Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (23 page)

P
eople buy
The New Yorker
for the damnedest of reasons. Sophisticated vulgarians like the cartoons; social climbers fancy the rarefied ads. Some people, for all I know, might even read the immensely long and uncompromisingly literate articles. I happily pay my yearly subscription just to read Roger Angell’s occasional essays on baseball.
Late Innings
collects Angell’s essays of the past five years and proves once and for all that wholes can be more than the sum of their admirable parts.

First published in the
Boston Sunday Globe
, 1982.

Angell devotes the bulk of
Late Innings
to the pair of essays he writes each year to sandwich the season—his musings on spring training, and his post-Series summary. More topical essays on people and events lie interspersed amidst this recurrent format. These include his masterful portrait of Bob Gibson (who single-handedly punctured the Impossible Dream of 1967), his account of life in the semipros, where people still play for love (and in frustration), and the finest essay of all—a beautiful, understated account of a single college game that explains and justifies the deep affection so many of us feel for baseball.

On the eve of the 1981 baseball strike, Angell is in New Haven attending a game between Yale and St. John’s. He is propelled by an ulterior motive, not an abiding passion for college ball. He has just learned that Smokey Joe Wood is still alive (at ninety-one) and as much a fan as ever. Since Wood coached the Yale team from the 1920s through the 1940s, Angell arranges through an intermediary to meet him at the game.

(Wood compiled a 34–5 record pitching for the Red Sox in 1912, perhaps the greatest performance for a single season in baseball history. Some people say he was faster than Walter Johnson, and the argument still rages among aficionados. But he lost his niche in baseball’s Pantheon at Cooperstown because he injured his pitching arm the next year and never recouped. Still, he would not quit and retooled himself as a better than average outfielder for five seasons with the Indians.)

Angell chats with Wood and gets a good flow of baseball reminiscences: pitching against Johnson, eating fried chicken cooked by Tris Speaker, Cobb at bat. But something is wrong, and Angell begins to fear that he is exploiting an old man who played for fourteen years and, by God’s grace, has lived to repeat the tales for sixty years. So he stops probing and begins to watch the game, which, unexpectedly, becomes riveting.

Ron Darling of Yale pitches eleven innings of no-hit ball and loses 1–0 in the twelfth. And suddenly we realize that, in Angell’s literary web, this contest has become Wood’s greatest game, his 1–0 victory over Walter Johnson, extending his own winning streak to fourteen games, and ending Johnson’s at sixteen. The continuity that he tried to establish directly with Wood (and, as a sensitive man, could not) is cemented indirectly through the act that unites them with the players on the field through nearly one hundred years of history—a well-played game.

This extraordinary climax leads Angell to a discourse on the controlling simile that captures his love of baseball and his belief that it is important. Baseball is like a river, both in the steady pace of its own action, permitting talk and a leisurely approach to beer and peanuts along the way, and in the continuity it establishes with our past through the isolation of individual performance (we can compare Wood’s 1912 season with Guidry’s in 1978, but how do you keep score during a football game?).

The simile also captures his anger and sadness at current developments that may destroy the game from within: subservience to media revenues that alienate players from fans by turning them into celebrities for their salaries rather than their performances, and that destroy the game’s pace by devaluing the primacy of a long regular season and encouraging such hokey hype as the additional round of playoffs that further cheapened the disastrous, strike-shortened 1981 season.

Angell is a baseball conservative in the best, dynamic sense of understanding the game’s inner strength and source of its continuity. “What compensation,” he asks in reference to last year’s strike, “can ever be made to us, the fans, who are the true owners and neighbors and keepers of the game for this dry, soundless summer and for the loss of our joy?”

The twice-yearly regular pieces are just as riveting and, by judicious editing, have not been tarnished by age. His account of the excruciating or exhilarating 1978 season (depending upon whether you favor the Sox or the Yanks) remains the premier essay of its genre. It also contains the greatest one-liner in the history of sports literature—his pugnacious insistence that Yaz’s final pop to third was not a divinely inevitable outcome, as the protracted history of Boston misery might lead us to suspect: “I still don’t see why it couldn’t have been arranged for him to single to right center…. I think God was shelling a peanut.”

