Author : Mark Winegardner
Publisher : Penguin Group
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 40,19 MB
Release : 1997-02
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780140260281
Based on actual events during the turbulent, postwar baseball days of 1946, this captivating, darkly comic novel tells of a group of American players who, frustrated by their treatment at the hands of the major league owners, begin defecting to a Mexican baseball league.
Author : Mark Winegardner
Publisher : Viking Adult
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 14,45 MB
Release : 1996
Category : Fiction
ISBN :
"When big-league ballplayers return from the war, unhappy with the contracts the club owners offer them, the wealthy Pasquel brothers pay unheard-of salaries to lure disaffected players - Sal Maglie, Vern Stephens, Danny Gardella, Max Lanier among them - to Mexico. When they get there, they see that the league already has major-league-caliber players - Negro Leaguers and Latinos - banned from the majors by the color line or shunned by subtler forms of racism. What follows is the first fully integrated season in the history of baseball." "In a cast that includes Ernest Hemingway, Babe Ruth, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo, at the center of this novel are Theolic "Fireball" Smith, Negro League star with dreams of being the one who breaks the color line in the U.S.; Danny Gardella, clown-prince wartime outfielder, whose mythic quest almost brings free agency to the majors in the 1940s; and Frank Bullinger, novelist-cum-journalist, "the youngest and most lost member of the Lost Generation," whose oral history this novel purports to be."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Author : Mark Winegardner
Publisher : HarperCollins
Page : 591 pages
File Size : 46,52 MB
Release : 2021-11-23
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0358541328
In 1948 Cleveland was America's sixth largest city; by 1969 it was the twelfth. For Easterners, Cleveland is where the Midwest begins; for Westerners, it is where the East begins. In the summer of 1948, fourteen-year-old David Zielinsky can look forward to a job at the docks. Anne O'Connor, at twelve, is the apple of her political boss father's eye. David and Anne will meet-and fall in love-four years later, and for the next twenty years this pair will be reluctant star-crossed lovers in a troubled and turbulent country. A natural-born storyteller, Mark Winegardner spins an epic tale of those twenty years, artfully weaving such real-life Clevelanders as Eliot Ness, Alan Freed, and Carl Stokes into the tapestry. His narrative gifts may bring the fiction of E. L. Doctorow to some readers' minds, but Winegardner is very much his own man, and his observations of Cleveland are laced with a loving skepticism. His masterful saga of this conflicted city is a novel that speaks a memorable truth.
Author : Lou Hernández
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 414 pages
File Size : 40,10 MB
Release : 2011-10-10
Category : Sports & Recreation
ISBN : 0786489367
Major League Baseball today would be unrecognizable without the large number of Latin American players and managers filling its ranks. Their strong influence on the sport can trace its beginnings to professional leagues established south of the border and in the Caribbean nations in the 1940s. This narrative history of Latin American baseball leagues during the 1940s and 1950s provides an in-depth, year-by-year chronicle of seasonal leagues in the seven primary baseball-playing areas in the region: Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Venezuela, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico. The success of these leagues, and their often acrimonious competition with U.S. Organized Baseball, eventually ushered in a new era of contract concessions from owners and general labor advancements for players that forever changed the game.
Author : Emily Ruth Rutter
Publisher : Univ. Press of Mississippi
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 26,18 MB
Release : 2018-04-30
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 149681715X
Winner of the 2018 John Coates Next Generation Award from the Negro Leagues Research Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research Although many Americans think of Jackie Robinson when considering the story of segregation in baseball, a long history of tragedies and triumphs precede Robinson’s momentous debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers. From the pioneering Cuban Giants (1885-1915) to the Negro Leagues (1920-1960), Black baseball was a long-standing staple of African American communities. While many of its artifacts and statistics are lost, Black baseball figured vibrantly in films, novels, plays, and poems. In Invisible Ball of Dreams: Literary Representations of Baseball behind the Color Line, author Emily Ruth Rutter examines wide-ranging representations of this history by William Brashler, Jerome Charyn, August Wilson, Gloria Naylor, Harmony Holiday, Kevin King, Kadir Nelson, and Denzel Washington, among others. Reading representations across the literary color line, Rutter opens a propitious space for exploring Black cultural pride and residual frustrations with racial hypocrisies on the one hand and the benefits and limitations of white empathy on the other. Exploring these topics is necessary to the project of enriching the archives of segregated baseball in particular and African American cultural history more generally.
