Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (31 page)

In 1960, mired
in drunken rages and sensing the approach of death, Cobb hired sportswriter Al Stump to compose a standard hagiographical biography in the defensive mode, as the title indicated—
My Life in Baseball: The True Record
. This book could not be more traditional in style (and therefore becomes a prototype by having the greatest of the great as its subject).

The Cobb-Stump apologia begins with the greatest possible panache, a foreword by none other than General Douglas MacArthur, whose personality and politics made him more likely than anyone else in America to admire Cobb. MacArthur wrote predictably:

There follows an even more remarkable preface from E. A. Batchelor, then the oldest active member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, and a longtime Cobb watcher and apologist. He called Cobb “the greatest ballplayer that ever lived” and praised “the greatest combination of qualities of body, heart, and mind ever given to a professional ballplayer.” But what qualities? Batchelor does take up all those nasty rumors about Cobb’s demented persona, but he presents a literally incredible explanation for them:

Mr. Stump’s chronicle then continues for another three hundred pages in the same mode.

Since then, Bouton’s revolution came and conquered—and Al Stump watched and waited. Few people get a second chance after the revolution (though Jacques-Louis David, as a Jacobin, voted for the death of Louis XVI and then lived to become Napoleon’s court painter). But Al Stump, at age seventy-eight, has just produced a new biography, more simply titled
Cobb
, and largely to expiate the inadequacies of his earlier treatment. The new volume still leans toward the respectful (for the mind cannot be easily cleared of earlier commitments, even so many years later), but Cobb’s persona now gets prominent billing, no aspects excluded. Stump himself, substituting for MacArthur in the prologue, writes of his earlier work: “That 1961 autobiography was very self-serving. Cobb had the final say in its contents, accorded him by the publisher. And when we did not agree, which was often, it was his word that was accepted by Doubleday.”

In striking symmetry of form with the 1961 volume, but with utter contrast in content, Stump’s new book then features a foreword by Jimmy Reese (then ninety-three, the oldest living major leaguer in the Association of Professional Ballplayers—just as the senior professional sportswriter had performed this task for the 1961 book). But Reese, who played against Cobb for many years, remembers the viciousness along with the skill and dedication:

Reese then quotes Lou Gehrig, perhaps the most genial of the star players: “Cobb is about as welcome in American League parks as a rattlesnake.”

Stump’s expiation has
gained immeasurably greater force by the conversion of his books into a movie, just released—
Cobb
, starring Tommy Lee Jones as Ty, and Robert Wuhl as Stump. The film hardly deals with Cobb’s life as a ballplayer, but concentrates on his dying year and on his relationship with Stump when the sportswriter ghosted the 1961 version. Director and screenwriter Ron Shelton (of
Bull Durham
fame) has cast his account of Cobb in the classic (and rather tired) genre of on-the-road “buddy” movies, in this case the adventures of an old codger and his strained but loyal sidekick. Cobb and Stump go to Reno for a bit of partying, on to Cooperstown (where colleagues honor him at the Hall of Fame dinner, but will not let him into their private parties thereafter), and finally to Cobb’s native Georgia, where he dies, surrounded by bitter memories of his father’s murder.

Among the film’s many inaccuracies (mostly exaggerations, for dramatic effect, of Cobb’s lousy driving, impotent loving, and tempestuous drinking), one item of artistic license stands out as a symbol of change in the history of baseball biography. Today, we simply cannot believe that a sympathetic character like Stump could have acted as such a toady to Cobb’s lies and rages. So the film relies upon a device to remake the 1960 Stump as a post-Bouton modernist. Stump writes the biography that Cobb requires on his portable typewriter, but he also stuffs a briefcase full of handwritten notes with all the true and nasty stuff, hastily scribbled while Cobb was drunk or asleep. These he intends to fashion into a separate book after Cobb’s impending death. (Cobb, of course, finds the notes in one of the film’s most dramatic scenes.)

I understand the need for this anachronistic ruse to make Al Stump a sympathetic character in modern terms—a man committed to the “true” record, even while he must humor his bully (in both senses) subject. Yet we distort and dishonor history in such an approach, no matter how good our intentions, just as we falsify a past we need to understand when we “update” racial relations (as in the current Broadway revival of
Show Boat
, first staged in 1927), or change the text of Bach’s
St. John Passion
to read “the people” every time the original, and truly biblical, text says “the Jews.” Al Stump planned no second “truthful” book when he worked with Cobb in 1960. Why would he have so proceeded against all the accepted standards of his day? In acting as a mouthpiece for Cobb, Stump was doing an honorable job, in a mode that had long been canonical for the genre. Richard Sandomir, interviewing Al Stump in the
New York Times
, wrote: “Stump was not haunted by or ambivalent about not writing a truer version of Cobb’s life the first time around.” Stump himself then told the interviewer: “I didn’t have any secret plan to go around Cobb to write a second book.”

3.

As Darwin recognized in devising his own theories for the broad sweep of life’s history, evolutionary change encompasses two distinct subjects: (1) trends, or general modification of lineages through time; and (2) diversification, or alterations in the number of entities (loss of species by extinction and gain by branching of genealogical lines). The Boutonian revolution in baseball biography may be judged by both criteria in considering the most interesting books of the last two years.

On the first subject of trending, or general change, the old hagiographies about on-field play are out, replaced, probably forever, by mixtures of psychobiography and social commentary with old-fashioned baseball chronicle. Consider, for example, two recent biographies of heroes (if the term retains meaning in its original sense) from early and later generations: Christy Mathewson (played 1900–1916) and Ted Williams (played 1939–1960).

