Q & A With Roger Kahn : The Boys of Summer and Others Revisited : Baseball: It was ‘The Era,’ when the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers ruled the world.

Roger Kahn’s latest book is “The Era,” published by Ticknor & Fields and named one of the best books of 1993 by The Sporting News. In this book, the author of “The Boys of Summer” revisits the years 1947-57 “when the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers ruled the world.” Recently he sat down with The Sporting News to talk about the relationship between ballplayers and the press and how it has deteriorated since he was a newspaper reporter in the 1950s.

Question: Weren’t you rather young and inexperienced when you began to cover the Dodgers in 1952?

Answer: Yes. I had never traveled with any team, any professional team. I had done a variety of reporting, a lot of college football. I had gone to Froebel Academy in Brooklyn. That was a grammar school, and I was there when Pee Wee Reese came on as the kid shortstop for the Dodgers. Now I was covering a team where Pee Wee Reese was the shortstop, somebody I had actually rooted for while I was in grammar school. I was taken around by Harold Rosenthal, another writer for the Tribune, and introduced to the players. They were very open and outspoken.

That night, I found myself standing in the hotel lobby near Clem Labine. He came over and said, “What are you doing tonight?” My social calendar was clear, and he said there was a movie maybe I would like to see with him, and it was called “Moulin Rouge,” about the French painter Toulouse-Lautrec. And he quickly added that he only knew about that because he was French. We went to the movie, and he paid for the tickets. I had heard that ballplayers were cheap, and I had heard that ballplayers were illiterate. We sat up and talked about life and love, the big issues, and Labine became a friend.

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Q: Sooner or later, didn’t you have to write something negative about him?

A: Yes, you have to do critical stuff. He was sent down to St. Paul. He was 5-1 the year before. He pitched the shutout before the Bobby Thomson home run. He just wasn’t pitching well. So I had to write that side. He would look hurt.

But it didn’t begin to come together for me until I began to notice some of the players would give me a quote and pull the quote back. Roy Campanella was notorious for that. He was having a bad year, and he would say, “I ain’t no eighth-place hitter.” And if you wrote that, he would say, “I never talked to the writer.” And so Campanella and I did not get along very well. Jackie Robinson and I did. Robinson never pulled a quote.

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Q: So this is an adversarial relationship.

A: Yes, reporting on people’s lives is adversarial. You’ve got to be willing to do it. After two years with the Dodgers, the Tribune forced me to Phoenix to cover the Giants. I thought the Giants were drab, but I suppose I was getting too close to some guys on the Dodgers and too angry at others.

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Q: Did your bosses sense that?

A: Yes. They said, “He’s beginning to think he’s a part of the Brooklyn National League baseball team, not a part of the editorial staff of the New York Herald Tribune. So we have to do something about it.” I said, “I don’t want to go to Phoenix. I don’t have any sources on that team.” Change is always frightening. I made a number of excuses, and they would buy none of them.

So out I went to Phoenix, and the Giants weren’t drab at all. Whitey Lockman wasn’t drab. Al Dark wasn’t drab. They were different, and they were dominated by this loud, manipulative character named Leo Durocher. So they kind of receded because Durocher was so loud. The trick with writing the Giants was to write something more than Leo Durocher. With Durocher it was totally adversarial. He had lined up all of the writers and worked out all their weaknesses and calculated how he could work on their weaknesses to get a positive press.

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Q: Just like he did with his players?

A: One writer was a serious alcoholic. Leo kept him in booze. Another was impecunious. Durocher lent him some money and said that if the writer ever knocked the club, he would go to his paper with the notes that the reporter had been required to sign.

By this time, I was reasonably tough. I had Campanella pulling quotes, and I had dealt with Walter O’Malley, and I had dealt with Buzzie Bavasi. I love Buzzie Bavasi, but Bavasi was manipulative, and Bavasi would tell you this to get you to write that. So I was not what Charlie Dressen would call a “Ned in the third reader,” Charlie’s term for someone who was very naive. I called Durocher. I was going out to Phoenix, and I asked, “Are you going to have a set starting lineup this year, 1954?” In 1953, the Giants had had a bad year, and he was juggling his lineup a lot. He said, “Yes.” I said, “Will you give me the lineup?” So he gave me the lineup: Wes Westrum catch, Lockman first, Davey Williams--it was a set lineup--and Willie (Mays) was going to come out of the Army.

So I wrote the story. And out I go to Phoenix, and the fellow from The New York Times asked Leo, “Are we going to have a set lineup this year?” Durocher said, “Yes, we are,” and gave him the same lineup he gave me. I turned to the guy from the Times after the press conference and said, “I wouldn’t write that because I used that on Sunday.” He said, “If it hasn’t appeared in the New York Times, it hasn’t appeared.” He wrote the same story. The Times bounced the story, saying the Trib had the same story three days ago.

These guys got together, and they called me over, and they said, “This is not the Dodgers. We don’t work like that out here. We all work together. If you have something, give it to the rest of us, and if we have something, we’ll give it to you.” I said, “I’m not really going to do that.”

