Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

by Stephen Jay Gould

  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.

  I was interested in interviewing Astaire to find out the correlation between his dancing and athletic ability. And to my surprise he said, “Well, I wouldn’t say that dancing comes so easily to me. I work at it. I practice hour after hour,” and suddenly you see a man who does something so effortlessly—seemingly effortlessly—and you find out that each of us who are genuine professionals pays a price.

  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:

  I said, “A line will take us hours maybe;

  Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought,

  Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.”

  Good Sports & Bad

  Books reviewed:

  Ball Four by Jim Bouton, edited by Leonard Schecter

  My Life in Baseball: The True Record by Ty Cobb and Al Stump

  Cobb: A Biography by Al Stump, foreword by Jimmie Reese

  Cobb, a film written and directed by Ron Shelton

  Matty: An American Hero: Christy Mathewson and the New York Giants by Ray Robinson

  Hitter: The Life and Turmoils of Ted Williams by Ed Linn

  “I Ain’t An Athlete, Lady…”: My Well-Rounded Life and Times by John Kruk and Paul Hagen

  Don’t Look Back: Satchel Paige in the Shadows of Baseball by Mark Ribowsky

  The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg by Nicholas Dawidoff

  The Meaning of Nolan Ryan by Nick Trujillo

  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.

  Thus, the World Series of 1904 was never played. It was the last time in the game’s modern history that an owner of a pennant-winning club could unilaterally kill off the World Series. It wouldn’t happen again. Thereafter, the Series was played every year on schedule, becoming the ultimate theatrical moment of every baseball season. No autocrat like Brush, no despot like McGraw would be able to do a thing about it.

  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:

  Baseball is a game. Win or lose, you play again the next day. If you lose the last game of the World Series [as the Phillies did] you can play again next year. It’s not the end of the world.

  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

  provided the perfect example of this change in sports when he told the story about a group of beat writers traveling by train with the New York Yankees in 1928. The group watched in awe as an attractive young woman wielding a knife chased after Babe Ruth yelling, “I’ll kill you, you son of a bitch.” One of the writers said, “That’d make a helluva story,” as his colleagues laughed and continued to play poker, knowing that the story would never be written….

  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

  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 defens
ive 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:

  This great athlete seems to have understood early in his professional career that in the competition of baseball, just as in war, defensive strategy never has produced ultimate victory and, as a consequence, he maintained an offensive posture to the end of his baseball days….

  Ty Cobb injected much of his own fighting spirit into that aspect of the American character which has put inspiration and direction behind our progress as a free nation.

  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:

  Early in his baseball life, a canard developed that Ty was a brawler who constantly sought trouble. This misconception seems to have started when he first joined the Tigers, as a slender youth of eighteen, a well-brought-up boy inclined to be friendly with everybody and anxious only to make good on his own merits. Unfortunately for him, there then were among an otherwise fine group of men on the Detroit roster, a few who were contemptible bullies. These rowdies immediately started to pick on the stripling from Georgia and did everything their disordered minds could think of to make life miserable for him.