Bottom of the Ninth

The academic invasion of baseball writing began in 1966 with Lawrence Ritter’s “The Glory of Their Times,” a luminous oral history of early big-league baseball (and early 20th century America) remembered by the men who played the game. Armed with a tape recorder, Ritter, an economics professor at New York University, sought out 22 very old old-timers and shaped their stories with accuracy and compassion. After that fine foray, other academics swarmed baseball writing, offering everything from nice, brief studies of forgotten sluggers to portentous volumes that are a little tough to read.

We have splendid work by Harvard’s Stephen Jay Gould, notably his Joe DiMaggio piece “The Streak of Streaks,” and “The Life That Ruth Built” by the Notre Dame historian Marshall Smelser. But there have also been books like “The Dodgers Move West,” in which Neil J. Sullivan, who teaches in the School of Public Affairs at the City University of New York, describes Walter O’Malley’s march on California land, gold, oil and silver as if it were Galahad’s search for the Grail. The results are unfortunate.

The ubiquitous Doris Kearns Goodwin makes a downside appearance with a 1998 memoir about growing up as a passionate rooter for the Brooklyn Dodgers. I found her passion commercial rather than believable and her choice of title, “Wait Till Next Year,” simply appalling. Jackie Robinson’s fiery memoir, composed with journalist Carl Rowan, appeared in 1960. Jack called this book, the best of all the Robinson volumes, “Wait Till Next Year.” Titles cannot be copyrighted, so there is nothing illegal in Doris Kearns, girl Dodger fan, cribbing from the bravest Dodger of them all. Nothing nice, either.

Do I mean to suggest that academic baseball writing is a mixed bag? Indeed I do. Is Charles C. Alexander’s “Breaking the Slump” a mixed bag all by itself? Once more, indeed. Alexander, distinguished professor of history at Ohio University, seems a Midwestern small-town sort of fellow, more than a little provincial in his view of Joe DiMaggio, the New York media and baseball fans who happen to be Jewish. He does, however, credit sources. Sometimes he affixes as many as 46 footnotes to a single chapter. Regrettably, his methodology is the book’s undoing.

Baseball during the Great Depression, which Alexander calls “the worst thing to happen to the American people since the calamitous Civil War,” was dramatic and full of stress and innovation. Hard times make interesting stories. Alexander writes that for much of the 1930s in America, “the smell of revolution was in the air.” Block that hyperbole. During the undeniably grim year of 1932, the Communist Party drew only 102,991 votes out of more than 39 million cast for the presidency. The Socialists garnered almost 900,000, but Socialists preached evolution, not revolution. (For a minute in the early going, I was afraid I would have to wire Alexander that the Cleveland first baseman who batted .330 in 1934 was Hal Trosky, not Leon Trotsky.) Anyway, the historical consensus is that FDR’s uneven New Deal and radiant personality kept capitalism secure. Times were tough, but no one barricaded the boulevard.

Alexander is more useful when he reports that 4,337 banks failed between 1930 and 1933. Scores of ballplayers lost savings. So did some club owners, including Connie Mack, who responded by selling star athletes to the Boston Red Sox, which led his Philadelphia Athletics on to ruin and, eventually, to Oakland.

As lean years persisted, attendance at major league games, which had reached 10 million in 1930, sagged to 6 million in 1933. The Dodgers, who attracted a million paying fans in 1930, saw their attendance shrivel to 434,188. In 1933, the St. Louis Browns played 77 games at home and attracted 89,113 onlookers, not including their peanut vendors, who were lonely men. Although player salaries shrank to an average of $6,000, every big league job became a treasure amid massive general unemployment. “When I made the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1934,” Cookie Lavagetto once told me, “five other guys named Lavagetto in the Bay area come off the home relief.”

Competition, more than fierce, was nasty. As Alexander notes, throwing at batters’ heads became almost universal. Needling grew unpleasant, mixing sexual taunts, which Alexander misses, with ethnic slights. Hank Greenberg told me Dizzy Dean tried to rattle him throughout the 1934 World Series by calling him “Moe” (not “Mose,” as Alexander writes). Annoyed, Greenberg hit .321. DiMaggio accepted the nickname of “Daig,” short for dago, as pretty much the way things were. Blacks were restricted to the Negro League. Women reporters were barred from press boxes. The times were not exactly free.

The universal need for cash did produce innovation. Night baseball came to the major leagues to boost attendance in 1935 and took hold. Radio broadcasts produced 7.3% of big league revenue in 1939, up from 0.3% in 1930. As economic times improved, so did the baseball business, brightened with such new stars as Stan Musial and Ted Williams. By 1941, baseball’s prospects looked fine--except, of course, the world was waltzing on the precipice.

Odd conclusions mar Alexander’s book. “For some 2 percent of the U.S. population,” he writes, “[Hank] Greenberg was the most important big-league player so far.” When he says “some 2 percent,” he’s referring to Jewish fans. This is ethnic stereotyping and, further, wildly untrue. I knew dozens of Jewish Yankee fans who rooted against Greenberg because he played for the Detroit Tigers against their home team. Their “most important big-league player” usually was Lou Gehrig. Alexander writes that DiMaggio “performed in the nation’s media capital ... and kept on good terms with the press even if he rarely spoke in anything but banalities.” Two gifted journalists, Heywood Hale Broun and Red Smith, assured me that the young DiMaggio was a thoughtful and entertaining companion.

For sources, Alexander cites 13 newspapers, five published in Ohio, where he lives. No Philadelphia Record, where Red Smith told of Connie Mack’s decline. Nothing from Boston, where the press went to war against Ted Williams. His main New York source is the Times, and thus he misses the splendid DiMaggio chronicler, Jimmy Cannon, who wrote for the New York Journal-American and later the Post.

Over a period of 11 years, Alexander says, he conducted a total of four interviews. Four, although hundreds of people from Depression baseball survive. In essence, then, everything that appears in “Breaking the Slump” has been written somewhere else. Ritter says he traveled 75,000 miles to reach sources for “The Glory of Their Times.” Spring is upon us. It’s a nice idea, isn’t it, to step out of the house?