The trouble is not that players have sex the night before a game. It’s that they stay out all night looking for it.
—Casey Stengel
I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren’t any rules, how could you break them?
—Leo Durocher
One percent of ballplayers are leaders of men. The other ninety-nine percent are followers of women.
—John J. McGraw
This is the toughest part of any comedian’s job. Making baseball likable and interesting to people who aren’t middle-aged white guys. You mean to say young freckle-faced kids aren’t carrying a floppy glove in their back pocket and a slingshot in the other, chewing a wad of bubble gum and riding bikes with a playing card clothespinned to the spokes down to the playground, with a dog with a black spot on one eye chasing after to play a ragtag game of fly-up? Well, golly, it does happen. Baseball, while certainly a favorite sport around here on Smartest Book acres, is not for everybody. Everybody doesn’t grow up playing catch anymore. Everybody isn’t American, Mexican, Canadian, Caribbean, Venezuelan, Japanese, or Korean. Unlike in my day—after the invention of TV but before the death of creativity and the arrival of the horrid app—kids today, when they can bother to put down their phones, want to play team sports where the action never stops, like soccer, basketball, and volleyball. Baseball is middle-aged get-the-fuck-off-my-lawn stuff. So no one wants to play the one-on-one, slow-pokey, waiting-your-turn-to-fail tedium. The kind baseball embodies. The feeling of standing in right field and losing your focus, then suddenly the ball is screaming toward you, and everybody is shouting and you almost get hit with the ball and your heart is racing . . . that kind of failure. Baseball is usually about failure with breaks for triumph. So it is not like life. More contained with a recordable ending. There are defined winners and losers and eventually it ends. So does this introduction. I guess what it comes down to is that I like baseball because it was something, one thing I could share with my dad. For reals. We bonded over it and I still like it. So maybe I can get you to like it, too. Let’s spend a minute in what I like to call:
It is 1967 and Young Greg is at the game with his dad, Big Steve. After driving up from the stifling suburb of San Carlos, they can smell the vicarious ghetto excitement and unfamiliar poverty of the neighborhood where Candlestick Park lies, near Hunter’s Point and the shipyards. Giant cranes working in the near distance just over the right-field parking lot. A blind man plays accordion on the hill in front of the park. They buy Cokes and peanuts and see the gods Willie Mays and Willie McCovey joking in the gray San Francisco afternoon. The grass is verdant and flat as a putting green. The Giants’ uniform is white with black stockings and the orange insignia on the cap. The ball is a white aspirin whizzing through the air. The public address announcer Jeff Carter gives the lineups and then sings the anthem in a jaunty baritone. Young Greg is captivated by how fast and brisk and snappy the fielding practice is. How cool the players act while taking turns swinging and slapping each other in the batting cage. No high fives. That was invented by a gay Dodger named Glenn Burke. In those days people gave each other five and ten skin, dig? The first drunk of the season is carried up the stairs. Kids crowd down to the crappy cyclone fence in right field in front of the wooden bleachers when Willie “Stretch” McCovey bats ’cause he is a lefty and often crashes one over there. Willie Mays throws a ball into the stands between every inning, and the youngsters go wild. Dirt and peanut shells blow into the waxed cups of Coke. The hot dog vendor yells down the aisle, banging his tongs on the side of a metal tank of lukewarm hot dog water the franks are bobbing in. Steve orders two and the vendor asks the only question they seem to know: “With or without?” Always with. The vendor takes his leathery hand and grabs a tongue depressor stick that lives in the crusty box of Gulden’s brownish yellow mustard and whaps it on two dogs. Big Steve tips him a quarter. The buns are semi-damp, the hot dogs divine. The same crazy old Chinese man in a Giants cap and plaid sport coat three sizes too large roams the first-base seats and screams, “Goddammit get a hit” at every player. Big Steve smokes menthols and yells at hippies for not standing up for the anthem. Young Greg asks a million questions. Big Steve makes up answers. Young Greg must go back. They do, hundreds of times. Till Big Steve passed, they never got along like they did at the ballpark or like they did talking about baseball. Field of dreams, more like field of common ground and understanding. Even for those divided by the gulf of family.
The dinky suburb of San Carlos, California, had twenty thousand people in the ’60s and about a zillion baseball teams. Instructional league, Little League, PONY League, Babe Ruth League; the place was baseball mad. On opening day a parade was held down the main drag, and thousands of kids in uniform would ride and march down to Burton Park with Barry Bonds, the famous and controversial Future Star, amongst them. The town was white as could be. The Bondses were the black neighborhood. Barry’s dad, Bobby, was a star with the Giants and our hero. Call it sentiment, environment, the thrill of the grass, Pavlovian conditioning, call it whatever the hell you want. Baseball was all around, and we absorbed it.
Growing up, every ballplayer chewed and everybody wore a crew cut and it was awesome. Let’s have more chaw and fewer incessant, revolving video ads behind the batter during the game.
