American Legion Baseball: A History, 1924–2020 by William E. Akin (review)

William Akin’s treatise on the American Legion baseball program makes a twofold contribution to baseball literature. On an overt level, it is a reference book that chronicles the American Legion World Series (ALWS), the capstone of a late- summer baseball tournament among teams of teenagers to crown a national champion. At a deeper level, Akin explores how a baseball program sponsored by a national organization of military veterans developed into a pathway to professional baseball during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

As a reference book, Akin provides an encyclopedic compilation of the annual ALWS from its inaugural year in 1926 through the prepandemic year of 2019. He supplies exceptional detail to identify each year’s qualifying teams, notable ballplayers, and host city. It’s all here, from the dynastic teams from Cincinnati Bentley Post 50 to the surprisingly frequent ALWS appearances by teams from Billings, Montana, and Manchester, New Hampshire, to the many small cities across the nation that commonly hosted the ALWS. Akin notes many players in the ALWS who either became major leaguers or had a stint in the minor leagues.

As a history book, Akin examines sporting and societal issues connected with the Legion program, which he considered to be “the training ground for major-league baseball” (61). However, “the Legion never recognized that producing stars of the future was a goal,” which created a persistent philosophical dissonance within the organization between the competing ideologies of baseball and the Legion’s expressed fundamental desire “to foster and perpetuate a 100 percent Americanism” (5, 82). What began as a civic program to convert good sportsmanship among youngsters into solid patriotic citizenship within adults soon morphed into a system for amateur ballplayers aspiring to turn professional. The juncture point occurred when Phil Cavarretta led the Chicago Post 467 team to the ALWS title in 1933, played the next year with the Chicago Cubs, and in 1935 appeared in the World Series.

In the first half of the book, Akin, a professor emeritus of history and author of two previous baseball books, does a superb job connecting the ALWS to sport and American society. In particular, Akin shines as a historian in his examination of how Legion leadership executed its Americanism agenda when confronted with overtures by female and Black players who wanted to compete in the ALWS. Akin poignantly depicts the tribulations experienced by Margaret Gisolo in 1928, Ernest “Bunny” Taliaferro in 1934, and John Ritchey in 1940, three ballplayers who had been accepted onto their local teams but were prohibited from playing in the ALWS by the Legion’s then less- inclusivemindset.

Akin is at his rhetorical best in chronicling the achievements of the ALWS tournament during its heyday in the postwar period 1946 to 1960 by combining his encyclopedic detail with a softer narrative approach. He very effectively describes the Legion’s adjustment in philosophical bearing from Americanism to athleticism under the baseball program’s postwar leadership of Dale Miller and Lou Brissie, a former major league pitcher and World War II veteran, when “the organization, which had downplayed the number of graduates in the major leagues, now took pride in such success” (51).

During Miller’s tenure, the Oakland, California, Erwin Post 337 team won back- to- back ALWS titles in 1949 and 1950 while deploying an ethnically and racially diversified roster. Ray Herrara, a shortstop of Mexican American heritage, was named ALWS Player of the Year in 1949 and went on to play minor league ball. Frank Robinson, an outfielder who was Black, played on the 1950 team before embarking on a Hall of Fame major league career. Brissie especially prioritized baseball over Americanism during his tenure, making numerous changes to the program to firmly establish the Legion baseball program as a pathway to the pro ranks.

The overemphasis of baseball to traditional Legion philosophy in the 1950s was too much for the organization, though. In 1961 Brissie was fired, and George...