”He liked the sound of the word. Women, women, women. He said it over and over because it was a secret sensation. Even at Mass, when they were fifty o”He liked the sound of the word. Women, women, women. He said it over and over because it was a secret sensation. Even at Mass, when they were fifty or a hundred of them around him, he reveled in the secrecy of his delights.
And it was all a sin--the whole thing had the sticky sensation of evil. Even the sound of some words was a sin. Ripple. Supple. Nipple. All sins. Carnal. The flesh. Scarlet. Lips. All sins. When he said the Hail Mary. Hail Mary full of grace, the lord is with thee and blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. The word shook him like thunder. Fruit of thy womb. Another sin is born.”
It took a long time for the gritty writer, Charles Bukowski, to find his audience, but he did eventually achieve a modest amount of fame and even more modest fortune from a slice of the reading public who wanted stories that were so tangible that the reader could taste the foul air and feel the grimy walls of desperation and poverty. Bukowski’s novels are more authentic than anything nonfiction prose can conjure. Bukowski found an influencer for his type of writing when he stumbled upon John Fante’s books at his local library. Fante’s novels were long out of print and nearly forgotten. In the 1950s, Fante had made a living writing mostly undeveloped screen plays for Hollywood. It was hack work, but it provided a steady paycheck. It was the1970s when Bukowski convinced his publisher, Black Sparrow Press, to bring Fante’s work back into the light of day.
Bukowski called John Fante a God.
I had read his most celebrated novel, Ask the Dust, many decades ago, and I was long overdue to reread it. I decided that I should expand my reading beyond his most famous novel and read the quartet in timeline order, rather than the order of publication. Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938) was his first Bandini novel, but remained unpublished until 1983. The Road to Los Angeles (1985) was next and then Ask the Dust (1939), followed by Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982). Ask the Dust is considered one of the quintessential novels about LA, and if you have doubts about reading the quartet, do make room for ATD in your reading queue.
WUSB is set in Colorado, and Arturo Bandini’s father is a bricklayer who finds it hard to obtain work when there is too much snow on the ground...which in Colorado would be a frequent problem. The Bandini family is poor and proud. They are a family of grand passions. Humiliations are reacted to with fists, insults, and brooding anger. Arguments are emotional, overwrought affairs that thunder through their house like Shakespearean tempests. I was raised in a family where emotions were bottled and buried. Humiliations were ignored, but not forgotten. Revenge was served cold. The white heat of anger was seen as an indulgence best brought down to a simmer. Grief was stoically controlled. So as I was reading all these flagrant expressions of emotion, I was decidedly uncomfortable. As I started to settle into the novel, pulled along by Fante’s easy flowing prose, I started to understand that this might not be my family, but this was certainly a living breathing family somewhere.
It is impossible to separate John Fante from Arturo Bandini. They are one and the same. Bandini may be living a larger, more embellished life than the one led by Fante, but the raw basis of their existence is the same. I was watching A Sad Flower in the Sand, a short documentary on John Fante. One of his friends said about him that she didn’t know if she could trust him because he would tell her two versions of a story about himself: one that was obviously embellished and one that seemed to be mostly true. It was only after she found out he was a novelist that she understood that he was sharing Bandini’s life with her. He obviously knew the difference between reality and fiction, but probably preferred the fictionalized version of himself, even though, I must say, the fictionalized version is no cakewalk.
Bandini and Fante are both short, maybe five foot one, and one of the continual humiliations for Bandini is that his two younger brothers are shooting past him in height. Bandini is in love with Rosa Pinelli, but she struggles to take him seriously. Being taken seriously is going to prove to be an ongoing issue for Bandini in all aspects of his life. He idealizes Rosa to the point of an obsession, which is probably somewhat baffling to her, given that they have rarely spoken. It is easier to keep someone on a pedestal when worshipping her beauty without the hindrance of weighing her other characteristics, such as personality, opinions, faults, and virtues.
Bandini’s mother has ”too much God in her,” and it drives most of the rest of the family crazy. Her middle son, August, has caught the religious virus, and she has hopes that he will become a priest. My Grandmother Ives was very religious and was very proud when one of her sons became a minister. She firmly believed that a mother that gave one son to the church was put in the VIP line to heaven. Maria Bandini hoped the same for herself. Despite all of her heavenly devotions, Svevo adores her, and she submits to his lusts like a dutiful wife should. Even as Svevo kicks the snow and rails against its existence, he still equates the beauty of it with his wife. ”The beautiful white snow was like the beautiful white wife of Svevo Bandini, so white, so fertile, lying in a white bed in a house up the street.”