Baseball was devised by clerks and bank types who had played cricket and town ball and one o’cat, whatever the devil that is, and rounders, the English kiddie game. It was organized by lower-middle-class guys in New York. When their jobs let out in the early afternoon, they would go play. Then followed rules and betting and drinking and pay. Blacks were excluded around the 1880s and only Women of bad rep would attend games. The Civil War spread the game because of the idle time in prison camps North and South. The soldiers learned the game and brought it home like venereal disease.
The purported inventor of baseball, Abner Doubleday, did fire the first shot of the Civil War as a captain at Fort Sumter. He also excitingly rode with Lincoln a few years later on the train to Gettysburg to give the address. He moved to San Francisco and started up the cable cars. He also commanded an all-black unit in Texas after the war and was a raging Theosophist. An interesting person and, oddly, a spiritual seeker. He had nothing whatsoever to do with baseball. That is all made-up stuff. He was a hero, and it felt right.
The supposed father of baseball, Alexander Joy Cartwright, did play in New York with the Knickerbockers and did move to Hawaii, where he was buddies with King Kamehameha III, but he did not concoct the rules that we still use today and all that nonsense. He was just there and had all that pinned on him later. We so don’t play the game our forebears did, and thank goodness. That game was slower and more violent. No gloves, no helmets, no overhand pitching.
In the 1860s, baseball joined boxing and horse racing as the only professional sports in America. The first admitted pro team was the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. They wore sexy red socks under knickers, which was super hot in the 1860s. Sporting groovy mustaches and beards, the Sox traveled from coast to coast on the just-completed Transcontinental Railroad. They won sixty-five games in a row and were a sensation all over the country. Then they lost and game attendance fell off and baseball morphed into a proto league. Fickle country.
Going to a ball game was very different in the 1800s. First of all, the smells were pungent and present, sweat from the days with no AC, horse mess, open grills, cigar smoke, spilt beer from the barrels. The sounds were wild vendors hawking nuts and lemonade, marching bands, organized groups of drunken rooters belting parody songs about the players—JFK’s grandfather Honey Fitzgerald was part of them. The teams rode from the hotel to the grounds in an open wagon singing their team anthem. Bystanders threw rocks and coal and every manner of junk at them. They banged on pots and pans and burned effigies of the players outside their hotel rooms at night to hector the players. The parks were not always enclosed, so long balls could roll way into the field. Carriages with gay parties parked in the outfield. People milled everywhere and were not shy about joining the action. Gamblers infested the stands, betting on every pitch. No dugouts for the players, bats lay on the ground near the crummy wooden bench and the water pail. At big games, crowds stood on the field in the outfield. They pushed back when the home team hit one and rushed in when the opposing team hit one. Players spiked each other, spit tobacco juice at the umps, and grabbed at each other’s belts to stop them from running or scoring. Cops wore high hats, ladies carried parasols. From the start, vendors sold sausages, fries, ice cream, beer, and, yes, whiskey in one daring and louche league. Papers and players called fans “kranks” and later “bugs” (as in crazy). Kranks threw glass bottles at each other and the umps and the players. No one wore numbers. All the players were Irish or Dutch, meaning German American. It was loud, violent, drinky, played in the daylight, and brief; most games were under two hours.
Sensibilities were shockingly different then. Dwarves and hunchbacks were mascots. Black children were on the bench as good-luck charms; the players rubbed their heads before batting. Cross-eyed Women were bad luck, but finding a hairpin a boon. Racist nicknames were hilarious. Teams had to fight to stay at nice hotels, as they were considered like show folk or carnies. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.
In the nineteenth century nicknames were descriptive and flowery. This one is a peach: Bob “Death to Flying Things” Ferguson, who scored the winning run against the Red Stockings that stopped their winning streak. Bob was an honest guy when everyone was crooked even if he had a terrible temper. He also smashed a guy’s arm with a bat while umpiring.
There were several deaf players in the early game and they were all nicknamed “Dummy.” Meaning the impolitic deaf and dumb. “Dummy” also of course meant stupid. Dummy Hoy played in the bigs for fourteen years after a childhood disease left him deaf. He was highly intelligent and could speak in a squeaky voice. He lived to be ninety-nine years old, and though he was born in the Civil War, he threw out the first pitch at game six of the 1961 World Series. That is continuity in an ever-changing universe. You can look it up.
Tony Mullane was a good-looking bigoted pitcher from Ireland. His nickname was gloriously “the Apollo of the Box.” He was big with the ladies. He also played on the integrated 1884 Toledo team that featured Moses “Fleet” Walker and his brother Welday Wilberforce Walker. They were the first and last blacks in the majors till Jackie Robinson. Mullane didn’t drink or smoke, but was enthusiastically racist and would not look at Walker’s signals. He said openly that he disliked Negroes and threw whatever he wanted. He became a cop in Chicago. Enchanting character. Now he could run for Congress in North Dakota.
