Epic season: the 1948 American League pennant race

Description

At no time in the 1948 season did any team lead the American League by four games. With less than a month remaining, the Yankees, Red Sox, Indians, and A's charged down the stretch heads apart. Cleveland eventually captured the flag in a one-game playoff against Boston, but it wasn't just the pennant race that year that was so remarkable; it was the season itself. In Cleveland, Lou Bourdreu experienced his greatest days as player-manager, Larry Doby took his place in the outfield, and the team's charismatic owner, Bill Veeck, brought in a 42-year-old rookie named Satchel Paige, who won six, lost one, did to Major League hitters what he'd been doing to their Negro League counterparts for decades, and perfectly complemented a couple of other Hall of Fame hurlers, Bob Feller and Bob Lemon. In Boston, long-time Yankee manager Joe McCarthy went over to the enemy, and Ted Williams came off a Triple Crown title with a season just as good. The A's, under Connie Mack, naturally folded first, but the Yankees, behind the heroics of an injured Joe DiMaggio and the emergence of Yogi Berra, stayed in it until the last weekend. Using interviews with such stars as Doby, Feller, Dom DiMaggio, and virtually every newspaper and magazine account of the times, Kaiser, a historian by profession, replays the season in painstaking detail, almost game by game, keeping in sight his larger context: a postwar game for a postwar nation. From time to time, that bigger picture turns his prose a little purple, but his subject is big enough to deflect that like an overmatched fastball. To keep things feeling contemporary, he drops the standings in every few pages, a visually dramatic effect that, like a good cliffhanger, keeps you gasping for how it all turns out, even though it turned out the way it did 50 years ago. --Jeff Silverman