Who, even in fantasy, could have constructed a better American idol than Christy Mathewson: tall, handsome, God-fearing (he opposed Sunday ball at first), nondrinking, gentle and polite, college-educated (at a time when few people in general, and ballplayers especially, got much formal schooling), and by far the greatest right-handed pitcher of the early game? He also died young, both tragically and heroically—of tuberculosis, just a few years after an accidental gassing in army exercises during World War I (probably unrelated to his early demise, but always so associated in the public mind). Ray Robinson’s fine biography sticks mostly to his sports career, but bears the pervasive signature of post-Boutonian writing in its constant linkage of baseball narrative with the main events of history, both domestic and foreign, and in its emphasis upon Matty’s relationships with others in the game, particularly with his feisty manager, John McGraw.

In 1991, I
participated in a learned symposium to discuss the fiftieth anniversary of Ted Williams’s banner season of 1941, when he hit .406 (a pinnacle reached by no one since). After all the panelists had spoken, Jean Yawkey, owner of the Boston Red Sox, rose from the audience and, obviously annoyed by the scholarly and statistical slant of the panelists, addressed a more emotional question to the audience: “How many of you never saw Ted Williams bat?” About half the people present raised their hand. Mrs. Yawkey simply said, “What a pity!” and sat down. I often saw Ted Williams at bat, and he was my mortal enemy (for I am a Yankee fan): he was the greatest.

Unlike Mathewson, Williams was no paragon of personal character. He played with enormous intensity and inward concentration (some called him selfish), and he maintained a constant feud with sportswriters and, to some extent, the public as well (Boston fans have still not entirely forgiven Williams for refusing to reenter the field and tip his hat to acknowledge their thunderous applause after he had homered in his last major league at-bat in 1960). But Williams was at least an adequate hero for our times: he didn’t brawl or drink (at least as a public spectacle), and he did sacrifice four prime seasons of his career to fight in two wars. Ed Linn’s marvelous biography,
Hitter
, is, again, refreshingly old-fashioned in its focus on his life at bat (Linn, a veteran sportswriter, followed Williams’s career from his rookie season in 1939), but also ineluctably post-Boutonian in its exploration of his troubled childhood with a difficult mother and his feuds with the press and, symbolically, in its Sturm und Drang subtitle:
The Life and Turmoils of Ted Williams
.

But the effects
of general change are most tellingly recorded not in alteration of the best products, but in transformation of the most ordinary, workaday books; for when potboilers adopt the new style, then the revolution is complete. Consider the usual process of composition for a baseball potboiler: decent player has banner year; sportswriter for the local paper has followed him all season; writer records on tape some tens of hours of interviews with player; writer produces a 250-page book in time for release at the beginning of the next season; book is heavily marketed in the player’s hometown and almost nowhere else; enough copies are sold to justify expenses and return some profit.

John Kruk is a perfectly competent ballplayer; he is also a distinctive character par excellence on the current baseball scene—fat and proud of it, and leader of the scruffy-imaged Philadelphia Phillies, toast of a nation, but losers to Toronto in the last World Series.

If you wish to find a good example of literary revolution completed, just read Kruk’s book “as told to” Paul Hagen: “
I Ain’t an Athlete, Lady…”: My Well-Rounded Life and Times
. We do hear a bit about baseball, but ever so much more about Kruk’s weight, Mitch Williams’s unhappiness, and various petty grousings about this and that. The hagiography of play on the diamond has turned into gossip about life off the field. Hardly an improvement.

As for diversification, post-Boutonian baseball biography has also added a variety of styles and subjects that would have been unthinkable in the hagiographical era. All may be viewed as consequences of the transformation of baseball biography into social commentary.

Social commentary thrives on the lives of people who have become marginal within their communities or professions. The post-Boutonian expansion of baseball writing has provided a bonanza of opportunity for biographers of the formerly neglected, most notably the shameful history of those once excluded from major league play by the irrelevancy of skin color. Many of these great players, palpable heroes among blacks, became legendary figures for fair-minded whites (I think of my father and grandfather), who knew that the excluded stars equaled or exceeded their own Ruths and Gehrigs but could never see them compete face to face.

The most famous, and perhaps the greatest, of all black players, pitcher Satchel Paige, finally got to perform in the major leagues—in his late forties, and with sustained excellence, long after most other players had retired. (I well remember the thrill of seeing him when I was a boy.) Although Paige may have been the greatest pitcher of all time, his biography must be written largely as social commentary—and Mark Ribowsky has done a fine job in
Don’t Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball
. What can one say, except that his story could make any grown man cry, as we learn about Paige’s dignity and his good humor as he walked the necessary but impossible tightrope between “acting black” (by white racist expectations) as the situation demanded (and when dignity did not greatly suffer, or could be redeemed by humor or subtle table-turning) and the explicit courage of directly making demands and taking action. Paige was also the Yogi Berra of his generation, “America’s greatest existentialist philosopher,” Ribowsky tells us with permissible hype. Just consider the poignancy and good spirit of this Paigeian dictum (though incontestably true as well) from a man unfairly deprived of so much: “Bases on balls is the curse of the nation.”

Among marginalized players
once deemed beyond consideration by conventional hagiography, the lousy performers stand out. Moe Berg, who played sporadically from 1923 to 1939, was a truly poor catcher but perhaps the most fascinating character in the history of baseball. He is therefore candidate
numero uno
for post-Boutonian biography of the marginalized—and Nicholas Dawidoff has responded splendidly in his best-selling
The Catcher Was a Spy
.