Pride, emotions, religious fever, and poverty eventually tear the Bandini family apart, but it is those aspects that also prove to be the glue that draws them back together. Arturo has not yet discovered the solace/pain that will await him as a struggling writer. LA will soon be a beckoning, and the tap, tap, tapping of typewriter keys will become a metronome for telling his stories.
“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, yo“The pleasure of rooting for Goliath is that you can expect to win. The pleasure of rooting for David is that, while you don’t know what to expect, you stand at least a chance of being inspired.”
This book came out in 2003, and the movie version came out in 2011; yet, it is amazing to me that despite the success shown by the Oakland As under the guidance of Billy Beane, baseball, for the most part, is still focusing on the wrong things. Just recently the manager of the New York Mets, Terry Collins, who commands one of the best teams in the world, said in an interview after the World Series:
“I’m not sure how much an old-school guy can add to the game today,’’ Collins told USA Today. “It’s become a young man’s game, especially with all of the technology stuff you’ve got to be involved in. I’m not very good at it. I don’t enjoy it like other people do. I’m not going to sit there today and look at all of these (expletive) numbers and try to predict this guy is going to be a great player. OPS this. OPS that. GPS. LCSs. DSDs. You know who has good numbers? Good (expletive) players.”
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Terry Collins said: “Shit Happens” at a press conference. Billy Beane must have rolled his eyes.
The MLB network show Hot Stove was incensed that Collins would make such a statement in this day and age, especially since they could track several “gut” decisions he made during the World Series that probably cost them a chance to win it. The most glaring error was when he decided to pull the pitcher, Matt Harvey, in the 9th inning of game five only to change his mind and send him back out there after Harvey complained. Collins looked into the player’s eyes and saw what he wanted to see. It was the third time through the order. Harvey had pitched brilliantly, but statistically, that bad word that Collins doesn’t like. When you look at the Royals, they get to pitchers late. The Royals got to Harvey and knocked him out of the game, which left a mess for Jeurys Familia to come into the game to try and save.
Royals Win!
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Eric Hosmer going off the Billy Beane script for success, but man, was it dramatic. I about had a heartattack.
The Royals deviate from Billy Beane ball at many junctures. One being the most dramatic play of the series when Eric Hosmer steals home. Beane does not believe in stealing bases, too risky, and if you steal a base on a Billy Beane team, you better make sure you are safe. The Royals also occasionally bunt to move a runner, which doesn’t fit the Beane philosophy. He believes in managing outs and never giving up an out to advance a runner. The Royals have speedy wheels and frequently turn bunts into base hits, which would probably keep them from finding themselves subjugated to a Billy Beane lecture. You can go off script, but just be right.
The Royals are a homegrown team. Most of the players have come from the farm club system, although they are a bit too athletic and good looking for a Billy Beane ball club. One of the things that Beane talks about is getting away from players who could sell jeans. He should know; he was one of those players that looked like a Greek God in a uniform. He was drafted in 1980 along with another phenom that even those people who don’t follow baseball probably recognize his name...Darryl Strawberry. Beane was an interesting enough prospect that, for a while, the Mets were even considering taking him in the draft first instead of Strawberry. Both were amazing specimens of what we want athletes to look like. The Mets ended up taking Beane, too, but with the 23rd pick. Beane had all the physical gifts to be successful, but sports is not just about the body; it is about the mind. Billy had a lot of expectations for himself, and those expectations became insecurities that eventually evolved into a gifted player being unable to play the game.
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Billy Beane on the verge of a stardom that somehow eluded him. He is exactly the player who Billy now tries to avoid.
He asked for a job in the As front office, and that began an odyssey in search of those players who were ”ballplayers”, not pretty head cases, not players that hit home runs and created RBIs, but players that could control the strike zone. As he tore apart the As organization, he got rid of the scouts who were still insisting on signing Apolloesque ballplayers and sold off overpriced talent. Ownership wasn’t giving him much money to work with anyway, so instead of buying expensive talent, he had to sell expensive talent and replace it with a motley group of players whom no one else wanted, but who had the one important element he wanted most, OPS (on base plus slugging), i.e. these guys knew how to get on base.
These players had a menagerie of interesting things wrong with them that had other clubs looking to get rid of them, which made them perfect for Billy Beane. One pitcher had club feet. They were below average fielders. They were overweight. They threw sidearm pitches. They were older players on their way out. They were players too green for any other team to consider playing them.
You can’t win with players like this!
Well, maybe you can. Exhibit A: The standings at the end of the season in the American League West in 2002.
Now the interesting thing is notice the payroll compared to the wins. The more money a team spent the fewer games they won. If I had been the Texas Rangers owner, I’d be looking at these results and think to myself, What am I paying for?
