Baseball Page 2

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  Stan Musial is a perfect example of baseball's great depth of living genealogy. In recent years, Musial's radiant excellence has been squeezed by the reverence for Babe Ruth as well as Musial's two more mystical contemporaries, Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, and Musial has also been somewhat obscured by the great outfielders who came along in his wake—Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle, Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, Roberto Clemente.

  Yet for fans of the 1940s and 1950s, Stan Musial was a beloved figure who played 22 seasons and batted .331, a high success ratio in a sport that acknowledges daily failure. He was of average size for his generation—six feet tall, a supple 175 pounds, and more inclined to grin than to glower. Stanley Frank Musial was a child of his times, straight out of the great American Depression. His father, Lukasz, a Polish immigrant, had worked in the zinc mines in Donora, Pennsylvania, in the worst days of the murderous smog of the Ohio River valley, grateful to be working in the aftermath of the great stock market collapse of 1929. Lukasz wanted his son to attend college but the boy insisted on signing with the massive minor league system of the St. Louis Cardinals. His career, his life, would touch a century of American history.

  Baseball was never more the national game than when these desperate young men, bound to the Cardinals by a Supreme Court–endorsed reserve clause contract, played survival-of-the-fittest games. Branch Rickey, perhaps baseball's most creative executive, had salted away hundreds of Depression-era youths in tiny rural towns, in his so-called farm system. These migrant workers in frayed hand-me-down flannel uniforms were the equivalent of the Joads in Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, although a few actually made it to the majors. The upward mobility of American youth—an athlete in the purest, most unthreatening form—has always been part of American mythology. Even in the worst moments of the Depression, people sought cheap entertainment at the movies, or the local ballpark. Family farms were failing but Branch Rickey's farms were thriving.

  Young Musial became just another body, a sore-armed pitcher due to be replaced by some other eager recruit. But his minor league manager, Dickie Kerr, had seen him swing a bat. Kerr knew a thing or two about this game. In the 1919 World Series, Kerr had won two games while some of his fabled Chicago White Sox teammates had mysteriously under-performed as part of an odious gambling scandal. Revered as a symbol of honesty, yet working in the low minor leagues, Kerr converted Musial from a failing pitcher to a promising slugger. In Kerr's later years, Musial would buy him a house, to repay him for his encouragement.

  Joining the Cardinals' major league team late in 1941, Musial would eventually match a retired gent named George Sisler as the greatest left-handed hitter ever to represent St. Louis. Sisler, who had been discovered by Branch Rickey at the University of Michigan, had played for the other team in St. Louis, the Browns, who would ultimately be run out of town by Mu-sial's Cardinals.

  Musial was on the winning side against Ted Williams's Red Sox, in the 1946 World Series, when all the men, at least the lucky ones, were back from World War Two. In 1947, Rickey, by then running the Brooklyn Dodgers, would bring up Jackie Robinson, the first African-American player of the century, and the balance of power would immediately change. Because of the skill of their black players, the Dodgers would supplant the Cardinals as the premier team of the National League, and Musial would never play in another World Series.

  Musial kept slashing hits right through the 1963 season, when he retired at the age of forty-two, replaced during the next season by Louis Clark Brock, who personified the alertness and speed that had characterized the Negro Leagues. Brock would break records for stolen bases, helping the Cardinals win three pennants in the next five years. Musial, a civic treasure in gracious retirement, would giggle and say the Cardinals were winning because they finally got themselves a good left fielder.

  The first great hitter of St. Louis, George Sisler, modest and sedate, had been eclipsed by Musial and other hitters until 2004, when his record for hits in a major league season was threatened by another left-handed hitter: Ichiro Suzuki, formerly with the Orix Blue Wave of Japan. Playing for the Seattle Mariners, a team that had not existed in the time of Sisler or the time of Musial, a team owned by Japanese merchants of the electronic game Nintendo, Ichiro was the perfect ballplayer for the new age of the Pacific Rim. In that worldly city where people shop for fish and rice in Asian supermarkets, Ichiro's aura was of a master craftsman who was respected by the hometown fans, as Sisler had been in one generation, and Musial had been in another. The great players have a way of being unique, yet after fifteen decades of baseball they also have a way of fitting a pattern.

