Breaking the Slump

Baseball in the Depression Era

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by Charles C. Alexander

Columbia University Press

Due/Published April 2004, 352 pages, paper

ISBN 0231113439

New in paper (S04)

In the face of the Great Depression, noted baseball historian Charles C. Alexander shows, Organized Baseball underwent an array of changes that defined the structure and operation of the game well into the postwar decades. The 1930s witnessed the advent of night baseball, the flowering of an extensive and, in some cases, controversial minor-league system of "farm clubs," and the exploitation of the relatively new broadcast medium of radio. Power brokers such as Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and owners Branch Rickey and "Colonel" Jacob Ruppert oversaw these and other developments even as they retained other traditional aspects of the game. As it had since the 1880s, the reserve clause continued to limit the salaries and mobility of ballplayers, subjecting them to the will of ownership to a degree unfathomable today. And Organized Baseball remained racially segregated throughout the 1930s, as the Negro leagues operated largely beyond the notice of white baseball fans. 

While tracing these and other organizational developments, Alexander keeps his focus on the daily experience of the ballplayers. What was it like for young men trying to make their way as professional ballplayers in an economy that offered few prospects for them otherwise? What kind of conditions did they have to deal with in terms of playing facilities, transportation, lodging, and relations with their employers? And what about the play itself? Alexander offers an expert appraisal of how the ballplayers and the quality of the game they played differed from today's.

Americans have periodically been reminded of baseball's extraordinary capacity to enrich and enliven the national spirit during hard times. Breaking the Slump is a portrait of the great game and its cultural significance during America's hardest times.

Contents


• I. Past Time
• II. The Last Fat Year (1930)
• III. Lean Years (1931-1932)
• IV. The Leanest Year (1933)
• V. New Deal Baseball (1934-1935)
• VI. Toward Recovery (1936-1937)
• VII. Pathos and Progress (1938-1939)
• VIII. Baseball Lives
• IX. Shadowball
• X. Recovery and War (1940-1941)