It is an old truism that baseball has captured the attention of many eminent literati, while other sports have not. Angell is the finest of them all, but the source of his success does not lie primarily with his powerful writing or with his deep understanding of baseball’s general appeal. It resides instead in the source of his continuity with Joe Wood—his love for the details of a well-played game. He is no literary rip-off artist, but a real fan who follows hundreds of games each year. His simile of the river is arresting literature, but look for his primary success in a three-page disquisition—written with as much literary power, by the way—on all the pros, cons, details, and implications of Reggie Jackson’s famous right-hip rhumba that deflected the ball, broke up a double play, and probably saved the 1978 Series. The power of baseball lies in its daily details. If the moguls who pander to TV revenues ever remember this, we may save the game and, as a substantial benefit on the side, guarantee a few more decades of Angell’s prose and insight.

First published in the
Boston Sunday Globe
, August 28, 1983.

The American League won the 1983 All-Star Game, but only following an extended and substantial drought before this year’s drubbing (thirty losses in thirty-six games since 1950), compared with exemplary success before then (twelve wins in sixteen games). About the only explanation for this stunning reverse in fortunes that makes any sense to me is the greater willingness of the National League to avail itself, early and with less hesitation, of the great pool of untapped talent—black players who, before Jackie Robinson’s debut in 1947, had been systematically excluded from major league baseball. And, as we contemplate the fading fortunes of our beloved Sox, we must face honestly (for all the legitimate veneration of Tom Yawkey) the fact that part of their persistent failure must lie in their slowness (as the very last major league team to integrate) to exploit this pool. To this day, the Sox field but one black in their starting line-up—and where would they be without him?

The integration of major league baseball in the late 1940s is both a microcosm of the most important American social transformation of modern times and a wonderful human drama in itself. It is not merely the tale of one enlightened, if complex, executive—Branch Rickey—bringing one highly talented young player, Jackie Robinson, to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. The story stretches back to the nineteenth century when the great Cap Anson led a shameful movement to drum out from major league baseball the few blacks then precariously accepted. And the story then extends forward through the history of the Negro Leagues to a wide ranging struggle involving numerous unsung heroes (like black sports writers for the Negro press) to drive white America from its hypocrisy.

Speaking of hypocrisy, the “official” position of major league baseball, so often expressed by former commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, held that blacks were welcome but that none of sufficient quality had presented themselves—a patently risible bit of nonsense with the likes of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson toiling for pittances in the Negro Leagues. (My father often told me a story of Paul Robeson’s in camera plea for integration before the annual meeting of baseball executives in the mid-1940s—where Dad, as a freelance stenographer, had been hired to record the secret proceedings for private use. Robeson, replete with flowing beard from his triumph, then under way, as Othello on Broadway, made a stirring statement that brought tears to my father’s eyes. Robeson finished and left, and Kenesaw Mountain Landis moved on to the next item of business without a single word of discussion or commentary.)

Tygiel succeeds in this fine book primarily because he casts his net so broadly in time, place, and status. He captures all the dignity of the great Negro League players who never had a chance, but who loved the game so much that they still predominantly mix tales of pleasure with their disappointment. He portrays the main act as the high drama it was, with its two so different principals—Branch Rickey, a contradictory mixture of humbug and ideals, profit seeking, and genuine commitment to equality; and Jackie Robinson, bristling with talent and with legitimate anger, but forced by his agreement with Rickey to mute his assertive personality and win acceptance by “good” example. (As a primary measure of white hypocrisy, caucasian supporters of integration took it for granted that blacks would have to be better behaved and more talented than their white contemporaries to “better their race” and win, by exemplary conduct, what was really no more than a birthright—a chance to compete according to their talents!)

Jackie Robinson attempts to turn a double play in a game against the Chicago Cubs, 1952.
Credit: Bettmann/Corbis

But Tygiel does not confine himself to Robinson and Rickey. He ranges as widely as possible, discussing the fates and experiences of all black pioneers in the major and minor leagues. The tales of Larry Doby, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and Luke Easter, the first black pathbreakers in the majors, are well documented—but Tygiel gives as much space to the struggles of aging Negro League stars caught and placed in the low minor leagues and never given a chance in the majors. He also documents the travails of black players during spring training in the segregated South, and he discusses the integration of the southern minor leagues—what should have been the most difficult battle, but often proceeded without great distress (given the economic power of blacks as potential spectators), in an age of official segregation.

