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Even the Browns: Baseball During World War II (Dover Baseball)

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During much of the World War II era the best teams in Major League Baseball (MLB) could be found in St. Louis, the Cardinals of the National League and the unlikely Browns. In 1944 the Cards won 105 games and defeated the cross-town Browns in the World Series, the only "streetcar series" in St. Louis history.

Wiliam B. Mead's "Evn the Browns" is an outstanding journalistic account of this era in MLB. It is built around the story of the Cardinals and Browns in St. Louis, but goes beyond that to take in and comment on the milieu of the 1940s. This is a reprint of the original 1978 edition of this wonderful book.

As Mead relates the joke, "first in booze, first in shoes, and last in the American League," was an apt characterization of the plight of the Browns better than perhaps any other statement about them. While Mead emphasizes the loss of MLB talent to the military during the war years, he makes the case that the Browns became respectable in the early 1940s after years of mediocrity. In reality, the Browns posted winning seasons in the war years, 1942-1945. They finished a distant third in the American League in 1942, but finally won the big one in 1944, capturing their only St. Louis pennant. As the "streetcar series" ended in 1944, however, it took with it the last opportunity for the Browns to produce a winner in St. Louis. After a good season in 1945, they slid back into their normal place at the bottom of the league until their departure from St. Louis for Baltimore in 1953, where they became the Orioles.

This is a wonderful, pleasurable history of baseball during the war years, focusing on the Browns and Cardinals, but going much beyond. Dover has done a service by bringing this classic into print.