When honesty, baseball writing went hand in glove

When I began writing “The Boys of Summer” in the autumn of 1968, my friendship with Jackie Robinson proved a benediction. One significant aspect of that book was its commercial success. Robinson telephoned me during the summer of 1972, when the book was No. 1 in Boise, Brockton and elsewhere, and called me some X-rated names. “You’ve got my telephone ringing every damn minute,” he said. “People seem to be finding out I’m not an Uncle Tom.”

About the time the first paperback printing of “The Boys,” a million copies, sold out, publishers began to recognize that baseball books could reap significant sums. Soon large crops of baseball books appeared each spring, variously like daffodils and weeds. This season’s crop includes Frank Deford’s “The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball,” a look at the way the game was played and managed at the beginning of the 20th century.

The book is competently written, but its premise that McGraw and Mathewson are responsible for baseball as we know it now is wildly overstated -- newsmagazines tend to do that -- and the book is not helped by its magazine origins. (Deford writes that the book began as a story for Sports Illustrated.)

Since the mid-1980s, serious baseball books have offered detailed indices and thorough bibliographies. Deford’s book has neither. So when Deford, trying to forge a nonexistent link, has Ring Lardner and Mathewson both dying of what he calls “TB,” there is no way to determine the source of this very considerable error. In a haunting memoir, “The Lardners: My Family Remembered,” Ring Lardner Jr. writes that on Sept. 24, 1933, a heart attack killed his father.

Along with Deford’s book comes “Best Baseball Writing 2005,” which includes some decent pieces gathered from a wide selection of papers and other publications over the last 12 months (never mind the “2005”). But I am a bit put off by its cover, which bills such distinguished semanticists as Ralph Kiner, Don Zimmer and Pete Rose. E.P. Dutton used to print a sportswriting collection in which stories in distinct categories were retyped and submitted anonymously to a jury of eminent journalists. They voted blind. The winners won cash prizes. The Dutton books remain the gold standard of “Bests.”

What did the older stories have that some don’t today? You can’t fault the sportswriters (most of the time): They work under the conditions they’ve been given. Years ago, they stayed in the same hotels and drank in the same bars with the players. All of this has changed, thanks to club owners and cable television channels squeezing out the writers, keeping players remote, protected from the writers. It’s a distance that’s sometimes reflected in the quality of the insights the writer gives; it’s also a distance that enables a player to come along and make sensational admissions -- think of Jose Canseco’s steroid gossip in “Juiced” -- where the baseball writers of old knew almost everything and anything about the players.

The history of good baseball writing -- the art of writing about adults playing a children’s game for (mostly) adult readers -- proceeds from two outrageously gifted people who flourished in the first half of the 20th century. Ringgold Wilmer Lardner and Heywood Campbell Broun began their careers as newspapermen. Very different careers; very different men. If I had to cite one thing that connected them, aside from a passion for the game, it would be an equal passion for spirituous beverages. These boys could drink, before writing, during writing and after writing. That was, to be sure, the way things were, in both journalism and baseball, particularly during the nonsensical era of Prohibition.

Ring Lardner was a fine journalist, but his gifts crested in short stories. In a 1915 issue of the Saturday Evening Post, one finds his wondrous fable “Alibi Ike.” Here, as was his wont, Lardner uses as narrator a fictive big-league ballplayer who is an oaf. When the story begins, the oaf is talking:

“His right name was Francis X. Farrell and I guess the X stood for ‘Excuse me.’ Because he never pulled a play, good or bad, on or off the field without apologizin’ for it.

“ ‘Alibi Ike’ was the name Carey wished on him the first day he reported down South. Of course we all cut the ‘Alibi’ part of it right away.

“He ast me one time, he says:

“ ‘Why do you all call me Ike for? I ain’t no Yid.’ ”

Lardner quickly shoves us face forward against the boorishness and vulgarity that are as much a part of big-league baseball as the double play. Virginia Woolf, not to my knowledge a hardball fan, commented that Ring Lardner’s stories let us “gaze into the depths of a society.”

Heywood Broun wrote a baseball novel in 1923, “The Sun Field,” but his greatest strength was in his stirring newspaper articles and columns. On Oct. 11, 1923, the New York World assigned Broun to the Polo Grounds, where the Giants, under their sulfurous manager, John “Muggsy” McGraw, were to meet a Yankee squad powered by George Herman Ruth in the second game of the World Series. The confrontation pitted McGraw’s so-called scientific baseball -- bunting, stealing signs, hit and run -- against baseball a la Babe, which is to say pure, steroid-free muscle. Just before the game, McGraw told Broun that he would not deliberately walk Ruth: “I’ve said it before and I’ve said it again, we pitch to better hitters than Ruth in the National League.”

