During the period from the end of World War II to the first expansion of the game of baseball in 1961, the sport underwent a series of transformative changes. From 1949 to 1954, major league baseball attendance dropped more than 30 per cent, as once fiercely loyal fans turned to other leisure activities, started going to see more football, and began watching more television. In addition, the sport had to wrestle with the issues of racial integration, franchise shifts and unionization, while trying to keep a firm hold on the minds and emotions of the American public. This work chronicles how baseball, with imagination and some foresight, survived the challenges of the postwar era. Some of the solutions were arrived at intelligently, some clumsily, but by the early 1960s baseball was a stronger, healthier and better balanced institution than ever before.