  The spectacle of baseball is ancient. When settlers in America's Northeast romped through a game of town ball, an early version of baseball, they did it in close proximity to walls and windows, roofs and chimneys, flowers and gardens.

  Baseball is as urban as sparring gladiators in the Colosseum, fighting each other, fighting lions, the scent of terror and failure and blood sickly-sweet in the air. Baseball is as urban as bearbaiting on the south bank of the Thames, a spectacle that competed for shillings with the words of Shakespeare and Jonson.

  Nowadays in glittering and brutally noisy ballparks in the center of cities, fans scream as if life were at stake, urging pitchers to throw blazing fastballs within inches of the batters' chins. This is not some bucolic pastime, even when Willie Mays or Ken Griffey, Jr., is chasing a line drive in some downtown meadow.

  In North America, baseball lives in the framework of a century of performance and legend, duly recorded. Whenever a player makes a mental mistake in a vital game, fans and broadcasters and writers (although not the players, who are rarely students of the game) still bring up the memory of poor Fred Merkle, a nineteen-year-old rookie who got a rare chance to play and helped cost the New York Giants a pennant because he neglected to step on second base. This was in 1908, mind you. Merkle's name still comes up today.

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  The game survives on its oral tradition. What else do you do at the ballpark but chatter for two or three or four hours? In rural America, people sat on their front porches and whittled with their knives and talked to each other. In ballparks, fans and players and commentators still have time to play with words and ideas and memories. Some fans debate the fine points of strategy, while others compare Babe Ruth and Barry Bonds, Ty Cobb and Pete Rose, Sadaharu Oh and Henry Aaron, Wee Willie Keeler and Ichiro Suzuki, as if they had seen them all play. Stumpy ornery Earl Weaver in Baltimore in the 1970s reminded people of nobody more than stumpy ornery John J. McGraw in Baltimore in the 1890s.

  With all their free time in dugouts and bullpens and clubhouses, players still come up with new expressions for the commonplace. There are as many names for home runs as Eskimos have for snow—dingers, taters, going yard. There are words for whatever transpires after the ball is hit: Can of corn. Frozen rope. Worm-killer. Snow cone. Fans delight in eccentric names for effective pitches: Eephus. Scroogie. Lord Charles. Mister Snappy. There was even a prodigious fastball known as the Linda Ronstadt because it “Blue Bayou.”

  People still relish the great player nicknames of the past. A fleet, sure-handed outfielder from Brooklyn named Robert Vavasour Ferguson, who played from 1871 to 1884, was known as “Death to Flying Things,” because of the way he tracked down fly balls. Superb players of the twentieth century were called the Georgia Peach, Old Reliable, Dizzy, and Shoeless Joe. Pepper Martin was the Wild Horse of the Osage. The aging fat-cat Yankees watched a brash rookie dash to first base on a walk during a lazy spring exhibition in 1963, which is how Pete Rose became known as Charlie Hustle.

  Baseball lends itself to narration because it can be parsed and reconstructed, pitch by pitch, through the hieroglyphics on a score-card—where the characters were, what they were doing, leading to speculation about what they were thinking and saying. Corny or downright inaccurate, baseball movies and baseball novels capture the national myths and history. We all know enough about baseball not
to be taken in, yet we are, all over again, even when the actor has no semblance to a great athlete—Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig? William Bendix or John Goodman as Babe Ruth? Still, put an actor in a flannel uniform and give him something formidable to ponder (a bribe offer, a fatal illness, a provocative female owner, or a literate groupie) and Americans automatically relate.

