In recent springs, as March Madness began its run and pitchers and catchers descended on Florida and Arizona, soon to be followed by full rosters of players and hopefuls, talk of sports books had been steroid tinged. Thanks to those efforts—beginning with Jose Canseco's Juiced in 2005 and ending with Selena Roberts's A-Rod last year—America's pastime was steeped in an anabolic bath. It remains to be seen how cleansing that bath has been, but as this spring's baseball titles show, the sport and its fandom are returning to what has marked the game since its inception in the 19th century: hero worship and an appreciation of the game itself and its role in the American family.
True, there is chatter about a certain Canadian doctor's contacts with ball players, and disgraced slugger Mark McGwire's brother revived steroid talk a bit with his own exposé. Triumph published Jay McGwire's Mark and Me in February, to some press attention, but Willie Mays smoothly eclipsed that tell-all when James S. Hirsh's Willie Mays: The Life, the Legend (Scribner) hit the ground running the same month and sped to the bestseller lists. As Pete Hamill wrote in his front-page New York Times Book Review appreciation, “A long time ago in America, there was a beautiful game called baseball.... In that vanished time, there was a ballplayer named Willie Mays.”
Greats of the Game
Next week, S&S vies for a spot on the bestseller roster with Tom Clavin and Danny Peary's biography of steroid's first statistical victim—Roger Maris, whose season home run record fell to McGwire in 1998. The authors of Roger Maris: Baseball's Reluctant Hero detail how painful it was for Maris to set the record in 1961, passing the legendary Babe Ruth and beating out his more popular teammate Mickey Mantle, and doing so with no fan support and a baseball commissioner who threatened to “asterisk” the achievement. They also write of the Maris family's anger at McGwire's eventual disgrace, and in some detail about the unsuccessful attempt by Anheuser-Busch to wrestle away a beer distributorship granted to Maris when he was a St. Louis Cardinal (the company ended up paying the family $120 million in cash for its efforts). No doubt, the book will spark conversations about restoring Maris's presteroid home run record (something the family wishes) and considering him for the Hall of Fame.
Steroids' second statistical victim, of course, was Henry Aaron. Sports journalist Howard Bryant contributes a full biography of the man, The Last Hero: A Life of Henry Aaron (Pantheon, May). Aaron, quietly spectatular through a long career in small markets, surpassed Babe Ruth by 41 career homers, a record that seemed unbreakable till Barry Bonds, probably with the aid of modern chemistry, soared by him. But Aaron, as Bryant argues, continued to be quietly—and not so quietly—spectacular after his playing days were over, as a high-ranking executive for the Atlanta Braves.
In May, another famed Yankee slugger gets his day in the sun, with HarperCollins's publication of Dayn Perry's Reggie Jackson. From his brilliant early career with the brash Oakland A's and his later career with the Yankees, Jackson possesses five World Series rings and is, in baseball legend, the epitome of the clutch player—Mr. October. Perry depicts the mercurial, moody, insecure Jackson in his relation to devilish father figures throughout the sport, from Charlie Finley to Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner.
In 1947, the Brooklyn Dodgers ennobled baseball by signing the first black player, Jackie Robinson. As bold a move as that was, it was not without a lot of groundwork by activists, sports writers (including the recently deceased Daily Worker sportswriter Lester Rodney), and black ballplayers. Part of that fascinating story is told in Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert: The Wild Saga of Interracial Baseball Before Jackie Robinson by Timothy Gay (S&S, Mar.). Of course, the Negro Leagues were well-known in the first half of the 20th century; though they played before predominantly black audiences, that changed during WWII, when the quality of play exceeded that of the draft-depleted Major Leagues. According to Gay, it was Satchel Paige who was an inadvertent ambassador for integration in baseball, showing white audiences a surpassing skill, flair, and likability. With his constant barnstorming, “Satchel made white club owners, scouts, and fans appreciate the caliber of ball being played in the Negro Leagues, and forced them to confront the absurdity” of the color barrier, writes Gay. A little-known part of Gay's story is the exhibition tours in the 1930 and '40s, with black and white players participating, and headlined by Paige and two white country boys, Dizzy Dean and Bob Feller. By 1947, America was more than ready for Jackie Robinson.