If the book has any faults, I must mention a slight schizophrenia of intent. Tygiel, a history professor by trade, can’t quite decide whether he is writing a sports book or a scholarly dissertation. Thus, the book is replete—absolutely chockfull—with those annoying and irrelevant footnotes that you have to look up in the back, and with the kind of scholarly documentation that can disrupt the flow of popular writing. When he switches gears and tries to write in the vernacular sports idiom, the effect is sometimes embarrassing—full of an overblown adjectivitis that, too many times, casts Robinson as the “broad-shouldered black athlete,” and Campy as the “stocky catcher.” I didn’t find these phrases too offensive, but when a home run becomes a “prodigious projectile,” then I do cringe.

Still, the importance of the subject so far transcends a simple ball game that the scholar’s approach certainly seems justified. The integration of baseball was no self-contained tale, or just a minor incident within a social movement. It formed a major chapter of America’s most important domestic story of the mid-twentieth century. We are grateful to Tygiel for such a fine and sensitive documentation.

The general importance of the subject might best be documented by a quote from Don Newcombe, the black Dodger pitcher who could be so good that I hated him (as a Giant and Yankee fan), and who also often hit over .300 to boot (he was frequently used as a pinch hitter). Newcombe recounts a visit from Martin Luther King: “We were paying our dues long before the civil rights marches. Martin Luther King told me in my home one night, ‘You’ll never know what you and Jackie and Roy do to make it possible to do my job.’”

Reprinted with permission from the
New York Review of Books
. Copyright © 1990 NYREV, Inc. First published as “The Virtues of Nakedness,” October 11, 1990.

C
onsider baseball as Janus, the double-visaged god of our beginnings. One face looks beyond our everyday world into the realm of myth. I went to a game at Fenway Park last month, accompanied by a professional sociologist and budding, but unsophisticated, baseball fan. She delighted in observing the few forms of joint action indulged in by fans of this most individualistic sport—the wave and the seventh-inning stretch in particular—referring to these displays, in her jargon, as “social organization.” But in the ninth inning, with Carlton Fisk at the plate for the visiting White Sox, another apparent ritual puzzled her greatly. Several dozen fans, dispersed throughout our vicinity, stood up, raised their arms above their heads, and gyrated in an odd little motion. What could this mean? My friend was utterly stumped.

I explained that this behavior fell outside the generalities of rules for human conduct in crowds, and that she would have to learn the specific mythology of baseball. The gyrating fans were enacting a ritual to be sure—by imitating, in the presence of the hero himself, a cardinal moment of baseball’s history. In the bottom of the twelfth inning of the sixth game of the 1975 World Series, probably the greatest baseball game ever played, Carlton Fisk, then a catcher for the Red Sox, hit a long ball toward left field in Fenway Park. It seemed to curve foul, but Fisk gyrated his body, put some English on the air space between home plate and the arching ball, and bent its trajectory right into the left-field foul pole—thus winning the game as he jigged around the bases. It was past midnight in the little New Hampshire town of Fisk’s birth, but someone ran to the church and set the bells ringing. Meanwhile, the Fenway Park organist played the Hallelujah Chorus as Fisk made his circuit. (I am also assured that the laws of physics preclude Fisk’s action at a distance, but facts cannot be denied.) The fans were simply re-creating a treasured moment of legendary official history.

The other face
looks back into our quotidian world of ordinary work and play. When I grew up on the streets of New York City in the late forties and early fifties, we found a hundred ways to improvise and vary the game of baseball. I particularly enjoyed the two-man versions—rubber balls bounced against stoops or pitched from one sidewalk square across a second and into the batter’s box of a third in line, where the hitter slapped the ball back toward the pitcher (we called it boxball-baseball). The canonical playground version for school recesses was punchball—played with fist against that same ubiquitous pink rubber sphere. After school, we grabbed the old mop handle and played stickball.

Mythology is wondrous,
a balm for the soul. But its problems cannot be ignored. At worst, it buys inspiration at the price of physical impossibility (as my initial story of churchbells and action at a distance testifies). At best, it purveys the same myopic view of history that made this most fascinating subject so boring and misleading in grade school as a sequential tale of monarchs and battles.

