Last
month, I authored an extensive article about Ken Burns’ Baseball documentary
and how watching it helped begin my love of the sport since then. Not long
after seeing the documentary, I did what I would later do so often when I learned
about a subject that interested me: I started reading books. In my case, in my
high school library.
It probably
says far more about how badly libraries in school or elsewhere are generally
funding that I was able to find so many classic books about baseball in said
library. I found the history of The World Series, written by Lee Allen one of
the most prominent baseball historians. I read Nice Guys Finish Last by
Leo Durocher, the ultimate biography of one of the longest serving – and most controversial
– managers in the sports history. I read Jim Brosnan’s Pennant Race, one of the first books to be
written to cover a baseball season while it was going on, from a Cincinnati
Reds pitcher who would later become a sportswriter himself. But of all the
books I found, the one that has left the most lasting impression more than a
quarter of a century later is Donald Honig’s Baseball America. I was
about to call him the most famous historian you never heard of, but he’s still
alive, I think it’s good that you hear about him before he dies and start
reading his books.
One
of the greatest books about baseball is Lawrence Ritter’s The Glory of Our
Times. Written in 1966, Ritter sought out not the greatest ballplayers of
the past (although some did later get into the Hall of Fame because of the
book) but so many of the bench players or lesser lights that blink for a moment
and then our forgotten. After it came out, Honig already a successful writer known
for fiction, tried to persuade Ritter to write a sequel. Ritter said he was too
busy but gave Honig his blessing to do so. And that’s when Honig became one of
the greatest historians of the sport in history,
Baseball
When The Grass Was Real and Baseball Between the Lines took
up the mantle of Ritter’s work. He would write history of the Dodgers in both
Brooklyn and LA, the Yankees and the Red Sox, the American League and the
National League, the All-Star Game, and the World Series. All of these books
are wonderful in their own way; all of them paint a picture of the sport in the
best way possible, many of them show the brilliance of the oral history. But having
read many of them and loved many of them, I still find Baseball America not
just Honig’s finest hour, but one of the greatest books on baseball – and sports
as a whole.
Much
of that is because of what Baseball America isn’t. It does not give you
lines of statistics, of battle titles and pitching records. With few exceptions
it doesn’t deal with pennant races or the World Series. And you might end up
reading the book and not being entirely sure what teams some of the players
listed spent much of their careers with. There are almanacs and books already
for that and Honig wrote many of them himself. What Honig accomplishes is
something that I’ve almost never seen in any non-fiction book before or since:
he writes the history of something as if it were a character driven novel. Almost
every chapter is devoted to one or two (occasionally more) significant figures
in the game, based on when the played and how they changed it. Most of this is
focused in the twentieth century and Honig covers it with what is certainly
anecdotes and passages from all the books he wrote over the years, and most
likely couldn’t find a way to include. (Indeed, many of the players he directly
quoted are from his earlier books.) This has the affect of what is almost
certainly a realistic depiction of history that reads like a work of fiction.
Many people may claim baseball is poetic at times. Baseball America is
the clearest literary argument it is.
Reading
the book not long after the fact, it is clear that many of the better turns of
phrase that Burns and his writers used in Baseball were lifted from this
book. And honestly, you can’t blame them. A phrase described Ban Johnson, the
founder of the American League as ‘looking like he was weaned on an icicle” needs
to be said in a documentary as does the description of Honus Wagner, the
greatest shortstop in history as having ‘shoulders broad enough to serve dinner
on’ or that ‘pebbles he scooped up were rumored to arrive along with the ball.’
You don’t need movie footage to get the impression of it. Indeed, I think many
of the passages in Burns’ documentary are giving in historical context as well:
Ty Cobb’s admonishment by his father before going to the minor leagues ‘Don’t
come home a failure’ is in the book. I wish they could have added the line
Honig used to follow it up: “How many points to the batting average to an
already competitive boy madly worshipping his father this added is hard to
measure.” The line that a scout says about recruiting Walter Johnson. The story
of the anecdotes surrounding Rube Waddell, which honestly the documentary downplayed.
Of course the legends of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle are
here, but he is willing to show just as much time to Rogers Hornsby and the
great Philadelphia Athletics Team of 1929-1931 (which he calls perhaps ‘The
Second Greatest Team of All Time’ right after discussing the 1927 Yankees). John
McGraw and Connie Mack are discussed at length, with virtue added to McGraw’s
laurel and the slightest admonishment to Mack’s. The 1941 season when DiMaggio
hit in fifty-six straight games and Ted Williams hit .406 – and there’s a side
note given to Washington shortstop Cecil Travis that might actually make you
wonder about what the sportswriters miss.
