Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (30 page)

Some features of the book seem overly idiosyncratic. Kahn spends a bit too much time on relatively trivial events that happened to involve him. He has also given the book a most curious (and regrettable) imbalance by writing at length about the admittedly thrilling beginning of “The Era” and then hurrying through the equally exciting end. He devotes, for example, a full thirty pages to the marvelous 1947 World Series, describing every game in detail, and for once in the conventional narrative mode (so discordant from the rest of the book that I wonder if this account was left over from an earlier work).

But he then compresses into the same number of pages all the dramatic events of 1954 through 1957: the Giants’ sweep of the 1954 World Series from the Cleveland Indians, the best team in the history of modern baseball (including Willie Mays’s legendary catch off Vic Wertz, and alcoholic utility outfielder Dusty Rhodes’s great moment of batting glory); the one and only victory of the Dodgers in the 1955 World Series (how could Kahn, of all people, downplay this singular triumph over the hated Yankees?); Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series; and the beginning of the California diaspora.

Kahn argues that the earlier years were more dramatic and important, but I suspect that he just ran out of gas. I, for one, would have read one hundred more pages with delight (and the book would only then have reached the length of
The Boys of Summer
)—for Kahn is the best baseball writer in the business, and shouldn’t scrimp.

New York baseball
was a marvel during the days of The Era. Ten of eleven seasons featured at least one New York team in the World Series. Seven World Series were “subway” contests between two New York teams (’47, ’49, ’52, ’53, ’55, and ’56 with Yanks vs. Dodgers, and ’51 with Yanks vs. Giants), while one of ours beat an infidel in two others (Yanks over Phils in ’50, and Giants over Indians in ’54). But the wider appeal of New York baseball lay in the incidents and stories involving the remarkable men who illuminated our athletic stage during The Era.

I didn’t know, for example, that Babe Pinelli umpired at second base in the fourth game of the 1947 World Series. With Yankee Bill Bevens pitching a no-hitter with two outs in the ninth, Pinelli called Dodger Al Gionfriddo safe at second in an attempted steal. Had Pinelli called Gionfriddo out—and Rizzuto, who made the tag, swears to this day that Pinelli was wrong—Bevens would have won his no-hitter. Instead, Cookie Lavagetto doubled to ruin Bevens’s achievement and, almost cruelly, to win the game as well, as two runners, whom Bevens had walked, scored on the hit. Why concentrate upon this incident? Because the same Babe Pinelli, umpiring his last game before his retirement, stood behind the plate when Don Larsen pitched his perfect game in the 1956 World Series—and Pinelli made a controversial final call by declaring Dale Mitchell out on strikes on a pitch that was clearly high and outside (the one that prompted Red Barber’s correction of my error). Was he atoning for a previous miscall?

Kahn writes best
about the ruthless, colorful, crude, imperious, and sometimes principled men who played and ruled New York ball during The Era. What crazy confluence could have brought such people as Walter O’Malley, Casey Stengel, and Leo Durocher together, even in so vast a city? The Dodger boss O’Malley never let a fact stand in the way of a tale and moved the Dodgers to California despite continuing enormous profits in Brooklyn. Kahn tells the story of two prominent sportswriters who challenged each other (one night in a bar, of course) to write down the names of the three worst human beings. Each wrote in secret and produced the same list: Hitler, Stalin, and O’Malley. (Just about right, in my opinion.) Dodger fan Wilfrid Sheed agrees as well, for he brands O’Malley as “this monstrous figure, this walking cartoon. He is the villainous Walter O’Malley, against whom this book is dedicated.”

Casey Stengel, who managed the Yanks to a record five World Series victories in a row (’49–’53), sometimes acted like a clown and spoke in syntax so fractured that his style gave the language a new term—Stengelese.
¹
But Stengel only used these mannerisms as a conscious device to lower an enemy’s guard, for he was brilliant and ruthless, a complex man capable of both real tenderness and cutting cruelty. When the Yanks beat the Phils 2–1 in the tenth inning of game two in the 1950 World Series, he remarked: “Yes sir, them Philadelphias is a very fine team, make no mistake. It is difficult to beat them, which is why it took us an extra inning today.” When the Yanks won 3–2 with two out in the ninth inning of game three, he said: “The Philadelphias are very difficult to beat, as I have told you. Why today, as you gentlemen saw, my fine team was unable to beat them again until the very last inning we were permitted to play.” When he took out rookie Whitey Ford for veteran Allie Reynolds to sew up the last game in the final inning, Stengel said: “I’m sorry I had to take the young man out, but as I have been telling you, the Philadelphias is hard to defeat, and I am paid by my employers to defeat them, which is why I went for the feller with the big fastball. Have a nice winter.” Sounds aimless, but edit the relative clauses, introduce some agreement, and you have ordinary English. And look what Casey accomplished: he had swept the opposition in four games, but praised them generously, placated a wounded young pitcher, and tempered a rout with comic relief.

