The Boys Who Were Left Behind: The 1944 World Series Between the Hapless St. Louis Browns and the Legendary St. Louis Cardinals

Heidenry (Theirs Was the Kingdom) and sportswriter Topel tell one of baseball's nearly forgotten underdog stories: the 1944 ""Streetcar Series"" that pitted the famed St. Louis Cardinals against the notorious St. Louis Browns in ""an aberration both of history and of sports."" A motley assortment of ""misfits, 4-Fs, brawlers, and drunks, and indisputably the worst team in the history of baseball,"" the Browns captured the American League pennant in a year when most of the league's talent had volunteered for military service or had been drafted. Heidenry and Topel do a remarkable job of mining original sources to write a suspenseful account of the six-day series. Readers interested in baseball and American history will appreciate how the authors place the contest in the larger context of WWII.