Baseball

  Praise for

  BASEBALL

  “[An] extraordinary book… Stories emerge like bright threads to establish the whole fabric of baseball.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “Vecsey possesses a journalist's eye for detail and a historian's feel for the sweep of action. His research is scrupulous and his writing crisp. This book is an instant classic—a lively, highly readable guide to America's great and enduring pastime.”

  —Louisville Courier-Journal

  “In his literary tribute to baseball, [Vecsey] serves up unique insights and anecdotes gleaned from the past five decades. His narrative is witty, charming and informative and so enjoyable, it is the next best thing to actually being in a ballpark during a championship run.”

  —Tucson Citizen

  “Many ‘history of baseball’ books are unwieldy and, at times, hard to swallow. Vecsey manages to parcel out bite-sized chunks, and the result is a breezy, delicious look at the game.”

  —The Tampa Tribune

  “[Vecsey] quickly tackles the most intractable of baseball's myths.… This is a tale told in the voice of an old friend who, fortunately for us, has interviewed many of the game's greats.… [An] engaging tour.”

  —The Washington Times

  “Vivid, affectionate and clear-eyed, Vecsey's account makes for an engaging sports history.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “[A] seamless and succinct popular history. [Vecsey's] account of the game's early days is especially strong.”

  —Booklist

  “George Vecsey in The New York Times is like the counterman at a favorite sandwich shop, serving us lunch and a thousand words of sports wisdom every day. Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game is an invitation to his house for Sunday dinner. The pace is more relaxed, the meal much larger, the result as wonderful as you suspected it would be.”

  —LEIGH MONTVILLE

  “George Vecsey's book on baseball is history from the heart, an account of the game that manages to be both loving and factual, personal and sweeping.”

  —SALLY JENKINS

  “This is a necessary book for those wives and girlfriends (and husbands and boyfriends) who don't understand why many grown-ups of seeming sensibility can remain transfixed by a game of balls and bats. American baseball is American history, as George Vecsey tells us again and again.”

  —SEYMOUR M. HERSH

  “Football is force and fanatics, basketball is beauty and bounce. Baseball is everything: action, grace, the seasons of our lives. George Vecsey's book proves it, without wasting a word.”

  —LEE EISENBERG

  MODERN LIBRARY CHRONICLES

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  ALSO BY GEORGE VECSEY

  Troublemaker (with Harry Wu)

  Get to the Heart (with Barbara Mandrell)

  A Year in the Sun

  Martina (with Martina Navratilova)

  Sweet Dreams (with Leonore Fleischer)

  Five O'Clock Comes Early: A Young Man's Battle

  with Alcoholism (with Bob Welch)

  Kentucky: A Celebration of American Life (with Jacques Lowe)

  Getting Off the Ground: The Pioneers of Aviation Speak

  for Themselves

  Loretta Lynn: Coal Miner's Daughter (with Loretta Lynn)

  One Sunset a Week: The Story of a Coal Miner

  The Way It Was: Great Sports Events from the Past (editor)

  Joy in Mudville: Being a Complete Account of the

  Unparalleled History of the New York Mets

  Naked Came the Stranger (1/25 authorship)

  TO THE ROOKIES: GEORGE ISABEL ANJALI ELIZABETH MARGARET

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  I SIX DEGREES

  II BERBERS WITH BATS

  III THE FIRST ENTREPRENEUR

  IV COLUMBUS, POCAHONTAS, AND DOUBLEDAY

  V GROWING PAINS

  VI THE BLACK SOX

  VII THE BABE

  VIII MR. RICKEY

  IX THE NEGRO LEAGUES

  X RADIO DAYS

  XI WAR

  XII JACKIE ROBINSON

  XIII BASEBALL HITS THE INTERSTATE

  XIV FREE AGENCY ARRIVES

  XV WHY THE YANKEES EXIST

  XVI THE WORLD CATCHES UP

  XVII SAME GAME, YUPPIFIED

  XVIII WHO'SIN CHARGE?

  XIX FOUR SCANDALS

  XX OCTOBER EXORCISMS

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  PROLOGUE

  It's all in the mind.

  —GEORGE HARRISON in Yellow Submarine

  When we were young, we played ball in the family backyard in a quiet corner of Queens, pretending we were Jackie Robinson or Stan Musial. There was a cinder-block wall behind our house, which made it easy to imagine we were taking potshots at the concave right field wall in Ebbets Field, a few miles to our west. Occasionally, we would break a window in our neighbor's house—a tinkling sound unlike the concussion of a Duke Snider drive off the wall in Brooklyn. It was not hard to imagine the bright blue scripted “Dodgers” across our chests.