Pete Browning was a superb hitter for Louisville, and his bat is the first Louisville Slugger. School was an issue for Pete, and his truancy and health problems left him a functional illiterate. He had nasty mastoiditis, which made him deaf and subject to blinding headaches. He drank real hard on and off the pitch and was a notoriously sketchy fielder. Great when sober or not in pain and dastardly when he couldn’t be bothered. Pete won a load of batting titles and would announce himself loudly when debarking from trains as “Pete Browning, the champion of the American Association, the Beer and Whiskey League.” He spoke to his bats and gave them Bible names like Gabriel. He also retired them when he felt they had no more hits in them. You ain’t seen eccentric till you met Mr. Browning. While on a night mission, he saved a child by pulling him out from under a mule-driven streetcar. He joined the outlaw Players League where he played for the beautifully named Cleveland Infants, and defected to the Pittsburgh team when Cleveland folded. That team stole a few players and became known as the Pirates. Browning also consorted with prostitutes so much that in addition to his mighty nicknames the Gladiator and the Louisville Slugger, he was known as “Pietro Redlight District Distillery Interests Browning.” Fans loved him everywhere he played. He was deaf, loud, flamboyant, a great hitter, and drank like the very devil. That, my friend, is colorful. No power shakes or spinning. No Pilates and low-impact sport shoes. No faux sobriety, worrying about drugs, performance enhancing or not. No taking the Lord on board and asking for guidance, just an old-fashioned, painful, furious, and exuberant life lived quickly, painfully, and wildly.
Was it better then? No way. No antibiotics, no counseling, no pension. On the other hand, he didn’t have to hear Justin Timberlake play on the jumbo screen when he went to bat. And nothing was sponsored by a credit card.
The most awesome baseball book about the early twentieth century is The Glory of Their Times by humanist and fan Larry Ritter. He crossed the country with a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the early ’60s interviewing ancient players in Laundromats and old folks’ homes and on their porches. Players with romantic monikers like Rube Marquard and Wahoo Crawford reminisce about riding carriages to the park, watching young Babe Ruth prank on the elevator, and playing with maniacs like Ty Cobb and Rube Waddell. It is a world of checkers and blue-plate specials, of nickel haircuts and streetcars pulled by horses. One ball, black from tobacco juice that all the players chewed, was used the whole goddamn game. It became lumpy with hitting and foul with mud and dirt and spit. Hard to see and harder to slug. They only replaced balls when they absolutely had to. That and the peppiness of the pellet are the big differences between before 1920 and after, when Babe Ruth rose like a titan.
The noughties and teens were the kooky most. Fans kicked down fences and rushed the field during the World Series. Pitchers pushed through seething crowds, and players ran for their lives after games and used bats to fight their way through the fans. “Bugs” banged on pots and burned players in effigy outside their hotel rooms all night. Today we have metal detectors and worry about terror at sporting events. In the early 1900s, it was still as wild as could be. We are and always were the terror.
Managers used wind-up toys and puppies to distract the distinctly flaky, if not fully mentally challenged, Rube Waddell while pitching. Rube was a tall, strange left-hander who could throw as hard as anybody. He was a freak even in those crazy days. The Rube ate ice cream by the quart and snorfed beer by the bucket. In the minors he would show up at game time in his street clothes and come through the grandstand taking his shirt off while the crowd went bananas. He would run and put on his uniform and yell, “Let’s get ’em.” He chased fire trucks because he loved to. After striking guys out, he would do backflips off the mound. The fans worshiped him. Managers hated him. He was what they then would call “touched.” Today he would be diagnosed with ADD or maybe autism. He got married a lot and drank so much he was called “the Sousepaw.” He passed away quite young after he caught pneumonia from helping out in a flood but was a singular star. Headstrong and unable to be homogenized.
Ty Cobb is justly known as a scrappy, violent, and racist baller who regularly slid into guys with sharpened spikes and hit black people whom he perceived as mouthy. His mother killed his domineering father when he was away at his first gig playing minor league ball. This horrible moment did nothing to help his iffy disposition. He carried a gun and fought every other teammate on the Tigers his rookie year. He jumped into the stands to beat up a heckler who had no hands and was suspended. Cobb had a sociopathic fear of failure and little regard for other people’s feelings, even those of his wives and children. He drank, cheated, played golf with Henry Ford, and was one financial wizard. He played in Detroit when cars were just getting popular. He rolled with captains of industry and, being from Georgia, he was hip to a new investment called Coca-Cola. He died with millions of dollars and on the sly was supporting other players. His cruelty on and off the field was riveting to the WWI-era crowds. But he was never beloved. There wasn’t much to love. ’Cause he is unsupportable as a human. But he is considered the greatest player for ages. His teammates called him “Peach,” but he wasn’t. Then came the Babe.
