Fame and Fortune in The Show: Baseball at Rickwood Field and Beyond in the Middle 1900s

Fame and Fortune in The Show transports the reader through the years of the Great Depression and into the middle 1960’s. Art Black weaves baseball into the fabric of America’s defining event of the twentieth century: the Second World War. From the opening pages, the book draws you in, as Germany invades Poland, as America enters the conflict, and as newspapers bring the war — and baseball — to the world. An imaginary, old-school newspaper reporter tells the story. The book, however, is not about World War II or about world affairs. The book is about baseball. It is about people — from the coal mines, from the factories and the foundries, people who could hear the crack of the bat from the stands and people who could hear it miles away over the radio as life played out in theaters of war and hardship and victory and change. Through it all winds a thread of racial tension that wounded a city but didn’t kill it. And within are stories of those who performed at Rickwood Field: Ted Williams, Joe DiMaggio, Satchel Paige, Casey Stengel, and many others. You’ll read of Willie Mays before fame and fortune found him. You’ll meet a famous broadcaster and a master promoter. You’ll cheer a disturbed Jim Piersall before he endured a nervous breakdown. The book is about baseball at Rickwood Field and is an homage to all the ball players who played at Rickwood on their way to or from the big leagues, or as happenstance would have it, to or from ordinary circumstances in extraordinary times.