REVIEW: ‘Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball’ by Luke Epplin
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Author Luke Epplin has penned the stellar Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball, a comprehensive and compelling look at Major League Baseball’s Cleveland Indians in the late-1940s and their quest to win the ultimate prize in baseball. It was a historic era for America’s pastime. Jackie Robinson had broken the color line, yet the sport remained highly segregated.
As Epplin alludes to in his 300-plus pages, there has been a lot of important and necessary text given to Robinson’s story, but the spotlight doesn’t always take in the months that followed, including the journey of Larry Doby and Satchel Paige, two Black players who would eventually join the Indians. Both athletes receive top billing in Our Team, with the author tracking their journey into the major leagues, taking in their triumphs, their setbacks and the society that surrounded them in the 1940s.
Along the way, readers also come to know Bill Veeck, the owner of the Indians at the time — a most unique character in baseball history. He ran gimmicks during the games to drum up fan support and tried to meet each and every spectator in the stadium, and his efforts of showmanship and advertising paid off with record-breaking attendance on a regular basis. He did this with an injured leg from World War II that progressively grew worse and required him to undergo multiple surgeries. Also profiled is Bob Feller, who grew up throwing baseballs in a cornfield in Iowa. He rose through the ranks to be a dominant pitcher for the Indians and also a savvy (and sometimes not-so-savvy) entrepreneur who was always trying to make money and get his face in front of the public. Feller and Paige would actually meet on the field from time to time during off-season barnstorming tours.
This cast of four characters — Paige, Doby, Veeck and Feller — come together for a World Series run that would go down in the history books. Along the way, readers learn about the discrimination and segregation of the sport, the uphill journey both Paige and Doby faced after they were finally accepted into the major leagues, the success and challenges of managing a team in the Negro Leagues (specifically seen through the eyes of the Newark Eagles and its co-owner, Effa Manley), the birth of the game-day spectacle, the identification shared by both a team and a city (Cleveland and the Indians in the 1940s seemed to be inextricably tied together), and the difficult, lesson-learning story of integration. Almost everything in the book has a modern-day contextualization.
Of the four narratives, Paige stands out. He pitched to an impossibly old age when compared to other baseball players. Just when an opposing team or manager began to doubt his physical ability on the mound, he would stun the audience (and the competition) with a powerful set of throws. Doby’s story is also fascinating to read; Epplin does a good job of following his life from South Carolina to Paterson, New Jersey, to eventual acceptance on the Indians.
Epplin has a unique manner of tying together the many important considerations when telling this tale: the boom of baseball in the post-WWII era, the hurtful and harmful legacy of racism in the sport and society, the excitement of a sold-out double-header, the crack of a bat, the soaring of a baseball, the roar of the crowd. Epplin is able to capture sentiment and pathos within his artfully curated historical snapshot.
One leaves Our Team with a better understanding and appreciation for the journeys profiled. There is also a simultaneous speculation when readers think about the many “what ifs” — most notably, what if Paige was accepted into the major leagues at an earlier age? What if Doby wasn’t given a chance to succeed after his less-than-stellar debut on the team? What if Feller’s father didn’t build him a baseball field in the backyard? What if Veeck never came out of his self-exile in Arizona to purchase a major league team?
Our Team is a powerful and poetic look back at baseball history and 20th-century American history. The lessons to be learned reverberate through the decades and still prove important today.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Our Team: The Epic Story of Four Men and the World Series That Changed Baseball by Luke Epplin. 400 pages. Flatiron Books. Click here for more information.