  Some nights when my father was not working at his newspaper job, we would sit on camp chairs on the lawn and listen to the Dodger game, the austere voice of Red Barber and the mellifluous tones of Connie Desmond. I remember three things about those nights: how nice it was to have my father home, the rude shock when I plugged the radio into the garage socket, and the fireflies floating around at dusk. There are no fireflies like that anymore. No Brooklyn Dodgers, either. />
  —

  Baseball with your dad. The American verity.

  Half a century later, I found myself on a front lawn somewhere out in America, pitching a Wiffle Ball to my grandson.

  “Hands back,” I told the boy. “Turn your hip to me. Look over your shoulder at the ball.”

  Over the years, I have discovered the best way to teach children to hit is turning them into the twisted stance of Stanley Frank Musial, the laughing cavalier of the St. Louis Cardinals, who played his last game back in 1963.

  Children are always surprised when they uncoil from the Musial stance, hitting the ball harder than they had expected. Sooner or later, their bodies will find their natural stance, but turning them into a human corkscrew is a good way to start.

  The boy had already been taught well by his father, but I could not resist adding a refinement.

  “And smile. Always smile. Hitting is fun,” I said. Children love getting permission to whack away at something. Smiling erases anxiety, releases positive energy.

  “Stan Musial always smiled,” I added.

  This was an exaggeration, of course. Musial only smiled after he slid into second base, raising a puff of white dust and brown dirt. I can still see Musial, his full grin lighting up the old bandbox in Brooklyn, a place he terrorized.

  My grandson had never heard of Stan Musial, had no idea he was one of the great hitters of the 1940s and 1950s. All the boy knew was that his grandfather was tossing a hollow plastic ball to him on the lawn, showing him a coiled stance that worked, somehow.

  Someday, if I have time, I will tell him stories that old people know about baseball, how Musial's teammate Enos (Country) Slaughter dashed home with the winning run in that wonderful World Series of 1946, and how Musial used to play the harmonica for his Cardinal teammates during long train rides—yes, train rides—and how forty years after retirement Musial would still whip out his harmonica and entertain fans outside the steamy ballpark a few blocks from the roiling Mississippi. I have seen that.

  “They loved him, even in Brooklyn,” I said, invoking the holy borough of my childhood team, the long-departed Dodgers. Someday I will drive my grandson past the block where we used to chase Jackie Robinson for autographs, outside an old ballpark that is as real to me as an amputated limb might be.

  “Dodger fans loved Musial even when he beat them,” I said. “You know what they used to call him?”

  The boy shook his head.

  “Stan the Man.”

  My grandson smiled at the nickname, twisted into the new stance. There was still time for a few more swings before it got dark.

  I

  SIX DEGREES

  In 1958, the St. Louis Cardinals made a barnstorming trip to Japan on the golden anniversary of the first visit by two major league squads. Among the Cardinals' entourage was Stan Musial, about to turn thirty-eight, old by baseball standards, but still exhibiting his characteristic smile and convoluted batting stance.

  In the city of Tokyo was a seventeen-year-old prospect named Sadaharu Oh, the son of a Chinese noodle shop operator and a Japanese mother. Oh was already Japan's best-known high school player. His batting coach, Tetsuharu Kawakami, strongly suggested that Oh adapt Musial's coiled stance. “Hitting is with your hip, not with your hand,” said Kawakami, who had won five batting titles in Japan.

  With the obstinacy of a seventeen-year-old, Oh declined. Several years later, on the brink of failure that was partially self-induced through his excesses and hardheadedness, Oh would submit to his guru. With the hope of salvaging his career, Oh would accept an even more idiosyncratic posture—“the flamingo stance,” the Japanese would call it. He would raise his front leg, the right one, forcing his weight and power to his back foot. The new stance had its roots in the twisted Musial position.

  That earnest trip in 1958 was regarded as something of a failure by Musial, who hit only two home runs for the adoring Japanese fans. “I was tired, worn out after the regular season,” Musial would recall thirty years later. “I'm sorry they couldn't have seen me earlier.” Yet the trip by the Cardinals would help produce the greatest home run hitter in the history of baseball, as Sadaharu Oh would eventually hit 868 home runs.

  Years later, Musial and Oh would meet, shake hands, and bow to each other, left-handed sluggers from opposite shores, comrades in unorthodoxy.

  This is the beauty of baseball. Everything is connected, either by statistic or anecdote or theory or history or the infallible memory of a fan who was there, who saw it, who can look it up. It is possible to sit in the ballpark (not the stadium, not the arena, but the ballpark, a homey title claimed only by baseball) and, during the process of one game, watch several overlapping games, overlapping generations and histories, all at once. The grandson, if he is not looking around for the hot dog vendor, may see Ichiro Suzuki slap a double into the corner. The grandfather may be thinking of how Stan Musial used to smack doubles just like that.

