Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

  Until we abandon the silly notion that the first amphibians, as conquerors of the land, somehow held more valor, and therefore embody more progress, than the vast majority of fishes that remained successfully in the sea, we will never understand the modalities and complexities of vertebrate evolution. Fish, in any case, encompass more than half of all vertebrate species today, and might well be considered the most persistently successful class of vertebrates. So should we substitute a different canonical story called “there’s no place like home” for the usual tale of conquest on imperialistic models of commercial expansion?

  If we must explain the surrounding world by telling stories—and I suspect that our brains do force us into this particular rut—let us at least expand the range of our tales beyond the canonical to the quirky, for then we might learn to appreciate more of the richness out there beyond our pale and usual ken, while still honoring our need to understand in human terms. Robert Frost caught the role and necessity of stories—and the freedom offered by unconventional tales—when he penned one of his brilliant epitomes of deep wisdom for a premature gravestone in 1942:

  And were an epitaph to be my story

  I’d have a short one ready for my own.

  I would have written of me on my stone:

  I had a lover’s quarrel with the world.

  CRITICISM

  Diamonds Are a Fan’s Best Friend

  Books reviewed:

  Ball Four Plus Ball Five by Jim Bouton

  Mr. October: The Reggie Jackson Story by Maury Allen

  True innovation carries within itself the seeds of its own obsolescence. Our urges to copy when unimaginative, or to improve and extend when more inspired, convert yesterday’s rebel into today’s ho-hum.

  First published in Washington Post Book World, June 21, 1981.

  Jim Bouton shined during the closing days of the great Yankee dynasty. He won two games in the 1964 World Series, but could not stop the Cardinals and their Gibson machine single-handedly. He pitched so hard that his cap, obeying Newton’s third law, often flew off as his body lunged forward. Mickey Mantle called him the “bulldog.” But his arm went bad and he won only nine games during his last four years as a Yankee. In 1969, he tried to come back as a marginally effective knuckleballer, barely holding on in the bullpen of the hapless Seattle Pilots (now the respectable Milwaukee Brewers), an expansion team that spent its single year of life mired deep in the cellar of the American League West. There he composed Ball Four, an honest and irreverent daily account of a baseball season viewed from within and below. Its candor scandalized a profession that expected to keep its secrets and come before the reading public with traditional books about sexless, Coke-drinking, cardboard heroes. Bouton’s book was so successful that honest confession replaced myth-making as a preferred literary genre of the field.

  Ten years later, Bouton has reissued Ball Four with a forty-page update, inevitably titled Ball Five. In rereading classics, I am always struck by the contrast between memory and reality. Many of the famous scenes of Ball Four have not lost their impact, but I remembered them as chapters, while they actually appear as paragraphs. Although Ball Four does recount the flaky antics of grown men, such as an unbeauty contest conducted to pick Yogi Berra’s successor on the “all-ugly nine” among active players, its real focus is on the anxieties and frustrations of a sore-armed athlete on a third-rate team. Its strength, in retrospect, lies not in its exposés—tame stuff compared with later works modeled upon it, and notoriously silent on race and real sex, while reasonably explicit about drinking and pill popping. Rather its relentless, even tedious, rendition of daily hopes, pettinesses, and pains—why did they yank me, why didn’t they pitch me—displays a human side of sports that we never discern in baseball books of the pre-Bouton era.

  Ball Four is a permanent antidote to the common view that ballplayers are hunks of meat, naturally and effortlessly displaying the talents that nature provided. Excellence in anything is a single-minded struggle, to be valued if only for its rarity. The honest struggles of winners and losers are our sustaining hopes for a species mired in mediocrity—whether the struggle be expressed in relentless search for the perfect knuckleball, the holy grail, or the Great American Novel.

  Ball Five recounts Bouton’s last decade as a broadcaster, actor, divorcé, and even comeback pitcher for the Atlanta Braves. It is studded with quotable one-liners. On Billy Martin’s reaction to Ball Four (before he wrote his own book in the Boutonian tradition): “Billy Martin…came running across the field hollering for me to get the hell out…. Because I’ve grown accustomed to the shape of my nose, I got the hell out.” On the high salaries that Bouton never enjoyed: “My position is that while the players don’t deserve all that money, the owners don’t deserve it even more.” Still, Ball Five is too sketchy to merit purchase on its own strength; for it is only a little less insubstantial than its title. Yet if Ball Five served as a vehicle for bringing Ball Four back into print, then it has done its part.

  Today, Bouton’s book as exposé seems almost quaint in comparison with those that followed. Indeed, we will never again see books in the style of Lucky to Be a Yankee, the heroic account of Joe DiMaggio that set such an unrealistic pattern for my own youth. Maury Allen, author of a fine post-Boutonian book on the hero of my childhood (Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?), has now written Mr. October, a perfectly adequate, though uninspired, biography of Reggie Jackson. Mr. October is a sports book in the old style. It contains much hackneyed writing in the heroic tradition: “Harnessing all the power in his 205-pound twenty-five-year-old body, Jackson exploded in a flash as the ball moved toward the plate.” It tells the heartwarming stories of Reggie’s visits to dying cancer patients, old and young. One picture caption reads: “Reggie has extraordinary demands on his time but always finds time for kids. Here he makes a handicapped lad one happy fellow.” Allen even puts in a good word for George Steinbrenner, citing his charitable contributions to underprivileged kids. It purveys quick and dirty conclusions as profundity—including the psychobabble interpretation of Jackson’s relationship with Billy Martin offered by “a leading Bellevue psychiatrist” who requested anonymity because he had never met either men, but only read about them.

  Yet, through all this hasty conventionality, Mr. October contains some honestly forthright and controversial material. Its discussions about the sex lives of players on the road is far more extensive than Bouton’s was. Allen’s account of persistent racism at both ends of the hierarchy—how many black owners and utility infielders do you see?—is as serious an indictment of modern baseball as anyone could raise. To make it in the majors, a black man had still better be a star—like Reggie Jackson. It is Jim Bouton’s legacy that even the most ordinary of sports books now outdoes Ball Four in candor.

  Reggie Jackson, playing for the Yankees, bats against the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1978 World Series. Credit: Neil Preston/Corbis

  Yet I wonder. Surely we don’t want dishonest books that misrepresent real people. Yet the ballplayer as unadorned hero has a legitimate place in American mythology. To me, Joe DiMaggio looks as elegant selling Mr. Coffee today as he did swinging a bat when I was a kid. As a nation, we are too young to have true mythic heroes, and we must press real human beings into service. Honest Abe Lincoln the legend is quite a different character from Abraham Lincoln the man. And so should they be. And so should both be treasured, as long as they are distinguished. In a complex and confusing world, the perfect clarity of sports provides a focus for legitimate, utterly unambiguous support of disdain. The Dodgers are evil, the Yankees good. They really are, and have been for as long as anyone in my family can remember.

  So Reggie, I am happy to know you a bit better as a man. But I will always remember you most for a glorious day in 1977—in October, of course—when you destroyed the enemy with three homers on three pitches. And I’ll keep eating those Reggie bars, even though the taste leaves something to be desired, and even though the Baby Ruth was na
med for Grover Cleveland’s daughter.

  Angell Hits a Grand Slam with Collected Baseball Essays

  Book reviewed:

  Late Innings: A Baseball Companion by Roger Angell

  People 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.

  The Black Men Who Integrated Big League Ball

  Book reviewed:

  Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy by Jules Tygiel.

  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 like
s 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