The Golden Era of Major League Baseball: A Time of Transition and Integration by Bryan Soderholm-Difatte (review)

The story of baseball’s integration during the postwar period has been told many times by many writers, both for the academic press and in popular culture. Jackie Robinson has been the subject of articles, books, and films that celebrate his efforts that ended the color line in Major League Baseball (MLB) in 1947. The same cannot be said of Hank Thompson, an average major league player for the New York Giants in the 1950s. The careers of players such as Thompson, and other African Americans who were not stars, make up a central theme in Soderholm-Difatte’s work. His argument that the initial wave of integration was composed primarily of all-star-caliber talent and that it was not truly complete until average players such as Thompson became starters is one of the strengths of the work. Another is the inclusion of the stories of other African American players who never made the grade, for a variety of reasons, which authors have typically overlooked.

Soderholm-Difatte also devotes considerable attention to the teams, managers, and dynasties that made the Golden Age shine, particularly the New York Yankees, who dominated the 1950s, winning eight American League pennants and six World Series. There is considerable discussion of Casey Stengel, the manager of the Yankees from 1949 to 1960. An interesting chapter deals with Leo Durocher, the manager of the New York Giants, who created a system that enabled the Giants to steal the opposing team’s catcher signals, which potentially helped them win the 1951 National League Pennant.

Soderholm-Difatte also covers team relocation and the expansion of MLB, and, while there is not much new material here, the author’s contention that Branch Rickey’s last gift to baseball was his failed effort to create a Continental League, which eventually led to MLB’s embrace of expansion, is interesting. Likewise is his consideration of the Brooks Lawrence Affair, a now largely forgotten incident in which the Cincinnati Redlegs’ manager Birdie Tebbetts was accused of lightly using Lawrence in September because he did not want to see a black man win twenty games. Analyzing Tebbetts’s use of Lawrence during the pennant stretch, Soderholm-Difatte concludes that the charges of racism leveled against Tebbetts were baseless.

Soderholm-Difatte’s work is informed by his work as a sabermetrician (member of the Society for American Baseball Research), and he makes considerable use of the sabermetric measure of WAR, or wins above replacement, to evaluate the players he considers. This is one of the foundations for his emphasis on Thompson as one of the first average African American major leaguers to earn a starting role.

The work suffers from a chaotic organization, with the chapter on Stengel’s idiosyncratic platooning system preceding the chapter that details the Yankee manager’s retirement. Despite the jangled nature of its organization, the book is exceptionally readable and will be hard to put down for the hardcore baseball fan. For the sport historian, the work’s lack of citations will be a drawback, but its themes will provide rich ground for further research.