Baseball had its ass saved by Babe Ruth. The 1919 Black Sox betting scandal had bummed out the public. There had always been gamblers around the game and in the stands. Loads of players had cheated or thrown games for money for years. But when big-time gangster Arnold “the Brain” Rothstein was presented the idea by sharpies to pay a whole team to lose, the wheels went spinning off. Rothstein helped modernize organized crime because he was a genius low-life scum and evidently taught Mafia kingpin Lucky Luciano how to dress. To give you an idea how hard Rothstein was, when he was shot down, the cops asked him on his deathbed who did it: “You stick to your line of work, I’ll stick to mine.” The White Sox were wildly talented and grossly underpaid, and they hated the team owner Charles “the Old Roman” Comiskey. Comiskey had been a player and supposedly had invented playing off the bag at first in the prehistoric baseball times. But like all sincere capitalists, he had forgotten all about the players when he got rich.
The Sox were open to bribery; it was common and, being Chicago, the whole scandal included stolen testimony and a grand jury acquittal of the players. The wealthy white owners hired a commissioner, a showboat judge with white hair and a stern jaw named Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Judge Landis made many famous rulings and was an autocratic scourge from the bench, but his rulings were almost always overturned. The thing was, he looked the part. He was lantern-jawed and gray-haired and spoke with authority. He demanded absolute power from the owners, got it, and threw the players under the bus. Eight players banned for life, including the famous illiterate slugger “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. Ruth had copied Joe’s swing for his awesome power. Jackson was a proper country boy and had played in his socks in a factory game and got the nickname there. His wife read him the papers, and he waited to order at restaurants till he heard what teammates were getting. He was the best player in the league next to Cobb and, lacking Cobb’s negotiating skill, was getting hosed. He was banned by Judge Landis along with seven other guys on his team. The players took the hit for something the owners were surely on to. Notice it was the players who were impugned. The owners owned the players then and provided no health care or pensions. Injury meant career over. Still, it is called the Black Sox Scandal and not the Older, Icky, Rich, Heedless, White Guy Owners Who Consorted with Mobsters and Looked the Other Way and Threw the Players Out and Kept the Money Scandal. Oh, history, you are so fact-based.
Landis carried on being staunchly against humanity by refusing to let blacks play till he died. He was petitioned by Wendell Smith and Sam Lacy, among other black writers, to break down the color barrier. But like all great racists, he insisted there was no written rule barring them. He finally passed during WWII and, lo and behold, Jackie Robinson was signed the next year.
Babe Ruth started hitting the Big Apple and all those homers right after the Black Sox Scandal. He diverted everyone’s attention away from the crookedness and made the sport fun. The lore of Babe Ruth looms large and has lasted way after his untimely demise. Charismatic and outrageous, he ate hot dogs by the dozen, shamelessly shagged Women, drank quarts of beer, and powdered giant homers. He stands with Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, and Pelé as bigger than the sport they played and more important to history than a mere athlete.
Ruth was lightly brushed by parenting above his dad’s saloon in Baltimore. By six he was on the street, drinking, smoking, throwing rocks at cops, and being a truant punk. His parents were busy and clapped him in St. Mary’s Industrial School where they scarcely visited him. Baby Babe George learned beautiful penmanship and how to sew at the end of a nun’s ruler. The priests saw early that he was a great ballplayer, and Father Mathias took him under his wing and made him a pitcher on the institutional team.
They played all over Baltimore, and teenage Ruth, now six-foot-one and rock hard, was a high school legend. He was signed by the minor league Baltimore Orioles and made a ward of the team’s owner, Jack Dunn. Ruth was, according to the players, “Dunnie’s Babe.” He had never been out of the confines of the priests and was as raw and rough as they come. He overate because he couldn’t believe the team would feed you. He chased chicks with something close to fervency, he married a Woman and then somehow forgot about her till years later when she died in a fire and it was revealed they were still married. Of course, he was a good Catholic. He was sold to Boston in the majors and, believe it or not, was a star pitcher. He kicked mad arse in a couple of World Series and then the manager had the idea of moving this guy who always swung from the heels to the outfield. The Red Sox owner needed dosh, so they sold him to the Yankees, where he spent the next fifteen years dominating the universe. They built Yankee Stadium for him. They started winning World Series. Ruth ran riot. When he met King George V, he said, “Hiya, King.” He was the center of attention everywhere he went, and he loved being just that. Ruth would yell at parties, “Any girl who doesn’t wanna fuck can leave right now.”
The Roaring ’20s were his resort. Fancy open-air cars and camel hair topcoats. Constant arguments with the tiny manager Miller Huggins, including hanging him by his heels off the back of a moving train. By thirty he was fat, and the writers thought he was through. But he gave a weepy speech at the sportswriters’ dinner and said he would not let the dirty-faced kids down. He hired a personal trainer and went on a tear and hit all his famous homers, including the called shot, which was the longest boom, hit in Wrigley Field in Chicago. He fought with umpires and raged at fans like King Kong standing on the dugout waving his fist and screaming, “You’re all yellow!” He guzzled soda, puffed cigars, and swilled beer in the morning. Children worshiped Ruth, they knew nothing of his epic whoring and drinking. He truly loved kids and really did hit a home run that he promised a dying boy. This may surprise you, but in those insensitive times, because of his dark complexion and thick lips, people often thought he was black. The opposing players let him know this through a series of horrid racist taunts. He was like Paul Bunyan if you knew who Paul Bunyan was, and he really did live up to the hype. He waved his cap when he ran around the bases, and late in his career he convinced the Yanks to let him pitch a game, which he did and won, going the whole enchilada. Ruth made movies, did every photo op, embodied the party era, and was the perfect counterpoint to the tedium of President Coolidge.
