Once again, despite the principals’ best efforts to destroy it, Major League Baseball is back, opening this month before record crowds across the country, including the new-old team in Washington, the erstwhile Expos, now known as the Nationals.The Beltway, of course, staged an even bigger baseball drama in March when a Congressional committee hauled something like half the All-Star team — Curt Schilling, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro, among them — before them in hopes of unearthing details of steroid use. Was this productive? Not really, but at least it served as a bit of a scarlet letter for executives and players alike. Retired slugger Mark McGwire, ashen-faced and humiliated, wasn’t ashamed enough to leave his Johnnie Cochran-inspired answers at home. So flimsy was his spine that he even failed to muster the courage to opine on whether steroid use in baseball is a form of cheating.
Such tempests, no matter how maddening, should be considered in context. Baseball seems forever on the brink of disaster, yet more people watch and attend big-league games now than ever before. Baseball must be in good shape; otherwise, how would the Mets survive amid disastrous trades and reckless free-agent spending?
Take a trip to Barnes & Noble and you’ll notice people are also writing (and reading) about baseball at unprecedented rates. Baseball bookshelves groan in agony, as bloated as Barry Bonds on a BALCO bender.
The current crop includes a bounty of books devoted to the Boston Red Sox, last seen eradicating an 86-year-old curse by winning the World Series in October. Since everyone beyond New England (remember, ESPN is based in Bristol, Conn., my conspiracy-theorist friends) has had enough of the Red Sox and their curse, our baseball sampler avoids anything involving Pesky’s Pole, Fenway Franks or Johnny Damon’s hair.
Instead, we’re going old school (Satchel Paige), really old school (Christy Mathewson and John McGraw’s New York Giants of the early 1900s) and, to avoid slipping into a nostalgic haze, the contemporary realm of Tony La Russa.
Sloppy Strike OutFirst, the enigmatic Mr. La Russa, a one-time wunderkind who now has managed various clubs for a combined quarter-century. He started with the White Sox in 1979, went to the A’s in 1986 and in 1996, joined the St. Louis Cardinals, the club he still leads.
In Three Nights in August, La Russa, who collaborated with author Buzz Bissinger, offers behind-the-scenes access and insight, including fascinating chapters on bean balls and when to use the hit-and-run. All too often, though, sanctimony and Bissinger’s pedestrian prose and specious reasoning eviscerate these diamond gems. In fact, it blemishes both men’s reputations. Bissinger’s Texas football tome, Friday Night Lights, remains one of the best sports books ever conceived; La Russa already ranks among the game’s all-time winningest managers and, despite World Series losses in 1988, 1990 and 2004, must be considered a dugout exemplar.
Three Nights documents a three-game Cubs-Cards series in August 2003 as a microcosm of big-league life. Bissinger has done a lot of homework, but he can’t stay out of his own way — or stop fawning over La Russa. Bissinger and La Russa bail out of the batter’s box before the narrative’s first pitch makes its way to the plate. “This book,” Bissinger writes, “was not conceived as a response to Moneyball.” The reference to Michael Lewis’ extraordinary 2003 examination of Billy Beane and the Oakland A’s, is disingenuous. A few sentences later, Bissinger belies his remarks with a lamentation on the new numbers-happy software aficionados embodied by Beane. (Bissinger makes no mention of Boston general manger Theo Epstein, the Moneyball disciple who assembled the club responsible for trouncing La Russa’s Cardinals in the 2004 World Series.)
“It is wrong to say that the new breed doesn’t care about baseball,” Bissinger writes. “But it’s not wrong to say that there is no way they could possibly love it, and so much of baseball is about love.”
Cue the Ken Burns soundtrack. Not only does Bissinger serve up clichéd treacle like that, he also makes claims that could never be proved. He rhapsodizes over La Russa and other baseball elders who value “heart,” “passion” and “desire.” Really. You’re all but waiting for James Earl Jones to stride across the page and offer a speech on how baseball can cure all that ails America.