Stengel always knew what he was doing. After losing the 1957 World Series to Milwaukee, and wishing to frustrate a young TV reporter who had asked the uncharitable question “Did your team choke up out there?” Stengel just said “Do you choke up on your fucking microphone?” and then clawed at his rear end. He later said to Roger Kahn: “You see, you gotta stop them terrible questions. When I said ‘fuck’ I ruined his audio. When I scratched my ass, I ruined his video, if you get my drift.” He could also be cruel. When Jackie Robinson criticized the Yanks for not hiring black players, and then struck out three times in a Series game against Allie Reynolds, a Native American Yankee pitcher, Stengel remarked: “Before he tells us we gotta hire a jig, he oughta learn how to hit an Indian.”

Leo Durocher, who started the era as the suspended manager of the Dodgers (ostensibly for gambling and associating with undesirables, but truly for his sexual behavior and general unwillingness to conform), and then led the Giants in the triumphs of ’51 and ’54, was cruel and swaggering on one side, brave and antiracist on the other. When Commissioner Happy Chandler announced Durocher’s suspension in April 1947, Durocher spoke only one sentence to the reporters at his hotel: “Now is the time a man needs a woman.” He then led his new wife, the beautiful actress Laraine Day, into his suite—and didn’t emerge for forty-eight hours. During spring training, before his suspension, several Dodgers planned a petition to protest the hiring of Jackie Robinson as major league baseball’s first black player. Durocher called a team meeting at one in the morning and told the instigators to “wipe your ass” with the petition. He ended by saying: “I don’t want to see your petition. I don’t want to hear anything about it. Fuck your petition. The meeting is over. Go back to bed.” Robinson had begun his career.

Kahn ends his
book by writing: “The Era ended when it was time for the Era to end and that, I believe, is everlastingly part of its beauty and its glory.” This I do not dispute. New York could not dominate a national game forever, while clean and dramatic endings beat extended fizzles. But, earlier in the book, Kahn writes of the 1951 regular season that ended with Thomson’s home run: “The National League Pennant Race of 1951 belongs to the ages. There has been nothing like it before or since. Nor will it come again.” Sadly, this is true—and for a deeper reason than Kahn realized at the time: there will not be another pennant race at all.

On the Wordsworthian theme—“We will grieve not, rather find Strength in what remains behind”—I take solace in what will prevail through any crass and commercially driven sacrifice of seasonal rhythm and schedule: the beauty of a single game well played, and the common denominator of baseball’s best performers—obsessive striving for excellence, the mark of all true professionalism. In observing an awesome skill that we do not possess, we tend to misread ease of performance as natural inclination. Even Red Barber so erred in asking Fred Astaire whether dancing came easily to him.

Intellectuals often make the same mistake in assuming that we struggle to become scholars, while athletes perform by inherited brawn. But Roger Kahn movingly documented the obsessive drive and the incessant practice common to all the Boys of Summer at the Dodgers’ apogee. When Billy Cox or Bobby Brown at third, Phil Rizzuto or Peewee Reese at short, dove to field a grounder with such fluidity; when DiMaggio or Mays ran across a whole field to meet a fly ball with precision; when Furillo threw a bullet from right field to home and Campy tagged the runner out by fifteen feet, we watched the equivalent of a poet’s couplet, stated with perfect grace, but produced by hours of struggle after a lifetime of discipline. As Yeats wrote:

Reprinted with permission from the
New York Review of Books
. Copyright © 1995 NYREV, Inc. First published March 2, 1995.

1.

In “Ode to the West Wind,” Shelley wrote one of our culture’s happiest lines: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” Baseball fans have always lived by this maxim, as winter’s talk (still called the “hot stove league” to honor older places of public conversation) yielded to spring training and the start of another season. But not this year. While owners and players, tycoons all, continue their pointless and destructive strike, fans are reduced to writing and remembering. In choosing baseball’s most ancient and distinctive genre—the sports biography—as my subject for this review, I can at least honor the continuity and change that fans once viewed as inviolable for the game itself, the guarantee of our fealty.