The fun stopped when the stock market crashed. Attendance dropped, and that forced the owners to do things like play games at night when people could go, an idea they borrowed from the Negro Leagues. The All-Star Game started in 1933, and, yes, Babe Ruth hit the first homer.
Dizzy Dean was from either Arkansas or Mississippi, depending on whom he was talking to. He was country as corn and had a wild personality. He followed Ruth during the Depression as the funnest player. His brother Daffy, who was decidedly not, also pitched on the Cardinals with him. He promised before the 1934 World Series, “Me ’n Paul will win ’em all.” When they did, he said, “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.” Dizzy barnstormed many seasons in those divided times with the most famous black player, Satchel Paige.
Dean was a superb pitcher and later a great announcer who made baseball popular on the old-fashioned steam-powered TV. He once said while working for CBS network, “There is a much better game, Dodgers and Giants, over on NBC.” You will never find that honesty in today’s game, where every pitch is sponsored and every announcer wrapped in corporate comfort gauze so as not to upset the apple cart.
Joe DiMaggio is a sexy part of American history. Tall and regal, husband to Marilyn Monroe, darling of New York when, goddammit, it was New York. Winner of nine World Series, three-time MVP, All-Star in every season he played. Mr. Coffee to a later TV generation. He started right after Babe Ruth split and played till Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle took over. He never threw a tantrum or argued or spit on an umpire or took drugs. He kept to himself, and the writers gave him room. He personified the dignity and aloofness of that era. He smoked and drank half cups of coffee and scared pitchers to death. In 1941, he hit in fifty-six games in a row. No one has done it since. In the minors he had hit in sixty-one games in a row. Joe had focus, poise, and grace. He is a great ballplayer, if not very modern, with his detachment and emotional unavailability. But in that, a pride that left people impressed if not in full swooning awe.
Ted Williams was known by many names. He gave himself the Kid, but writers dubbed him Thumper, the Splendid Splinter, and most best of all, Teddy Fucking Ballgame. He hit a lot and he hit homers. He also flew planes for the Marines. He was handsome and looked cool in vintage sports clothes. He didn’t wear a tie. He was a sexy fighter pilot. He missed parts of five seasons serving in two wars. He was shot down but would not eject for fear of shearing off his knees, so he crash-landed a flaming jet and leapt out cursing and threw his helmet to the ground. He is the last player to have hit .400, a sacred number because, as of this date, no one has done it since. He is the consummate dedicated professional hitter. Ted possessed a frightening recall of all pitchers and a scientific approach to hitting. He was not good at marriage, fatherhood, or relations with the media. The Boston fans loved him, but the country was undecided until years after he retired, when he became beloved. Ted was outspoken and, though having only a sporadic education, highly intelligent. Ted Williams did not get along with the press and, after the first year, the fans. He refused to doff his cap in the time-honored tradition. In his final game some twenty years after his start in Boston, he hit a home run in his last at bat. The crowd cheered for ages. Ted did not appear. The manager sent him out to left field, where he was relieved by a sub, and he trotted off. The fans went crazy. Ted still did not tip his cap. Of this incident John Updike wrote, “Gods do not answer letters.”
WWII did not stop baseball, but it was a reality check on what was happening in the good ole USA while the soldiers were away “fighting for freedom.” Women suddenly had jobs and did them well till men came back and put the hammer down. Whites-only in baseball as usual, including older players and one fifteen-year-old. And if you can handle it, a one-armed man. Feel the inescapable indignity of being a star black player and seeing that white owners would rather play a one-armed athlete than have a black on the team. The owners’ excuse was always that the fans weren’t ready for integration. The truth was that they were governed by fear, prejudice, and greed.
The man who broke the unspoken color barrier was an officer, lettered athlete, college football star, and brother of an Olympic silver medalist. There is so much to admire about Jackie Robinson. Smart, good-looking, poised, articulate, all-around great sports star. The courage and strength of character he showed are inspiring. It had not escaped the public’s notice that black people had fought in every war in the history of the land of the free and had just returned from the war against fascism and “racial superiority.” Yet these same soldiers were hypocritically not allowed equal access to anything back at home. Black papers were all over this, as were the Communists, who once had a voice in politics in America. The time was long past to right this. Baseball as the paragon of all things great like apple pie, and exclusion was the last to fall upon its doops. Branch Rickey, the GM of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed him in 1945. No one in the game wanted him to. To a man, the owners in the National League voted against integration. The common wisdom was that black players did not have what it took to play in fast company and fans would freak out and riot. The commissioner pretended to support it. Rickey had scouts all over trying to find him a black player he could sell to the public, and Jackie was quickly on his short list. Jackie was a popular running back at UCLA playing on an integrated team, then a second lieutenant in the army. Robinson had fought his way into Officer Candidate School. He had the famous heavyweight champ Joe Louis pull some strings when they weren’t letting blacks in. One night in camp he got on a bus, and the white driver told him to go to the back. He refused and was court-martialed. Robinson won the case eleven years before lifelong activist and goddess Rosa Parks’s boycott in Montgomery.