Several years ago, Red Sox fanatic Stephen King proffered a brilliant piece of writing advice: “The adverb is not your friend.” This proverb missed Bissinger, who uses “simply” 11 times in a six-page span alone, while additional examples of adverb abuse abound. And unnecessary italics and ellipses . . . dot sentences with enough frequency to leave one convinced Larry King edited the manuscript. Sloppiness permeates Three Nights. Eminent Braves pitching coach Leo Mazzone becomes “Lee,” and Atlanta’s Peachtree Street becomes, in Bissinger’s version, “Peach Street.”
Through Bissinger, La Russa proselytizes on steroids. He managed both McGwire and Jose Canseco, the loathsome if prescient snitch who crystallized the current scandal with his recently published tell-all book. La Russa maintains his usual stance, blasting Canseco while touting McGwire’s inflated biceps. McGwire acknowledged using a now-banned supplement, androstendione, during his record-setting 1998 season. According to Bissinger, “La Russa does not believe that McGwire ever used anything other than Andro.” Much like Canseco, McGwire went from a lean young player to a hulking veteran during his big-league tenure, and suffered numerous injuries to his back and around major joints, tell-tale signs of excessive freight on delicate frames, which, in many cases, stems from steroid use.
Glory daysWilliam Price Fox, writer-in-residence at the University of South Carolina, is the author of Satchel Paige’s America, more an extended conversation than a traditional biography. Fox, on assignment for Holiday magazine during the early 1970s, spent many nights with Paige in Kansas City, accompanying the Hall of Fame pitcher to his various nighttime haunts.
Despite a Titanic-sized red flag in the publisher’s description of how the book came about — “Fox relied on his memory” — the book, more often than not, rings true. Fox published his magazine article based on unrecorded conversations, as Paige went flat when recorders or notebooks were brandished. Instead, the two men swapped stories and Fox returned to his hotel room each night to scribble down everything he could remember.
This is dangerous living in the journalism world, but the pace and rhythm of Paige’s numerous quotes bear an authentic sheen. Of his famous advice to avoid fried foods because they anger the blood, Paige quashes what he terms a mythical quotation.
“How’m I going to eat eggs in the morning when I’m out on the road unless I fry them?” Paige asks Fox. “I sure as hell ain’t going to suck them. And how about bacon? And how about ham? And how about sausage? What am I going to do with stuff like that? Here I am on some sorry-assed gravel road four hundred miles from nowhere, what kind of breakfast can I cook on my Coleman if I can’t fry me up something?”
Writer Frank Deford’s mastery, like Mariano Rivera, the Yankees’ late-inning maestro, demonstrates the most enviable traits associated with excellence in any field: it is smooth and effortless.
With The Old Ball Game, Deford highlights the legendary run of John “Muggsy” McGraw and Christy Mathewson. McGraw, a stellar player on the dominant Baltimore teams of the 1890s, reigned supreme during the first two decades of the 1900s as the game’s shrewdest manager.
With Mathewson, the first all-American sports hero and a dynamic pitcher, McGraw had a pivotal piece in the New York Giants’ dynasty. The Giants won just one World Series during the McGraw-Mathewson years but claimed four National League pennants and were consistent contenders.
“It was the two of them together that made the New York Giants,” Deford said in a recent telephone interview. “And because it was New York, (they) had such an effect on the popularity of the sport at the turn of the century.”
Mathewson, a college graduate at a time when only 6 percent of Americans earned high-school diplomas, brought intellect, wholesomeness and a magnificent pitching arm to New York and the rest of the baseball world. He compiled 373 wins and a sparkling 2.13 ERA over 17 seasons, and during the 1905 World Series, he threw three shutouts in six days. Matthewson became part of the Hall of Fame’s inaugural class, joining Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson and Honus Wagner in the single greatest collection of inductees in baseball history.
While McGraw’s vicious competitive streak and merciless tactics live on in modern-day coaching heirs, Mathewson’s combined gifts were, in Deford’s words, sui generis: “There won’t be anyone else like him because the environment will never be that way again. Mathewson was a man of his time.” So even though the Bissinger/La Russa book is a bust, for our humble purpose — the search for a few decent books to tide you over between episodes of Baseball Tonight — solace can still be found in Satchel Paige and the sturdy prose of Frank Deford.
This article appears in Apr 20-26, 2005.
