Nyet read yet

I belong to a Baseball Books group on Facebook. Every now and then, a member will post an item heretofore unknown to me. That was the case today when this one came up:

Published in 1964 by Paul Molloy, a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times, A Pennant for the Kremlin seems to fit in perfectly for the times, when the Cold War was still high on public consciousness albeit a bit less than a decade earlier.

I haven’t read it yet, but am ordering a copy ASAP. I found this 2009 review from The Hipster Dad’s Bookshelf which refers to the classic Cold War comedy, Dr. Strangelove.

The premise of Pennant is that through some bizarre circumstances (of course), the Ruskies have come to own the Chicago White Sox (not the Boston Red Sox, or Cincinnati Reds, who actually changed their name to Red Stockings for a time because of communist paranoia?). The review notes

the Soviets … send a Hollywood-approved group of Russians to manage their interest. You’ve got the wiser-and-shrewder-than-he-looks new manager, who dresses in a half-suit/half-Sox uniform, and his cute twentysomething daughter, who gets to fall in love with the world-weary team star, and you’ve also got a minder who keeps grouchily reporting everything back to Moscow and who signs all the players up for subscriptions to the worker’s newspapers, and if you can read this guy without visualizing Peter Bull, who played the Soviet ambassador in Dr. Strangelove, then you weren’t paying close enough attention to the movie.

Here’s the paperback edition:

Tagged as: baseball fiction