In formulating his optimistic maxim, Shelley called the west wind of autumn “the trumpet of a prophecy.” Several of the biographies under review issue their own jeremiads without any overt intent. Their statements about the continuity of baseball, particularly the annual ritual of the World Series (which neither distant war nor immediate earthquake could ever interrupt), ring especially hollow after the rupture of 1994, when baseball’s owners canceled both the season’s end and the subsequent World Series. In his biography of Christy Mathewson, baseball’s first public hero, Ray Robinson discussed the refusal of the 1904 Giants to meet the Red Sox in a World Series (only one had been played before, in 1903, so the Giants were scarcely violating an established tradition). The Giants’ owner, John Brush, and manager, John McGraw, hated the “upstart” American League—just formed in 1901, while their own National League dated to 1876—and didn’t wish to dignify the new league’s existence with such a contest.

Even the clichés of conventional biographical puffery, the passages either read in derision or skipped in boredom, have poignancy in this altered context, as in this bromide from John Kruk of the Philadelphia Phillies, a key player in the last World Series of 1993:

I am a
paleontologist by trade, a student of life’s uninterrupted 3.5-billion-year history on earth. All species die, and new forms emerge; but continuity has and must be maintained, or else we would not be here today—for if all life had ever been exterminated, what odds could be placed on reconstitution, especially of anything as complex as Ted Williams’s swing, or Nolan Ryan’s heater? Paleontologists therefore have a special feeling about the ultimate value of continuity.

If deprived of the thing itself, we must seek a surrogate with the cardinal properties of persistence and its own interesting history of change. Aside from schedules, scorecards, rule books, and guides on how to play, the literature of baseball best provides such continuity (with alteration through time) in its distinctive genre of biography for star performers.

Such works are as old as professionalization of the sport itself (mid to late nineteenth century). Putative autobiography has always relied upon the services of ghostwriters (the preferred form of yesteryear) or “as-told-to” mouthpieces who craft the conventional sequence of chapters from taped interviews (the modern style). Sportswriters have not been overpaid, and supply often exceeds demand—so a job as trumpet for the stars has always been regarded as potentially lucrative and sufficiently honorable. Moreover, with few exceptions, ballplayers have not been blessed with literary skills to match their physical prowess, so we should not begrudge them their surrogates. Even the pitcher Christy Mathewson, regarded as
the
intellectual among early-twentieth-century players because he had spent some time in college (at Bucknell, though he did not graduate), hired a ghostwriter to compose the many books that appeared under his name.

The history of baseball biography has followed the trend of general culture. Before 1970, almost all published books strictly obeyed the conventions of the hagiographical mode—limitation of treatment to the heroic aspects of on-field play, told as an epic, so that the tragedies of defeat (borne with stoic honor) received equal space with the joys of victory. Statements about personal life, if any, echoed Horatio Alger and told us how diligence and dedication might overcome an early life of poverty and illness. Even the titles of these books conveyed the gratitude of men who might never have emerged from the coal mine, or debarked from the fishing boat, if God had not granted, and the public appreciated, their fortunate skills of body—as in Joe DiMaggio’s
Lucky to Be a Yankee
from the 1940s.

Former arbiters of taste must have felt (as so many apostles of “traditional values” and other high-minded tags for restriction and conformity do today) that maintaining the social order required a concept of unalloyed heroism. Human beings so designated as role models had to embody all virtues of the paragon—which meant, of course, that they could not be described in their truly human and ineluctably faulted form.

I confess to
some ambivalence about our modern veering to the other extreme of “kiss and tell.” We need heroes, and Zeus and Achilles will no longer do (they weren’t very nice folks anyway). I don’t mind discreet silence about certain categories of private behavior (and I am glad that the press kept out of FDR’s bedroom). But I do reject a one-dimensional presentation of public life (and I regret the lost opportunity for private understanding of the man and public knowledge of disability when Roosevelt and the press so cunningly hid his paralysis; think what might have been gained if he had been able to announce, in calm dignity, that he did not govern with his legs).

