The year is 1918, and the U.S. has just joined Britain and her allies in the Great War against Germany and her empire of evil. On the grounds of Wrigley Field in Chicago, baseball players parade with bats instead of guns to demonstrate the patriotism of baseball.

And within the ball club, as with the fans, pervasive anti-German sentiment takes the form of constant harassment of the one German-American player, Willie Kaisar. But when harassment turns to Willie’s murder, his teammate Mickey Rawlings gets involved.

Was it, as the heavily censored newspapers claimed, a freak accident, or was a rival team owner responsible, or was it an anti-German plot by the paramilitary Patriotic Sons of Liberty?

For answers, read Troy Soos’ historical mystery novel, “Murder at Wrigley Field.” Mr. Soos immerses you in the days and nights of working-class baseball players and their owners as well as the hysteria of the home front during World War I.

Rawlings became a war hero, but according to “Hunting a Detroit Tiger,” Soos’ next baseball novel, after his celebrity status was played out the Cubs unceremoniously traded him to the Detroit Tigers. The wartime attacks on civil liberties turned on the ballplayers when they got caught up in the union fever and the post-war strike wave that enveloped the country after 1919.

The radical Industrial Workers of the World were trying to convince the ballplayers they were workers in need of a union like any others. Fighting the IWW were the team’s private police, the Detroit cops and the Anti-Red Squads led by U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer and a young J. Edgar Hoover.

When he was accused of assassinating a former player turned union organizer, Mickey’s only escape was to seek the real killer. How he changed in the process illustrates in microcosm the labor organizing, politics and, of course, baseball of that time.

These and other Mickey Rawlings mysteries are available in the DC 37 Education Fund Library.

— Ken Nash
Ed Fund Library, Room 211