The end of baseball : a novel /

Maverick baseball entrepreneur Bill Veeck returns from World War II and buys the Philadelphia Athletics from irascible owner Connie Mack. The caveat is that if the team doesn't turn a profit in its first year, it reverts back to Mack. That means A's must be transformed into a winner, and in the war years, the only sources of good players are the Negro Leagues. Veeck begins with a bitter, alcoholic Josh Gibson and then adds Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, and Buck Leonard all of whom think they'll be playing on a Philly Negro League team. The Veeck shenanigans continue, and he opens the season with his groundbreaking team despite the resistance of owners, players, the press, and J. Edgar Hoover, who smells a Communist plot. Schilling's alternate-history fiction pushes baseball's integration ahead by four years, but the pages turn on the larger-than-life characterization of Veeck, who emerges here as every bit as flamboyant as he was in the real world. In the ultimate woulda-coulda-shouda story,  the vaunted color line  is no match for Veeck's showmanship and unquenchable spirit.--Lukowsky, Wes Copyright 2008 Booklist

With this debut, sportswriter Schilling has written one of the best baseball novels since Howard Frank Mosher's Waiting for Teddy Williams. Using actual events, Schilling has fictionalized a fantasy scenario in baseball history-the integration of black players into the major leagues in 1944. Bill Veeck Jr., a Marine veteran from a prestigious baseball family, buys the Philadelphia Athletics in 1943, becoming the youngest man to ever own a major league club. Veeck is a genius at publicity and promotion who wants to win the World Series-but using black players. He signs the best of the Negro League to the Athletics, against all conventional feeling and the opposition of Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, the vicious commissioner of baseball. The Athletics romp through the 1944 season behind the on-and-off diamond antics of real-life stars like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige and Roy Campanella, with Veeck struggling to raise money, avoid race riots and flummox Judge Landis. This exciting, fast-paced story is a fine commentary on baseball lore, race relations, and American sentiment during World War II, and it will have the reader hanging on every pitch, wondering how Veeck and his players will overcome racial discrimination to prove they can play in the major leagues. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

A flamboyant visionary tries to make baseball history. Veteran sports journalist and debut novelist Schilling offers a compassionate, enjoyable re-imagining of the early days of baseball. The year 1944 finds oddball baseball promoter Bill Veeck returning from World War II sans one leg but emboldened by a mission to create the first black Major League Baseball team. To surmount the obvious challenges, Veeck pulls the wool over Commissioner Kenesaw Landis's eyes by packing the Philadelphia Athletics with the most prominent athletes from the Philadelphia Stars, a Negro League team. Veeck's dream lineup includes rapid-fire pitcher Satchel Paige, who has a "zeppelin-sized ego" to match, Cuban secret weapon Mart"n Dihigo and a doomed giant of a hitter, Josh Gibson, whose colossal swing rivals Babe Ruth's. Determined to gather only the best players, Veeck soon gets the attention of J. Edgar Hoover, who thinks the promoter's great experiment is a communist plot. The players, meanwhile, are competing with each other; misbehaving in the harsh glare of the national press; and trying to play their best game in American communities where bigotry is threatening to turn ballparks into riot zones. Among the backdrop of patriotic elation, pre-civil rights racism and Cold War paranoia, Schilling's novel offers a deeply inspirational story of faith. A terrific tale. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.