Summer of the Cheap Wieners (Paperback)

Meet the 1941 Phillies: A sad little ball club with a fading number of disgruntled fans. They aren’t very good now, and they won’t be soon. But the Phillies of 1941 certainly are a team—just like all the others, with a uniform and a roster full of players: Cheap ones, angry ones, regretful ones, with nicknames like “Boom-Boom” and “Dangerous Dan.” Together, they’ll find a way to win about 40 or so baseball games. Also together, they will lose far more.

Their season starts poorly and by May they’ve traded their last player of any value. Meanwhile, Joe DiMaggio has been drawing boos from bored Yankee fans until he hits a fateful little dribbler that turns into a 56-game hit streak. As the summer goes on, the Phillies try to strangle each other, resent the pity of their opponents, and watch their manager lose his sanity and his job security. For some reason, everyone seems a lot more interested in the DiMaggio thing while meetings are quietly held by league officials to discuss how no one is even buying hot dogs at Phillies games.

The summer of 1941 is the setting of eternal baseball lore including DiMaggio’s streak, Ted Williams winning the All-Star Game, and the Brooklyn Dodgers breaking free of their iconic dreadfulness, all as tanks roll across Europe. There’s a lot going on in the world, but the Phillies are willing to settle for fewer mean columns being written about them. After all, they have a season to play, too; loss by loss, heartbreak by heartbreak, attempted strangling by attempted strangling.

It was a season that deserved to be forgotten and quickly was. But it taught the Phillies, their fans, and the city of Philadelphia that some players make history; a lot more of them are just playing through it.