Baseball rebels: The players, people, and social movements that shook up the game and changed AmericaBy PeterDreier, RobertElias, Lincoln, NE: U of Nebraska P. 2022. 370 pp. $36.95 (cloth)

Baseball, it is safe to say, is not America's most progressive sport. Its athletes are probably the most conservative of the major American professional team sports and its fans tend to be the most bound by traditions and history, although a very narrow conception of the latter. Baseball, more than any other sport, has “unwritten rules” of decorum, the breaching of which can oftentimes lead to a fastball in the ribs, and frequently those rules seem to amount to ways of policing Black and Hispanic players. Meanwhile, players in the NBA and WNBA have been consistently vocal about a range of political issues, perhaps most obviously with questions surrounding Black Lives Matter (BLM) but on other questions as well. Although fans of the NFL (and college football) can be vocally conservative, players have oftentimes been active in engaging a range of political issues, staking a claim well to the left of their fans. When Colin Kaepernick knelt during the National Anthem to call attention to the issue of police brutality, he faced strident, vocal criticism. Yet many players joined him and expressed their support. In part, players in the NBA, WNBA, and NFL supported kneeling and Black Lives Matter because those leagues have a higher percentage of Black athletes than does Major League Baseball (MLB). Furthermore, the WNBA has brought a range of issues about sex and gender to the forefront and has a significant percentage of out gay players, which the men's leagues have yet to see. Yet, baseball has a long history of athlete activism and engagement in political questions. Peter Dreier and Robert Elias want to highlight and remind readers, historians, and fans of this history, which they do ably in Baseball Rebels. It is this long history, amidst the sport's admitted conservatism, especially today, that Dreier and Elias explore. Naturally their springboard, and the bulk of their book, covers matters of race. Perhaps the most significant moment in American sport, after all, came with Jackie Robinson's desegregation of Organized Baseball, first with the Montreal Royals in 1946 but especially when he debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947. Yet for decades before Robinson's debut the sport's shameful history of excluding Black players through baseball's “Unwritten Agreement,” one nonetheless enforced rigidly, usually at the behest of baseball's martinet of a commissioner, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who ruled the sport with an iron fist from his appointment as all-powerful commissioner in the wake of the Black Sox scandal in which the Chicago White Sox threw the World Series at the behest of gamblers in 1919. Yet Dreier and Elias are more interested in the response of Black baseball players and their advocates in the more-than half-century between when Moses Fleetwood Walker was the only and last Black player in the professional ranks in the late 19th century and Robinson's appearance for the Dodgers. The authors emphasize the challenges to segregation, the players who clearly would have excelled in the major leagues, and the context that created the Negro Leagues. They show how the leaders of the Negro Leagues were deeply committed to racial progress even if integration would prove to be a dual-edged sword for Black baseball, obviating the need for those leagues once desegregation of the majors reached a tipping point. Though race is at the epicenter of Baseball Rebels—and understandably so—the authors explore myriad other issues. Their chapter on women in baseball—including but going well beyond the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (the league depicted in the famous baseball film A League of Their Own) that emerged to fill the entertainment gap during World War II—is a tour de force as is their chapter on gay players and the challenges they have faced and continue to face in a sporting environment that still seems unremittingly hostile to an out gay male player. Given the good work they do on Curt Flood and other players who challenged baseball's draconian labor and contract environment well into the 1960s, it would have been beneficial for the authors to explore more deeply the way that some players challenged the authoritarian nature of owners and the contracts they effectively foisted on players as far back as the last decade of the 19th and first years of the 20th centuries, including the dreaded “reserve clause” that effectively locked players into whatever contract their owners desired to sign them too, leaving players with no leverage and virtually as chattel. Given how well the authors tie events in baseball to larger trends in American history, they could have connected baseball labor issues with larger questions of workers and capital in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era—John Montgomery Ward, a heroic force in fighting these battles gets only two passing mentions in a book where he could have been a heroic embodiment of its themes. This absence aside, however, Dreier and Elias have done a fine job of restoring baseball's rebels, protesters, and activists to their rightful place in the sport's history. Well-written and convincingly argued, Baseball Rebels warrants a place on the shelves of fans and scholars alike. Baseball may seem like a fundamentally conservative sporting culture. But as this important book shows, beneath the surface, there have always been brave dissenters willing to challenge the status quo even at the expense of their own careers, and even in the face of long, daunting odds.

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