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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} 1954 The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Baseball: the definitive autobiography of Ted Williams and 7 other noteworthy books. A number of intriguing subjects make it into this lineup of baseball books, from how the Brooklyn Dodgers ended up in Los Angeles to a replay of the most closely contested World Series ever to an 800-page examination of Ted Willams's life on and off the field. Here are excerpts from 8 noteworthy new books about baseball. 1. “1954: The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Forever” By Ross Atkin. Bill Madden. Da Capo Press. “Growing up in the poor section of Mobile, Alabama, [Hank] Aaron picked cotton on a farm and delivered twenty-five-pound blocks of ice as a youth, jobs he later said possibly helped in greater strengthening his hands and wrists. At Central High School he was a two-sport star in baseball and football, and he turned down several football scholarships to pursue a career in baseball. He signed his first pro contract as a junior in high school with the Mobile Black Bears, an independent Negro League Team. Then, in November of 1951 he signed with the Indianapolis Clowns of the Negro American League. In twenty-six games for the Clowns he hit .366, with fiver homers, thirty-three RBI, and nine stolen bases. The major league scouts took notice, a half dozen of them following the Clowns for the first part of the season. Two of them, Dewey Griggs of the Braves and Alex Pompez of the Giants, implored their teams to offer him contracts. As Aaron related, ‘I had the Giants’ contract in my hand and was ready to sign it, but they wanted to give me an A-ball contract with a C-ball salary. Then the Braves came in with an offer starting me off in C ball but with a B-ball salary. So for the difference of $100 a month, I could’ve been teammates with Willie Mays. Imagine that. I often wonder if the Giants had both me and Willie in their outfield if they’d ever have been able to move to San Francisco in [1958].” About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”: “Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.” If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism. But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908. We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.” 1954: The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Forever. Jackie Robinson heroically broke the color barrier in 1947. But how—and, in practice, when—did the integration of the sport actually occur? Bill Madden shows that baseball’s famous black experiment” did not truly succeed until the coming of age of Willie Mays and the emergence of some star players—Larry Doby, Hank Aaron, and Ernie Banks—in 1954. And as a relevant backdrop off the field, it was in May of that year that the US Supreme Court unanimously ruled, in the case of Brown v. Board of Education, that segregation be outlawed in America’s public schools. Featuring original interviews with key players and weaving together the narrative of one of baseball’s greatest seasons with the racially charged events of that year, 1954 demonstrates how our national pastime—with the notable exception of the Yankees, who represented white supremacy in the game—was actually ahead of the curve in terms of the acceptance of black Americans, while the nation at large continued to struggle with tolerance. ‘1954’ Promises a Look at Pioneering Black Athletes, but Instead Delivers a Baseball Pennant Chase. Americans, and maybe everyone else too, love happy endings. Especially when they’re attached to messy beginnings and middles. Conventional wisdom holds that all was right with major league baseball after Jackie Robinson desegregated it for good with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. His very presence shattered the “gentlemen’s agreement” that kept the big leagues lily-white for generations, and his electrifying performance shattered any notion that blacks couldn’t excel on that level. Midway through that season, the Cleveland Indians signed a black player, outfielder Larry Doby, and other teams would follow in the next few seasons. Since most accounts of Robinson’s story imply that the battles had been basically won by the end of his historic rookie season, it makes sense to look at how the desegregation of the major leagues actually played out. That’s the book promised by the lengthy subtitle of 1954: The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars Changed Major League Baseball Forever . But the book Bill Madden wrote is much less racially charged, telling instead the story of an interesting baseball season. By the end of it, race is almost a footnote. At the dawn of the 1954 season, five of the 16 big league teams had yet to add a black player to their rosters. One of them was the New York Yankees, which became the team under the most fire to do something about that (they would, a year later, with Elston Howard). The raw numbers weren’t much better, Madden reports: 27 blacks out of 448 big leaguers, just under six percent, on Opening Day rosters. Many of them wouldn’t amount to much, but a few of them did. In 1954 we meet three of them: the Milwaukee Braves’ Henry Aaron, the Chicago Cubs’ Ernie Banks, and the New York Giants’ Willie Mays. Mays joined the Giants in 1951, but spent the next two seasons fulfilling military duties, while Aaron and Banks were brand new to the big leagues. But instead of focusing on the players and their experiences (Where did they stay on road trips? Did their teammates accept them? What kinds of hostilities did they face? How did all this affect them as people?), Madden spends more time looking at their on-the-field contributions. In fact, he spends more time looking at the teams in general than considering their racial makeup, or the impact of integration on their fortunes. And thus does 1954 settle into the leisurely rhythm of a typical baseball season. Madden focuses on the five teams chasing pennants that year: the Dodgers, Giants and Braves in the National League, and the Yankees and Indians in the American League. It’s a fun tale for diehard baseball history fans to read, as Madden captures the ins-and-outs of a highly competitive season. But it’s really not much more than a season’s nuts-and- bolts chronicle, without anything specifically compelling enough to indicate why this particular one matters more than others, especially when it comes to the difference-making presence of black stars on the winning teams. The Giants and the Indians reached the World Series, with Mays’ legendary catch becoming the defining image (and this book’s cover photo) of New York’s four-game sweep. If Madden is saying that by 1954, black excellence in baseball was no longer shocking, that’s one thing to note – but he doesn’t really note it. He talks about the superstars on the contenders to some degree of detail (but you’ll want to refer to their biographies and autobiographies for their stories in depth), but not at all about what the subtitle implies. He does not consider the first wave of post-Robinson stars as a group, or what was germane to their experiences coming along once the barriers had been broken (taking this approach, he might have included the other black stars who came of age in the mid-‘50s, including Howard, Frank Robinson and dark-skinned Puerto Rican Roberto Clemente). That’s one of history’s typical blind spots. The pioneers get all the glory, but those who immediately followed had an only slightly different road to travel, and often encountered barriers of their own along the way, but got little of posterity’s credit for it. The post-Robinson stars did not have to put up with anywhere near as much pressure as Robinson, but that doesn’t mean all was hunky-dory with baseball by then.