When I was growing up, I read dozens of sports books. My favorite was O'Reilly of Notre Dame. The best author of these type of stories was John R. Tunis. Somehow I missed him, maybe because he wrote mostly about baseball and I was more interested in football. I recently was re-introduced to the genre on the internet and decided to mooch some of Tunis' books and see what I had missed.If this book is typical of Tunis' stories, I'm sorry I missed them back in the 1940s and 50s when he was writing them. In this book, two brothers, Spike and Bob Russell, a shortstop and a second baseman are called up by the Brooklyn Dodgers in mid-season. They go through the usual rookie hazing and soon become integral to the team's success. So much so that when the team hits a bad slump, Spike is asked to replace the fired manager. On its face this is an unlikely event but it gives Tunis an opportunity to show how teamwork even in a somewhat individual sport like baseball makes the difference between winning and losing.Tunis goes a step further and introduces prejudice into the mix when the Dodgers call up a Jewish catcher, Jocko Klein. (This book was written in 1943, before people could even imagine that blacks would ever play in the major leagues.) The last third of the book details how Spike tries to get Jocko accepted by the team within the parameters of his world, where even his brother Bob believes all Jews are quitters. Today the story would seem childish and naive but in 1943 this was a rare effort to help young people see how prejudice hurts everybody and what's necessary to rise above it, all done in a non-preachy way. As an adult, I would give this book a couple or three stars at most. As a youth in the 40s, I would most likely have given it five stars, up there with O'Reilly. So I settled on four stars. I'm glad I re-visited my youth even if it was only a virtual visit.