  —

  The American playwright John Guare is known for his enduring play Six Degrees of Separation, based on a theory that there are no more than six layers between any two people on the planet. Guare was not talking about baseball, but he could have been. The so-called American game has existed in a straight and highly detectable line since the 1840s—and backward into earlier times on other continents.

  The game is perpetuated in raucous living museums, many of them in the center of cities, on a continent just beginning to have some history to it. Some cities have been playing other cities for a long time now, by American standards. These old places contain triumphs and resentments, nowhere near the rivalries of the old city-states of Europe, but the beginning of history, at the very least.

  The hearts of the fans contain memories of something horrible that happened in 1908, or 1940, or maybe even last week. No other American sport has so many ancient joys and sorrows. It sounds overbearingly cutesy when sportswriters in Boston refer to the Red Sox as Ye Olde Towne Team, yet in that marvelous October of 2004 the Sox labored under a cloud of communal frustration dating back to 1918 when Babe Ruth pitched the Sox to a championship, and was soon sold to the New York Yankees. When the Sox went on their memorable eight-game romp in 2004, you could hear the brass band of a century earlier: a local rock group had resurrected “Tessie,” the anthem of the very first World Series of 1903. Base-ball's history echoed in vibrant Fenway Park as well as the crooked streets and anarchic traffic of Boston.

  Baseball fans know these links, discuss them in dens and bars and playgrounds and even at contemporary ballparks—that is, when they can be heard above the god-awful din of the modern sound system. These memories are much more than trivia or statistics; they are a way of keeping history alive.

  The sport has a timeless feel to it, as if it has always been here. That is because each game is unfettered by the tyranny of a stopwatch, as anybody will attest who has ever held car keys in hand, poised in an exit portal, only to witness a nine-inning game suddenly lurch into extra innings. I am thinking here of a marathon I once covered as a young reporter in 1962, the first year of Casey Stengel's Amazing Mets, who very quickly established themselves as the Worst Team in the History of Baseball, capital letters and all. On a chilly spring night, the Mets played the equally wretched Chicago Cubs in extra innings. The game seemed interminable— refreshment stands were closed down, children were fast asleep on their parents' laps, and fans were beginning to dread getting up for work in the morning. As I sat in the stands to savor the mood of this horrendous new team so gloriously born in New York, I heard one fan say to another, “I hate to go—but I hate to stay.” Those words seemed to sum up the morbid compulsion that keeps fans in their seats, quite unable to leave this silly game.

  The absence of a clock is matched by the perfection of the calendar. The season begins in the hopefulness of early spring and it flourishes in the heat of the summer and then it breaks hearts in the nippy evenings of late October.

  Plus, they play it every day. No ot
her sport in the world can match baseball for constant adventures, new results. All around the world, at every moment, there are compelling sports events, many of them presented on multiple television channels—soccer goals rocketing into the net in Rio, basketballs dunked in Shanghai, nifty putts in Madrid, dazzling backhands in Melbourne, gaudy touchdowns in Dallas, vehicles whizzing across finish lines in Monte Carlo or Daytona. But only baseball summons the same cast of characters to return, a few hours after the end of the previous game.

  “Let's play two,” chirped Ernie Banks of the Cubs, who had often played two or even three games a day in the Negro Leagues and became an icon in the major leagues for his celebration of the daily ritual.

  No other sport has this endurance. American football players must go back into their bunkers to receive six days of drills before their bodies heal enough to play again. Likewise, basketball, soccer, and hockey players cannot play every day. Yet barring injuries, baseball regulars are expected to start in 140 or 150 games out of a total of 162, with starting pitchers expected to throw once every five days.

  The result of this regularity is a delightful soap opera that airs virtually seven days a week. The player who muffed a fly ball last night or stole a base or made an incredible catch must go back out there today, in front of fans who reward him or revile him for events only a few hours old.

  These daily games seep into the consciousness of citizens who insist they have stopped paying attention to baseball. People say they became disillusioned at their favorite team's defection to another town or the serial labor shutdowns of the past generation, and they claim they would rather watch pro football or stock cars going around in circles, or whatever. They declare they are turned off by high salaries as well as the steroid generation that saw bulked-up sluggers whacking home runs at an unprecedented rate, but the reality is that baseball has survived gambling plots, outlaw leagues, racial segregation, depressions, world wars, the early death of a stunning number of its heroes, financial failures of teams, inept ownerships, the bad taste of its sponsors and networks, blundering commissioners, inroads by other sports. It endures.