Ruth responded with a power-hitting clinic, featuring two home runs, and the Yankees defeated the Giants, 4-2. Broun wrote: “Ere the sun had set on McGraw’s rash and presumptuous words, the Babe had flashed across the sky fiery portents which should have been sufficient to strike terror and conviction into the heart of all infidels. But John McGraw clung to his heresy with a courage worthy of a better case.”

Abruptly, scientific baseball became passe. Punning on the Bible, Broun summed up a memorable game with a wonderful lead: “The Ruth is mighty and shall prevail.” It’s a showdown that Deford mentions briefly in “The Old Ball Game,” though he does describe the bleak train ride home after, when McGraw put on a brave face but privately felt that this might mean he should quit the sport.

Great drama like this, and Broun’s words, caused parlors and saloons to buzz in the decades after with the question, when will someone write a great baseball novel? Some still may ask, but two fine baseball novels appeared during the 1950s. Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural” proceeds from his belief that “the whole history of baseball has the quality of mythology.” Malamud works off Arthurian legends: The team is called the Knights; Roy Hobbs, the central figure, is seen as a Grail Knight; and his magical homemade bat, “Wonderboy,” is Excalibur. Hobbs becomes corrupted and the novel ends with failure. Too proud to take a walk, he strikes out on a bad pitch with the tying run on third. (In the movie version, the tragic end became a cotton-candy light show. Robert Redford’s Hobbs homers and the high drive shatters a lot of bulbs.)

Mark Harris employed the Lardner technique of using a ballplayer as narrator in “Bang the Drum Slowly,” but Harris’ character, Henry Wiggen, is smart and sensitive, if amusingly shaky on syntax. The story interplays an exciting season for the New York Mammoths with a fatal illness, Bright’s disease, that strikes the third-string catcher, Bruce Pearson. After the World Series, Wiggen attends Pearson’s funeral in Bainbridge, Ga. Through Wiggen, Harris writes: “He was not a bad fellow, no worse than most, probably better than some, and not a bad ballplayer neither when they give him a chance, when they laid off him long enough. From here on in I rag nobody.”

A continuum of worthwhile baseball books followed. Jim Brosnan, a literate, journeyman right-hander, kept a diary of his 1959 season, spent mostly with the Cincinnati Reds, a second-division team. This led to a fine and original work, “The Long Season,” superior to its splashy imitator, “Ball Four” by Jim Bouton and “edited” by Leonard Shecter. Brosnan didn’t need a collaborator, and he makes some nice phrases: “The empty locker symbolizes the cold blue sadness of the last day of the season.... On that day professionals really do play.”

Other fine examples of baseball writing include Jackie Robinson’s work with Carl Rowan, one of the first black journalists to win a Pulitzer, on Robinson’s 1961 memoir, “Wait Till Next Year.” Robinson spoke his piece -- he was good at that -- and Rowan supplied transitions, if not brilliantly then well enough. Each man expressed himself in his own voice and that produced the best of the Robinson books, of which we now have a surfeit. “Both Campy [Roy Campanella] and I played our hearts out for the Dodgers,” Robinson says, “because something in us made it impossible for us to go along with the age-old Brooklyn slogan, ‘Wait till next year.’ I know that in this era of human freedom we Negroes must also play our hearts out, must speak up with responsible militancy, or another generation will be telling Campy’s and my great grandchildren, ‘Wait till next year.’ ”

Where then is baseball writing headed this year, next year and after that? I used to be pleased after ballgames to talk to, say, pitcher Warren Spahn, as he sat on the bench in his underwear, and ask, “What happened in that six-run fifth inning, Spahnie?” Since Spahn had total recall and was one honest left-hander, the answer was rewarding. I pitied the political writers who never got to ask Eisenhower after a State of the Union speech, “What went wrong in paragraph eight there, Ike?” Or the music critics, who didn’t get to interview Bernstein or Von Karajan in underwear or tux, and were left spouting personal opinions to those who cared and those who didn’t.

Today’s multimillionaire players may be innately as honest as the old-timers, but they have semi-millionaire agents jabbering, “Image, man, image. Watch the image!” That sort of advice does not encourage outpourings of truth. We had an honorable craft and I felt baseball writing was at the very cutting edge of journalism. I’d like to see sportswriters and editors stage a mini-revolution against managed news and, of course, I’m all for greater literacy too. If sportswriters fight for access and sports editors start reading Thomas Hardy, we will be starting back on the right pathway up the hill. *