The Victory Season; The End of World War II and the Birth of Baseball's Golden Age

New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2013. First Edition [stated]. First printing [stated]. Hardcover. Very good. iv, 460 pages. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Robert Weintraub lives in Decatur, Georgia, but he grew up in the large shadow cast by Yankee Stadium, in Rye, New York, and is a lifelong Yankees fan. Weintraub has written about sports for Slate, Play, ESPN, The Guardian, Deadspin, and many more. He is also a television producer, and has worked on programs airing on ESPN, ABC Sports, CNN International, Turner Broadcasting, Speed Channel, Discovery, and dozens of others. He has covered events large and small, from the Super Bowl, Olympic Games, and World Cup to the Dragon Boat Races in Taiwan. Weintraub has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Singapore, and Sydney, and while he loves the American South, he dearly misses the ocean. When not working, Weintraub has cast aside a former life that included cage diving with Great White Sharks and scaling Uluru for one of domestic tranquility with his wife Lorie and two young children. The House That Ruth Built was his first book. The Victory Season: The End of World War II and the Birth of Baseball's Golden Age is a 2013 book written by Robert Weintraub whose previous work includes the New York Times best-seller The House That Ruth Built. The Victory Season focuses on the 1946 Major League Baseball season, which was the first full season that followed the end of World War II. Weintraub's book focuses on four major areas:· Transition of baseball players from military service to professional baseball. Professional ball players were subject to the war time draft and many of them served in the different military services. Of those that served, a number of them, such as Joe DiMaggio never saw action and instead played on service baseball teams that entertained the troops. Other such as Bob Feller and Jack Lohrke saw extensive action throughout the war. Feller received numerous campaign ribbons and battle stars for his service in the · Navy; Lohrke gained fame as a man who cheated death so many times, both during and after the war, he was given the nickname "Lucky" Lohrke.  Racial integration of baseball. In 1946, baseball was still a segregated sport. Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers broke the racial barrier by signing Jackie Robinson as the league's first black ball player in 1946. Although he did not reach the major league level until the following season, Weintraub examines Robinson's challenges and accomplishments as a minor league player for the Montreal Royals, a Brooklyn farm team, during the 1946 season.  Defections to the Mexican League. Upset over the continued imposition of baseball's reserve clause, combined with the owner's failure to provide meaningful pay raises, several well known baseball players accepted a Mexican millionaire's offer of significantly higher salaries to play south of the border. However, when St. Louis Cardinals star Stan Musial wavered, claiming that he couldn't break his contract with the Cardinals, the effort slowed and eventually ended when the economics of the rival league could not support the higher salaries.  The 1946 World Series between the Boston Red Sox and the St. Louis Cardinals. The 1946 Red Sox were a baseball powerhouse featuring a heavy hitting lineup that included Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr. The pitching staff was anchored by Boo Ferriss. The Cardinals also had an impressive lineup that featured Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst, Enos Slaughter, Marty Marion, and Whitey Kurowski. Although heavily favored to win the Series, the Red Sox lost in seven games. Many people placed the blame on Pesky's failure to make a key play, allowing Slaughter to score from first base on a play that would have normally advanced him no further than third base. Pesky is quoted in the book as accepting blame for the loss.Weintraub covers a number of other areas in the book, to include an attempt to unionize players, life in postwar Germany, shortages and rationing in the United States, and numerous anecdotes about some of baseball's most famous personalities to include Leo Durocher, Larry MacPhail, Tom Yawkey, Pete Reiser, and others. Although not as well known to baseball fans, Weintraub also tells the story of Eiji Sawamura, the Japanese pitching star who rebuffed offers to join major league baseball and who subsequently died in World War II fighting for Japan. Critics provided favorable reviews of the book and complimented Weintraub's "meticulous research" and ability to weave stories together in a "conversational style" that added to the books readability.