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Q: At that time, did beat writers last a good long while, or did they get burned out, to use a more modern expression?

A: They lasted a good long while.

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Q: What kind of objectivity is left after many years doing the same thing?

A: None. I think, more than that, what kind of powers of observation are left after doing the same thing for so long? I was in spring training in Phoenix. One guy didn’t go to any of the workouts or the games, but he paid a young guy eight bucks a week to tell him what happened. The guy never left the hotel. And this was tolerated by the papers. I think there were more bums--people who could not write reasonable English--than there are today, but then the few stars were brighter than the stars today, the few stars being Jimmy Cannon, Red Smith, John Lardner. I don’t see anyone writing at peak as well as Lardner or Cannon or Smith did at their peaks.

But every town had hacks. Was there much sense of the player-management rivalry in what they wrote? No, there wasn’t. I had it. Dick Young had it. But these hacks didn’t. They wouldn’t touch that.

The shocking thing I learned in the research for “The Era” is that when Jackie Robinson played his first game in Jersey City--he had a great day--nobody covered it except the beat guys. The Times didn’t send anybody; the Tribune didn’t send anybody. NBC, CBS, nobody sent anybody, just the beat guys. If you look, as I have done, at Robinson’s year in 1947, there is very little in the papers about what was really going on.

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Q: What do you suspect it’s like in the clubhouse today?

A: Well, I think the big change with the press is that today there are no off-limits. Young was pretty tough, and I was pretty tough, but we had limits. We didn’t write about players getting drunk. Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. And Young didn’t. There was sex in the ‘50s, too. That didn’t begin yesterday. But there was a sense of limits to what you would do. I don’t think that is there today. I think there’s this creeping “National Enquirer” impact on journalism. Taking it out of sports, the Times wouldn’t have covered Woody Allen and Mia Farrow 30 years ago.

So I ran an experiment last spring. I was out doing a book about pitching. I’m going to do the circle change, the back door slider, etc., and the only way to do that is to talk to the players. So, I did an experiment. I picked the Orioles because I knew the Orioles were going to win the pennant, which proves how much baseball I know. I did not have trouble with anybody. You can say, “Well, they know who you are. Everybody knows ‘The Boys of Summer.’ ” I don’t know.

I’ve got some rules. I try to relate to a guy on his terms. If I’m relating to Rick Sutcliffe, I know I’m dealing with a reasonably sophisticated athlete who has been written about, who has lived in Hollywood, who knows where he is. I watched him warm up. I kidded him a little bit about working on his knockdown pitches, and he kidded back.

Take Arthur Rhodes. The back of Arthur Rhodes’ car is a speaker. Sutcliffe said, “If you want to talk to Rhodes, remember he’s a kid from Waco, Texas. Do you know anything about the kind of music he likes?” So I tried to get some sense of what Arthur Rhodes was interested in. I didn’t go in and say, “What kind of pitch was that the guy hit 420 feet in the fifth inning?”

For starters I try not to make it adversarial. I don’t whistle in a losing locker room. That’s a lot of work, and I think it would be hard to do if I began with a guy at the All-Star Game or began with a guy at the World Series. You don’t. You begin in spring training. You begin when there’s nobody around, and you go one on one.

And the reasons I can get, over the years, people to talk, is I try never to go into a person’s horrible personal stuff. I’ve got a line in “The Era” that we were not encouraged at the Herald Tribune to throw hand grenades just to see how big a bang they would make. Save it. I think there’s just a way to do it, and I probably can’t define it, but I can do it.

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Q: What about the players’ behavior toward the press?

A: It says in the standard minor league contract, “Player will cooperate with press and promotions as determined by club.” You ought to have that in every major league contract. And this obnoxious behavior, pouring ice on (Tim) McCarver, shooting bleach at a guy with a water pistol, would stop. You don’t need Deion Sanders. Sit him down for a year.

I tell you that if Walter O’Malley had Bret Saberhagen, he wouldn’t have him for very long. If Branch Rickey had Bret Saberhagen, he wouldn’t have him for very long. That kind of conduct was simply not tolerated. I think there’s been a complete collapse of leadership.

I would say those kinds of tough things. Maybe they aren’t practical, but I would say this to the players, “The press will write nasty stuff, but you will be polite. If you’re not polite, I’m going to sit you.” Why can’t you do that in the bigs? Because some agent is going to say, “You can’t talk to my client that way?”

What I’d like to see a commissioner do with beat writers is something Stanley Woodward made us do with football at the Trib. Go to some seminars on how the game is really played. I played six-man football in school, but this was different, stunting and looping, stuff Merlin Olsen can hold forth on. I’d like to see some kind of seminars for young baseball writers that would bring the writers into the playing of the game.

A famous American writer whom I like said, “I love this game. I played this game.” I said, “You know, what you played and what they play is not the same game.” Talk about the game, about the pitching. I would bet you that 50% of the writers don’t know what a circle change is. Tell them what’s going on. I find that McCarver gets a little annoying doing it all the time, but give them the fun of the game. It’s supposed to be fun, a joyous thing.