Baseball books a boy’s best pal
The first books I remember seeking out and reading were baseball books. They were cheap and paperback, quickies like Baseball Stars of 1965, edited by Ray Robinson, compiled from magazine articles and newspaper clippings. With “behind-the-scenes stories of big league stars” and, most importantly to me, “lifetime statistics.”
I also read deeply in John R. Tunis’ oeuvre, consuming at least 20 of the 23 juvenile sports novels. Roy Tucker from The Kid From Tomkinsville is one of those essential American characters, and not just because you’ll find echoes of it in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural and Mark Harris’ Bang the Drum Slowly, or read it described thusly in Philip
Roth’s American Pastoral:
“… a grim, gripping book to a boy, simply written, stiff in places but direct and dignified, about the Kid, Roy Tucker, a clean-cut young pitcher from the rural Connecticut hills whose father dies when he is 4 and whose mother dies when he is 4 and who helps his grandmother make ends meet by working the family farm during the day and working at night in town at ‘MacKenzie’s drugstore on the corner of South Main.’
“The book, published in 1940, had black-and-white drawings that, with just a little expressionistic distortion and just enough anatomical skill, cannily pictorialize the hardness of the Kid’s life, back before the game of baseball was illuminated with a million statistics, back when it was about the mysteries of earthly fate, when major leaguers looked less like big healthy kids and more like lean and hungry workingmen. The drawings seemed conceived out of the dark austerities of Depression America.”
Tunis was the first author whose name meant anything to me, but I also read Clair Bee’s Chip Hilton novels (Bee was a moonlighting college basketball coach, inducted into the College Basketball Hall of Fame in 1968), and just about anything else I could get that had to do with ball games. I went deep into The Sporting News and its annual stiff-covered guides that ran 700 pages. Ty Cobb’s autobiography (co-written with Al Stump), My Life in Baseball: The True Record might have been the first non-juvenile book I attempted.
(“I find little comfort in the popular picture of Cobb as a spike-slashing demon of the diamond with a wide streak of cruelty in his nature,” Cobb writes in the book. “The fights and feuds I was in have been steadily slanted to put me in the wrong … My critics have had their innings. I will have mine now.”)
Most of what I read didn’t have that kind of substance. All those ghosted autobiographies and “how we won the championship” stories were intended as commercial ventures, or, more generously, as souvenirs for fans who wish to vicariously re-experience their heroes’ triumph. They were never intended to be taken seriously, much less endure. (Though there are exceptions;
see Dock Ellis in the Country of Baseball by Ellis and Donald Hall, the poet who died a week ago: “Baseball is a country all to itself. It is an old country, like Ruritania, northwest of Bohemia and its seacoast …”
More practical and durable were some of the player-endorsed instruction guides: Ted Williams’ The Science of Hitting, first published in 1971, is still cited as the definitive work. (Among other things, Williams correctly intuited that a slight uppercut was, for most hitters, preferable to a “level swing,” an insight verified by modern science.) Those seeking a second opinion might want to hunt down a copy of 1979’s The Making of a Hitter by former Dodger infielder Jim Lefebvre and his hitting coach father Ben.
It might be argued that baseball may be the only sport that can be said to have a canon — it isn’t too difficult to come up with a list of 20 or 50 essential baseball books, from Eliot Asinof ’s Eight Men Out to Ted Williams’ autobiography My Turn at Bat (which, like The Science of Hitting, was co-written by John Underhill). Roth’s The Great American Novel (1973) would make the list, as well as Roger Kahn’s The Boys of Summer and Only the Ball Was White by Robert Peterson.
Jim Bouton’s Ball Four and Jim Brosnan’s oft-overlooked
The Long Season are the best season diaries ever published by players, though Pat Jordan, the onetime Milwaukee Braves bonus baby who lost command of his pitches after a couple of seasons, is the best player-writer, and his The False Spring is perhaps the best sports memoir ever published.
Baseball was our first major team sport and, for whatever reason, its languid rhythms and illusion of continuity seem especially conducive to good writing.
The old truism is that the smaller the ball, the better the literature. I’m not sure that’s true — you could make a case for Fred Exeley’s “fictional memoir” of his fixation with the New York (football) Giants A Fan’s Notes as the finest American sports book — but American writers come to baseball because baseball is inextricable from the American experience.