Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy

For the first half of the twentieth century, Major League Baseball pretended to be a monument for the Land of the Free's national pastime. But actually it was a shameful bulwark of segregation. BASEBALL'S GREAT EXPERIMENT is an enlightening chronicle of how American baseball became integrated--and therefore TRULY American.Jules Tygiel's first chapter displays fireworks. Jackie Robinson's debut in the Dodger organization propels the reader forward like a fast-paced novel. Then the pace slows down and becomes history. In the next chapter Tygiel flashes back to the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, relating how the few blacks who played in organized baseball were gradually squeezed out. Tom Sawyer's fence got whitewashed.In the third chapter, Tygiel returns to the 1940s and begins his detailed account of Branch Rickey's affair with integration and Jackie Robinson. It relegates 42--the recent movie--to the status of a peepshow. So if that movie is all you know about this affair, you know practically nothing.For the last section of the book, you made need to apply yourself. At least I did. It is not quite a scholarly account, but it lacks the narrative flow of the Jackie Robinson section. Even so, it is a cornucopia of precious anecdotes. Baseball players that I knew only as faces on baseball cards became real people, afflicted with the adversities of prejudice and segregation. Can you imagine the great Henry Aaron having to pee alongside the team bus because he was not allowed to use the white restroom?The trade paperback has disadvantages. Its small typescript may be troublesome, and its printed photos are poor. But the hardcover will not have Tygiel's "Afterword," which updates the book to 2007. Both editions have many footnotes, a bibliography, and an index. I generally skip the "Acknowledgments," but for this book it was worth reading. Tygiel tells how he got interested in the subject, and he reveals his authoritative sources of research. (For example, Dodger manager Walter Alston and Jackie Robinson's wife Rachel.)

This is the book from which John McCain and his ghost writer "borrowed" most of the content, both of facts and of rhetoric, for the first chapter of McCain's "Hard Call". The ghost does acknowledge Tygiel, but merely in passing.And this is surely the deepest historical biography of any sports figure ever written. Jules Tygiel is a professor of history at San Francisco State University, and the author of a fine dispassionate biography of Ronald Reagan, as well as the book "Baseball As History", which quite brilliantly examines the culture of America in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries through the lens of baseball.You can read "Baseball's Great Experiment" simply for pleasure, as a baseball lover, or you can read it for historical insight, which it offers aplenty. It's a great irony that baseball and the army were integrated meaningfully long before corporate business, the mainline Christian churches, the federal bureaucracy, or academia!Tygiel writes firm straight-forward prose, with a minimum of sermonizing (McCain's big fault as a writer) or academic pomposity. His portrayals of Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson are well-rounded and believable, with both their strengths and their weaknesses. Even if you have a total indifference to baseball, you'll find the human drama fascinating.As for yours truly... Do it again, Red Sox!

This book celebrates Jackie Robinson's success, but also shows clearly that it wasn't all ice cream and cookies for Black players after 1947. It summarizes the prior history of the Negro Leagues, reviews the challenges of integrating the rest of the American and National Leagues and the minor leagues around the country (not just in the South), and what was lost as Black players and fans were co-opted from the Negro Leagues (at that time one of the largest and most visible Black-owned enterprise in the US) by the newly integrated, but still white-owned 'major leagues.'The 50th Anniversary Edition has a short but valuable afterword.

This is a wonderful book about Jackie Robinson by an author who knew his subject well.

THis is a wonderful book that I can't praise enough. If you - like me - have been putting off reading about Jackie Robinson and the other black baseball pioneers of the late 1940's and 1950's, this is the book for you. It's a shocking description of just what life was like for blacks at that time. It's a real eye-opener that needs to be read by all baseball fans and all students of American history.

The story of the integration of baseball needs to be told again and again, especially in a time when a divided nation tends to forget how far we still have to go when it comes to respecting one another and accepting everyone into not only baseball but society as well.

terrific

This book is very repetitive and not interesting.

for someone who doesn’t really know baseball, living in the UK, but is curious about the story of Jackie Robinson, this has to be the definitive account. Admittedly, you’ll have to Google some baseball terms but this doesn’t spoil the tale, in fact much seems quite familiar. The detail is amazing - those who only played a single game in the major leagues all have a mention and the main characters appear as rounded individuals, sometimes to their cost.Overall, a great read. Thank you.

Not sure how that happened but I got a used book. Through Amazon I’m waiting to hear back from the seller to see if I can get a replacement as the book is damaged on the front back and spine and has some highlighter in it. Otherwise, if the book was new, the cover has a nice look to it, but the photos inside the book are very faded looking so the quality is not what I expected. Font is OK not very dark and a little on the small side but the damage to the book and the poor quality photos are a big disappointment but if you don’t care so much for that quality and you want to read the contact of the book , I’m sure it would be good. It’s a gift for my son and unfortunately it’s past his birthday so I’m hoping to get a replacement soon just waiting on the seller and hopefully they’ll be able to help me out in someway

Great book about the breaking of the colour bar in American baseball in the late forties, written by an American history academic, so is written with academic vigour.