"The best baseball novel so far this century." —Allen Barra, Baltimore Sun
"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.
—Kirkus Reviews
-Press Release
"A blast. Like a Satchel Paige flutter ball, The End of Baseball amuses and beguiles with every sharp turn. This is the best baseball novel I've read in years.” —Jonathan Eig, New York Times bestselling author of Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season
In this free-spirited baseball story, a team that "almost was" becomes real, and the extraordinary season of 1944 comes vividly to life.
Bill Veeck, the maverick promoter, returned from Guadalcanal with a leg missing and $500 to his name, has hustled his way into buying the Philadelphia Athletics. Hungry for a pennant, young Veeck jettisons the team's white players and secretly recruits the legendary stars of the Negro Leagues, fielding a club that will go down in baseball annals as one of the greatest to play the game.
Here are the behind-the-scenes adventures that bring this dream to reality, and a cast of characters only history's pen could create: the powerful columnist Walter Winchell, who saves the club by whispering in President Roosevelt's ear; the steely commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, hell-bent on preserving the sport as he knows it; J. Edgar
Hoover, who sees in Veeck's experiment the sowing of communism in the nation's pastime; the sportswriters and the people of Philadelphia who come to love this team; and, of course, the players themselves—the tragic Josh Gibson, the remarkable but self-centered Satchel Paige, the Cuban wonder MartÃn Dihigo, the veteran stalwarts Cool Papa Bell, Willie Wells, and Buck Leonard, and the rising stars Roy Campanella, Monte Irvin, Artie Wilson, and Dave Barnhill, whose conscience almost ruins the team.
About the Author
Peter Schilling has been a sportswriter, film critic, and freelance writer for over seven years. He has covered the Minnesota Twins for the Minneapolis City Pages in 2007, was the film critic for The Rake Magazine (Minneapolis), and now covers film for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.
Schilling grew up in Michigan and graduated from Michigan State University with a B.A. in Literature. Since then, he has done extensive research for two novels, with a specific emphasis on the Negro Leagues and the homefront during World War II. He is a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and is a member of that organization's Negro League, Latino Baseball, Baseball and the Arts, and Women in Baseball committees. In addition, Schilling is also on the board of the Cinema Revolution Society in Minneapolis, as well as an advisory board member with Take-Up Productions, a repertory cinema organization in the Twin Cities. He currently resides in St. Louis Park, MN.
"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."
—Publisher's Weekly
"This rollicking read of a book stars such big names as Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Josh Gibson, Buck Leonard, Roy Campanella, and Veeck himself. In lesser hands than those of novelist Schilling, these '44 Athletics would breeze to the pennant. But Schilling's season packs lots of lumps before it reaches a curiously realistic climax... [A]s somebody in baseball puts it, The End of Baseball sails straight down central. As somebody else in baseball used to say, it's a winner."
—Harry Levins, St. Louis Post-Dispatch
"Schilling hits a home run with his debut novel... while not only doing a solid job transporting the reader back to the mid 1940s, he takes on the enviable task of developing multiple characters that have tremendous amonuts of complexity."
—Pat Lagreid, The Baseball Book Review
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