Rickey called him into the office in Brooklyn. Jackie had played a while in the Negro Leagues with, you guessed it, Satchel Paige, but he never liked it much. They were old-fashioned in his eyes, and he was from the West Coast and had not seen that much whites-only nonsense. He was too upfront to use the Negro-only restrooms and handle the treatment that those players were dealt. Rickey asked him if he had the courage not to fight back for the first couple of seasons. Robinson agreed. He played in Montreal on the Dodgers farm team. They won the Little World Series, and he was carried around the field by jubilant white fans. The next year he played in Brooklyn. The other players were not all warm. Opposing players rode him. The fans shouted horrible stuff. Ben Chapman, the Phillies manager, went out of his way to call him every hideous racial name. After a few months of abuse, the white Dodgers began to see Jackie’s side and started to fight back for him. They went to the World Series, and Jackie was Rookie of the Year. So much for the common wisdom. Baseball finally let blacks in, though it took another twenty-eight years to let them manage. When minorities own teams and run them poorly, then we can say we made it equal.
PATER-NATIONAL PASTIME
Pro baseball is once and ever a macho guy game, but Women are breaking through, and there are a few Women playing in the minors. But baseball changes slowly. In 1987, in a press box in Scottsdale, Arizona, a San Francisco Giants official said to me, “There will never be Japanese players in the majors.” This is the kind of foresight pro baseball is so wisely guided by. It is to be fervently wished that Major League Baseball allows some Women jobs as players and umpires and proves that it still deserves to be the National Pastime—a name they gave themselves. On that special afternoon we will sing “Express Yourself” by Madonna at the Reproductive Rights Dome on the WMLB opening day with Lady Gaga dressed only in a soft pretzel and President Chelsea throwing out the first pitch to Hope Solo III behind the plate. Field that dream. If not, fade away.
There have been only two geniuses in the world. Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.
—Tallulah Bankhead
Willie Mays is a hero. He still makes grown men cry just to recollect his derring-do. A genius of baseball, he would lay off pitches early in the game, knowing he could crack the same pitch later. He windmilled around the base paths looking over his shoulder at the ball. His cap flew off with every ball he chased because he wore a cap too small so as to provide excitement. Doris Day and Tallulah Bankhead loved him. He swung hard and connected often. Possibly with those ladies as well. He started as a teen in the Negro Leagues and finished as one of the greatest and most joyful players the sport has ever seen. He is also a frank man raised in Alabama in the Depression by his father and his aunts. When his godson Barry Bonds broke the single-season home-run record, Willie got up on that night and said, “I told him he couldn’t do it, but he did it.” At the 2007 All-Star game, he gave Ken Griffey Jr. his jacket, and that millionaire superstar jumped up and down like a six-year-old. That is Willie’s magic. He played like he loved it. He still loves it. That is why people love him.
Mickey Mantle, the legend, the drinker, the errant dad, the belter of homers, came from the small town of Commerce, Oklahoma. His dad, Mutt, worked in a mine. Nearly every man in his family had died before the age of forty. So Mickey drank and chased as if every day were his last. Mutt named Mickey for a ballplayer—Mickey Cochrane—and drilled him endlessly, making him hit from both sides of the plate. Mickey was the best player in his tiny town and word got out. The Yankees sort of secretly and illegally signed him as a high school student. Mickey was cute and shy and had an “aw, shucks” personality. When he arrived in the majors it was evident he was the fastest player in the game and could hit the ball harder and farther than anyone else.
He was awkward at first but grew to love New York, where he partied hard and had Women falling all over him. A horrible fluke injury in his rookie season came during the World Series against the crosstown Giants featuring rookie Willie Mays. Mays hit the ball to right center. Joe DiMaggio, who was coincidentally Mays’s and Mantle’s hero, was playing center and called Mantle off the ball. He pulled up and stepped on a sprinkler and tore his knee. He was never quite the same, and a million injuries and wild nights later he still turned out to be one of the greatest of all time. Straight-up immortal.
The parks were ancient and crumbling. White people had moved to the suburbs to escape being around nonwhite people. TV was paying the teams more. Clubs moved to the West Coast when the owners finally awoke from their alcoholic stupor and realized there was a whole country full of fans. Blacks and Latinos were now on every team—yes, it took that long—but were still often segregated on the road, having to stay and eat apart from the white players.
