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Title: The End of Baseball

Subtitle: A Novel

Author: Peter Schilling

Narrator: Paul Boehmer

Format: Unabridged

Length: 14 hrs and 56 mins

Language: English

Release date: 03-19-14

Publisher: Audible Studios

Ratings: 3 of 5 out of 4 votes

Genres: Fiction, Historical

Publisher's Summary:

In Peter Schilling's wonderful novel, the extraordinary baseball season of 1944 comes vividly to life. Bill Veeck, the maverick promoter, returned from Guadalcanal with a leg missing and $500 to his name, has hustled his way into buying the Philadelphia Athletics. Hungry for a pennant, young Veeck jettisons the team's white players and secretly recruits the legendary stars of the Negro Leagues, fielding a club that will go down in baseball annals as one of the greatest ever to play the game. Here are the behind-the-scenes adventures that bring this dream to reality, and a cast of characters only history's pen could create. The End of Baseball is the most rollicking, free-spirited baseball story in years, the unvarnished truth of that incredible season and the men who lived it.

Members Reviews:

20th Century Social History as Told Through Baseball

This book is a hoot. It's a "What If?" What if every fan's favorite rouge team owner Bill Veeck was able to make good on the plan he tantalizingly referenced in his autobiography "Veeck as in Wreck"? What if he had been able to buy a major league team during World War II and stock the entire roster with Negro League All Stars? This book is the entertainingly plausible answer. Veeck is a big-hearted, headline-grabbing, authority-provoking entrepreneur. The players--who a good baseball fan recognizes from the Negro Leagues and the early years of MLB integration (and a certain Cuban player who this reviewer heard tall tales about when he was a little kid)--are nicely characterized: Some are well-adjusted and pleasant, others are cranky and churlish, some have big egos, one has a terrible drug problem. A variety of WWI-era personalities, inside and outside of baseball, round out this satisfying tale. Is it too late to throw Kenesaw Mountain Landis out of the Hall of Fame?

The End of the Book: Disappointing

If you buy this book with the hope of feeling good when you finish it, don't buy it. If you buy it thinking it will truly reflect how good the best of the old Negro League stars would have been, and would have definitely destroyed their major league competition (which was weakened by star players who were drafted to serve in WWII), you will be disappointed.

The book does expose what a racist and low-life that Commissioner Landis was. It exposes that St. Louis has not always been the best baseball city in America, once having some of the most racist fans in the country. It exposes J. Edgar Hoover making a mockery of civil rights and liberties.

In summary, the book probably accurately depicts how difficult this country would have made life for these black ballplayers had Bill Veeck been allowed to integrate baseball with a bang. But it completely misses the mark in letting the black players with superior talent to lose to the lowly St. Louis Browns (yes, I know that the Browns did win the pennant in 1944). I wonder why the author chose to end his book with one more insult to the Negro League greats?

A really good baseball/social/historical novel

An interesting "account" of the first season of integrated major league baseball. Peter Schilling's novel keeps your attention, for the most part, by devising a page-turning baseball season and by focusing on a few terrific, real-life characters, including Satchel Paige, Bill Veeck, Josh Gibson, and Roy Campanella.