  Baseball artifacts have now become collectibles, part of Americana. A turn-of-the-century Honus Wagner card or a Mickey Mantle rookie card could help finance a college education—if it is in flawless condition, not battered and scuffed from being traded and scaled against walls by children. Baseball caps, jerseys, autographs, and assorted doodads are tradable commodities today, yet in their purest form they are an indicator of the deep hold of baseball on the American psyche.

  Long before all the other team sports, baseball language wafted upon the summer breeze, from open windows and street-corner debates. Games on the radio and articles in mass newspapers made the general populace familiar with the lingo of baseball, which blended into daily life: when politicians call for harsh measures in sending criminals to jail for a long time, they talk about “three strikes and out”; somebody describing a promising first date may use the phrase “getting to second base.”

  The game is celebrated in the song “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” particularly when bellowed by the earthy broadcaster Harry Caray, grossly shirtless, leaning out of his booth on a steamy Chicago afternoon.

  The song is so pervasive in the American mind (particularly with a good old-fashioned organ accompaniment) that the government should make it part of the naturalization quiz. Even people who say they follow only golf or soccer or football secretly know the tune, to their chagrin. Paul Tagliabue, the highly effective commissioner of the National Football League—himself a jock who once led the Georgetown University basketball team in rebound-ing—professes to have been terminally bored by baseball as a child. But I bet if you jabbed him with truth serum even Tagliabue could sing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” complete with the exaggerated arm waving and mugging of Harry Caray. In fact, I'd pay money to see that very serious lawyer performing the song. It's in there somewhere.

  The words were written by Jack Norworth in 1908 and the music was added by Albert Von Tilzer. Norworth's words caught the feel of the game perfectly, particularly considering that he never set foot inside a ballpark until 1940, and clearly was not influenced by television, there having been no telecasts at the time. The song immediately conjures up feelings of good times, summer days, cold beers, maybe even some knowledgeable fans sitting around me, discussing the good old days.

  The sport also has its epic poem, its Beowulf, entitled “Casey at the Bat,” written by Ernest Lawrence Thayer in 1888, about a beloved slugger who had his chance to make the hometown fans happy:

  The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day;

  The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play.

  And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,

  A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

  Thayer's poem, which continues for twelve more stanzas to its inevitable dismal (“There is no joy in Mudville”) conclusion, has been performed at banquets for over a century, both in fact and fiction. In his delightful book The Southpaw—one of the very best baseball novels ever written, about a quirky lefty from upstate New York—Mark Harris depicts a sportswriter from the small hometown paper who recites “Casey at the Bat” whenever he has a few drinks in him:

  …I went back and found Bill standing on the seat in the car behind reciting “Casey at the Bat” whilst 2 conductors tried to coax him down like you try to coax a cat out of a tree, and I laughed and said why did they not just drag him down, and they said it was against the rules of the railroad. I said I was not under railroad rules myself.…

  Casey's Mudville has become the symbol of all towns that dare to root for their faltering darlings. When I wrote a book about the shocking World Series victory by the formerly hideous Mets in 1969, the editor ceremoniously wrote down the title for me on a slip of paper: “Joy in Mudville.” The book is long out of print; the title remains brilliant.

  I could get mawkish and declare that the sport has gone to hell because of (a) money or (b) television or (c) the owners or (d) the players, but the truth is, today's players are consistent and familiar to us—our national sporting theater, our knights and louts and fallen angels, our saints and sinners, our samurai and shamans. We have known them a long, long time.

  II

  BERBERS WITH BATS

  In 1937, seeking a tribe of Berbers rumored to have blond hair, an Italian demographer trekked the wilds of Libya. The demographer, Corrado Gini, not only located the tribe and confirmed its blond traits but also discovered that the tribesmen played a game involving a bat, a ball, and bases. Gini may not have known of the Giants' Mel Ott or the Yankees' Joe DiMaggio, who would play in the New York Subway Series that autumn, but he did recognize elements of the so-called American sport of baseball.