Baseball is in love with RBIs and Home Runs. They think those are the things about baseball that put butts in seats. As the Royals made their way through the playoffs in the American league in 2015, they encountered two teams that depended on the home run to win ball games. The Royals hit 95 home runs in 2014, which placed them dead last at 30th among major league baseball teams. In 2015, they improved to 139 home runs, but were still 24th in the league. Their opponent in the playoffs in 2015, the Toronto Blue Jays, were 1st in all of major league baseball with 232 home runs. Their other opponent, the Houston Astros, hit 230 home runs and were second in the league for home runs.
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Jose Bautista hit several dramatic home runs in the playoffs, including the famous bat flip home run, but despite those fence clearing bombs, they were unable to advance in the playoffs.
Jacking up home runs might equal playoffs, but it doesn’t seem to equal winning world championships.
Even the Mets hit 177 home runs for 9th in the league. They did win the pennant, but still fell short of winning a world championship. To my eye, they are a more complete offensive ballclub than Houston or Toronto and will be contenders again this year, but not because they hit a lot of home runs.
So why is major league baseball so reluctant to embrace the philosophy of Moneyball? ”Anti-intellectual resentment is common in all of American life and it has many diverse expressions.” For instance, preferring high school players in the draft over college players, even though statistically college players do better. College athletes have played against stiffer competition. They have honed their skills. They have more reliable stats to give a general manager a better clue to how they will perform at the next level.
I admire the Mets. They are a terrific team. I still have a lot of nostalgia for Gary Carter and the Miracle Mets of 1986, and if the Royals hadn’t been playing against them last year, I would have been rooting for them in the World Series. I have to say that Terry Collins’ comments about basically comparing statistics to voodoo was disappointing to me. I don’t mean to pick on Collins, but his comments came after he made several decisions in the face of a pile of data to the contrary that probably cost his team at least a better chance to win the World Series. He is not alone. Baseball is still filled with owners, GMs, and managers who believe that home runs and RBIs are the most important statistics and the best way to win championships.
The Royals, after all, are an anomaly, right?
It was the same things teams were saying about the As in the early 2000s.
I think of all those ballplayers who really know how to play the game, who are stuck in the minor leagues because they hit too many singles or walked too many times, and didn’t launch enough missiles over the back fence.
I loved this book because I’m a fan of baseball, but the book had a much bigger impact on me. I started thinking about and applying Billy Beane principles to my own business. We are a company mired in traditions and traditional thinking and long overdue for an overhaul in philosophy to meet new challenges. Like all companies, we need to become more efficient, more lean, more targeted to what wins ball games rather than what creates a big splash. I’m buying copies of this book for the rest of the management staff, and we are going to talk about singles and doubles and managing our outs. Maybe we, too, can get our Royal on.
This is probably the most controversial book and the most honest book ever written about baseball. It is interesting how the words honest and controversial seem to travel together like a Harley Davidson with a sidecar. Jim Bouton won two World Series games in 1964 with the New York Yankees, but in 1965 he developed arm troubles that turned the pitching phenom from a starter into a bullpen pitcher. When we catch up with Jim, he is with the Seattle Pilots expansion team, trying to learn how to throw a knuckleball in an attempt to resurrect and lengthen his career. Now if you haven’t heard of the Seattle Pilots, don’t feel bad because I’d never heard of them either. They only existed for one year, 1969, and then they were moved to Milwaukee to become the Brewers.
Probably few would remember this organization except for the fact that Jim Bouton was with the team. He was taking notes and immortalizing most of the one year this team was in existence. This book hit baseball players/managers/owners like a psycho nun with a steel studded ruler was rapping their knuckles over and over again. I wonder how the baseball commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, felt about the book? Ahh yes, he called Ball Four“detrimental to baseball.”
Now a normal writer can’t buy publicity like this, but Bouton was still trying to pitch in the major leagues, and the reaction certainly made things more difficult for him. The book went nuclear. Athletes, in general, who are not known for reading, were reading this book, and for the most part, they had negative reactions. Most weren’t quite as vocal about it as Pete Rose, who anytime Bouton was pitching screamed from the dugout steps: ”Fuck you! Shakespeare!”
My question is who told Pete Rose about Shakespeare?
The controversy was over Bouton revealing the everyday stupidity that sometimes colossally bored baseball players got up to. Not to mention the rampant alcohol and drug abuse, greenie anyone? Greenies were speed, and pretty much everyone on the team was using them, at least in their minds, to ramp up their abilities on the diamond. Wrapped around all this was the serial infidelity that was just considered one of the perks of being a professional ball player. One of the coaches of the Pilots would always remind the guys before letting them off the plane to go meet up with their wives…”Act Horny”.
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1964 after a World Series win. Mantle and Bouton were still friends.
