos Slaughter’s famous dash home on Harry Walker’s double. Exciting stuff, certainly, but how much here is new?

To be fair, potential readers of this book ought to determine whether they are part of its intended audience. Those who are new to baseball history will be entertained and educated. Scholars of this era, on the other hand, will find nothing here that they have not encountered elsewhere, particularly in Frederick Turner’s fine and concise When the Boys Came Back: Baseball and 1946 (1996). Most distressing to those who like to look at a book’s source material is the almost complete lack of attributions in Weintraub’s text. Except for an occasional “according to …,” we have no idea what his sources were.

There is a notes section of some length, but it does not contain either standard footnotes or the more modern alternative wherein a note reprints a phrase...