We are thrilled that the SABR publication How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945 edited by Russ Speiller and James Forr is now available. The book is accompanied by a website featuring more photographs, interviews, video clips and more.

Within the pages of our new SABR Digital Library book and companion website, How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945, you won’t find names of legendary American baseball heroes like Mickey Mantle or Ken Griffey Jr., but you will most definitely find American heroes. People such as Rosie Maruki Kakuuchi, Pete Mitsui, George Tamura, Jim Morita, and Mary Matsuno Miya didn’t just excel at playing ball. They excelled at perseverance, after having their lives taken away from them to be detained at the Manzanar incarceration camp during World War II.

How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945 
Edited by Russ Speiller and James Forr 
Associate Editor: Bill Nowlin 
Foreword by Dave Roberts, Los Angeles Dodgers manager
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-960819-67-3, $19.95 
ISBN (ebook): 978-1-960819-66-6, $9.99
8.5″ x 11″, 162 pages

How We Played the Game: Baseball at Manzanar, 1942–1945 tells the story of baseball at Manzanar. The volume is illustrated with many historical photos, some taken by Toyo Miyatake, an incarceree who snuck a forbidden lens into the camp and built his own camera, and some by famed photographers Ansel Adams and Dorothea Lange. Contributors include over a dozen members of the Society for American Baseball Research and several other key individuals such as Dan Kwong, the son of an incarceree and leader of the effort to restore the baseball field on the Manzanar historic site, and Kerry Yo Nakagawa, founder of the Nisei Baseball Research Project. This team has joined forces to tell the story of how the Japanese Americans incarcerated at Manzanar played the game.

Our special Featured Spotlight web project complements the new Digital Library book. At SABR.org/baseball-at-manzanar, explore the Baseball at Manzanar companion website to find more essays and stories, rare photos, interviews, and multimedia clips with survivors of the camp and their families in their own words, plus special coverage of the reconstruction and reclamation of the Manzanar baseball field leading up to a historic doubleheader played there in 2024 and the ballfield’s grand opening in October 2026. 

Visit SABR.org/baseball-at-manzanar to download the free e-book edition, save 50% off the purchase of the paperback, or learn more.