Now all of that was bad enough, but where Bouton stepped over the line for many baseball fans was revealing the less than stellar lifestyle of the legendary Mickey Mantle. Sportswriters have a long history of protecting athletes. Most recently, though it was common knowledge among reporters, nothing was reported on the infidelities of Tiger Woods. His image, as far as the public was concerned, was that of a brilliant athlete with the perfect wife, the perfect life. The press was well aware of Mantle’s excessive epic drinking and his infidelities, but never wrote a word about it.
Then comes along Jim Bouton.
Bouton is a rookie on the Yankees, and one of the first stories he tells about Mantle is the whole team gathering around him on the rooftop of their hotel that, by the way it is angled, gives them a bird’s eye view into hotel rooms across the way. They could watch women undress. I’m not sure, since this was a group effort, that we can even really call this Peeping Tom or Toms. The guys called it ”Beaver Shooting,” and they put a good bit of effort into finding ways to see women exposed. One player drilled holes into the connecting door of his hotel room so he could spy on whoever was in the next room. In another case a player drilled a hole through the back of the dugout wall so he could peek up the skirt of an unsuspecting fan. They had mirrors that they would slide under hotel room doors. The list goes on and on.
It was almost a pathological obsession.
It reminded me of one time when I was about fourteen, and I was hanging out at the bottom of a set of stairs at the high school waiting for a friend when several girls started down the steps. I looked up to see if it was my friend coming, and my line of sight gave me a perfect uninhibited view of the girls’ underwear. I was gobsmacked. I was turned to stone. I forced my eyes away after what felt like fifteen minutes, but was only probably a fraction over a second. I was sure they knew! They were of course oblivious, but it didn’t keep me from turning thirteen shades of red as their mingled perfumes brushed by me.
Beyond the controversy, the book provides an incredible view of what it is like to be a ballplayer. The paranoias, the insecurities, the unfairness, the pranks, and the joys when a knuckleball breaks off the plate the way it is supposed to. The constant worry about being traded or sent down to the minor leagues. ”Us battered bastards of baseball are the biggest customers of the U.S. Post Office, forwarding-address department. I’ve seen letters chasing guys for months, years even. Sometimes you walk into a clubhouse and there’s a letter on the table for a guy who was released two years ago.”
Now certainly, Bouton created more stress for himself because it wasn’t long before everyone in the clubhouse knew he was writing a book. He had a sneaking suspicion that the head office might not be all that happy to know he was keeping track of their activities, and the ball clubs antics, and the decisions that were being made behind the scenes. He had the normal ball players paranoia times ten.
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You, too, can learn how to throw a knuckleball.
I have to admit it was fun coming home from work each day and spending some time with the Seattle Pilots. They might have been all too human, but they were certainly real. I have to hope that this book also had some positive impacts on professional baseball. I hope that clubs took a look at the drug use and the after hours carousing. I have a feeling a few wives had a few questions for their baseball playing husbands. Maybe even some ball players seeing themselves in this light, exposed (that would only be fair), made some changes to how they conducted themselves. This wasn’t the era of exorbitant salaries, but they were certainly making more than the average American who came to see them play. Whether they wanted to be or not, they were/are role models not only for kids, but for fans of all ages.
Now, I have to go back to work. Anyone got a greenie?
When I was twelve, my Dad found a handful of his Topps baseball cards from the 1950s and gave them to me. Among the cool player’s names were Bob Feller, Yogi Berra, and a lanky black man named Satchel Paige. I pondered on the name Satchel and the name Yogi. How does a guy get a name like Satchel or for that matter Yogi? Later while in college, I was amused to hear that Woody Allen, as a tribute to the great ball player, named his son Satchel Ronan O’Sullivan Farrow, although calling Ronan Woody’s child is a bit of a stretch. I’m of the opinion, shared by many others, that he is actually Frank Sinatra’s son. Ronan doesn’t go by Satchel, which could be because he doesn’t like it, or it could be because he has some issues with his “father.” I hope he understands that he was named after a baseball legend.
It wasn’t until I read this book that some possibilities for the origins of Leroy Page evolving into Satchel Paige became known to me. (He added an i to his last name because he thought it added some panache.) As a boy, Leroy worked at the train station in Mobile, Alabama, carrying satchels for passengers. One story is that he designed a pole that would go over his shoulders that allowed him to carry more satchels at one time and, therefore, make more money. That is the sanitized story. The other story is that he was light fingered and quick enough to “liberate” satchels from passengers. I tend to lean towards the later since it was only a few years later that he found himself at reformatory school. It turned out to be a blessing in disguise. He traded five years of his life to learn how to play baseball.
Satchel was an enigma.
