Book Reviews Tygiel, Jules. Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Le-

Certainly one of the most thoroughly discussed and popular subjects in American sport history is the story of Jackie Robinson and the integration of organized baseball. Few topics elicit such a responsive chord or stir people’s emotions more than the Robinson saga. It is a tale of courage and heroics, both on the part of Robinson and Branch Rickey, the “Mahatma” or “Deacon” of the national game. The details of Robinson’s signing with the Brooklyn Dodgers can be vividly recounted even by those with a limited knowledge of baseball history. Perhaps no other episode in sport so conveniently fits our national perception of equality and fair play. While there has been a plethora of books written about the Robinson legend. no work covers the subject more thoroughly than Jules Tygiel’s recent study Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy. Combining exhaustive research with lucid writing, Tygiel’s work makes significant advances over any of the books written previously about the Robinson legacy, including Murray Polner’s Branch Rickey: A Biography, and Harvey Frommer’s Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier. Maybe more than anything else, Tygiel’s study forces us to confront some of the more somber truths and parables associated with the “national game.” Despite arguments to the contrary, American baseball had not been a “melting pot” for diverse ethnic groups, nor had it eliminated the racial disparities that distinguished other phases of society. He makes it clear that organized baseball was characterized by a persistent white racism that made desegregation a painfully slow process. Closing its doors to blacks in the latter nineteenth century, organized baseball did not become desegregated again un-