Fiction Addict

Genre: Historical

Publisher: Ivan R. Dee

Publication date: April 25, 2008

Reviewed by Jeremy Taylor

Baseball legend has it that in 1942, minor league team owner Bill Veeck arranged to purchase the Philadelphia Phillies and bring in players from the Negro Leagues. When Commissioner Kenesaw Landis got wind of the plan, he vetoed the sale because he believed integrating the major leagues would be the end of baseball as we know it.

The End of Baseball tells the story of what might have happened had Veeck purchased the Philadelphia Athletics and subsequently signed an all-black team. It is essentially the story of major league baseball’s racial integration as it could have happened—and might have without Commissioner Landis’s interference.

Taking the point of view of players, owners, managers, and even a prominent heckler, the narrative weaves a path through the world of professional baseball that is for the most part easy and fun to follow. What the book does not do well is make most of its characters likeable, and the number of setbacks and tragedies the characters and their team face may turn off some readers well before the book’s finale.

Readers who aren’t already baseball fans may have trouble with this book. The sheer number of characters is enough to baffle anyone who isn’t familiar with the historical names, and Schilling for some reason placed certain key scenes out of order, so the action is hard to follow at times. Foul language is prevalent, though not gratuitous, and drug and alcohol abuse factors prominently in one character’s storyline.

Set in the early to mid 1940s, this is the story of a nation at war and its desperate search for an escape from the brutal reality of everyday life. It is the story of that nation’s struggle to come to grips with the idea that black athletes deserve not only to be recognized for their abilities but treated with dignity and respect as human beings. Above all, it is the story of America’s grandest game during a period when Americans arguably could not have lived without it.