Baseball’s Shining Season: America’s Pastime on the Brink of War – Martin W. Sandler and Craig Sandler
Bloomsbury Children’s Books, 2026

Given that baseball is America’s pastime, it is not surprising that the sport played at outsized role during World War II. Actually, one of the many facts I learned from this terrific book is that it was surpassed in popularity by football by the 1970s, partly because the latter sport was better adapted to viewing on television. Readers may note that my prior ignorance of that change might imply that the book is at a remedial level for baseball fans, but that assumption would be untrue. Martin W. Sandler and Craig Sandler provide both a meaningful overview of baseball during the war years, and a wealth of historical information about the conflict itself. 

There are many excellent features of this text.  The authors seamlessly integrate baseball and World War II throughout; readers understand from the beginning that these defining parts of American history would be inextricably linked from 1941 to the end of the war, with continuing effects in the postwar period.  The book is illustrated with carefully selected photographs.  There are text boxes, charts, and other graphics showcasing information that supports their theme, as well as offering incentives to keep reading and learn more.

The Sandlers’ evident enthusiasm for their topic takes the form of dramatic assertions: “And amazingly, with darkness closing in all over the world, baseball staged a season that still shines in the annals of this history-obsessed sport as one of the brightest seasons ever, maybe the brightest.” Then, they go on to support every one of these inspiring, sometimes disturbing, statements with compelling evidence.

A lengthy discussion of the Negro leagues, and the shamefully delayed admission of Black players to Major League Baseball, does not avoid the topic of racism in American life.  Discrimination against women in sports is the background for the formation of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, with the unwieldy acronym of AAGPBL. With so many male players serving in the armed forces, women were given an opportunity, as in other professions, to finally prove their value. (After the war, as in the case of other expanded roles for women, backlash and retrenchment reversed their progress, for a long time.)

Individual outstanding athletes, including Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Hank Greenberg and Satchel Paige, receive their due, but this is not only a book about athletic brilliance. Social, economic, and military factors that interacted to change both American life and the sport itself, are the focus of careful analysis. There is a sense of completion in the postwar chapters on games played by American troops in occupied Germany, as well as the fate of baseball in Japan, where it had already been popular before that country’s aggression led to war. 

Baseball’s Shining Season is entirely appropriate for fans of the sport, as well as for young readers already interested in World War II. Martin W. Sandler and Craig Sandler’s true achievement is that the book succeeds on multiple levels, as an engaging introduction or a further investigation, about both American and global identity during a struggle for democracy.