Nearly every time he was asked for his birth date, whether by reporters or for official documents, he gave a different date, usually a date that made him younger than his actual age. Later when asked about his marriage date, he did the same thing, slinging a different date out there each time. It was as if he were trying to keep anything real to be known about Leroy safely tucked in the shadows of the larger than life Satchel.
He was a phenom.
He’d have to be coming from Mobile, Alabama, and having the wrong tint in the wrong time. He was told by owners and managers his whole life, ”If only you were white.” He was a superstar for the Negro leagues. His fastball was nearly unhittable until he hurt his arm in the late 1930s. The great Joe DiMaggio had a chance to bat against him and said he was "the best and fastest pitcher I've ever faced." He became the star that fans attending Negro games most wanted to see. He was a showman. He embellished, bragged, and most importantly delivered. Modesty was not a word he was very familiar with.
Satchel played wherever someone would pay him to play. He skipped out on contracts when he got better offers. He went to other countries to play if the offer was too irresistible. Given the fact that he spent money as fast as he could make it, he was forced to keep hustling. He made a better living than most white major leaguers by barnstorming across the country. He put his black All-stars up against some of the best of the major leaguers in exhibition games. The crowds came out to see this crazy, spaghetti legged pitcher with size fourteen feet pitch. He would raise his front foot so far into the air before he pitched that, as one player put it, “he temporarily blotted out the sun.”
As innings of pitching mounted (everyone wanted to see Satchel pitch every game), he developed some arm saving pitches that also resulted in some embarrassing swings from big leaguers. ”I got bloopers, loopers, and droopers. I got a jump ball, a be ball, a screw ball, a wobbly ball, a whispy-dispy-do, a hurry-up ball, a nothin’ ball and a bat dodger.”
If the world was a fair place, he would have been the first black to integrate into major league baseball, and though he supported Jackie Robinson publicly, privately he was hurt. He understood that he was ”old-school, while the twenty-six-year-old Robinson was a college boy and army veteran who the owner felt could bear the ruthless scrutiny of being first.”
Nobody did more to advance the idea that black men could compete on the same diamond equally with white men as Satchel Paige. He proved it every time he put on his cleats and toed the mound. Black people came to see him pitch in droves, but so did white people.
Another reason why Satchel may not have been the best choice to be first was the fact that he was a notorious womanizer. Single women, married women, black women, and white women flocked to him in whatever city he played in, and he enjoyed their company. He used to leave tickets at the box office of every game for “Mrs. Paige” and it tickled the other players that every day a different woman picked those tickets up. He was a man who enjoyed good food, women, music, fine clothes, and burned through a pile of money in the process. Though white players were enjoying the same benefits, a black man, especially the first integrated ball player, would have made fans uncomfortable that he was being seen with white women. Not to mention the very real possibility that some morons in some states would be looking for him with a rope.
He did finally make the major leagues as a 42 year old rookie for the Cleveland Indians. To this day he is still the oldest rookie ever in major league baseball. At age 59, he was hired for one game for the Boston Red Sox as a stunt to raise attendance. A crowd packed the stadium, and ”he needed twenty-eight tosses to get nine outs. He struck out one and walked none over three innings. Batters popped up his pitches and tapped meek grounders. The only base hit was a double by Carl Yastrzemski.” He was stripping down in the locker room when a player came down to tell him he had to come back out. The darkened stadium was filled with lit matches and lighters as the audience serenaded him with The Old Gray Mare.
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I really love this picture of Satchel Paige. He is a tired warrior.
One interesting thing that no one could have anticipated with the integration of baseball was that only the very best black players were given spots on teams. Average players were more likely to be white. The end result was that, as the Negro leagues shut down, there were fewer black men making a living playing baseball.
Satchel called for integration of baseball for decades before Jackie Robinson was even playing. He proved every year that men of color could play the game as well as white men. He endured racism as he travelled across this country, entertaining black and white fans of the game. Sometimes hotels who would host blacks could not be found. Sometimes only dives could be found where regularly the whole team slept in one room. The players learned to sleep with newspapers under them to keep the bugs from nesting with them. (The rustling of his natural movements while sleeping would scare the bugs back into the walls.) Sometimes finding food was difficult because no one would serve the black players; some who would had them stand back in the kitchen to eat.
Satchel was a shrewd negotiator in an age when most players were just glad to have a job. He knew his value and asked for it. He was the first black man to pitch in a World Series game. He was a man of firsts, and if he had been able to play in his prime in the major leagues, the Cy Young award might very well be called the Satchel Paige award.