Most baseball books continue to bask in the mythology—tales of heroics in that tiny pinnacle of activity known as major league baseball. We have tales of unforgettable seasons; sagas of dynasties (the once-proud Yankees, the current Athletics), or disasters (Cubbies, Phillies, and Sox); and, above all, ghost-written autobiographies, now a bit more confessional than the old cardboard, but still basically hagiographical.

But the Janus face of our daily lives peeks through often enough, and even sets the theme of several contemporary baseball books. When the
New York Review
sent me this year’s crop for the new season—to receive during spring training, read during a lazy summer, and report just in time for the World Series—I decided to select the three items that treated this neglected, ordinary face. These three otherwise disparate books share the common property of their allegiance to
Annales
history vs. kings and battles. Seymour tells us the explicit story of the largely undocumented mountain supporting the pinnacle (and leaves us wondering whether we should use such a metaphor at all). George Will and Heiman, Weiner, and Gutman adopt the other tactic of demythologizing from within the pinnacle—Will by displaying the workaday quality of manifest excellence in performance, Heiman et al. by tracing the heroes after they pass from the limelight into the invisibility of later life.

Baseball: The People’s Game
is the third volume of a distinguished series by the doyen of baseball historians, former Dodger batboy and history professor, Dr. Harold Seymour (the first two entries,
The Early Years
and
The Golden Age
, treat official history, but this magisterial compendium makes up for any previous neglect of Janus’s other face). Aristotle invoked the house in a venerable and celebrated metaphor for his theory of causality (bricks and mortar as material causes, masons as efficient causes, blueprints as formal causes, and inhabitants as final causes). Seymour uses the same structure for ordering his chapters on the history of baseball up to the Second World War, as played by nonprofessionals, from kiddie toss-up games on the street to well-organized industrial and semipro leagues. In “the house of baseball,” Seymour treats, sequentially, the foundation (boys’ baseball), the ground floor (organized men’s leagues from colleges, to towns, to industries, to the armed forces), the basement (baseball in prisons, reformatories, and Indian schools and reservations), the annex (women’s baseball), and the outbuilding (black baseball).

Seymour’s book, all six-hundred-plus pages of it, revels in intimate detail, often reading more like a list, filled out in prose style, than a narrative. Seymour is the leading professional in a small but growing field of sports history, yet he writes with the most admirable zeal of a hobbyist and amateur in the fine (not the pejorative) sense of a word that means “to love.” I can well imagine Seymour’s mode of composition. He must have hundreds of thousands of index cards (for this project surely began decades before our modern electronic shortcuts), each with the history of baseball in a particular state prison, prairie town, or military outpost. He then ordered them by time or concept and disgorged this great labor of love. Any fan must rejoice and greatly admire the results; the less committed may be forgiven for occasionally feeling that some details might be less important than others, and perhaps justifiably excludable. (Must we know, for example, that everyone became seasick during a return steamer ride from California to the Chemawa Indian School in Oregon following a pre–World War I trip by the school baseball team and band?)

Still, as the
saying goes, baseball is a game of inches and an enterprise awash in particulars, statistical and otherwise; and Seymour’s densely detailed account will rivet any enthusiast’s attention. Since baseball is truly our “national pastime” (however trite the phrase), the various arms of the establishment that have sponsored the game have invoked utility or defense against subversion for a plethora of purposes: the promotion of “American” values in wayward boys, the suppression of unionism through fostering paternalism in factories, the spread of imperialism, and the undermining of Indian culture.

Yet just as one can’t blame science, as an institution, for misuse in the service of racism, baseball was valued and enjoyed, whatever misappropriation took place. Moreover, means are not causes; and instruments remain available to both sides. The ILGWU and other major unions formed their own leagues, and the
Daily Worker
had a crackerjack sports section; Albert “Chief” Bender began his march to the Hall of Fame from an Indian boarding school, and Babe Ruth learned his baseball in a Catholic charity home for orphans and wayward children in Baltimore. Some beneficiaries admitted that the real influence flowed from baseball to the sponsoring institution, and not vice versa. An Illinois pastor gloated in 1912 about the success of his church team: “There is many a one who comes to play and remains to pray.”

