Barnstorming was a way of life for professional baseball players in the 30’s and 40’s. Pay was not good, especially for players in the minors as well as Negro League players. With major portions of the country lacking a major league baseball team, barnstorming gave the fans a way to see baseball greats in action. There was no color bar in barnstorming – fans both black and white wanted to see their favorites go against the best players in the other leagues. In Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert : the wild saga of interracial baseball before Jackie Robinson, baseball scholar Timothy Gay covers the barnstorming exploits of pitchers Satchel Paige, Dizzy Dean, and Robert Feller along with a large supporting cast including Negro League greats Buck O’Neill, Monty Irvin and Judy Johnson to the DiMaggios, Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. The war years include teams that played in the armed services, with many anecdotes of major and Negro League servicemen. As far as I can tell, this is the only book that covers interracial barnstorming in this time period along with a serious look at the racially integrated California Winter League (in existence for decades in the early part of the twentieth century.)

Gay’s book is written as scholarship and is heavily footnoted. There is an excellent bibliography and index along with statistics showing the Paige/Dean and Paige/Feller match-ups. Although the illustrations show many photos of Satch, the Dean brothers and Bob Feller, there are also photos of lesser known players.

The book can be dry reading with its plethora of facts but it is worthwhile noting that many major, minor and Negro leaguers played against each other years before Jackie Robinson would integrate the majors with results that can surprise the reader. ( )

A baseball history book centering mostly on the years prior to Jackie Robinson's debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers as the first black ballplayer in the modern major leagues. This tells the story of Dizzy Dean, Satchel Paige and Bob Feller, and how they discovered that not only was "barnstorming" (baseball competitions/exhibitions in the offseason, mostly to rural areas) a lucrative supplement to their incomes, but that fan interest was magnified when the contests featured black teams against white professionals. Some of this I already knew, but I was amazed at the durability of these pitchers (although Dizzy's premature departure from baseball was doubtless due to the abuse he heaped on his arm). I also was unaware of Satchel's later success in the big leagues. The author is at his best when he discusses the times, the events and emotions, but he's not a natural baseball play-by-play man, and the book bogs down at times with game statistics and dry descriptions. Still a fascinating book, and the booksigning was where I think I had one of my most fortuitous strokes of luck: there were 4 door prizes, and out of about 150 people, my wife Nancy and I won 2 of them: 4 tickets to any Cardinals game, and a signed Stan Musial baseball. We bought lottery tickets on the way home, but no soap. ( )