The 1960s Cardinals finally housed and fed all the players together like humans and they came up with a team that won three pennants. That and the ferocity of their star pitcher, the tall, black, and intimidating Bob Gibson. He was a sickly child, but his older brother, a playground legend, never let him complain and instilled him with maturity and an uncommon drive to win. Gibson was an all-around athlete and signed with the legendary barnstorming basketball team, the Harlem Globetrotters, where he was great at dunking but did not dig all the clowning. The Cardinals signed him and finally paid him to quit playing hoops in the off-season. He hated his first manager Solly Hemus, whom he thought racist and who offered him little encouragement. When the Cards hired the encouraging Johnny Keane, Gibson’s career took off. He was notorious for never speaking to the opposing players and throwing at guys’ heads. He barely spoke to his own teammates on game day and hated for the catcher to come out for a conference. He told Tim McCarver, “The only thing you know about pitching is you can’t hit it.” He went on to win two games in the 1964 World Series, giving up two homers in the ninth inning of the seventh and deciding game and hanging tough for the win. He then put on a big pitching show, winning three games in the 1967 World Series and winning MVP in 1968, and forced baseball to lower the pitching mound five inches since no one could hit him. Perhaps nothing more exemplifies Gibson than when facing Hall of Famer Roberto Clemente in July ’67—he took a line drive off his leg, shattering his fibula, and stayed in to pitch with a broken leg before the bone snapped. That September he won those three games in the World Series. That is crazy tough.
Peter Rose is a dynamo. Infamous for his hairdo and being banned for gambling, Rose played for hundreds of years and proudly bore the derisive nickname Whitey Ford gave him when he saw him run to first on a base on balls: “Charlie Hustle.” Pete would dive headfirst on a steal, then leap up, dust off, and call time at the umps. He threw football blocks, tried to beat up a shortstop way smaller than him in the playoffs, played every position except pitcher, catcher, and shortstop, chased chicks, uttered the immortal phrase, “I didn’t drive two hundred miles to fuck my own wife,” and crouched low and whipped his unspeakable ’70s mullet back to watch the pitch pound the catcher’s mitt. Watching him was unforgettable. Booing him was required. Admiring his play was justified. He broke the hit record of that other great maniac, Ty Cobb. But Pete was not a sociopath or overly violent. He just gave 110 percent. He was in several World Series with two different teams. The truth is there wasn’t a team he was on that wasn’t better ’cause of him. He wasn’t fast, but he could run. He wasn’t a great fielder, but played infield and outfield. He managed, but was then caught betting, on his own team, of course. Gambling is the biggest no-no in the game. Remember the Black Sox? Pete got busted while the overly educated poet and chain-smoking didactic A. Bartlett Giamatti was commissioner. Most commissioners are tools of the owners and have the fortitude of a small, dyspeptic kitten. They have been, to a man, desperate corporate drones. They defend the owners’ rights, shit on the fans, and berate the players. Bart was, first of all, educated and pedantic. In baseball, if you read a book without pictures you are an intellectual. He was a Renaissance scholar who wrote many books. He was president of Yale and refused to divest the school holdings from apartheid South Africa. Giamatti did not actually ban Rose—he got Rose to consent to being banned. Rose is still a hero to fans for his tenacious play and never-say-die attitude. He did a reality TV show, of course, and can be found in Vegas signing stuff for money. The warrior player ran into the poet commissioner and the confusion has never ended. The irresistible force met the immovable object. The object passed this realm and the force is floating rudderless through the cosmos.
On matters of race, on matters of decency, baseball should lead the way.
—A. Bart Giamatti
Like a Pope who died after just a few weeks in office, Giamatti has almost taken on the aura of sainthood; a philosophic scholar who descended on baseball from some higher level—or at least a higher level than most of the newspaper and magazine writers who quoted his pretentious, overripe prose with awe, without bothering to figure out the content of his precious emissions.
—Marvin Miller
The decade that featured Disco Demolition night, nickel beer night, the San Diego Chicken, Astroturf fields, polyester double-knit uniforms, Morgana the Kissing Bandit, and the designated hitter, the ’70s were the actual ’60s, since baseball moves at a glacial pace.
Dock Ellis was a black man and a pitcher of some regard. He was also outspoken, drove a Cadillac with red leather trim on the outside, and pitched a no-hitter on acid. Yes, he did. Players have always used drugs, and Dock insisted that he never played a game without using methamphetamine. One June day he thought he wasn’t pitching and was at a friend’s house where he took some LSD. He was then reminded that he was in fact pitching that day, so he went to the park. In the stands was a Woman who always gave the players greenies, the speed of choice; he gobbled some trying to keep it together. He says he was hallucinating, could only see the catcher’s mitt in his haze, hit a few batters, walked a few more, and somehow pulled off giving up no hits while tweaking on acid. Dock said of this experience, “I was high as a Georgia pine.” Lest you think he was only a drugged clown, Dock spoke out against racism, claiming in 1971 that he and Vida Blue, another cool black star, would not get to face each other in the All-Star Game because they had never had two blacks start before. In the ensuing storm they both were allowed to start, a first for the great American pastime. He also confronted racists in the crowd by approaching their kids and asking to come over for dinner. The kids were always overawed and said yes and he went over to several people’s houses who had called him terrible names. That is activism on a one-to-one basis. Dock was once fined by the commissioner for wearing curlers, but more than that, after he retired he campaigned against drug use before his untimely demise. A real hero of real proportions.