  Gini filmed the Berbers playing the game, which they called “ta kurt om en mahag,” meaning “the ball of the pilgrim's mother” in the Hamitic language. Gini later presented a scholarly paper, postulating that both the light-hair genes and the ball game had surely been brought by early Europeans, long before the Christian era. He compared the Berber game to what one historian has called “ancient spring rain rituals of the Berbers,” as described by the Greek historian Herodotus 500 years before Christ.

  Otherwise preoccupied with outlasting the Depression, Americans did not take notice of Gini's theory in 1937, but if they had, they would have found it somewhat inconvenient, since the young country was gearing up for a centennial celebration of baseball along with the opening of a Baseball Hall of Fame. Gini's discovery defied the American creationist myth that baseball had been invented on a certain day in 1839 in the bucolic upstate New York village of Cooperstown.

  Since Gini, other historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and social scientists have discovered incidents of bat-and-ball games in the ancient past. Eons and eons before Sandy Koufax and Bob Gibson arrived on this earth, people were throwing and hitting small objects, perhaps even scuttling from pillar to post, or base to base, if the spirit moved them. Bat-and-ball games seem to be a rather basic human pleasure, easily improvised by a couple of bored sentries or monks or schoolgirls with access to a thin stick and something round. The rules sort of fall into place.

  As David Block recounts in his book Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game there are ancient references to Lydians, Persians, Indians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, and northern Europeans, all playing one form or another of bat-and-ball games for ritual or recreation. There are wall paintings in Egyptian royal tombs and indications of Mayans playing in the Yucatán. In 1085, an early version of the game, called “stool ball,” is mentioned in England's Domesday Book.

  A drawing from Spain in 1251 shows people tossing a ball underhand and others hitting, holding a slightly tapered bat with a contemporary grip. The fielders are cautiously using two hands to catch the ball. “There's a bat and there's a ball,” Ted Spencer, the curator of the Baseball Hall of Fame, said in 2004, long after the Doubleday mythology had been sorted out. “It looks like two guys playing baseball to me,” Spencer added.

  In the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore, a mile from the upscale food court and retro architectural touches of the Camden Yards stadium, is a drawing from the Ghistelles Calendar from Flanders in 1301, depicting one young man pitching to another young man, who is holding a very definite bat object with a narrow handle and a thick stock.

  “Great arm extension! You can kiss that one good-bye,” reads the caption in Block's book under drawings of early batting stances, the language a parody of the Mel Allens and Ernie Harwells of broadcasting, who would appear on the scene more than six centuries later.

  Long before peanuts and Cracker Jack and the seve
nth-inning stretch, the game of baseball underwent many changes. In 1598, John Stow's classic Survey of London described one game played in that ancient city: “After dinner all the youthes go into the fields to play at the ball.…The schollers of euery schoole haue their ball, or baston, in their hands: the auncient and wealthy men of the Citie come foorth on horsebacke to see the sport of the young men, and to take part in the pleasure in beholding their agilitie.”

  In London in 1744, John Newbery published a children's book, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, which contained, according to Block, the first reference to the game, within the following poem:

  B is for Base-ball

  The Ball once struck off,

  Away flies the Boy

  To the next destin'd Post,

  And then Home with Joy.

  One of the first writers ever to praise the inner qualities of baseball was a German, Johann Christoph Friedrich Gutsmuths, in his 1796 book Games for the Exercise and Recreation of the Body and Spirit for the Youth and His Educator and All Friends of Innocent Joys of Youth. Gutsmuths describes a game called “Ball with Free Station, or English Base-ball,” in which runners can be retired in various ways including throwing the ball at them or throwing the ball to a base and shouting “Burned!”

  The cataloguer also described an eighteenth-century German version of a ball game but he preferred the English version because it demanded “attentiveness”—the alertness that parents try to teach nine-year-olds on grassy Little League fields: “Think ahead! What will you do if the ball comes to you?”

  Gutsmuths even goes into minute detail of the rules, including a fascination with the possibility that two runners will wind up on the same base: “This once again calls for the order of the game: there can only be one person at one base at any time.”