Daniel R. Levitt

Early professional baseball was a contentious endeavor. The forty years after the National League’s founding in 1876 saw four different leagues step forward as ‘Majors’ - yet only one, the American League, survived. The Federal League, subject of Levitt’s tale, was the last of these challengers. The Battle is a popular account of the history Robert Wiggins details in his textbook The Federal League of Base Ball Clubs.

The Federal League failed for for two reasons. First, it was clearly undercapitalized: only three of team owners could really afford the venture. Sinclair, an oil magnate; Ward, a New York bread manufacturer; and Weeghman, a Chicago restauranteur; spent heavily to keep the rest of the league afloat, and eventually ran out of patience, if not money.

The second, and more disturbing, reason, though, is that a Federal judge named Kennesaw Mountain Landis, a self-proclaimed baseball fan, refused to do his job. Since everyone in baseball, including the Federals, knew that Major League Baseball used an unenforceable contract clause to bind players to their teams and operated as a monopoly, the new league expected the courts to enforce anti-trust law and allow a fair chance to compete. Landis, however, saw no need to issue a ruling on the case until the undercapitalized Federals had run out of money and gave up. Once the Federal League asked for peace, the Majors rewarded Landis for his inaction by making him baseballs first Commissioner.… (altro)

This is a terrific portrait of long-time Yankee GM Ed Barrow, his teams, and his times. Levitt's research is impeccable, as are his interpretations of the material.

While this is primarily a biography, the book features the author's enormous research effort about the way baseball's conditions and working rules changed over the course of Barrow's career. This is important because Barrow was constantly adjusting his work to accommodate those conditions and rules. It's valuable because I've not seen a similar effort by any author.

I do wish Levitt had included footnotes in some way, shape, or form. But there's a fine bibliography.

Delightful book. Well worth any serious baseball fan's time.

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Having praised the book, I need to rant about the ebook. The ebook version has been butchered, as the publisher (Nebraska) has omitted all but one of the book's photographs, and roughly half of the statistical (mainly financial) tables that Levitt compiled in the process of writing the book. The surviving tables are unlabelled, and isolated in an appendix, which makes it painfully difficult to refer to them, even though they're mentioned in the text. A better publisher would have included all the tables, and built hyperlinks from the references to the tables, and from the tables back to the text.

Treating ebook purchasers as second class citizens is simply irresponsible. In the long run, it's a losing strategy.

The missing pictures and tables are all marked with the comment "Copyrighted image removed by Publisher", a note apparently intended to give the impression that the copyright is at issue. That's silly, and it's insulting.

This review has also been published on a dabbler's journal.… (altro)