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  • 1930: The Story of a Baseball Season When Hitters Reigned Supreme by Lew Freedman
  • James E. Overmyer
Lew Freedman. 1930: The Story of a Baseball Season When Hitters Reigned Supreme. New York: Sports Publishing, 2021. 300 pp. Cloth, $26.99.

The 1930 major league season, eleven years after the end of the low-scoring Deadball Era, produced an unprecedented display of hitting to cap a decade of steadily improving offense. The combined slugging percentage of the National League (NL) and American League (AL) jumped almost 40 percent from 1928. There were nearly 20 percent more runs scored than two years prior, many of them coming on the 1,565 home runs hit in 1930, more than 40 percent more than in 1928.

As nine of the sixteen clubs had team batting averages of more than .300 (and the entire NL hit .303), many individual hitters rode that tide to their best career years. For some, when the tide receded in future seasons, 1930 was the best year they ever had, maybe the only good one they achieved. Offensive records were set: Hack Wilson’s fifty-six home runs for the Chicago Cubs set an NL mark that stood up for sixty-seven years, and no one in either league has since topped his 191 RBIs. All this offense, of course, came at the expense of the pitchers, as the leagues’ combined ERA was nearly 5.00. The Philadelphia Phillies, a woeful last-place finisher in the NL, summed up the season. Playing in the intimate Baker Bowl, the team had the second-highest batting average in the league but an atrocious ERA of 6.71. Compared to what baseball’s followers had been used to, this was a very unusual season for individual player accomplishments (or failures).

Veteran sportswriter Lew Freedman’s 1930: The Story of a Baseball Season When Hitters Reigned Supreme covers this all—except it doesn’t, really. The story of 1930 is sprinkled throughout the chapters, but one doesn’t get a strong sense of an exceptional season once individual achievements are taken into account. In truth, the home run bashing aside, it wasn’t a very remarkable year. Only the NL pennant race was close, where St. Louis came on strong to edge midseason leader Chicago by two games. Three of the four first-division teams from 1929 in each league stayed up there. Other than the Cardinals, who improved over their 1929 record by fourteen games, the only other team [End Page 139] to make a big jump to the top was the Washington Senators, who got twenty-three games better but still finished eight games behind the Philadelphia Athletics, the AL winner.

In lieu of writing a book about a pennant race, Freedman has given each of the sixteen teams a chapter, which allows him to spend a few words on sketches about each franchise’s main contributors. He has a good eye for the interesting anecdote. For example, Detroit Tigers hard-hitting outfielder Heinie Manush was traded to the St. Louis Browns before the 1928 season after he reportedly was the “other man” in a prominent local divorce case, resulting in the newspaper headline “Fence Buster Star Also in Role of Home Wrecker” (53). Another example is that the workhouse NL pitcher Larry French had 197 wins when he enlisted in the navy in 1942. He’d last played for Brooklyn and was stationed at the Brooklyn Navy Yard, so he asked permission to pitch for the team when it was at home in hopes of picking up at least three wins and reaching two hundred for his career. The navy turned him down, but he didn’t turn down the navy. He stayed in the service after the war and retired as a high-ranking officer. Cardinal hurler Flint Rehm had a problem with the bottle, and upon reappearing after being missing for a game, he claimed he had been kidnapped and forcibly plied with liquor: “They made me drink that awful stuff ” (261). The management of the Cards, on a 39–10 late-season run to vault into first, shrugged and put him back in the rotation.

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