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The Last Rebel Yell by Ken Brooks

The Last Rebel Yell is a wonderful book about the Alabama-Florida League (it excludes the Alabama State League years) that is a must for anyone interested in Class D baseball.  This book is filled with anecdotes, photos, player profiles, interviews, and stats.  Brooks made the book easy and fun to read, and also a great book just to browse through. The focus here is on Panama City, but there's lots of coverage of the rest of the league too.  This book is out of print and very hard to find, but some libraries have it in their reference sections. The Last Rebel Yell is long out of print, but you can somtimes get a  copy for a fair price ($10-$30) at the  ABEBOOK  Advanced Book Exchange search facility mentioned above.  At the site, enter the search for either Last Rebel Yell or Ken Brooks, but be aware that there is a civil war book by the same title.  A listing of bookstores with copies will be returned along with the price the store is going to charge.  Complete the info and an email is sent to the store.  They will contact you back with purchasing information.  I've bought many hard to find books here and highly recommend the site!

Last Rebel Yell - reviewed by Tommy Rogers:

Ken Brooks traces the history of the lowest of the low of the minor leagues in an interesting bit of cultural history which chronicles the Alabama-Florida League. The AFL (936-1962) consisted of cities which in some cases were hardly more than villages in southeast Alabama and northwest Florida. The league spanned the paradigm shifts of World War II and the development of all weather roads, antibiotics, airplane travel, and the disappearance of basefall as a central focus of small town life. The day of these boys of summer on fields of sometimes less than meticulous manicure, of sometimes dingy lights and of single cold shower dressing rooms, was the time of the $.20 cent hamburger, $.20 milk shake, $.20 loaf of bread and the $.20 gallon of gas, and of $250 as a pretty good paying job. It was a pre-TV, pre-air conditioning era when what happened on a summer's eve on a baseball diamond would be the stuff of the next day's conversation in the cafe's and service stations and of the winter's "Hot Stove League".

What happened on local league diamonds could be the stuff of memorial comparisons that transcedened decades. It was a time when bicycles were safely left unattended in public places, and cars were routinely parked unlocked with windows down. It was a time when local teams, the leagues in which they played, and the comparitive statistics which accrued were matters of civic and communal consciousness. The viability of the low minors on the terms in which it then existed was a phenoemnon on its way out through displacement by paradigmatic cultural shifts even it reached its peak. There was no reason not to think at the time local baseball interest would not recover from temporary aberrant challenges and carry forth its continuity. The AFL initiated play with teams in places like Troy, Ozark, Enterprise, Dothan, Adalusia, and Union Springs, Al. and Panama City, Fl. From our present perspective, Brooks observes, it is easy to underestimate the importance of a Class D team to towns in the pre-TV era. Brooks begins his historical portrait with Paul Hemphill's gripping and poignant experiential account of his one game with the Graceville, Fla. Oiliers (1954) Graceville, a village of circa 1,000 population, was the most tiny of all towns in professional baseball in the lowest of the lowest of classifications, but Hemphill's tears had salt which burns through the years with a sting with which those who have in some context similarly felt the devastating nature of undesirable finality can easily emphasize. Brooks follows with a focus on Panama City as a Class D case history. The author includes interviews with more than a dozen persons who lived portions of the league's history. He presents the the statistics, the stadia, the death of a batting star from a beaning which almost destroyed the league, the administrative controversies, the playoffs and the great moments and the peccantries. Class D baseball, even in the lowest league in the lowest of classifications, was important it its own right. It was an integral expression of communal affiliation and association. The players were men who, as Bill James has expressed it,  played baseball. They were playing baseball there and then, and what they did there and then had its own meaning. Team compositions were likely to be composed of minor leaguers on their way down (sometimes as player managers), minor league journeyman whose experienes might span decades and experience in the more exotic places of the high minors, augmented by local coaches, law enforcement personnel, service station operators and novice players from who knows where. While the major leaguers of the era might be reknowed and admired nationally, and the magical creatures who cavorted under the arc lights on the tapesty of green and brown of the picture postcard diamonds of green cathederals like Rickwood Field in Birmingham or Ponce De Leon Park in Atlanta of the prestiguous Southern Association of major deep South metro areas might be reknowned regionally, the Class D ballplayers were equally were the glory of their times locally. In Brook's cultural history we meet men integral to the AFL -- the characters like Bo Belinsky, Bobby Bragan, Lou Pinella; the greats like Virgil "Fire" Trucks, Neal Cobb, Spencer "Onion" Davis; the journemen like Bobby Dews, Wayne Terwilliger, Cal Ripkin, Sr.; the sometimes notables like Bobby Cox, Steve Barber, Steve Dalkowski, Travis Tidwell, or Dixie Howell of the famous Ala. Crimson Tide combination of Howell to Don Hudson. If the late 1940s was the heyday of minor league baseball, it becomes clear by hindsight that even then incipient signs of an irreversible mortality were making themselves apparent. Even in the best of times franchise survivability was an ever present challenge. With the demise of the Class B Southestern League in the early 1950's, larger population centers like Montgomery, Selma and Pensacola replaced the more bucolic AFL entries. Even so, Graceville, Fla. lasted through 1958. By the league's last season (1962), the AFL had outlasted the historic and prestigous "major league of Dixie" (the Southern Association). Of the AFL league entries that last year, Pensacola, Ft. Walton, Selma, Dothan, Montgomery and Adalusia, only the latter had been an original league entrant, and that affiliation had not been consistent. Baseball is a something of seamless web. Persons and events connect with persons and events with an interconnectivity of intriguing synchronicity and fortuity that reverberates with individual and collective memory. There is a sense in which the AFL lives on with memorial viability simultaneously with such displacement as an integral aspect of communal awareness and experience that knowledge of the location of the fields on which the league's teams played has in some instances been lost to memory. Brook's THE LAST REBEL YELL is a graceful portrait of a vanished America. Reading the book is sort of like a diversionary drive on a two lane highway with its horse-shoe motels and neon lighted pre-fast food franchise drive-ins from an era when the highways went through all the towns, wherein in passing through one could see, sense and feel what the countryside was like, and in retrospect can remember how place existed once on such a lost and humane scale.

