Baseball pervades the American psyche. Eugene J. McCarthy has written that it is the metaphysical sport, and Lance Morrow that it is “a form of American mysticism.” As a bureaucratic society fueled on massive movements of paper, we find it reassuring that Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson are on our postage stamps. And as host country to the 1984 Olympics, we plan to introduce baseball as a demonstration sport next year in Los Angeles.

The literature of baseball is vast. Roger Angell’s epistles on the sport have become New Yorker State of the Unions. American biographers, historians, and sociologists retell the past and update the world in terms of baseball, our truest civil religion. When a black astronaut first orbits the earth and a black preacher contemplates running for the presidency, we are not surprised to find new volumes appear to retell and interpret the story of professional baseball’s belated but revolutionizing integration. 

Jules Tygiel’s Baseball’s Great Experiment will become required baseball literature. As Satchel Paige said of his own fastball, this is “thoughtful stuff.” Written by a social historian who handles his tools with finesse, Tygiel’s study will likewise become a standard in the history of Jim Crow. It is based on extensive scholarship, and graced throughout with nuanced interviews. 

Tygiel reports that The National Association of Base Ball Players (the first organized baseball league) forbade the inclusion of blacks on league teams in a written code in 1867. When it disbanded several years later, other leagues relied on “gentlemen’s agreements” to exclude nonwhite players. And while there were twenty or so black players integrated on northern teams during the 1870s and ’80s, by 1899 there were none. “By designating some people as unworthy of admission, the baseball community elevated the status of those accepted into the profession,” writes Tygiel. For a half-century white baseball would reflect the hypocrisy and racism of American society. 

In response, blacks formed teams and leagues of their own. Talent abounded. Black baseball became a rare area of black entrepreneurial success. Innovation marked both play and style. (Black leagues pioneered night baseball, and even fielded several women players.) But what underlay the black baseball endeavor was a thirst for acceptance and the opportunity to play in organized (white) ball. As Rube Foster put it when he founded the Negro National League in 1920, “We have to be ready when the time comes for integration.” 

That time came with World War II. Population migrations and the war effort broke down certain racial stereotypes. The lure of possible pecuniary benefits for teams and a glittering assortment of talent in the Negro Leagues enticed white owners to finally consider integration. Moral principles influenced a few, and prodding from the press (black and white) as well as political agitation all created a climate suitable for baseball’s great experiment. 

That experiment is rightfully personified in Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson who broke the baseball color line in 1946. As Tygiel demonstrates, the retelling of this story will never grow stale. It is, in fact, the pulsing heart of Tygiel’s tale, and it carries the reader with excitement throughout. Tygiel enhances the drama by situating baseball in its wider, national milieu. He describes Branch Rickey’s masterful plan to integrate baseball and those he incorporated in the endeavor. Rickey sought the advice of academics and sociologists such as Dan Dodson of New York University and Professor Frank Tannenbaum of Columbia. Tygiel details as well the hesitant pace at which integration once initiated progressed (only in 1959 did Pumpsie Green break the color line with the Boston Red Sox), and the demise of the Negro Leagues following integration. The author is clear that as yet integration is incomplete. Quoting a 1982 survey of twenty-four major league clubs (with the Yankees and Red Sox refusing to cooperate), Tygiel discloses that “blacks held only 32 of the 913 available white-collar baseball jobs, including secretarial positions. Of the 568 full-time league scouts, only fifteen were black.” He concludes, “After four decades of integration the persistence of discrimination clouds baseball’s proudest achievement.” It clouds the national horizon as well. 

Baseball’s flair is best demonstrated in its personages. Murray Polner’s sympathetic, authoritative biography Branch Rickey is bright and agreeable. A baseball genius, Rickey fashioned extraordinary baseball organizations and assembled remarkable casts of athletes for over fifty years. The father of the farm club system and major league expansion, Rickey was, in the words of Red Smith: “player, manager, executive, lawyer, preacher, horse-trader, spellbinder, innovator, husband and father and grandfather, farmer, logician, obscurantist, reformer, financier, sociologist, crusader, sharper, father confessor, checker shark, friend and fighter.” Polner conveys all of these diverse aspects of Rickey’s character. Whether Rickey was “a genuine American hero,” as Polner asserts, or merely “an American original,” as Tygiel writes, depends probably on temperament. Polner’s characterization is engrossing. 

Donn Rogosin’s Invisible Men, a short history of the Negro Leagues, builds on such classics as Robert Peterson’s Only the Ball Was White and John Holway’s Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues. Black baseball history has become available to a wider audience through books, such documentary movies as “There Was Always a Sun Shining Someplace—Life in the Negro Leagues,” Rogosin’s own radio interviews with Negro League players on National Public Radio, and even a remarkable set of early black stars baseball cards published by a St. Louis collectibles firm. While well intentioned, Invisible Men unfortunately bears the mark of a radio production. It lacks structure, and by relying on oral testimony, often combines important reflections with diverting details. Furthermore, the author attempts to make amends which can never be made: the tragedy of those who were excluded from organized baseball will always be that. Let us never forget. 

Baseball, as society, is ever changing. The former American League umpire Ron Luciano recently stated: “When I started, it was played by nine rough competitors on grass, in graceful ball parks. By the time I was finished, there were ten men on each side, the game was played indoors on plastic, and I had to spend half my time watching out for a man dressed in a chicken suit who kept trying to kiss me.” And so the books will continue.

Baseball’s Great Experiment
Jackie Robinson and His Legacy
Jules Tygiel
Oxford
$16.95 | 392 pp. 

Branch Rickey
A Biography
Murray Pokier 
Atheneum
$14.95 | 207 pp.

Invisible Men
Life in Baseball’s Negro Leagues
Donn Rogosin 
Atheneum
$14.95 | 283 pp.