Ballplayers, as young males living on the road for so many months a year, are notoriously less likely to act as paragons in any case, so the old style seems more inaccurate about these men than about any other putative heroes (except, perhaps, actors and politicians). There is, of course, no final “truth” to be captured by the art of biography, but we can pronounce this postmodern dictum and still allow that some genres depart further than others from salient facts of a person’s life. The old hagiographical biographies certainly left a lot out. Had the authors of these books explicitly restricted their narratives to performance on the field, we might criticize them for limited compass, but could not charge gross inaccuracy. Yet these older books do make a claim for providing full and accurate representation of players’ lives.

Can we understand Babe Ruth without his drinking and whoring; or Ty Cobb without his paranoia, racism, and general nastiness; or Grover Cleveland Alexander and Jimmie Foxx (and so many others) without the perils of dipsomania? In
The Meaning of Nolan Ryan
, Nick Trujillo tells a story about Babe Ruth and the press that can stand as a symbol of transformation, with all its meanings and ambiguities. An eyewitness

The change to kiss-and-tell biography would have occurred in any case because a cultural alteration of this magnitude cannot be resisted by one segment so firmly tied to the mainstream. But particular items fuel or catalyze any particular transition, and we need to honor these efforts whatever the general inevitability. Jim Bouton was a mediocre pitcher for the New York Yankees at the end of their glory years in the early 1960s. He then played for the hapless Seattle Pilots in 1969, a short-lived team. Bouton wasn’t much of a pitcher (sixty-two wins, sixty-three losses, lifetime), but he had one skill vouchsafed to very few ballplayers: he could write. In 1970, he changed the face of sports biography forever by composing a book with the unsurprising title
Ball Four
. His description of life in baseball broke all taboos by trying to describe the tedium, the pettiness, the raucousness, even the raunchiness of this particular male society on the road.

Yet
Ball Four
already seems dated. Bouton has much to say about drinking and pill popping. Some of his scenes are memorable for their humor—particularly the clubhouse election to choose a new catcher for the “all-ugly nine” in 1965 after Yogi Berra retired. But Bouton maintains a discreet silence about a variety of unmentionable subjects, notably dishonesty and race relations, and also about sex, where he lets humor and silliness substitute for action. (In Bouton’s most celebrated “exposé,” he recounts how Mickey Mantle and Billy Martin would crawl out upon ledges and roofs of hotels for a game of “beaver shooting,” or spotting naked women through the windows.)

Now everything hangs out (often to the near exclusion of play on the field as a subject—what an absurd inversion!). Even the most saccharine book for granny and the kids must now include the expletives deleted from Nixon’s tapes and a “manly” account of sexual prowess (often with a disingenuous admission of guilt as an attempted nod to the feminists). Jim Bouton himself, on reissuing
Ball Four
in 1981, wrote: “The books that have come after mine make
Ball Four
, as an exposé, read like
The Bobbsey Twins Go to the Seashore
.”

2.

A classical device in literature traces the passage of time by permitting the anomalous survival of an oldster into the wonder of a new age—Rip Van Winkle as America’s prototype, though paleontologists have their own version in the concept of “living fossils,” or creatures like cockroaches and horseshoe crabs that persist almost unchanged for “too many” millennia. This season offers a marvelous opportunity to write about the history of baseball biography because we have just been presented with the finest example of this device in all the days of our sports.

Ty Cobb, who played from 1905 to 1928 (mostly with Detroit and later with Philadelphia), was probably the finest player in the history of baseball. (Ruth, Aaron, and a few others have their defenders, but why quibble among the paragons?) He hit over .400 in three seasons, stole 892 bases, and won twelve batting championships. His lifetime batting average of .367 will, we may state with confidence, never be equaled (although Pete Rose eclipsed his mark for most career hits, while three players surpassed him in stolen bases).

But Cobb was also, and even more undoubtedly, the meanest star in the history of American sport. He delighted in the fact that he had pistol-whipped a man to death. A violent racist, he would beat up any black person who touched him (his teammates once had to pull him off a black laundrywoman). He once dived into the stands to thrash a man who had taunted him (and he continued the beating even when told that the man had no arms, for his tormentor had called him a “half nigger”). Psychobiographers have no trouble attributing this behavior to the great trauma of his teenage years, when his mother shot his adored father to death after mistaking him for an intruder (and why blame her, since Mr. Cobb Sr. had climbed in through a second-story window, apparently on suspicion that his wife was in bed with a lover? And perhaps she was). Whatever the complex causes, Cobb was vicious and probably psychotic. He played brilliantly, made millions in the stock market thereafter, and lived and died absolutely friendless.

Ty Cobb in 1915.
Credit: Bettmann/Corbis