Indeed,
many of the interviews probably give us the clearest picture of how so many of
these legends’ contemporaries felt. Roger Peckinpah, a shortstop of the 1920s
and 1930s gives us a clear picture of just how deep the corruption of the 1919
Black Sox might have been – and how baseball was looking the other way well
before that in at least one vital case. We hear from Waite Hoyt, a team of Babe
Ruth’s how chaotic it could be just to walk down the street with him. We hear
how Lefty Grove, possibly the greatest pitcher who ever lived, wasn’t afraid of
Ruth or Cobb, but tiptoed around Gehrig. We get pictures of Walter Johnson,
from Smoky Joe Wood who might have been as great as him – he was better than
him for a year, and from Babe Herman who got a taste of his fastball – six years
after he retired – and still couldn’t get his bat around it. We see how Tommy
Henrich would watch Al Simmons – who famously said ‘he hated pitchers’ – proved
it when years after his retirement, he steps in for batting practice and
Henrich sees the look in his eyes. We get a taste of the Negro Leagues from the
story of Cool Papa Bell, and the narration of Clyde Sukeforth, the scout who
signed him. And there is of course the story of The Shot Heard the World….and
the fact that when the Giants got the locker room, they had to toast with warm
champagne because the clubhouse people had lost their heart. “Well, not
everybody believed in miracles,” Honig writes. “At least, not before then.”
If
there is a flaw with Honig’s book, it is the fact that he spends so much time
dealing with the first half of the twentieth century that he has to rush to
deal with the second half. Thus Frank Robinson, Roberto Clemente and Hank Aaron
are dealt with in the space of three pages before returning to Willie Mays and
his triumphs, Roger Maris’ home run chase gets four pages and the final two
chapters have to cover all the radical changes that have happened from the
Miracle Mets to the Seitz decision that created free agency to one chapter that
covers Pete Rose and Reggie Jackson to stand in for all the great players of
that era. (I do give credit, however, to Honig for giving several pages to Steve
Carlton, perhaps as much to his ignoring the media as his actual
accomplishments. It’s certainly more than Burns did.) But Honig’s isn’t trying
to be a biographer or strictly being a historian; he’s trying to paint a
picture of a sport with words. Very few writers have ever done so good a job.
It
is this merger of so many genres - oral history, biography, sports history, and
the story of America – that makes Baseball America such a great book to
read. Because even though Honig loves the sport, he is not blind to its flaws.
He acknowledges that there is shady dealing and bad practices at the heart of
so many of the great players – even the saintly Christy Mathewson is shown to
be considered as much part of the illegitimacy of signing players back then. He
doesn’t believe the Red Sox were cursed, but he acknowledges that Henry Frazee
didn’t have the best interests of the team at heart. He acknowledges the skills
of Yankee dominance in the 1950s but is willing to paint Casey Stengel as both
a genius and a push button manager. And he is more than willing to show the
utter disregard that the Giants and the Dodgers showed for New York when they
abandoned it for California. Indeed, he actually has a quote about the Giants
subsequent fate for the next thirty years that I’ve never been able to get out
of my head:
“The
winds of Candlestick may be the will of old Aeolus, or they may be the avenging
ghosts of McGraw and Matty and all the other bygone Giants denied their ancestral
home.”
Maybe
when the Giants finally moved, the ghosts stayed in Candlestick. Might explain
how their fortunes finally changed and that the Dodgers: “who enjoyed sunshine
and balmy Pacific breezes, caressing winning ball clubs and record setting crowds”
have spent most of this century having less success in the postseason than the
Giants have enjoyed (last night’s results included.) Perhaps the ‘ancient siren
call for the rotund Irishman who went west” has been taken over after the
passing of ghosts of Branch Rickey, Jackie
Robinson, and the rest of the Boys of Summer. (Hey, it’s as a good a theory as
any as to why the Giants won three world championship in 5 years in the 2010s
and Clayton Kershaw – one of the greatest pictures of this century – can’t win in
the postseason.)
If
you love baseball but don’t know its history, Baseball America is as
good a book as any to start – it is in a sense a sports book for people who don’t
read books about sports. It’s harder to find that some of the other books I’ve
listed so far, but Amazon and eBay will have copies in the $20 range at most. It’s
relatively brief – just over 330 pages – and once you’ve read it , not only
will you want to start reading Honig’s other books, you’ll want to start
tracking down the stories of not only the legends he devotes details to, but
the ones he only speaks of in passing such as Eddie Collins or Stan Musial or Hank
Greenberg (he only gets three pages). You’ll want to learn the full stories of
Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson and all the great players who came before them. You
will want to know more details about Connie Mack who for fifty years managed a
team that you probably thought started out in Oakland and you’ll want to know
when you learn its stories history, why it finally ended up there. And you will
want to see Baseball and see so many of the stories and pieces of
history Burns and his writers nudged and turned into great art. Hell, maybe you’ll
even want to buy a ticket to a ball game.
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