The Golden Era of Major League Baseball: A Time of Transition and Integration

Rowman & Littlefield has just published my book on major league baseball in the 1950s, The Golden Era of Major League Baseball: A Time of Transition and Integration. Narrative themes include integration—especially the opportunities for blacks who were not elite players to compete for starting positions against whites of comparable ability; the Yankees and Dodgers many years of triumph; the powerful impetus for expanding the geographic reach of the major leagues, resulting in the first movement of franchises in half-a-century and leading inexorably toward expansion; the growing sophistication in structuring pitching staffs, the use of relief pitchers, platooning, and position-player substitutions; and the 1950s not being as boring in the style of play as has been the accepted wisdom. I also provide an in-depth analysis of the impact of Giants manager Leo Durocher's center field-clubhouse spy operation on the 1951 pennant race and Brooklyn manager Charlie Dressen's decisions in the Bobby Thomson-home run playoff game.

The Golden Era of Major League Baseball: 
A Time of Transition and Integration

by Bryan Soderholm-Difatte

I hope you will find this book on the key developments in the era a thoughtful examination from a different perspective.

Chapters are as follows:

1. The Arc of Integration
2. Boston's Postwar Dynasty That Wasn't
3. End of the Player-Manager Era
4. Enter Stengel the Grandmaster
5. Last of the Titans and Baseball's Expansion Imperative
6. Brooklyn's Answer to New York
7. Durocher the Spymaster
8. Charlie Dressen's Worst Day at the Office
9. The Age of Enlightenment About Relief Pitching
10. Slow-Walking Integration
11. Exit the Grandmaster
12. Consolidating Integration and the Importance of Hank Thompson
13. The Brooks Lawrence Affair
14. The Braves' New World
15. "Perfessor" Stengel's Controlled Chaos Theory of Platooning
16. Diversity and the Los Angeles and Chicago Speedways
17. Coming to Terms With Integration

The book is available through both the publisher and Amazon Books. The links are below:

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781442252219/The-Golden-Era-of-Major-League-Baseball-A-Time-of-Transition-and-Integration#

http://www.amazon.com/Golden-Era-Major-League-Baseball/dp/1442252219/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1447209700&sr=1-1&keywords=the+golden+era+of+major+league+baseball