Book Fires a Beanball at Game

What kind of baseball fan are you? A brief quiz:

1. A baseball stadium is:

a) A green cathedral.

b) Mount Olympus with the gods at play.

c) A 60,000-seat edifice built of concrete and structural steel where a family of four can, on a good night, spend $80 and 3 1/2 hours without falling asleep.

2. The James Earl Jones soliloquy in “Field of Dreams” made you:

a) Weep uncontrollably.

b) Stand and applaud.

c) Begin to gag, fall to your knees and pray for Shoeless Joe to stick a sock in it.

3. Spring training is:

a) Passage from boyhood to manhood.

b) Passage from the cold despair of winter to the vibrant bloom of glorious, bountiful possibility.

c) Passage from the 40-man roster to the 25-man roster.

4. Cooperstown is:

a) Valhalla.

b) More holy than the Sistine Chapel.

c) A small town with a sports museum in upstate New York that’s hard to get to.

If you answered c) to one or more of the above, do not panic.

You are not a Communist.

You are not alone.

Very likely, you are just another in the growing legion of Baseball Agnostics--clear-thinking, well-adjusted individuals who can appreciate baseball as a game of keen athletic skill and strategy, same as football and hockey, but do not believe that time begins on opening day, or that life imitates the World Series, or that the smell of freshly cut ballpark grass is an intoxicating incense that insulates us from the stench of the outside world, whisking us back to a simpler, happier, more innocent era.

To a Baseball Agnostic, the smell of freshly cut ballpark grass means the grounds crew has done its job and now it is time for the Yankees and Red Sox to do theirs.

In his newly released book, “Field of Screams: The Dark Underside of America’s National Pastime,” Richard Scheinin has written what amounts to a manifesto for Baseball Agnosticism. Scheinin gets to the point immediately, firing this opening salvo:

“Aren’t you tired of it? It’s been foisted on us for years now, decades even. All this literary bilge about how baseball is some sort of gentle art form, the game for poets. . . . Well, it’s time for a reality check. I appreciate a well-executed squeeze play as much as the next guy, but everything that happens between the foul lines is not pretty. It’s time to put perspective on the myth: that’s no ballet and that’s no Field of Dreams.”

For the next 380 pages, Scheinin systematically pummels what he calls the Big Baseball Myth, chronicling more than a century’s worth of miscreants, criminals, substance-abusers and game-fixers, casts them against a backdrop of drunken hooligans in the stands, and concludes that the reality of the game is leagues away from the Boys of Summer gloss.

Boys of the Slammer are more to the point. Or, as Scheinin words it, “a panoply of villainy.”

Scheinin takes Jacques Barzun’s oft-repeated observation that “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball” and turns it on its ear. To understand baseball, one must first understand America, “Field of Screams” argues. Through the years, baseball’s history has mirrored the country’s--rooted in violence and racism, often aspiring for better, only to be dragged back down time and again.

Ah, baseball in 1800s. A pastoral, gentlemanly endeavor, full of waxed handlebar mustaches, colorfully striped long stockings and picnic blankets behind home plate.

So what about the barbed-wire fences that had to be erected to keep bloodthirsty fans from maiming the umpire?

Or Curt Welch, center fielder for the St. Louis Browns, who kept a pint of whiskey stashed behind an outfield sign at Sportsman’s Park for between-innings pick-me-ups?

Or Chicago Manager Cap Anson, Hall of Famer, who forced the Newark team to bench its black pitcher and catcher before agreeing to play an 1887 exhibition game?

Or 1890s umpire Timothy Hurst, who resorted to firing a pistol in the air to keep a hostile crowd at bay?

All the legendary louts are here. The sadistic, racist Ty Cobb, so hated by teammates that he slept on team train rides with a loaded Luger by his side. The pugnacious manager, John McGraw, who viewed clean play as a sign of weakness, professing that “sportsmanship and fair play are all right, but it is the prospect of a hot fight that brings out the crowds.” The fabled first baseman Hal Chase, repeatedly accused of throwing games but forever cleared of charges because he was a “gate attraction.”

The ‘40s and the ‘50s were baseball’s Golden Age, or so we have been taught. When It Was A Game. The Glory of Their Times.

In 1940, Detroit catcher Birdie Tebbetts was nearly killed when a fan in the upper deck of Cleveland Stadium dropped a tomato crate on his head.

In 1949, the first year of widespread integration in professional baseball, a total of 12 black non-pitchers played for Triple-A teams--and four wound up being carted off on stretchers after beanings.

In 1950, Ted Williams gives fans at Fenway Park the finger. In 1956, Williams spits at fans at Fenway Park. In 1958, Williams flings a bat 75 feet into the stands, hitting the housekeeper of Red Sox General Manager Joe Cronin.

On to the ‘60s and the beanball wars that ruined Tony Conigliaro’s career, the cruel taunting of outfielder and former mental patient Jimmy Piersall, the Cobb-like spikings and braggadocio of Maury Wills.

Vignettes from the ‘70s, ‘80s and ‘90s: Hank Aaron receives death threats as he closes in on Babe Ruth’s home-run record. The Texas Rangers have to defend themselves with bats against drunken fans on Ten-Cent Beer Night in Cleveland. Fans riot in Pittsburgh and Detroit after World Series victories. George Steinbrenner and Howard Spira. Wade Boggs and Margo Adams. Lenny Dykstra and his Mercedes. Pete Rose and his bookie.

“Field of Screams” concludes that baseball and its players are not “seedier than society, only as seedy. In baseball, you can see the whole panorama of the lower end of the human experience: alcohol, drugs, wife-beating, horrible murders, suicide.”

It’s a side of the game the poets and the self-assigned Bards of the Ballyard neatly choose to ignore, which makes “Field of Screams” a book every last one of them should be commanded to read, before the next genuflection.