That Lively Railroad Town tells the intertwined stories of minor and major league baseball at the turn of the twentieth century. In central New York, a small town used its championship semi-pro team to ease the stigma of a salacious local murder case, while its former second baseman led a boycott of major league player contracts to break the National League’s monopoly and set the game up to flourish. This sequel to The Workingman’s Game weaves these stories against a backdrop of economic, racial, ethnic and labor strife, and an assassination that shocked the world.