Publication date:
16 May 2010Length of book:
352 pagesPublisher
Ivan R. DeeISBN-13: 9781566638487
In Peter Schilling's wonderful novel, the extraordinary baseball season of 1944 comes vividly to life. Bill Veeck, the maverick promoter, returned from Guadalcanal with a leg missing and $500 to his name, has hustled his way into buying the Philadelphia Athletics. Hungry for a pennant, young Veeck jettisons the team's white players and secretly recruits the legendary stars of the Negro Leagues, fielding a club that will go down in baseball annals as one of the greatest ever to play the game. Here are the behind-the-scenes adventures that bring this dream to reality, and a cast of characters only history's pen could create. The End of Baseball is the most rollicking, free-spirited baseball story in years, the unvarnished truth of that incredible season and the men who lived it.
Just as the exploits of the great players of the Negro Leagues have assumed the status of mythology, the Bill Veeck of the stories most of us have received secondhand has always seemed like a character from the imagination of a first rate novelist. Peter Schilling's fine book stirs all that wonderful, received folklore into a classic what-if tale. People always say baseball is a game where anything can happen, but there was a time when the most magical thing that might have happened, didn't; The End of Baseball is so engaging and convincing that it accomplishes something truly special: it makes you wish desperately it were true.