The Soul of Baseball and Other Baseball Books (Review)
Reviewed by Colman McCarthy
THE SOUL OF BASEBALL
A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America
By Joe Posnanski
Morrow. 276 pp. $24.95
First as a player for the Kansas City Monarchs in the Negro League of the 1930s and ‘40s and later as the team’s manager, Buck O’Neil did much more than collect base hits and victories. He gathered stories, on field and off. He played, roamed and cavorted with Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson. He rode broken-down busses and ran bases on weedy fields in seedy segregated towns, all of it with stellar free-form athletes kept from the big leagues because they were black.
Joe Posnanski, a sports columnist for the Kansas City Star, caught up with O’Neil when this grandson of a field slave was 93. Just in time. Seizing on the obvious--mine O’Neil’s memories while gold was still there--Posnanski traveled the land in 2005 with the aging but ever alert and lively star who died last October at 94.
They were at Buck O’Neil Day at the Minneapolis Twin’s Metrodome. In Washington, O’Neil testified before a Senate subcommittee, asking that the Negro League museum in Kansas City officially be given a national designation. It was at the museum that Posnanski reports the dialogue between O”Neil and Willie Mays, who came to the majors four years after Jackie Robinson. Mays says that the uniform he once wore for the Minneapolis Millers “is selling for eighty thousand dollars”--the same sum the New York Giants paid Mays in 1959 when he hit .347 and led the league in stolen bases and runs scored.
In Posnanski’s caring and capable hands, O’Neil--who made it to the majors as the first black coach—shows no bitterness over enduring decades of racism. To the end, Posnanski writes, “he still loved baseball. He loved people. He forgave, but so easily that it hardly seemed like forgiving.”
THE NIGHT CASEY WAS BORN
The True Story Behind the Great American Ballad
By John Evangelist Walsh
Overlook Press. 219 pp. $25
Feats and defeats are the marks of baseball, the high and lows remembered by those who play and watch the games. We bank memories of Bobby Thompson’s home run, Willie Mays’s catch and Don Larsen’s no-hitter in the same vault as Mickey Owen’s dropped third strike and Bill Buckner’s missed grounder. Savants of baseball can supply the dates of those heroics or ignominies and, if old enough, how they cheered or moaned as they happened.
And then we have the mighty Casey of the Mudville nine. Who doesn’t know the immortal final lines of the country’s most enduring baseball poem?
Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out.
The cadenced poem, in long-line quatrains, appeared on June 3, 1888 in the San Francisco Examiner. The author was Ernest Thayer, a recent Harvard graduate and native of Worcester, Mass., who had gone west to try his fortunes.
In a forensic examination of baseball’s early years, John Evangelist Walsh exhumes the story about the creation of the poem and the culture that embraced the mythical Casey as if his third strike whiff was a metaphor of all human failure. Walsh, a biographer of Robert Frost, John Keats and Edgar Allan Poe, offers all the historical details of 1890s baseball anyone cold want. The 52 line poem itself would likely have been forgotten had it not been performed thousands of times on hundreds of stages by a comic opera star named DeWolf Hopper.
Serving up part Americana and part nostalgia, Walsh swings for the fences—and unlike Casey does indeed connect.
TY & THE BABE
By Tom Stanton
Thomas Dunne Books. 357 pp. $23.95
It was the ninth inning, a mid-summer game in 1924. Ty Cobb’s Detroit Tigers were four runs behind Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees. A Detroit pitcher, after throwing twice at the Babe’s head, beaned the next batter in the back. That was it. The Yankees charged onto the field, along with the police to contain the brawl. In the melee, Ruth sought out Cobb, challenging him to a fist fight.
The pair was kept apart by teammates who knew of the intense hatred between Ruth and Cobb. They might kill each other. Ruth and Cobb played on the same fields for 15 seasons, each setting records and each with oceanic egos. Away from the stadia where he thrilled the crowds with home runs, the Babe was a world-class hedonist. When he wasn’t knocking ‘em back in saloons, he was knocking up floozies in hotels. Cobb, a self-disciplined Mason from Georgia, had his own character defects, including racism and a foul mouth.
Tom Stanton, adulatory toward both men, believes that “the passing years have been unkind and unfair to both men. They have been reduced to stark and shallow clichés.”
Maybe, but that discounts the many reputable biographies of Cobb—by Al Stump in 1996 and Dan Holmes in 2004, to name two--and the many more about Ruth, including last year’s “The Big Bam” by Leigh Montville.
The value of “Ty & the Babe” is in Stanton’s finely detailed story of the post-playing days reconciliation between the two men, now grown-ups tempered by life. They became golfing pals and staged exhibition matches. When Ruth succumbed to throat cancer in August 1948, Cobb said “I wish I could have been more like the Babe. When he died, an entire nation mourned.” Including Cobb.
DROPPING THE BALL
Baseball’s Troubles and How We Can and Must Solve Them
By Dave Winfield with Michael Levin
Scribner. 224 pp. $25
Not much is here. Those who follow baseball, even sporadically, are familiar with what Dave Winfield calls the “troubles”: the steroid scandal, inflated salaries, aloof players, exploitation of Dominican Republic teenage prospects, the declining number of black big leaguers, collective bargaining haggling.
Winfield, a Hall of Famer who played 23 years in the majors, asks “is baseball in dire straits? Of course not. It’s making tons of money. Attendance records continue to be broken. Many fans have forgiven the game for strikes, scandals, and steroids. Here’s my point:
“It’s good, but not all good.
“It could be so much better.” (p21)
Right on. But everything can be made better. In 15 chapters of mostly bland prose Winfield describes how the ball has been dropped. The final pages offer a should list: owners should do this, players should do that, little leaguers should do this. About the only ones not singled are the hot dog vendors. Presumably, hawking overpriced, watery and chemicalized meat on stale buns is okay.
Winfield the Reformer is currently an executive with the San Diego Padres. Here’s a should for Dave: turn the Padres into a model franchise. Be a doer, not a talker.
Colman McCarthy, a former Washington Post columnist, in the unpaid CEO of Home Run Baseball Camp at Friendship Playground in Washington DC. His specialty is helping five year olds get out of their batting slumps.