Under Pallor, Under Shadow: The 1920 American League Pennant Race That Rattled and Rebuilt Baseball (review)

Clevelanders have more than a passing interest in the numerous excellent books chronicling events of the 1920 season and its dramatic pennant race. These books offer very different vantage points, some far, some near. Some authors stand back and treat the 1920 American League race within a broad narrative, either as part of an individual player’s life story, such as Charles Alexander’s and Timothy Gay’s biographies of Tris Speaker, or as part of a wide social and cultural analysis, as in Robert Cottrell’s Blackball, the Black Sox, and the Babe. Others move in close and address one seminal aspect of that season, as does Mike Sowell in The Pitch That Killed. At both extremes, the pennant race itself is not the main protagonist.

It is, however, in Bill Felber’s Under Pallor, Under Shadow. While addressing the dark subjects implied by the title—death and game fixing—Felber’s story is at heart a sports story, the season-long competition among the Indians, Yankees, and White Sox, written in plentiful detail.

Felber balances the amount of detail, enabling readers with less background to follow the story comfortably, without boring readers who have more knowledge of the era. He succinctly captures the drama of the race in what could have been—and almost was—a confusing sequence of descriptions of individual games and series. Despite moving back and forth among the competing teams and rival cities, Felber saves his narrative from collapsing into a confused jumble of minutiae by using context and comparisons that transcend and unite the individual details. He provides germane and instructive contrasts between the game then and now. He offers a thorough explanation of the physics of home runs (although he passes over Newton and the simple, yet elegant, F = ma). Felber considers the psychology of baseball, including the human weaknesses, motivations, and interests of those who play and follow the game, and he helps the reader to consider alternative explanations for outcomes: design versus accident, conspiracy versus coincidence. Concerning the Black Sox, he writes, for example, “it was equally possible to read the [players’ actions] as evidence of their collective commitment to the team—or to the gamblers” (100).

Despite the broader references and themes, and perhaps because of them, Under Pallor, Under Shadow is at heart a good story. Felber keeps the reader engaged in the twists and turns, the strategies and the unpredictabilities, the talent and the sheer randomness of the pennant race. Ultimately, it is one of those books that the further into it one reads, the more one enjoys it.

If Under Pallor, Under Shadow has one flaw, it is arguably Felber’s sometimes overly dramatic style, which while generally engaging, can at times seem exaggerated: “The last three weeks of innocence and purity in the history of baseball” (93). While Felber’s intentions are clear, the arguments supporting his assertions do not always seem entirely in proportion to the gravity of those assertions. And yet, in some ways, his style merely reflects the hyperbolic style of sports writing in 1920, represented by this quote Felber pulled from the Chicago Daily News: “It is literally true, perhaps, that nothing could so undermine the average American’s confidence in society as the discovery of corruption in organized baseball” (214). Moreover, Felber’s seemingly exaggerated assertions—“It became important to the nation’s cultural well-being” (215)—may accurately reflect perceptions of baseball’s importance in 1920.

Felber collects newspaper accounts of the 1920 season to form the book’s compelling narrative. As a bonus for those unfamiliar with the distinctive and varied styles of sports journalism in the early twentieth century, the book’s final chapter provides an instructive and often amusing glimpse into those styles of writing, as seen in Ring Lardner’s observation from Game Five of the World Series that it was...