Work, Fight, or Play Ball

William Ecenbarger, a freelance writer, is the author of Pennsylvania Stories--Well Told (Temple), Walkin’ the Line, Glory by the Wayside: The Old Churches of Hawaii, and Kids for Cash: Two Judges, Thousands of Children, and a $2.6 Million Kickback Scheme. He is the coauthor of Catching Lightning in a Bottle: How Merrill Lynch Revolutionized the Financial World (with Winthrop H. Smith) and Making Ideas Matter : My Life as a Policy Entrepreneur (with Dwight Evans).

“As a military historian and a huge baseball fan, I found William Ecenbarger’s Work, Fight, or Play Ball to be both compelling history and an extremely fun read. Ecenbarger’s work tells the important story of the nexus of sports, war, and big business in delineating how industrial leagues became a safe haven for baseball players who sought to avoid the western front. Work, Fight, or Play Ball also allows readers to sit in the bleachers and watch as ballplayers from Babe Ruth to Shoeless Joe took their at-bats for an important yet under researched portion of baseball’s historical world.”-Andrew Wiest, University Distinguished Historian at the Dale Center for the Study of War and Society at the University of Southern Mississippi, and author of The Illustrated History of World War I “What effect did World War I have on Major League Baseball and its players? In Work, Fight, or Play Ball, Bill Ecenbarger provides the answer in glowing detail. This absolutely fascinating and extremely informative book contains masterful research on what players such as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and Rogers Hornsby did during the war, how the major leagues survived, and the special leagues that formed to compete with them.”-Rich Westcott, author of Biz Mackey, a Giant behind the Plate and twenty-six other books "Patriotism and America’s pastime converge in this exceptionally written history from Ecenbarger, who provides baseball stats alongside a compelling narrative of the U.S. ensnared in the perils of global war. The story of cooperation between professional sports and the U.S. government over a century ago proves prescient to the present day."-Booklist