cover image Small-Town Heroes: Images of Minor League Baseball

Small-Town Heroes: Images of Minor League Baseball

Hank Davis. University of Iowa Press, $34.95 (372pp) ISBN 978-0-87745-579-0

Baseball's minor leagues have waxed and waned with the economy, the expansion of the majors, the growth of television and the fans' disillusion with multimillionaire stars. In 1994, there were 15 leagues and about 150 teams with an attendance of some 33 million fans. Canadian psychology professor Davis spent seven years researching minor-league ball, in the last three visiting 28 towns and concentrating on the lower minors. His tour took him from Ontario through New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia, from the upper South to Tennessee and Iowa, and he found the national pastime at this level not too different from the game a 100 years ago: he found fresh-faced kidsDonly a very few of whom would make it to the big leaguesDwilling to play for virtually no salary. But now there are fewer independent teams in the minors, and all depend on promotional stunts and the sale of memorabilia to survive. The essence of the book, however, is the people, and Davis portrays them with understanding and compassion but without sentimentalizing them, aided by 80 photos of his subjects. (Mar.)