Black Baseball’s National Showcase: The East-West All-Star Game, 1933 to 1962

When the best Black baseball players assembled for the annual East-West All-Star games, which for a generation paralleled the White All-Star games, the concentration of talent on the field was second to none. This scholarly work brings together the painstakingly assembled history of those games, reconstructed play-by-plays, and accurate statistical records.

Larry Lester recaptures the vigor of the Black communities’ united attention to the event, describes the players whose talents brought them to this pinnacle of achievement, and discusses the less salubrious but still important stratagem of promoters, gamblers, and petty tyrants who cast an occasional shadow on the sunlit fields of Chicago’s Comiskey Park.

This is the expanded version, which extends the original book (published in 2001) from 1953 up through 1962 with additional commentaries and box scores. Also added are team pitching and batting statistics. The original edition won The Sporting News’ Best Researched Baseball Book in 2002.