Long Gone by Paul Hemphill

(also available in movie form on VHS)

Paul Hemphill is an author from  Birmingham, Alabama, who has written  books focusing on both the the south and on baseball (The Nashville Sounds, The Heart of the Game: The Education of a Minor League Ballplayer, among others). Hemphill's first novel, Long Gone, is raunchy, and kind of low brow, befitting the characters in the book, but it is also a fun look at life in the deep south in the fifties and life in the Alabama-Florida League. Being no book reviewer, I'll let the jacket's liner notes tell you more:

    This raunchy Novel with a heart of gold is about love and loss of innocence at the bottom of the most minor league in baseball - The Alabama-Florida League, Class D, in the summer of 1956.  Specifically, it is the story of Cecil B. "Stud" Cantrel, a 39 year old maverick sour with promise gone bad, once a rising star with the Yankees and now, with shrapnel in one knee and a failing marriage behind him, the hard-drinking, womanizing player-manager for the Graceville Oilers:  a man, and a team, in last place, literally and figuratively.     But then Stud's path crosses that of Jamie Weeks, a teenage second baseman who hitches from Birmingham into Graceville with nothing but his bat, his glove, and his spikes, his hopes and dreams, and a prepared speech.  More important, Stud meets a determined young woman with the improbable name of Dixie Lee Box who refuses to be relegated to the status of Saturday-night recreation and who surprises Stud - and the rest of us - by making him fall in love with her. The disgraceful Oilers - partly through the efforts of Joe Louis (Jose) Brown, a black catcher masquerading as a Venezuelan to avoid retaliation by the Ku Klux Klan - begin, amazingly, to climb out of the cellar. The owner of the Oilers, the Reverend Q. Talmadge Ramey - a homosexual sometime used-car dealer, fertilizer czar, moonshine entrepreneur, and evangelist DJ for station WGOD in Graceville - even stops threatening to cancel Stud's contract. Suddenly it appears that Stud has a chance at a kind of innocence and promise again, until men and events conspire to show him that even this last chance is long gone.

Long Gone was long out of print, but now you can find a copy at web sites like Powell's Books or Amazon.

50 Years of Professional Baseball In Alabama since 1900 by Zipp Newman and Frank McGowen

More in the style of a souvenir program than a book, this soft cover book concentrated on the Birmingham Barons, but also devoted ample coverage of the Alabama State League and the Georgia - Alabama League's Alabama entries.  Lots of great photos, most of which are on this web page, and some interesting but fairly light histories make this book/magazine a great find, plus there's an interesting profile of Rickwood Field. This book is very hard to find and will cost anywhere from $40 to $100.  I've seen it on EBAY once, and the sale price was over $50..

Yes, there is a Chase Riddle biography out there! The book isn't about his AFL days, it's about his successful baseball coaching career at Troy State University, where he lead the Trojans to back-to-back NCAA Division II National Championships.  Mostly a collection of articles and anecdotes,  the book is a nice tribute to a baseball legend.

The Story Of Minor League Baseball, by Robert Finch, others:

This 700+ page book, covering the history of minor league baseball from 1901 through 1952 is a rare gem in that it is the first record book to cover the minor leagues as a whole.   The are anecdotes, lists, and overviews of the 43 minor leagues that existed in 1952, including the AFL.  This book can also be found at ABEBOOKS or occasionally on Ebay, but be prepared to spend $100 or more for a copy.  My copy cost over $100 and was well worn! There are some interesting photos of minor league executives, and a well-written history covers the beginnings of the minors as well as the Bramham and Trautman tenures

This great book is now out of print.  For a short period of time, you could have purchase the 500+ page book for only $9.00!!  Now, if you can find a copy, expect to page $75-$125.  This book has the standings and various statistics for every team in every minor league from the 1800's through 1984.  Miles Wolff, who published Baseball America, compiled the book and other minor league record books, but this is simply the best minor league reference published to date.

The encyclopedia Of Minor League Baseball by Miles Wolf