NONFICTION - April 24, 1994

RUNS, HITS, AND AN ERA: The Pacific Coast League, 1903-58 by Paul J. Zingg and Mark D. Medeiros (University of Illinois Press: $19.95, paper; 170 pp.) I have yet to make it through a baseball season without harking back to the teams that thrilled me as a kid--teams that no longer exist, from a league whose geography later defied its name, populated by players now relegated to cult mythology. There was Suitcase Simpson, travelin’ man who reached San Diego via the old “Negro circuits,” and Hollywood’s Lucky Lohrke, who earned his nickname by missing a deadly bus trip, and Stout Steve Bilko, who bashed 148 home runs in three years to become the biggest man in Los Angeles, literally and figuratively. Oh, what a time that was, in the best minor league that ever existed, the Pacific Coast League.

My only regret is that I was on hand for less than the last decade of its Golden Age. But “Runs, Hits, and an Era” does more than make up for the inconvenience of my birth date. Lashed together in conjunction with an exhibit currently running at the Oakland Museum, it commemorates a league that should be remembered as far more than the spawning ground for future Hall of Famers Joe Di Maggio and Ted Williams. With vintage pictures and workmanlike prose, this evocative little book traces the PCL from its beginnings in 1903--one team was the Santa Cruz Beachcombers, another the San Jose Prune Pickers--and it ends with the Dodgers and Giants bringing the big leagues west in ’58.

Forget the distended aberration that embraced Little Rock and Oklahoma City in the seasons that followed. This is the legitimate article here, a Coast League that has Angels in L.A.’s Wrigley Field and Stars in Hollywood’s Gilmore Field, a Coast League in which Fatty Arbuckle, the scandal-plagued movie comedian, owned a rival team and rival trolley companies built a ballpark in Portland so they would have one more place to bring the public. If you weren’t around when Casey Stengel of the Oakland Oaks and Lefty O’Doul of the San Francisco Seals matched managerial wits, you’ll wish you had been. And Lord, what players--Buzz Arlett and Jigger Statz, Tony Freitas and Truck Eagen and Frank Shellenback. Sluggers, spitballers and speed merchants. Shades from a past that we never knew as well as “Hits, Runs, and an Era” helps us know it now.