cover image Baseball in '41: 2a Celebration of the ""Best Baseball Season Ever""

Baseball in '41: 2a Celebration of the ""Best Baseball Season Ever""

Robert W. Creamer. Viking Books, $21.95 (352pp) ISBN 978-0-670-83374-0

1941: Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games (still a record), Ted Williams batted over .400 (an average not matched in the past 50 years), and catcher Mickey Owen dropped a game-ending third strike that figured largely in the Dodgers' loss of the World Series. In that year of ``disintegrating peace,'' the author, who would later become an editor of Sports Illustrated , was an 18-year-old Yankee fan. Although the book focuses primarily on the national pastime, it also includes social and political history, for during ``the best baseball season ever,'' Roosevelt readied the country for war. While he follows the travails of Boston's Williams and Detroit's Hank Greenberg, the first diamond superstar to be drafted, Creamer is very much a New York chauvinist, so the book's chief audience may be regional. Photos not seen by PW. BOMC selection; author tour. (June)