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:
Not many are left who saw Ty Cobb on the rampage in the years 1905–28…. What a wildcat he was…. We called him “Jack Dempsey in spikes.” The story is quite true that Cobb filed his spikes to razor sharpness to first intimidate opponents and then gore them.
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.
Berg was marginal on all fronts within baseball—a crummy player, a Jew, and an intellectual. Berg finished both college and law school, and was a linguist by avocation and partial hype. (In Japan, for example, he did what generations of bluffers, including myself, I must admit, have done to convince people of nonexistent competence based upon marginal effort: he learned the fifty or so symbols of the katakana, the syllabary used as a supplementary system to traditional kanji characters; with katakana, any series of sounds can be written out, at least approximately.)
I had not expected to like Moe Berg much, for I thought that all the standard stories of his life had been egregiously embellished, and that his other exploits might turn out to be as mundane as his baseball. Not so, and I thank Dawidoff for the corrections. Though he thrived on exaggeration, in part concocted by the press to give him a persona that could transcend his play, Berg was a genuinely cultured and accomplished man. (I love John McGraw’s comment about Berg’s trip to Europe: “Who ever heard of a ballplayer spending his vacation studying Latin—and in Paris?”)
Moreover, the well-rehearsed legend of his career in espionage turns out to be true. Chosen for his rare combination of charm, good looks, intelligence, genuine bravery, and linguistic ability, Berg worked at high levels of espionage for the U.S government during World War II. He had a major role in a plot, bizarre and futile in retrospect but not absurd in conception, to kidnap (even perhaps to kill) Werner Heisenberg, if the great German physicist had been making substantial progress toward the manufacture of nuclear weapons. (He wasn’t—but no one knew for sure, and Berg could have emerged as a great hero if the German bomb had been a near reality.)
Berg’s life ended in sadness, for he could never move beyond his past, or overcome the maddening secretiveness and idiosyncrasy that ultimately drove nearly everyone away. Rejected by the CIA for work in espionage after 1945 (for they found unsupportable in peacetime the same bravado that Wild Bill Donovan had valued for the wartime effort), Berg spent the last quarter-century of his life (he died in 1972) unemployed, moving and mooching from acquaintance to acquaintance, telling the same old baseball and war stories. During all this time, he tried to write his autobiography, but never could—perhaps because hagiography was then dominant, and Berg had too much self-respect to compose in such a mode. Dawidoff writes of Berg’s inability to complete the book of his life:
Alone at his desk, Berg could gloss over and manipulate things no longer…. He saw [himself] as a mediocre ballplayer, a scholar only within the unlearned community of baseball, and an intelligence agent whose work had come to nothing. There was no bomb, and the CIA didn’t want him.
If lives of the marginalized have added one genre of social commentary to the literature of baseball biography, another may be found in retaining the traditional focus on star players, but in writing about their cultural impact rather than their skill on the field. I trust that this genre will be exploited only so far (for genuine sports talk must not end), but I must confess to great interest in Nick Trujillo’s The Meaning of Nolan Ryan, the first postmodern biography of a star ballplayer.
Nolan Ryan broke in with the hapless New York Mets in 1966 and pitched until the end of the 1993 season. Very few major league pitchers play into their forties, and those who do usually rely on soft stuff (knuckleballers stay the longest). Nolan Ryan continued to throw the best fastball in the game right to the end. Moreover, he improved through time. He began as a mediocre hurler with no control and no diversity of pitches (the Mets only used him once, in relief for a couple of innings, during the magnificent World Series of 1969). He ended with great control, immense cunning, and a host of additional pitches to augment the heater. In addition, Ryan is a traditional hero in an age that has almost deprived the term of meaning: he is tall, handsome, patriotic, married only once, and living on a ranch, down-home in manner (despite his immense acquired wealth), and gracious and modest. Enter, therefore, the exploiters and the commercializers, for this is America. And enter Nick Trujillo, associate professor of communication studies at California State University, Sacramento.
When Ryan was signed by the Texas Rangers in 1989, Trujillo spent three seasons studying his utility to the team’s owners and fans. Once upon a time, we might have defined utility by performance on the field, and Ryan continued to do some marvelous pitching. But now, with ballplayers marketed in every conceivable outlet from autograph shows to pictures on pencils, the financial value of a gen
uine hero can be measured only by taking account of all his salable symbols, with on-field performance as a starting point of ever-receding import.
We therefore meet the postmodern Ryan of commercial America, fragmented into his salable symbolic roles, none more genuine or truer than the other. Trujillo lists them as follows: “Ryan the Hall of Fame power pitcher, Ryan the cowboy rancher, Ryan the family man, Ryan the workaholic, Ryan the profit-seeking endorser, Ryan the conservative Republican, Ryan the hunter and fisherman, and even Ryan the sex symbol.”
I was most struck by Trujillo’s analysis of the power of the press and television to orchestrate artificial frenzies over trivial events—particularly the immense publicity (and sale of memorabilia) ignited on the occasion of Ryan’s 5,000th strikeout. (No other pitcher had ever reached this number, but once you get to 4,999, number 5,000 just has to come along the next time—no big deal when you are averaging more than nine strikeouts per game. The total accomplishment is, of course, magnificent; the event of number 5,000 itself is meaningless.) Yet the press and the publicists told us we should care, and most Ranger fans swear they can remember their location at the sublime moment, just as all folks of my generation know where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot.
The public may be cheapened by this devaluation of play, but has Ryan (as he became greatly enriched) also been diminished in turn? In 1975, in vigorous midcareer, Ryan told a reporter: “I try to spend all my free time with my family. I could make more appearances and get more attention other ways, I guess, but this is the life I want.” In 1992 he wrote in his autobiography, Miracle Man, about his greater willingness to make endorsements: “I have a better idea of what they want, and I’m learning to deliver with every take…. Since the extra income allows me to do things for my family I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise, I carefully select the right ones and accept them.”