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Lew Freedman. 1930: The Story of a Baseball Season When Hitters Reigned Supreme. New York: Sports Publishing, 2021. 300 pp. Cloth, $26.99.
The 1930 major league season, eleven years after the end of the low-scoring Deadball Era, produced an unprecedented display of hitting to cap a decade of steadily improving offense. The combined slugging percentage of the National League (NL) and American League (AL) jumped almost 40 percent from 1928. There were nearly 20 percent more runs scored than two years prior, many of them coming on the 1,565 home runs hit in 1930, more than 40 percent more than in 1928.
As nine of the sixteen clubs had team batting averages of more than .300 (and the entire NL hit .303), many individual hitters rode that tide to their best career years. For some, when the tide receded in future seasons, 1930 was the best year they ever had, maybe the only good one they achieved. Offensive records were set: Hack Wilson's fifty-six home runs for the Chicago Cubs set an NL mark that stood up for sixty-seven years, and no one in either league has since topped his 191 RBIs. All this offense, of course, came at the expense of the pitchers, as the leagues' combined ERA was nearly 5.00. The Philadelphia Phillies, a woeful last-place finisher in the NL, summed up the season. Playing in the intimate Baker Bowl, the team had the second-highest batting average in the league but...