As for Seymour’s stories, thousands upon thousands of them, I was most intrigued by two features. First, the comprehensiveness in detail (I doubt that I could even envisage many of the topics Seymour discusses, much less ferret out the information). In a dizzying few pages on small-town baseball before World War I, we learn about the purchasing of uniforms (Sears needed longer notice for delivery by July 4 than at other times); the practice of lining basepaths with buggies and then with automobiles (windshields often removed); the playing of bands; hiring of “ringers” as fraudulent substitutes in the lineup; the influence of betting; and endless arguments about the propriety of Sunday ball. Among the taller tales, we learn that during a game in Utah, with two on and none out, the batter hit a ball high into a tree (located in fair territory). The runners all circled the bases, but the opposing fielder shook the tree, dislodged the ball, caught it before it hit the ground, and turned a three-run homer into a triple play! (The innocent and bucolic wraps around the urban and commercial. A few years ago, Dave Kingman hit a high pop fly into the ceiling meshwork of the indoor stadium in Minneapolis. It never came down and was proclaimed a ground-rule double.)

Second, consider the sheer delight of a good tale (combined with instruction in broader aspects of American culture): Did you know that a baseball game once had to be interrupted at Fort Apache so that soldiers could saddle up to chase the escaped Geronimo? That several leagues operated in Panama during the building of the Canal, and that a Marine squad lost to a group of civilian players in a game staged at the bottom of the Culebra Cut, perhaps our greatest engineering triumph before the Apollo program? That a factory owner in a western city sent a note to a rival in 1883, with a gentle protest against baseball played by industrial squads on the rooftops?

The details mount. A nineteenth-century drug company league included teams named the Hop Bitters, the Home Comforts, and the Paregorics (who, I trust, got many runs of one sort, and none of another). A touring women’s softball team of the 1930s was called Slapsie Maxie Rosenbloom’s Curvaceous Cuties (some things do change for the better). On a similar theme of prejudice, a 1908 league of the United States Steel Company formed a white squad called the “big team,” and a black group called the “little jive team.” In 1905, the first recorded game between two different nonwhite races occurred when a visiting Japanese team played at an Indian boarding school in California. The patronizing reporter for
Sporting News
observed: “The Orientals…had it over the Aborigines during all stages of the game, with the exception of the sixth inning, when the Sherman braves with a whoop broke from the reservation and went tearing madly about until six of them had scored.”

President Eliot of Harvard discouraged baseball and considered a curve ball a “low form of cunning,” and the pitcher’s practice of looking home and then trying to pick a runner off first base as “ungentlemantly.” A 1907 league at the Massachusetts State Prison featured teams by occupation (Weavers, Lasters, Carpenters, Kitchen, and Band), but the Lifers had to play the Smokes (a black team). Another game at the same prison featured the Children of Israel vs. the Sons of Italy, at least the first time around. At their second game, the prison newspaper referred only to the “Jews vs. Wops.” We read that a game at Sing Sing prison had to be called off in 1916 because all balls had been fouled into the Hudson River (now pretty foul itself). Finally, Patrick Casey, a condemned man at the state prison in Carson City, Nevada, asked to umpire a game as his last request. His wish was granted as the warden arranged a match between two convict teams. Casey was executed the next day; “kill the umpire” indeed!

Seymour tells the tale of his own role as umpire, during the 1930s, for a twilight (after working hours) industrial league in Brooklyn, dominated by Brooklyn Edison. One evening, Seymour called out an Edison runner on a close play and was summarily fired. If getting even marks the ultimate triumph over getting mad, then Seymour has certainly made his mark as the recorder and arbiter of vernacular baseball. I trust that we are past the academic elitism that would brand such a subject as peripheral or unimportant in American history. Any activity that has commandeered the time and devotion of so many Americans, and that found a place for itself at the heart of so many American institutions, cannot be dismissed because conventional taxonomy places it into a category of play or “leisure.”

George Will’s
Men at Work
has led the best-seller league throughout the summer, and for good reason. Will has pursued an opposite tactic for illuminating the less visible face of Janus. He has examined the pinnacle itself, the citadel known as Organized Baseball, and tried to demythologize the institution from within. Will’s subtitle,
The Craft of Baseball
, epitomizes his thesis. Since “baseball is a game of normal human proportions and abnormally small margins,” tiny advantages win ball games. Luck is important, and raw skill never hurts, but over a season of 162 games and daily play, the accumulation of minuscule edges, wrought by continual practice, obsessive watchfulness, and keen intelligence, marks the difference between a pennant and a .500 season. “Most games,” Will rightly notes, “are won by small things executed in a professional manner.”