Is All the Stars Came Out That Night a good read?

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By Andrew Perloff, SI.com

Welcome to the SI.com Book Club. Each month we'll review a sports book and offer an excerpt. October's selection: All the Stars Came Out That Night by Kevin King.

Imagine if segregation still existed and minorities were forced to play in a separate baseball league. Fans would spend inordinate hours debating which league was better on sports talk radio? Pedro Martinez vs. Roger Clemens. Barry Bonds vs. Mark McGwire. Albert Pujols vs. ... well, no one compares to Pujols.

The idea for All The Stars Came Out That Night, the fictional tale set in 1934 featuring a game between the best Major League and Negro league players, feels like it was borne out of a sports talk radio debate more than an exploration of social justice. Although there are probably underlying racial issues in the book, a real fan will get too caught up in the baseball to notice them.

Author Kevin King creates a dazzling portrait of real-life stars such as Dizzy Dean, Satchell Paige, Babe Ruth and Josh Gibson at a time when baseball was the most popular sport in America. If you're not familiar with Negro League stars like Cool Papa Bell, Oscar Charleston and Buck Leonard, you'll feel like you've seen them play by the end of the novel.

Unlike in The Natural or Field of Dreams, King doesn't turn the players into mythical figures. Paige is the well-meaning con man with a knack for getting in trouble, Joe Dimmagio is a cocky kid out of San Francisco who barely resembles the miserable-looking superstar he developed into, and Ruth is a flatulent, out-of-shape drunk who can still hit when he has to.

The tale is narrated by famous gossip columnist Walter Winchell and includes references to just about every 1930s celebrity. King's Winchell-like prose is often a little heavy on the florid descriptions and the non-historical fictional characters sprinkled throughout the novel don't add much. But what keeps the story going is it constantly returns to baseball.

The novel begins right as Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang Cardinals are about to beat the Tigers in the '34 World Series. Meanwhile, Paige is in a nasty contract dispute with the non-fictional Pittsburgh Crawfords owner and known gangster Gus Greenlee. Paige's idea for the ultimate barnstorming game had nothing to do with race and everything to do with money. King is very careful not to elevate any of the events of this volatile period in MLB history to anything beyond baseball. Branch Rickey is eluded to quickly as a very Moneyball-type of general manager. Social justice takes a back seat to financial concerns and a burning curiosity about how the black players stack up against the white players.

Commisioner Kennesaw "Mountain" Landis sanctions the game with two conditions -- only seven Major Leaguers are allowed on the roster and no one can ever know it happened. So the Major League team is forced to be creative with its roster. Since Dean was the catalyst for the game, he chooses four other members of the Gas House Gang, leaving two spots for other current Major Leaguers, which causes much debate. For the non-Major League spots, they choose the recently retired Ruth, a minor leaguer named Dimaggio and a long-since disappeared Joe Jackson. Multi-sport female star Babe Didrickson gets a tryout, but doesn't make the team and Hank Greenberg isn't an option, because the game's benefactor, Henry Ford, was anti-Semetic.

The Negro League players also use creative recruiting to field the best non-white team. In one slightly overblown subplot, Paige and Gibson travel to the Domincan Republic to kidnap Martin Dihigo, the great Latin star who may just be the most underappreciated baseball player of the 20th century.

To keep the showdown secret, they decide to play at Fenway Park at night with rented lights. With its new 37-foot wall in left field, Fenway proved to be an appropriate home for a fictional game of this proportion. Along with Wrigley, Fenway is one of baseball's last links to a different time when baseball meant even more to the nation than pro football does today. All the Stars Came Out is a vibrant reminder of that bygone era, while not romanticizing it into something unrecognizable.

If you're a fan of Negro League baseball, All The Stars Came Out is a worthwhile read just to evaluate King's accuracy in describing great stars like Paige, Gibson and Charleston. But you don't have to be an expert in baseball history to enjoy the novel. King brings names you may only recognize from the record book to life and taps into the imagination of baseball fans in a way that isn't done much since the national pasttime turned into just another sport.