Description
Collector's Note – Why This Issue Matters
The 1939 edition of America's Baseball Annual: The Wind-up, featuring writing by Grantland Rice and George Kirksey, is a primary document of Major League Baseball at one of the most historically significant moments in the sport's history — the 1938 season that the annual reviewed was the final full season before the outbreak of World War II began reshaping the American sporting landscape, and it arrived at a moment when the sport's golden age was at its most fully realized. The 1938 season had produced extraordinary individual performances: Hank Greenberg had hit 58 home runs, falling just two short of Babe Ruth's record in a chase that had captivated the country, and the Yankees had completed their third consecutive World Series championship under Joe McCarthy. The players, teams, and storylines that the 1939 annual documented were those of a sport at the height of its cultural dominance in American life — before the war would take hundreds of players into military service, before night baseball had become universal, and before the integration of the game that Jackie Robinson would achieve in 1947 would begin the transformation of the sport's racial geography. An annual publication of this kind, produced by some of the most celebrated sportswriters of the era, is exactly the kind of primary source document that serious collectors of baseball history in print seek out as foundational items for their archives. Collectors interested in the broader landscape of American sports publishing from this era will find the 1939 magazines collection at OriginalMagazines.com the most useful resource for exploring what remains available from this extraordinary year in American history.
The bylines attached to this annual are themselves a significant part of its collector value. Grantland Rice was the most celebrated American sportswriter of the first half of the twentieth century — the man who named the Notre Dame backfield "The Four Horsemen" in 1924, who had been writing about sports since the 1890s, and whose prose style had done more than any other writer's to shape the mythology and the elevated language of American sportswriting. By 1939, Rice was in the final phase of a career that spanned over five decades and that had produced some of the most enduring images in the history of American sports journalism. His contribution to the 1939 baseball annual gives the publication an authority and a literary quality that purely statistical or journalistic annuals of the period cannot match. George Kirksey, his co-writer, was a United Press sportswriter who had covered baseball at the major league level for years and brought the kind of specific, inside knowledge of the game's current landscape that complemented Rice's more literary and retrospective perspective. Together, their contributions to this annual represent a specific intersection of the sport's mythology-making tradition and its journalistic record that makes the publication valuable as both a baseball document and a piece of American literary history.
The 1939 publication date also places this annual at a specific and deeply poignant moment in American cultural history that gives even a sports publication an additional layer of historical significance. The summer of 1939 was the last summer of peace before the German invasion of Poland on September 1 would trigger the Second World War. In that final summer, Lou Gehrig — who had played 2,130 consecutive games and was one of the most beloved figures in the history of American sports — was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and was forced to retire from the Yankees. His farewell address at Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, in which he called himself "the luckiest man on the face of the earth," was one of the most moving moments in American sports history and one of the most widely reported events of the summer. An annual published in 1939 reviewing the 1938 season was being read and collected in the specific atmosphere of that summer and those events, giving its celebration of the sport's golden age a bittersweet quality that only deepens with historical distance.
About the Publication
America's Baseball Annual: The Wind-up was a specialist sports annual published to provide a comprehensive retrospective review of the Major League Baseball season just concluded, aimed at the devoted baseball readership that wanted more depth, statistical coverage, and analytical perspective than the daily sports press could provide within its format constraints. Annual publications of this type were an important part of the sports publishing landscape of the 1930s and 1940s, serving the baseball fan community's hunger for the kind of sustained reflection on the season's events, individual performances, and historical context that could only be accomplished in book or annual format rather than in daily newspapers. The combination of statistical analysis and literary sportswriting exemplified by Rice and Kirksey gave this particular annual a dual audience: the serious fan who wanted the numbers, and the reader who appreciated the sport's mythology as well as its mechanics.
Key Highlights Inside
- Grantland Rice's sportswriting — baseball's foremost literary voice — contributions by the most celebrated American sportswriter of the first half of the twentieth century, whose prose style had defined the elevated mythology of American sports journalism for over four decades and whose involvement with this annual gives it a literary authority that transcends standard sports annual publishing.
- 1938 MLB season review — Greenberg's 58 home runs — retrospective coverage of a season that included Hank Greenberg's extraordinary 58-home-run performance, the Yankees' third consecutive World Series championship, and the full range of individual and team achievements that made 1938 one of the more statistically dramatic seasons of the pre-war era.
- Statistics and analysis of the 1938 season — comprehensive statistical coverage of the season's individual and team performances, providing the kind of detailed numerical record that makes baseball annuals of this era primary research documents for historians of the sport's pre-war golden age.
- Photography of iconic players and teams from the era — illustrated coverage of the players and teams who defined Major League Baseball in the late 1930s, producing a visual record of the sport at a specific and historically significant moment that subsequent photography cannot replicate.
- Published in the final summer before World War II — produced in 1939, the last year before the war began reshaping American life and the sport itself, this annual documents baseball at the final moment of its pre-war golden age, making it a historical artifact of unusual poignancy and documentary importance.
Condition & Rarity
Surviving copies of this annual should be understood within the context of what eighty-six years of existence means for a specialist sports publication printed on the paper stock typical of late 1930s American periodical publishing. Minor wear consistent with the publication's age, marks, and binding wear are honest condition disclosures that are entirely expected and that do not automatically preclude collector or research value — what matters most is the structural integrity of the binding and the completeness and legibility of the content, including the Rice and Kirksey articles and the statistical and photographic record of the 1938 season. Baseball annuals from the pre-war era survive in much smaller numbers than the major weekly news magazines of the same period, both because their initial print runs were smaller and because they were less systematically preserved by institutions and libraries. A good-condition example of the 1939 Wind-up with its content intact and readable represents a genuinely significant find for collectors of pre-war baseball publishing history. The plastic protective covering indicates deliberate preservation effort and more careful recent storage than an unprotected copy would have received.
Looking for More Issues Like This?
Pre-war baseball annuals featuring writing by figures of Grantland Rice's stature are among the rarer and more historically substantive pieces of American sports publishing history, and the 1939 Wind-up — documenting the final golden-age season before the war would transform the sport — is a particularly significant example. If you're researching the broader landscape of American publishing, sports journalism, and cultural life in the year that ended peace in Europe, the 1939 magazines collection at OriginalMagazines.com brings together a wide range of titles from one of the most historically consequential years of the entire twentieth century — essential browsing for any serious collector of the period.