Reggie Jackson, a baseball phenom, went to ASU and had the audacity to date white girls. This did not go over well. When he got to the bigs he never stopped bragging about how great he was. He led the Oakland A’s to three World Series and the Yankees to two championships in a row. In his twenty-one seasons, his teams went to the post-season eleven times, and he won two World Series MVPs. He went to the Yankees and fought constantly with the hard-drinking manager Billy Martin, including a fight in the dugout on live TV. His masterpiece was in game six of the 1977 World Series, where he hit three consecutive home runs on the first pitch. He had hit one the night before as well, even though he walked after that at bat. According to baseball rules, a walk is not an at bat, so he actually hit four home runs in a row on four pitches. He got the nickname Mr. October, had a candy bar named after him, hit a load more homers, and was by far the most outrageous player of his day.
The most significant thing that happened in the ’70s was free agency. The “reserve clause” that baseball owners had used to keep the players in servitude was finally discarded. Curt Flood, the sensitive Cardinal, had sued for his freedom and was denied. But Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally decided to play without contracts rather than submit to being owned by the team on a year-by-year basis. The owners freaked out and it went to arbitration. Arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled the players were not bound, and the owners who had been hoping for more power fired him. Marvin Miller, the players’ rep, had fought the owners and won. The players got the power of free agency and have bargained for lots of stuff like pensions since. The owners have kept possession of TV rights, tax breaks, and being greedy.
The players took coke while the owners looked the other way. The best team of the decade, the New York Mets, managed to win one World Series championship and stumbled around with their contentious superstars Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry. Players were openly buying drugs at the ballpark. Finally, there was a trial, and they sent a drug dealer to jail. Several players did time as well. No owners were harmed in this cleanup. The owners also colluded to keep the players’ salaries down and were forced to make small reparations.
Mike Schmidt was a giant third baseman who hit lots of homers. He started poorly and hit under .200, which is shocking, but eventually caught fire and won three MVP awards and a championship for the Phillies, who were a doormat. The Phillies fans, by the way, distinguished themselves by booing him mercilessly during a slump. He responded by appearing on the field in a wig and sunglasses.
Boom arena baseball was born. The ’80s saw baseball losing ground to all the other sports, so chemically induced action was needed. Pioneering slugger Jose Canseco has had the brass to say he was juicing from jump street. The rest has all been chaos and conjecture. We have made our feelings clear. Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens are the two best players of their generation. They juiced. The owners knew and did not say nothing. All the moralizing in the world doesn’t make them or any of the hundreds of others worse people or players. Ruth drank, Mantle drank, all the players have always taken speed or whatever to key up for games. Just like everyone in the regular, not professional, sports world. Let’s test the owners to see if they have taken drugs or if they even have a heart.
The fact that football is more popular today than baseball is not in the least surprising. One, the game is over quicker and the season is shorter. All this makes for a much more compact vehicle for gambling. The Super Bowl provides this one-off giant hit of gambling that’s worldwide, and that’s what people like. That’s like the final match of the World Cup or the Kentucky Derby or the Irish Sweepstakes or any of those onetime big-hit gambling events. People love to gamble on sports. It’s kind of the reason why there are professional sports. It’s absolutely born out of that. What about the pride of athleticism and the dedication to a craft and the discipline in bringing your entire mind and body to the equipoise of one specific task that you perform physically better than anyone else? There is always that. Plus chewing and spitting.
The game is getting better. The players are fit and they play hard. Where once everyone was named Tommy and Willie, now there are Brandons and Justins. And Asians and South Americans. Finally we are the world. This is good and right and true. Baseball is a fun game. If there were no big leagues, it would still be fun.
While baseball is never going to succeed at speeding up, we probably haven’t seen the last of the long ball. Someday soon there will be a new round of miraculously huge titans crashing the ball over the fences. And we will all pretend they aren’t all juiced until we don’t again. But some of the problems with baseball are not hard to fix. For starters, make every city own the team like the Green Bay Packers in football. Why is baseball sacred to capitalism? If the fans owned the game, it would be possible to afford to take your kids. Please stop with “God Bless America” and the anthem. A corporate entertainment event is not a weepy patriotic rally. Why do we sing the anthem at ball games? Tradition. The last redoubt of the staunchly narrow-minded. Slavery was a tradition, too. “God Bless America” started after 9/11. Now if you don’t stand up, some son of liberty yells at you. Belief systems are not your business to enforce, Paul Revere. Save patriotism for never. Never is the best time for it. Bombs bursting in air are not a family sentiment. Flag waving is the lowest and scariest form of mass insanity. We could do without jet flyovers as well. Everyone doesn’t welcome the sound of our jets buzzing them. To some, it sounds like fear and imminent destruction. If you need the screaming of jets to make you feel triumphant, you are either a suitable case for treatment or a member of the Georgia legislature.