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Bill Madden’s 1954 intrigued me based on the tag on front
of the book: “The Year Willie Mays and the First Generation of Black Superstars
Changed Major League Baseball Forever.”
Yep, immediately hooked. It was still a year away from
Elston Howard making his Yankees debut – as the Yankees were one of the least
teams to integrate, but there was information included on Howard, which I found
compelling. There were good tidbits on players here and there with Madden
having an occasionally insightful quote.
Yet the biggest problem is that 1954 was just a big recap
of the season in which the New York Giants swept the Cleveland Indians in the World
Series.
I hoped 1954 would go deeper into the race relations and
issues in baseball. We all know Jackie Robinson was the first black baseball
player in 1947. He was recently celebrated with a movie that depicted many of
the hardships. But it seems as though Madden glossed over many of these issues,
and when he did write about them, he only briefly touched on it. He didn’t spend
more than a page at a time going through what minority baseball players
contended with.
Most couldn’t stay in the same hotels as their white
teammates. There wasn’t much talk as to how this caused problems within the
team or how teammates felt about this.
The book was all about baseball – and it’s a baseball
book – but the feeling was that it was going to touch on something deeper and
it just never went there.
Madden writes in his introduction that more than 10 years
ago Larry Doby had contacted him to write his autobiography. That is a book I
would have loved to read. Unfortunately, Doby died a short time after that and
the book was never written.
Thanks for the review. Probably not as enlightening to you as it was to me but I did like John Feinstein's book about life in the minor leagues, "Where Nobody Knows Your Name".
ReplyDeleteI saw that book in B&N the other day. I covered minor leaguers for years, so I have some perspective. Would definitely be interested in checking that out.
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