By David E. Kaiser
At no time within the 1948 season did any group lead the yank League through 4 video games. With below a month last, the Yankees, purple Sox, Indians, and A's charged down the stretch heads aside. Cleveland ultimately captured the flag in a one-game playoff opposed to Boston, however it wasn't simply the pennant race that yr that was once so awesome; it was once the season itself. In Cleveland, Lou Bourdreu skilled his maximum days as player-manager, Larry Doby took his position within the outfield, and the team's charismatic proprietor, invoice Veeck, introduced in a 42-year-old rookie named Satchel Paige, who received six, misplaced one, did to significant League hitters what he'd been doing to their Negro League opposite numbers for many years, and completely complemented a pair of different corridor of reputation hurlers, Bob Feller and Bob Lemon. In Boston, long-time Yankee supervisor Joe McCarthy went over to the enemy, and Ted Williams got here off a Triple Crown name with a season simply nearly as good. The A's, less than Connie Mack, certainly folded first, however the Yankees, at the back of the heroics of an injured Joe DiMaggio and the emergence of Yogi Berra, stayed in it till the final weekend. utilizing interviews with such stars as Doby, Feller, Dom DiMaggio, and nearly each newspaper and journal account of the days, Kaiser, a historian via occupation, replays the season in painstaking element, nearly video game via video game, protecting in sight his better context: a postwar video game for a postwar state. at times, that higher photo turns his prose a bit crimson, yet his topic is enormous adequate to deflect that like an overmatched fastball. to maintain issues feeling modern, he drops the standings in each few pages, a visually dramatic impact that, like an exceptional cliffhanger, retains you gasping for the way all of it seems, although it grew to become out how it did 50 years in the past. --Jeff Silverman
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Spring training got off to an entertaining start when McCarthy, defusing a possible confrontation with Williams, broke his own coat-and-tie rule and showed up for dinner in the hotel dining room wearing a loud sports shirt. " asked McCarthy when Williams arrived for the first morning's workouts. A few minutes later the Red Sox were busily taking batting practice, and Williams had his first clue that he and McCarthy might see eye to eye after all. Within days, McCarthy called the writers over and asked them not to discuss the ticklish question of which established shortstop, Pesky or Stephens, would move to third.
Boudreau had already had a remarkable career. A graduate of the University of Illinoiswhere he had been a star basketball playerhe had joined the Indians after a few months of minor league experience in 1939. He immediately established himself as a great shortstop and a good right-handed line-drive hitter. In 1942, when Roger Peckinpaugh stepped down as Cleveland's manager, Boudreau seized upon a chance comment by a reporter, marched into the front office, asked for the job, and got it. At twenty-four, the "Boy Manager" was the youngest in modern history.
With his lantern jaw and chunky body, he could be an impressive presence on the field, and although he respected umpires, he also knew how to try to intimidate them in a key game. "God damn you," he told Ernie Stewart on a hot July day in 1943, when Stewart had ejected pitcher Charley Wensloff for throwing his glove in protest, "you didn't put my pitcher out, did you? If you put that pitcher out, I will turn this crowd loose on you. '' But when the game was over, McCarthy told Wensloff, ''I don't know what you did to minor league umpires in throwing your glove or anything like that, but you are in the major leagues now and you can't do that.