Baseball Between the Lines is a direct sequel to Don Honig’s Baseball When the Grass was Real, being an oral history of baseball in the 1940s and 1950s,  recounting interviews with ballplayers of the era.  This was an time of upset and change: not only were ballplayers being taken away by the war, but the war would bring its own social changes along with technological progress.  The color barrier finally fell, for instance, in ‘47, leading to Jackie Robinson and other great players joining the ranks.   Baseball parks began employing lights and inaugurated night games – which would become a primary attraction,  allowing for working men to attend more games and enjoy them more in the cool of the evening. Television, too, brought major league baseball to increasingly more people, and celebrity to more ball players — but television would have its negative effects like reducing the audience for minor league games. Before television, they were the only ‘game in town’ for many audiences outside the northeastern US, which in this era before the Dodgers had bolted for Plasticland, and the Braves had flown south to Atlanta — still had a monopoly on MLB clubs.

  As with Baseball When the Grass Was Real, the men interviewed here are not necessarily superstars –  there’s no Ted Williams here – but greats like Williams and Ruth are frequently talked about.  One notable difference in the Audible versions of When the Grass was Real and this is that the narrator Ben Bartolone doesn’t change his voices for different players. While Stephen McLaughlin would use different accents and cadences – including several southern accents and one attempt at the Mid-Atlantic accent – Bartolone reads every player exactly the same, whether they’re from south Bahston or the Mississippi delta. He has a good voice for reading, but it lessens the immersion when everyone sounds identical.   One amusing aspect of this particular collection was learning how frequently Army officers would meddle in ballplayers’  assignments because they wanted to have strong baseball teams at their bases:  one soldier was scheduled to be medically discharged, but his CO refused to sign off  because he didn’t want to lose such a valuable member of his team! (This CO was effectively keeping the soldier in uniform just as a ballplayer: he had a 6 am  to 6 pm daily pass, and no assigned duties whatsoever.) There are lots of good stories here, like a man who pitched two no-hitters back to back and was relieved when someone finally scored a base run on him because the pressure had gotten to be so intense. Another player, when traded from the Yankees, was surprised when his mother said thank God – she was a member of the Red Sox Nation and hated having a son who played for the Evil Empire, but had never voiced her opinion for his sake.

This collection was quite fun to listen to, but I say that as someone who enjoyed both Honig’s prior work and the Ritter classic that inspired it. (Speaking of, you can pick up Ritter’s The Glory of their Times on Kindle for $2. I did, just to see if it has more interviews than the audiobook original, which I think it does.)