Sunday, October 16, 2022

Constant Reader Book of the Month November: Baseball America by Donald Honig

 

 

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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