Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

by Stephen Jay Gould

  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.’”

  Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus

  Books reviewed:

  Baseball: The People’s Game by Harold Seymour

  Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball by George F. Will

  When the Cheering Stops: Former Major Leaguers and Their Lives by Lee Heiman, Dave Weiner, and Bill Gutman

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

  Consider 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?

  It is creditably reported to us that some of our employees frequently use the roofs of buildings extending from yours to ours to play base ball thereon. We are ever desirous to help elevate the national game, and this altitude seems to be about as high as it ever will get, yet there are also a few objections to this special location.

  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.”

  Will ridicules the common notion, particularly among insecure intellectuals who don’t understand the subtlety of the game, that success in baseball
rests upon sheer brawn tempered by good instinct, because activities of the body cannot demand much of the mind. Will quotes Tony La Russa, baseball’s most intellectual manager:

  La Russa says, with a fine sense of semantic tidiness, that what are called baseball “instincts” are actually the result of “an accumulation of baseball information. They are uses of that information as the basis of decision making as game situations develop.”

  Will advances his unexceptionable thesis by concentrating upon the daily work and cogitation of four particularly thoughtful and industrious men at the top of their specialties within the profession—Tony La Russa for managing, Orel Hershiser for pitching, Tony Gwynn for batting, and Cal Ripken Jr. for defense. (By the way, Will’s thesis, if ever properly grasped, would forthwith and forever end the silly discussion about the supposed anomaly of why so many intellectuals love baseball, and why baseball, alone among major sports, has a distinguished literature [with Will’s book as the latest entry]. We who have loved and lived with the game all our lives feel no need to mount a defense against such ignorance.)

  I most admire Will’s success in resolving a structural problem inherent in his excellent choice of procedure. Having made a key decision to stress the incremental, repetitive honing of skills by practice, the tiny advantages that accrue with eternal vigilance to detail, and the minute edges gained from your thoughtfulness and someone else’s slack, how can Will make these workaday themes lively and continuously interesting (Carlton Fisk’s homer possesses an undeniable éclat compared with daily batting practice)? Will realized that his favored theme could not carry the book unaided. He has therefore created a marvel of variegated but seamless patchwork by lacing the central text with all manner of baseball lore, including statistical digressions, and hot-stove-league commentary, with a good (and entirely legitimate) sprinkling of classical tales about past and present stars from Janus’s other face.