They Also Served: Baseball and the Home Front, 1941-45

Tells how baseball players who could not become soldiers boosted the morale of fans during World War II by maintaining--in accordance with orders from the president--the national pastime in a time of national crisis. 17,500 first printing.

YA-- Gilbert's lively, nostalgic look at baseball provides readers with delightful and heartwarming anecdotes about our national sport during the tumultuous years of the Second World War. Patriotism was rampant and when the star athletes left the sports field for the front lines, men and boys on the home front substituted on the baseball diamond, becoming shining examples of courage and devotion. This is a worthy companion to Baseball Goes to War (Farragut, 1985) by Mead and Goldstein's Superstars and Screwballs (Dutton, 1991) . -- Peggy H. Mooney, Fairfax County Public Library, VA
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

When at the onset of WW II FDR penned his "green light letter" for major league baseball, few envisioned the dramatic and often zany changes in store for the game which shortages of players, material and capital would entail. Gilbert ( Real Grass, Real Heroes ) splendidly recaptures those gray days, threading baseball history with headline news from home and abroad. What makes this snappy, upbeat record special is Gilbert's focus, not on the game's greats but on the 4-Fs and has-beens sneeringly known elsewhere as wartime players. Resurrected from mothballs and raised to near-heroic status are one-armed outfielder Pete Gray; 15-year-old pitcher Joe Nuxhall; the first Cuban player, Bobby Estalella; and bullpen catcher Moe Berg."Berg can speak 15 languages and can't hit in any of them."--Casey Stengel Most memorable of these punchy portraits is that of Bert Shepard, who lost his leg in Germany and returned home to pitch briefly on a wooden replacement. Photos.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A bush-league rundown on how the national pastime muddled through WW II when roughly 500 professional baseball players were serving in the US armed forces. Gilbert, who has ghosted bios for a number of sports figures (Dom DiMaggio, Bob Feller, Elvin Hayes, Duke Snider, etc.) and one pol (Bert Lance) offers an essentially chronological account of the hit-and-miss competition that marked wartime pennant races and World Series play. With talented athletes trooping or called to the colors, he recalls, club owners filled their rosters with youngsters like Joe Nuxhall (whose main claim to fame is having pitched for the Cincinnati Reds before his 16th birthday), Cubans, over-the-hill veterans, and draft rejects, including Pete Gray (a one-armed outfielder who batted .218 for the lowly St. Louis Browns in 1945). Despite a wealth of potentially engrossing home-front anecdotes, though, Gilbert never manages to lift his narrative out of a for-the-record ruck. Nor does he succeed in relating the comparatively narrow world of major-league baseball to the global conflict that obliged it to make do for the duration. Equally unfortunate is the fact that a brief stint as a teenage batboy for the Washington Senators seems to have skewed the author's coverage. At any rate, he devotes an inordinate amount of attention to this genuinely hapless team. Fans in search of superior reportage on how the diamond game survived WW II should check Richard Goldstein's 1980 entry, Spartan Seasons, in preference to Gilbert's less-than-winning effort. (Twenty-two b&w photographs--not seen.) -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Gilbert's chronicle of major league baseball during the wartime years (1941-45) is a blend of popular history and nostalgia about the national pastime. Though the game at no time faced a shutdown, the drain on available talent brought on by the war spurred major changes in the form of more night contests and an influx of Hispanic players. It also led to a string of personal triumphs and tragedies, including the interruption of some brilliant careers (e.g., Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Hank Greenberg) and the advent of others (e.g., Stan Musial, George Kell, Johnny Pesky). Though broader in scope, this work is similar in theme to Robert Creamer's Baseball in 1941 ( LJ 2/15/91). For popular sports collections.
- William H. Hoffman, Ft. Myers-Lee Cty. P.L., Fla.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.