Major League Baseball Transactions, 1946

It was in 1942 that baseball seemed to settle into a four-year dream of unrecognizable rosters and foreign boxscores. Through 1943, fans watched, as rapt as before, but puzzled to find in the familiar so much that was now unfamiliar. And when the lowly St. Louis Browns made the 1944 World Series, aficionados openly questioned what they saw. Suspicion only grew in 1945 when a few dimly recalled names slipped back onto scorecards. But it was 1946, when 382 bat-toting ex-soldiers took the field, that reveille brought an end to the strangeness. The author provides a day-by-day account of swiftly changing roster moves that reinvigorated the game and brought fans back to the ballpark. Documenting the positions played by each man for every day, providing explanations of player absences, and annotating the rosters for each major league team, the work preserves in fine detail the arrival of baseball's Golden Age