Customer Reviews

Breaking the Slump

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The post depression era of baseball was one of the most turbulent times the sport has ever known. From the near collapse of some major league teams, to the invention of night baseball, Alexander's new book is like reading 12 years worth of newspaper sports sections, all crammed into one book. Charles has a great way of bringing light to some very interesting facts in baseball history, but some sections of the book could get a little monotonous. In a yearly breakdown of events preceding the Great Depression, we are taken through the 1930's, and into the early 1940's by way of yearly statistical leaders, brief synopsis of team standings, and a few other major tidbits. Along the way, Alexander occasionally plugs in some personal insight, as well as some excellent lost trivia, that some baseball historians may not know. He has also dedicated one chapter to the Negro leagues of the era (Shadow Ball), which I found to be very interesting and deeply fascinating. Overall, I would recommend the book to all baseball enthusiasts.

It goes without saying that baseball's history dwarfs that of any other sport, and Charles Alexander has done an excellent job of covering the period of baseball during the 1930's and up to the beginning of the U.S.'s entry into World War II. It's true that this time period has been covered in other books, but it still is a very worthwhile read for anyone interested in baseball history regardless of whether you have read about this era or not. The advent of night baseball and the birth of baseball's Hall of Fame took place in the 1930's. Many of the game's players were suited for work in baseball and nothing else. As pitcher Waite Hoyt stated, "The trouble with baseball as a life's work is that it takes the player's best years and trains him for nothing else." It is also the story of the racism that prevailed, not only in the major leagues, but in the country as well. Many of the greatest players such as Satchel Paige, James "Cool Papa" Bell, and Josh Gibson toiled in the Negro Leagues because they were denied entry into the lilly white major leagues by a "gentlemen's agreement" that owners denied even existed. Baseball struggled during the lean years of the 1930s, but many great players took part in the game and played for salaries that were better than workers in other paying jobs were receiving even though the reserve clause tied players to the club that signed them. The author hints that baseball during the '30s may have been better than any other time period, and many players feel the same. I guess players from any era feel their era was the best, but I would have to say the era following World War II may have been even better. I don't see how baseball could have been best during the 1930s when a large portion of the population was denied entry into the so-called national pastime. What I especially liked about the book was the author didn't bore the reader with an endless account of games and how runs were scored. I haven't liked all of Charles Alexander's books (in my opinion his book on Rogers Hornsby came up short), but this is a book you will enjoy if you enjoy baseball and its history.

What made the 1930's such an important era for professional baseball? How did the game evolve as both a sport and a business? How did the developments of this era influence the shape of the game in the decades that followed? These are some of the themes explored by historian and baseball fan Charles Alexander in "Breaking The Slump."

Alexander's greatest gift seems to be for biography; his lives of John McGraw and Ty Cobb are true standouts in baseball literature. In trying to cover the sweep of an entire decade in this volume, he sometimes loses sight of his larger perspectives, but on balance, this is a very worthwhile effort. Alexander's prose is clear, it flows well, and he does have a knack for digging out forgotten nuggets of the game's history.

If you want to know more about the heyday of Hank Greenberg, Jimmie Foxx, Carl Hubbell, Mel Ott and Dizzy Dean, this is a worthwhile, mostly satisfying book.--William C. Hall

Breaking the Slump is a straight forward narrative account of baseball in the 1930s. It does a good job with "who, what, where and when" in recounting the baseball seasons from 1930 through 1941. What Breaking the Slump fails to do is convey a good sense of the game during that period. Further, written by an academic historian, Breaking the Slump simply does not hold the reader's attention as a good baseball history should.


The "color" is pretty much tucked into a single chapter near the end in which Alexander talks about life in baseball during the decade. This is a shame. The game saw some of its most colorful, zany characters during this time period. Hilarious anecdotes involving players such as Dizzy Dean and Lefty Gomez abound, and can be found in the oral histories of the game during this time, as can the more tragic side of the hard scrabble life of the 1930s.

If Breaking the Slump does not serve well as a popular history due to its dryness, it is too short to be a definitive academic treatment of the era either. Nowhere is there a comprehensive treatment of any aspect of the game. Instead, it falls somewhere in between.

In sum, for a solid basic history of the game during this time, Breaking the Slump will do. But it will need to be supplemented with various oral histories and memoirs if the reader is to fully appreciate what made the game so special during this era. It took me longer to read Breaking the Slump than Lee Lowenfish's superb new biography of Branch Rickey, which is more than twice as long. Given the colorful nature of the game and its players during the Great Depression, I'm afraid Alexander must shoulder some of the blame for this otherwise good book being as dry as it is.

Charles Alexander seems to be in a slump himself - this book is a pale shadow of his fierce McGraw and Cobb bios. The info about the era on and off field is there but the writing is hardly compelling.