It was odd for me to be reaching back in time to the child I was in 1979 when I first held a Satchel Paige baseball card. I’ve been curious about the man for thirty-seven years. He has cropped up here and there in other books I’ve read. I’m not sure why it has taken me this long to give the man a voice in my head. Whatever inkling I had of who he was when I first learned his name, it was nothing compared to the man that I’ve met while reading this book.
”Leroy became Satchel. And Satchel became a legend.”
”DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a s”DiMaggio's grace came to represent more than athletic skill in those years. To the men who wrote about the game, it was a talisman, a touchstone, a symbol of the limitless potential of the human individual. That an Italian immigrant, a fisherman's son, could catch fly balls the way Keats wrote poetry or Beethoven wrote sonatas was more than just a popular marvel. It was proof positive that democracy was real. On the baseball diamond, if nowhere else, America was truly a classless society. DiMaggio's grace embodied the democracy of our dreams.”
Joe DiMaggio was 6’2”, a big man, but a man graced with natural elegance. Off the field he dressed well, reinforcing that image of cool, calm, and collected. As one of his dates was surprised to discover she was not the focus of the male attention in the room. ”Dining with Joe DiMaggio, Ms. Cosgrove felt, gave her a remarkable insight into the male animal. The entire restaurant came to a halt for two hours. The chair of every man was angled so that its occupant could keep an eye on her date.”
It was a nation wide man crush before we knew what to call it.
On the other side of the coin was Ted Williams. As much as the press loved Joe DiMaggio they hated Ted Williams. The feeling was mutual. DiMaggio was the best player of his era, but no one would question who was the best hitter. Williams was the first to really look at hitting as a science. ”Nothing was left to chance. If he was batting and a cloud passed over, he would step out of the batter’s box and fidget until the light was just a little better. He honed his bats at night, working a bone against them to make the fibers harder. He was the first to combine olive oil and rosin in order to get a better grip on the bat. He learned to gradually decrease the weight of his bats as the summer wore on and fatigue set in.”
Ted Williams was a throwback to another era. ”As he aged he became even more handsome, his face now leathery. he was crusty, outspoken, and unbending, a frontier man in the modern age, the real John Wayne. ‘He is not a man for this age,’ his old friend and teammate Birdie Tebbetts said of him. ‘The only place I would put him, the only place he’d be at home, is the Alamo.’”
DiMaggio was the Yankee Clipper and Williams was a Boston Red Sox. In the summer of 1949 those two teams were squaring off to see who would go to the World Series. To make things even more interesting Joe’s little brother Dom played for the Red Sox. His whole career was spent in the shadow of his brother, but he was one hell of a player in his own right. The Red Sox got down early in the season, at one point by eleven games, but then clawed their way back into the race. Hollywood couldn’t have drawn up the ending any better. The Yankees and Red Soxs met in a final series at the very end of the season to determine who was going to win the pennant
It was very simple…win or go home.
David Halberstam gives us an inside look, not only at the stars, but each significant player involved in this rivalry in 1949. Most of the players came from very humble origins. They all dealt with the stresses of the game different. Ellis Kinder, the great Red Sox pitcher was probably my favorite to read about. The night before he was supposed to pitch he’d stay up all night drinking and chasing women. He’d pour coffee into himself on game day to get ready to pitch. It is amazing to me that he could abuse himself that much and still be one of the premier pitchers in the league. He wasn’t alone, other players as well partied on their off hours as hard as they played on the field.
Yogi Berra was the first ball player to get an agent. A man by the name of Frank Scott noticed that Yogi was being paid in watches instead of money whenever he would give speeches or attend events. Scott saw an opportunity for Yogi to make a lot more money and for Frank Scott to be paid for making the arrangements. The dealings between management and players was also beginning to change. The owners took advantage of the players to the point that it made a Union not only viable, but necessary. It made Tommy Henrich, who spent his whole career with the Yankees, uneasy watching this transition. Certainly some of the charm of the game was lost when players went from being blue collar workers to being millionaires.
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I feel very fortunate to own this baseball card of Yogi Berra. It was one of my Dad’s.
This is also the era when owners were struggling with the allure of radio and television. There was fear that it would significantly reduce stadium attendance. Little did the owners know the revenue that would be eventually generated from, especially, television contracts.
I’ve been a long suffering Kansas City Royals fan, but last season ended the long playoff drought that had extended back to 1985. The 2014 season was so exciting it was almost worth the wait. I didn’t see these young ball players as millionaires, maybe because they didn’t act like millionaires. They played like kids with exuberance and joy that was contagious to the crowds in the ballparks and the viewers on television. The way they played, referred to as small ball, was like seeing baseball as it was played many decades ago.
