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Season of ‘42
Joe D, Teddy Ballgame, and Baseball’s Fight to Survive a Turbulent First Year of War
by Jack Cavanaugh

Season of '42
By Jack Cavanaugh

Baseball is, famously, the “talking game,” and a lot of that talking takes place in the pages of books. Each year, the depths of winter bring a longing for the summer game, a desire that directs us to the bookshelf in search of yet another of the delightful “conversations” that are so much a part of the game’s literary tradition.

This year, I chose Jack Cavanaugh’s Season of ‘42 for my January baseball fix. That turned out to be an a major error.

The first warning sign should have been the title: Season of ‘42. That title--so closely echoing earlier efforts, in various media (including David Halberstam’s vastly superior Summer of ‘49)--feels unmistakably unoriginal. To be fair, baseball’s 1942 season is Cavanaugh’s focus, so the title may be considered apt. Certainly, being derivative could be overcome by exceptional execution. Great writing, like winning, cures a lot of ills.


Sadly, Cavanaugh was not up to the task. The problems come early--very early, right in the introduction, wherein the author’s muddled style immediately confronts the reader. The book’s second paragraph--a forest of inelegant prose crammed into numerous run-on sentences--stretches over more than two pages, a burdensome thing to look at, even allowing for a comfortable type size with generous leading, let alone read. That ominous beginning foreshadows the rest of the book; Cavanaugh’s writing never gets better.

The stylistic troubles reflect Season of ‘42’s greater problems: namely, a lack of focus and a lack of any real sense of where the author stands on the issues involved in baseball’s wartime experience.

As an example of the latter, Cavanaugh mentions the controversial matter of players’ salary demands during wartime. Should stars like DiMaggio and Williams have made demands for (relatively) big paychecks from their teams, while other able-bodied men of similar age and background were off in foreign lands and seas putting their lives on the line? Or should players have been satisfied with the fact that they “were lucky to be in the big leagues playing a kids’ game” while others were being drafted? In reporting this matter Cavanaugh never takes a compelling stance either way. He relates the particulars of DiMaggio’s holdout before the ‘42 season, noting the “lucky” argument as made by Yankees management and the editorial page of The Sporting News (one of several times he echoes that sentiment); but Cavanaugh also states that the wartime circumstances “should not have figured in [DiMaggio’s] salary discussions with [Yankees GM] Barrow.” The author seems to be playing both sides of the argument; this lack of a firm stance either way, on various issues of the period, plagues Cavanaugh’s entire narrative.

Such a tenuous vision may have contributed to the lack of focus that runs throughout the book. Given its full title, Season of ‘42 should have a fairly tight focus: the particulars of one baseball season during the nation’s first full year of involvement in a global war. Yet Cavanaugh can not resist regaling his readers with the difference between baseball then and today--a subject that raises its head multiple times throughout the book. (To wit: the comparison between Stan Musial and his earnings, and latter-day St. Louis star Albert Pujols and his earnings, is simply not germane to baseball’s wartime experience.) Also, Cavanaugh fails to successfully interweave the two major threads of his narrative; chapters on the progress of the baseball season, and chapters on events of the war both abroad and on the home front, often do not work together to tell a unified story. The reader is left feeling uncertain about what story Cavanaugh really intended to tell with this work.

One can, perhaps, defend the author’s lack of a specific stance on the questions of the day by claiming that Cavanaugh is just letting the reader make up his own mind. Similarly, the unfocused nature of the narrative may be forgivable, given that the topic lends itself to a broad or narrow presentation, depending upon the author’s wishes. Perhaps even the author’s stylistic deficiencies could be given a pass. However, what is indefensible is fact that Season of ‘42 includes multiple factual errors that even a casually informed reader--let alone a hardcore baseball fan--can instantly identify.

For instance, Cavanaugh writes about a mid-season game between the Yankees and Philadelphia, and identifies New York’s opponents as the Phillies--an impossibility in 1942 outside of an exhibition game. (Simple research on mlb.com, based on one of the players named, confirms that the team in question was the Athletics.) It’s not a typo, either; Cavanaugh names the opponents as the Phillies twice.

In another dubious passage, Cavanaugh recounts the greatness of catcher Ernie Lombardi. He tells the reader that, despite his prowess with the bat, Lombardi was not a home run hitter, having “never [hit] more than the twenty he it in 1920.” This is an eye-popping claim, since two paragraphs above Cavanaugh reports Lombardi as being thirty-six years old in 1944. According to the author, Ernie Lombardi played in the major leagues when he was eight-years old--and belted twenty dingers! Clearly, this is a factual error, and one is tempted to assume it’s a simple typo--that the real twenty home run season was in fact 1930, when Lombardi was a more plausible eighteen years old. Except that’s not the answer; Lombardi only entered the majors in 1931, and hit his career high twenty home runs in 1939. How then did Cavanaugh place Lombardi’s home run best in the 1920 season? Remarkably sloppy research and writing, obviously.

That blunder, and the Phillies flub, are just the most obvious errors in the text, mistakes that stick out like a sore thumb. How many more errors fill these pages? Who knows? What we do know is that a reader should not be called upon to copy check the book he is reading. It is baffling that a writer of Cavanaugh’s experience--his jacket bio cites a long list of impressive credits--could publish such a sloppy, careless book.

Put it all together and this book is an extreme disappointment. Season of ‘42 has a good premise; it could have been not only entertaining for a baseball fan, but also illuminating of one of the most intriguing periods of the game’s history. Instead, this work never achieves even a pedestrian level of literary accomplishment. There’s no win here for anyone--Season of ‘42 should have been rained out.