Baseball in '41: Dimaggio, Williams And the Glories of a Magic Time

Recreates the glory and atmosphere of the great baseball season of 1941, when DiMaggio had his record fifty-six game hitting streak, Williams batted .406, and America went to war

1941: Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games (still a record), Ted Williams batted over .400 (an average not matched in the past 50 years), and catcher Mickey Owen dropped a game-ending third strike that figured largely in the Dodgers' loss of the World Series. In that year of "disintegrating peace," the author, who would later become an editor of Sports Illustrated , was an 18-year-old Yankee fan. Although the book focuses primarily on the national pastime, it also includes social and political history, for during "the best baseball season ever," Roosevelt readied the country for war. While he follows the travails of Boston's Williams and Detroit's Hank Greenberg, the first diamond superstar to be drafted, Creamer is very much a New York chauvinist, so the book's chief audience may be regional. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC selection; author tour.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A thoroughly agreeable and digressive trip down memory lane with a lifelong fan of the national pastime. In 1941, Creamer (Stengel, 1984; Babe, 1974) turned 19 and entered college. Though aware that the war raging in Europe would inevitably affect his future, the young New Yorker paid appreciably more attention to major-league baseball's pennant races. Who can blame him? It was a genuinely wonderful year. Among other signal events, Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 straight games, Ted Williams batted .406, the Brooklyn Dodgers (under Leo Durocher) beat out the St. Louis Cardinals for the National League flag, and the New York Yankees returned to form, outdistancing their rivals by a double- digit margin to cop the junior-circuit crown. The Bronx Bombers went on to win a five-game World Series from the Bums, thanks in large measure to Mickey Owen's fabled muff of a ninth-inning pitch. Between opening day and the final out, Creamer recalls other of the season's highlights as well. Cases in point range from Stan Musial's debut and the dramatic three-run homer Williams hit in the last of the ninth to win the All Star game through the way a superpatriotic press almost literally hounded Hank Greenberg (the American League's MVP in 1940) into the military. As a bonus, the author displays touches of real class in his blow-by-blow account of a glorious time. At one point, for instance, he likens the latter-day Yankees to Austria, ``an unimportant little country that has monuments to the days when it ruled half of Europe.'' An evocative delight for nostalgia buffs as well as devotees of the diamond game and its storied past. (Sixteen pages of b&w photos--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

The author of Babe ( LJ 6/15/74) and Stengel: His Life and Times ( LJ 2/15/84), and with Ralph Houk of Season of Glory ( LJ 9/1/86), recalls this momentous year in baseball and world history. He reprises Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak, Ted Williams's .406 batting average, Hank Greenberg and the draft, the furious Dodgers-Cardinals pennant fight, and the ensuing World Series. All this is portrayed against the looming U.S. entry into World War II. The choice here for the season's best baseball book. For all popular and serious sports collections.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.