From the days when players used to run out every play at first; or they would steal without giving a thought to the cost to their bodies; or lay out for spectacular catches in the outfield. These young men from the Royals played last season seemingly unaware of the stats sheet. It was all about sacrifice, hard work, and driving other teams crazy. I have been seeing more spectacular plays this year than I ever remember seeing before and not just from the Royals. It was as if the Royals woke the whole league up and reminded everyone of when a baseball game was as magical as anything Walt Disney ever dreamed up.
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Eric Hosmer the talented very young first baseman for the Kansas City Royals. Here them ROAR indeed.
”Sooner or Later,” the author Ed Linn observes, “society beats down the man of muscle and sweat.” Surely these fine athletes, these boys of summer, ha”Sooner or Later,” the author Ed Linn observes, “society beats down the man of muscle and sweat.” Surely these fine athletes, these boys of summer, have found their measure of ruin. But one does not come away from visits with them, from long nights remembering the past and considering the present, full of sorrow. In the end, quite the other way, one is renewed.”
Since the moment I was aware enough to process sounds and know what they mean, I’ve been a Kansas City Royals fan. From opening day until the final out, my father had the AM radio tuned to the Royals baseball games. Even when he wasn’t in the house, the radio would still be on with the sounds of the crowd, the sharp crack of a bat, and the exciting play by play commentary of the announcer punctuating the silence of a hot summer afternoon. When I got old enough to ride the tractor with my father, we would listen to the game together as the ruts of the field would bounce us from side to side.
Baseball made the world seem bigger.
My father was a dominate pitcher in high school. He’d pitch complete games, sometimes two or three times a week. His back has a permanent curvature to his spine from all that pitching. This was an era before they had rules and regulations in place to protect young, developing athletes. He was recruited to play college ball. He had thoughts of being an engineer. Going to school and playing baseball were just dreams caught in dust motes...drifting...drifting...uncatchable.
Roger Kahn’s father introduced him to baseball. His mother was a serious academic, and she considered the excited discussions about dem bums, the Brooklyn Dodgers, a detriment to the development of her son’s mind. Kahn grew up being able to talk baseball with his father and Ulysses with his mother. When he later became a sports writer, both parents would prove to have an equal amount of influence on how he saw the game of baseball and how he wrote about it.
When I was going to college in Tucson, I rented a two bedroom house just off of campus. Whenever the Wildcat football team would score, I could hear the roar of the crowd, and whenever something went wrong for the team, I could hear the collective groans. To some people who visited me this was annoying, but for me it only brought back fond memories of listening to the crowd react to a baseball game from the radio on the farm. Kahn lived in Brooklyn close enough to Ebbets Field that he could listen to the game on the radio and hear the reactions from the crowd seconds later. ”When the wind blew from the south and the French doors had been opened, the sound of cheering carried from Ebbets Field into the apartment.”
I don’t remember how I first learned that the Los Angeles Dodgers used to be in Brooklyn, but I do remember asking my father about it. He got a grin on his face and said “Pee Wee Reese.” I thought to myself what an odd name for a ballplayer. Reese had been one of my Dad’s favorite players because, when he wasn’t pitching, he played shortstop and had hopes of playing half as good as Pee Wee Reese. The Dodgers lost seven championships before finally winning in 1955. Five of those losses were to their rivals the New York Yankees. I wonder, if they had won more World Series championships, if we would still be calling them the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers. Of course as a kid, I didn’t have a clue about finances or the lure of California that brought the Giants and the Dodgers to the Golden state out West. It hadn’t even occurred to me that you could move a baseball team. I thought to myself, what would I do if they moved the Royals?
Kahn had the privilege of covering the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1950s. He got to know Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Duke Snyder, Carl Furillo, Roy Campanella, Carl Erskine, Joe Black, and the great one, Jackie Robinson. When I say he knew them, I mean he really knew them. He traveled with the team. He saw them when they were ecstatic, when they were angry, when they were at their best and at their worst. We all know from documentaries, films, and slews of books about the trials and tribulations of Jackie Robinson, but I think sometimes in that narrative we forget about how important it was that the white shortstop from Kentucky offered his friendship to a black man from Georgia.
Reese could have easily been a man of his time. He could have embraced what for the South has almost been a cultural heritage of racism. When he looked at Jackie Robinson, he didn’t just see a black man; he saw a man who could really play baseball and a man who could help the Dodgers win.
In the book, there is this poignant moment when Joe Black, a pitcher for the Dodgers, relates how he had always wanted to play baseball. He kept scrapbooks of all the clippings of his favorite players. He was a senior in high school when he asked a baseball scout why he was signing all these other guys, but hadn’t tried to sign him.
That is the moment when he realized that “colored” men didn’t play in the major leagues.