Author : Mark Winegardner
Publisher : Mariner Books
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 49,68 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Middle West
ISBN : 9780156027366
The proprietor of a bowling alley whose artist daughter paints only phalluses. A ninth-grade girl who marries in haste only to be faced with her husband's impotence. A libidinous poet who learns the meaning of harassment. The life and loves of a professional lawn-mower. These are just a few of the distinctive stories that make up Mark Winegardner's remarkable debut short-story collection. Winegardner, whose rich and epic novel Crooked River Burning gave the much-maligned city of Cleveland a fresh and vibrant aspect, now returns to the Midwest that he knows so intimately and casts a piercingly compassionate eye on its denizens. The result is a kaleidoscopic picture of a people who are arrogant and humble, faithful and disloyal, driven and floundering-a people who are finally, America itself.
Author : Geoff Hamilton
Publisher : Infobase Learning
Page : 1386 pages
File Size : 13,28 MB
Release : 2015-04-22
Category : American fiction
ISBN : 1438140673
Presents an alphabetical reference guide detailing the lives and works of authors associated with the English-language fiction of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
Author : William Marshall
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
Page : 694 pages
File Size : 24,1 MB
Release : 2021-11-21
Category : Sports & Recreation
ISBN : 0813187702
With personal interviews of players and owners and with over two decades of research in newspapers and archives, Bill Marshall tells of the players, the pennant races, and the officials who shaped one of the most memorable eras in sports and American history. At the end of World War II, soldiers returning from overseas hungered to resume their love affair with baseball. Spectators still identified with players, whose salaries and off-season employment as postmen, plumbers, farmers, and insurance salesmen resembled their own. It was a time when kids played baseball on sandlots and in pastures, fans followed the game on the radio, and tickets were affordable. The outstanding play of Joe DiMaggio, Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Bob Feller, Don Newcombe, Warren Spahn, and many others dominated the field. But perhaps no performance was more important than that of Jackie Robinson, whose entrance into the game broke the color barrier, won him the respect of millions of Americans, and helped set the stage for the civil rights movement. Baseball's Pivotal Era, 1945-1951 also records the attempt to organize the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Mexican League's success in luring players south of the border that led to a series of lawsuits that almost undermined baseball's reserve clause and antitrust exemption. The result was spring training pay, uniform contracts, minimum salary levels, player representation, and a pension plan—the very issues that would divide players and owners almost fifty years later. During these years, the game was led by A.B. "Happy" Chandler, a hand-shaking, speech-making, singing Kentucky politician. Most owners thought he would be easily manipulated, unlike baseball's first commissioner, the autocratic Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis. Instead, Chandler's style led one owner to complain that he was the "player's commissioner, the fan's commissioner, the press and radio commissioner, everybody's commissioner but the men who pay him."
Author : David Wallechinsky
Publisher : Canongate Books
Page : 445 pages
File Size : 17,6 MB
Release : 2009-08-06
Category : Humor
ISBN : 1847676677
The first and best compendium of facts weirder than fiction, of intriguing information and must-talk-about trivia has spawned many imitators – but none as addictive or successful. For nearly three decades the editors researched curious facts, unusual statistics and the incredible stories behind them. The most entertaining and informative of these have been brought together in this edition.
Author : Alan M. Klein
Publisher : Princeton University Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 18,24 MB
Release : 2016-11-22
Category : Sports & Recreation
ISBN : 1400884527
From 1985 to 1994 there existed a significant but unheralded experiment in professional baseball. For ten seasons, the Tecolotes de los Dos Laredos (The Owls of the Two Laredos) were the only team in professional sports to represent two nations. Playing in the storied Mexican League (an AAA affiliate of major league baseball), the "Tecos" had home parks on both sides of the U.S.-Mexico border, in Laredo, Texas and in Nuevo Laredo, Tamaulipas. In true border fashion, Mexican and American national anthems were played before each game, and the Tecos were operated by interests in both cities. Baseball on the Border is the story of the rise and unexpected demise of this surprising team. For Alan Klein, a cultural anthropologist specializing in sport, "the border" is almost a nation of its own. Having formed teams of players from both sides of the Rio Grande for almost a century, organizers and followers of the "Border Birds" often join forces but just as frequently squabble with each other in a chronic border tension. Throughout the book, Klein includes firsthand observations of the team and descriptions of its players. Readers will meet Dan Firova, the Tecos' beleaguered manager, a border-region native who nevertheless finds himself a target of the Mexican media. The "Ugly American," Willie Waite, is a young pitcher whose stunning success does nothing to diminish the disdain he has for his Mexican teammates. Ernesto Barraza, "The Trickster," once threw a no-hitter on only seventy-three pitches (on April Fool's Day, appropriately enough), but occasionally shows up at the park missing part of his uniform. And then there is Andres Mora, an aged slugger who, despite three seasons in major league baseball and a life of personal excesses, came within a few home runs of setting the all-time Mexican League record. This is just part of the roster of the Tecos and only a fraction of the lineup of Baseball on the Border. Anyone with an interest in baseball will be enlightened and entertained by this informative book.
