Skip to footer

6 baseball books for mid-season reading

These new releases should provide a good selection for summer reading.

3. ‘Singles and Smiles: How Artie Wilson Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier,’ by Gaylon H. White

  • By Ross Atkin

Bet you’ve never heard of Artie Wilson. Few modern baseball fans presumably have. Wilson, however, deserves the attention given him in “Singles and Smiles.” Not only was he that rarest of hitters, with a .402 batting average with the Birmingham Black Barons, making him the last hitter to break the .400 barrier at a top level of pro ball. But he was also was one of the game’s best shortstops, and a popular racial pioneer to boot. With his joyous attitude and his playing excellence he was a fan favorite when, in 1949, he became only the second black player in the Pacific Coast League. Two years later he was brought up to the majors by the New York Giants, but struggled at the plate in only 22 at-bats and reportedly urged Manager Leo Durocher to bring up a player Wilson had taken under wing when with the Black Barons, none other than Willie Mays.

Here’s an excerpt from Singles and Smiles:

“A Negro League ballplayer spent more time on a bus than in his own house or apartment. The bus was how he got from town to town and game to game. The bus is where he ate when a restaurant owner wouldn’t serve him a meal inside. The bus was where he slept when there was nowhere else to sleep.

“The bus was home to Artie Wilson and his Birmingham Black Baron teammates. When Artie returned to his house in Birmingham, his cousin, Lillie Mae, told the bus driver, ‘Leave that bus here! Cause Artie can’t sleep!’

“Artie slept on a bed about once a week. ‘Didn’t get much sleep. Only in the bus. But those were good days. We had a good bus driver, and we had a lot of fun.’ ”

3 of 6
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.