I find it a testament to his character that he had collected those newspaper articles and had followed the careers of his favorite ball players, and it never occurred to him that they were white and that none of them were black. When he went back through his scrapbook, he really peered at all the faces and for the first time saw them as white men instead of as men who were really good at playing baseball. He had been color blind until others forced him to see.
What Kahn does with this book is explore his relationship with his father. A relationship that cannot be separated from the lives of the Brooklyn Dodgers. We meet the players while they were playing and then again in their lives after baseball. There is a tinge of melancholy about the book that left me feeling a bit blue. We see these athletes at the height of the power, and then we see them later as construction workers, grocery store owners, successful entrepreneurs, and failed dreamers. Life has not been easy for most of them. They played in an era before players were receiving mega deals that made them millionaires. Few retired from baseball in the 1950s rich enough to retire from working. It has taken me a while to realize this, but regardless of whether you are a famous baseball player, a teacher, a piano player in a nightclub, a writer, or a circulation manager, life is tough and uncertain and rarely follows the script of our life that we had conceptualized in our heads.
A few years ago, I was talking to a young man on his farm, and his grandfather, who I thought was half asleep on his feet, perked up when he heard my name. He said, “Are you related to Dean Keeten?” I thought he must be talking about my father Donald because we all have the family name of Dean, but he quickly set me straight. He was asking about my grandfather. “Did you ever see him play baseball?” he asked. I explained that he had died in 1954 long before I was born. He laughed and said, “I’ve never seen anyone get from first to third as quickly as your grandfather.” I could see the images of long ago baseball games flickering behind the thin membrane of his eyelids. Men long dead were alive again brushing dirt from their pants after a slide into third or making an over the shoulder catch with a glove barely bigger than their hand.
My grandfather was a hard working man, but he would stop everything when it was time to play baseball. In those years, every town had a baseball team that would play against other town teams. It was serious business, a game played by men not boys, and winning was as important as a bumper wheat crop.
For a few moments my Grandfather shimmered to life through the eyes of a man who actually got to see him play baseball.
Roy Campanella’s career was cut short by a car accident in 1958 that severed his spine, leaving him paralysed. I could feel the trepidation in Kahn as he prepared to go see him. He found Roy whirling about in an electric chair that he controlled with the palm of one hand. His once powerful legs had withered to a fraction of their normal size. He was reduced, but not diminished. His larger than life personality was still sustaining him. ”He pushed the lever and the wheelchair started off bearing the broken body and leaving me…, to marvel at the vaulting human spirit, imprisoned yet free, in the noble wreckage of the athlete, in the dazzling palace of the man.”
I don’t really know what it is about baseball. Annie Savoy in the movie Bull Durham says: ”Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth, and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job.”
It’s a game that will break your goddamned heart and make you weep for joy, sometimes mere moments apart. In 1980, the Royals finally got passed those boys in pinstripes to go to the World Series. We were all so invested in that team. My mother, who never watched sports before, had followed their exploits all season long and had gotten to know their names. She cheered and fretted as George Brett flirted with hitting .400. He finally ended the season at .390. The Philadelphia Phillies behind the amazing pitching of Tug McGraw dispatched the Royals in six. The nation had become enamored with the plucky Royals, and game six of the 1980 World Series still holds the record for the most TV watchers of a World Series game.
I was sitting on the floor with my chin resting on my elbows, contemplating the reality that the Royals had lost. How could we lose? We had George Brett! I was starting to hope that all this had just been a nightmare, and I was going to wake up to a new day with game six unplayed. I felt tears sting my eyes and knew that the fact that we had lost was already starting to become coal dust memories. I heard my mother sob. I rolled over and looked at her on the couch with tears rolling down her cheeks. I got up and gave her a hug, and then she started to sob for real. I’d seen her cry before, but I’d never seen her cry like this before. The players may have lost the game, but we lost something a lot more precious...a dream.
The Royals did get a chance to redeem themselves in 1985. We had our Tug McGraw that year, a young phenom pitcher named Bret Saberhagen, and then I had a chance to see my mother cry tears of joy.
Whether it is dem bums in Brooklyn or the Cubbies or the Miracle Mets, they have all left an indelible mark on their fans. There has been a lot of speculation about whether Walt Whitman ever said this, that maybe Annie Savoy took liberties with Whitman’s words, but I choose to believe that Whitman was the right man to have said it: "I see great things in baseball. It's our game, the American game. It will repair our losses and be a blessing to us."
The Church of Baseball has been safe in the hands of Roger Kahn. He caught the magic of a diamond of green grass under a blue sky. I kept having to brush the popcorn and the peanut shells from the leaves of the book. I could feel the leather on my left hand as my eye searched the sky for the speck of white. I’m sure, like all of us, Kahn wished he could say one more time: ”Hey...Dad? You wanna have a catch.”
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