The Veracruz blues

by Mark Winegardner

When big-league ballplayers return from the war, unhappy with the contracts the club owners offer them, the wealthy Pasquel brothers pay unheard-of salaries to lure disaffected players - Sal Maglie, Vern Stephens, Danny Gardella, Max Lanier among them - to Mexico. When they get there, they see that the league already has major-league-caliber players - Negro Leaguers and Latinos - banned from the majors by the color line or shunned by subtler forms of racism. What follows is the first fully integrated season in the history of baseball. In a cast that includes Ernest Hemingway, Babe Ruth, Diego Rivera, and Frida Kahlo, at the center of this novel are Theolic "Fireball" Smith, Negro League star with dreams of being the one who breaks the color line in the U.S.; Danny Gardella, clown-prince wartime outfielder, whose mythic quest almost brings free agency to the majors in the 1940s; and Frank Bullinger, novelist-cum-journalist, "the youngest and most lost member of the Lost Generation," who