Voices of the Past
On the Society of Baseball Researchers' Web site, you can find “Larry Ritter's 50-Book Essential Library.” It's a great selection, with one flaw: it doesn't contain Laurence S. Ritter's own The Glory of Their Times (first published in 1966 and still in print), a book that many SABRites (including this reporter) consider the most valuable baseball book ever written, containing Ritter's interviews from the 1960s with ballplayers in the late stages of their lives talking about a game that had already vanished. Ritter died in 2004, but former commissioner of baseball Fay Vincent has picked up the ball. Vincent's It's What's Inside the Lines That Count (S&S, Mar.) consists of interviews he conducted with stars of the '70s and '80s, who also played in a time that has vanished. Among Vincent's interviewees are Dick Williams, Willie McCovey, Tom Seaver, Earl Weaver, and Marvin Miller. As in Ritter's book, there are stories you've never heard before, such as Weaver saying, of the 1969 World Series loss to the Mets, “If we had known Gary Gentry threw as hard as Seaver, it might have been a different story, but we were unprepared. They said Gentry was just average.”
Baseball literature is more than biographies and testimonies of great players. There is the inside game, often told by the lesser stars. Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970) and Jim Brosnan's The Long Season (1960) are classics. Based on season-long diaries, those books revealed the intimate details of ballplayers' lives on the road and in the clubhouse. This season, another inside view is offered by an Ivy League—educated, New York Times blogging former centerfielder with 59 career homers. Doug Glanville's The Game from Where I Stand (Times Books, May) is an erudite and idiosyncratic view of a professional's life and how it interfaces with a private one, from trying to date women to maintaining political and social views in the clubhouse, and dealing with life as a black athlete and then as a retired black athlete. Buzz Bissinger calls it “a book of uncommon grace and elegance... filled with insight and a certain kind of poetry.”
Out-of-the-Way Fields
As if baseball needs another case made for how interwoven it is in the fabric of American life, Wall Street Journal sports columnist Allen Barra weighs in with Rickwood Field (Norton, July), about a 100-year-old ball park in Birmingham, Ala. Barra, a native Alabamian, journeyed back home to chronicle the history of the ballpark, in which the likes of Paige, Cobb, Ruth, and Mays once played. Rickwood Field, in Barra's telling, is called as a witness to the history of a city that has seen poverty, violence, and recovery, but with baseball always glowing as a welcome distraction if not a way out.
Baseball, arguably an American invention (it probably isn't, but that's another hot stove league controversy), is more than a pastime in some cultures. In the Dominican Republic, it is nearly a religion. And in one small city, San Pedro de Macorís, it is bigger than that—both a faith and business venture rolled into one. The small sugar mill town first landed a native son in the major leagues in 1956—Ozzie Virgil with the New York Giants. Since then, according to Mark Kurlansky in The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macorís (Riverhead, Apr.), 75 more players, many of them shortstops, have made it. Kurlansky weaves a history of sugar, culture, global politics, and economics into an often disturbing story that features, at its heart, poor young boys who want nothing more than to play ball.
All in the Family
They are an odd couple—or rather, the Odd Couple—of sports talk. Mike Greenberg, the self-proclaimed metrosexual who admits to using crème rinse in his hair and lots of lotions on his skin, and Mike Golic, the pizza-gobbling jock who at times feigns a poor vocabulary. Together they host a daily four-hour talkfest on ESPN Radio, Mike and Mike in the Morning, that attracts three million listeners. This year marks their 10th anniversary on the air together, and ESPN/Ballantine is honoring the duo with their first book together, Mike and Mike's Rules for Sports and Life. No doubt, their mix of broad comedy, intelligent analysis, and gracious interviews will be on display—and shamelessly flogged on their show. As for “rules for life,” there is likely to be something for everyone.
Another author with a platform is Will Leitch, founding editor of Gawker's sports blog, Deadspin. He's an Internet superstar—at least according to Forbes magazine—known for such things as posting pictures of partying NFL quarterback Matt Leinart. In Are We Winning? Fathers and Sons in the New Golden Age of Baseball (Hyperion), Leitch brings a Gen-X irreverence to the baseball memoir (natch), while invoking some of its more hackneyed clichés—the book begins as a letter to his “yet-to-be-conceived” son about how important baseball will be to them. Of course, it has a lot to do with his own father; of course, Leitch and his father (for whom his son will be named) go to Wrigley Field. Look for Leitch on Mike and Mike.
Daughters also have fathers who love sports, and they might love sports themselves. Former WNBA star Rebecca Lobo writes the introduction to an anthology of essays about the father-daughter relationship as it is forged through a variety of sports, with contributions from Chris Evert, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Sally Jenkins, Bill Simmons, and Jim Craig. Fathers & Daughters & Sports is being published in May by ESPN Books.
