Collection captures baseball’s heroes, their human stories
Good sportswriting is not mainly about who won the game. It’s about who played the game — their flaws and fears, triumphs and tears. It’s also about the social setting in which those games are played, about the way sports reflect and reveal our humanity. In this collection of his newspaper columns, “Baseball’s Best Ever: A Half Century of Covering Hall of Famers,” Ira Berkow quotes another sportswriter, the immortal Red Smith, on this point: “Games are a part of every culture we know anything about . ... The man who reports on these games contributes his small bit to the record of his time.”
Berkow, who wrote mainly for the Newspaper Enterprise Association syndicate and then for the New York Times, donates more than a “small bit” to that record. I often found myself skipping over the statistics and the standings he writes about — we already know what happened, after all — and focusing on the personal stories, especially the ones about failure and disappointment. Here for instance is Mickey Mantle, a boyhood idol of mine, who told Berkow in 1971, three years after retiring from the New York Yankees: “Playing baseball is all I’ve ever known. It makes me kind of bitter that it’s all over. You look around and see other guys my age, other guys forty years old, who are just starting to reach their peak in other jobs. And I’m finished.”
Some statistics can be fascinating, however, and one of my favorite columns features all the ways in which baseball’s biggest stars screwed up. Warren Spahn, one of the best left-handed pitchers of all time, gave up 434 home runs. Babe Ruth led the majors in strikeouts in four different years and whiffed 1,306 times — a benchmark for decades until Mantle flailed even more often. The record for grounding into double plays in a single World Series is seven — held by Joe DiMaggio. “At times, as the evidence shows, even the greatest among us aren’t great, or even very good,” Berkow writes. “Somehow, though, that’s
heartening.”
All collections of previously published pieces contain strengths and weaknesses. They can capture moments in real time, unfiltered by false nostalgia or faulty memory. But they can also feel dated and repetitive. Too many columns here focus on anodyne speeches by Hall of Fame inductees and elegiac tributes to recently departed oldtimers.
But at his best, Berkow can turn a phrase like an all-star second baseman turning a double play. Here he describes Ozzie Smith, the ineffable shortstop of the St. Louis Cardinals:
“He leaps, he dives, he whirls. He seems to appear behind second base as if popping from underground; he can soar and stay aloft like a hummingbird and wait for a line drive to arrive.” Of Kirby Puckett, a rotund yet robust hitter for the Minnesota Twins, Berkow says that he “is built like a keg of dynamite and periodically explodes like one.”
One of this volume’s recurring themes is the intersection of race and baseball, and Berkow has a creative way of showing the impact of Jackie Robinson, who integrated the sport in 1947. He turns to Ed Charles, a journeyman infielder in the 1960s, who recalled “the biggest day of my life,” when he was 13 and Robinson came through his hometown in Florida with the Brooklyn Dodgers. “I realized then I could play in the major leagues,” Charles said. “When it was over, we chased the Dodger train as far as we could with Robinson waving to us from the back. We ran until we couldn’t hear the sound any more. We were exhausted but we were never so happy.”
A big part of baseball, often hidden from the fans, is the nagging injuries that plague many players — especially catchers — during a sixmonth season. Said Johnny Bench, one of the best backstops ever, “I’ve been shot up with so many painkillers to stay in the lineup that if I were a race horse I’d be illegal.”
Finally here are two bits of folk wisdom. One comes from the old Cardinals pitcher Dizzy Dean: “I ain’t what I used to be, but who the hell is.” And this one from hurler Catfish Hunter, a country boy from North Carolina: “The sun don’t shine on the same dog all the time.” True enough, but the sun shines on, and through, enough of these columns to make this collection well worth reading.
“Long Train Runnin’: Our Story of The Doobie Brothers” isn’t loaded with the tales of debauchery you’d get from books about, say, the Stones, Led Zeppelin or Mötley Crüe.
More than most bands, the Doobies, as depicted by frontmen Tom Johnston and Patrick Simmons, were all just downto-earth dudes who wrote a bunch of beloved boogie-rock songs and went about their business without an excess of drama.
A director looking to thrust people into the action with a dramatic first scene might go to chapter 18, where the Doobie Brothers were in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on the Stampede tour in April 1975. Just before showtime, Johnston, the guitarist and singer on most of the band’s hits, was rushed back to Los Angeles on the Doobies’ plane with a bleeding ulcer.
While bassist Tiran Porter was walking out to inform the crowd that they wouldn’t be playing, Simmons was having a change of heart and ran out and stopped him. “Look,” he told the crowd, “Tommy isn’t here tonight, and we are not sure what to do. We want to play for you, but only if you want us.”
Of course, the show went on, and it went extremely well, by Simmons’ account.
Baton Rouge became a key turning point in Doobies history, as guitarist Jeff “Skunk” Baxter suggested they call his former Steely Dan buddy Michael McDonald to cover vocals on that tour. He would go on to replace Johnston, taking the Doobies in a new direction and to greater commercial success.
The current tour, which celebrates the 50th anniversary of the band, reunites McDonald with Johnston and Simmons, who reignited the Doobies in 1987, after the 1982 breakup, and have kept it going ever since. McDonald’s first trip with them was scheduled for 2020, then bumped to 2021 because of the pandemic and then, for Pittsburgh, bumped another year (to July 9), after McDonald got COVID in September.
With all three singersongwriters on board, the Doobies are able to unlock the whole catalog, from early hits such as
“Listen to the Music,” “Long Train Runnin’ ” and “China Grove” to the McDonald years, when they hit the charts in the more contemporary R&B vein of “What a Fool Believes” and “Minute by Minute.”
One of the headscratchers in the autobiography, and in the Doobies timeline, is why Johnston no longer felt like he belonged in the band he co-founded when he was fit to return around 1976.
“To be honest with you,” Simmons said in a recent phone interview, “I think there are some unsaid things in the book. I think Tom saw an opportunity to do a solo project and he felt that it was a good jumping off point for him, to go do his own thing without the guilt of having to abandon everyone. That’s my interpretation, and I don’t blame him for that. I think it was something that had been in the back of his mind that he wanted to do a solo project, and I think he felt he was shouldering too much weight to do both things at the same time.”
Johnston had some modest success with the two solo albums, while the Doobies rocketed to the top of the charts and won three Grammys between the “Minute by Minute” album and single “What a Fool Believes.” The band’s more polished R&B sound in the late ‘70s, which has gotten them onto Yacht Rock playlists, won them a whole new audience while perhaps alienating some of the hardcore fans of their more classic rock sound.
One would think they would lose the biker crowd for sure. But, no, Simmons said.
“The Harley crowd liked [McDonald] so much that they got him to buy a motorcycle! He went out and bought a Harley. We just talked about it the other day. He loves riding. Living in LA, it’s not as friendly to bikes down there, although he did ride. He had a Harley for quite a while.
One of the things breezed over pretty quickly in the book is the breakup in 1982, one album after topping the charts and winning the Grammys. That same year, McDonald went Top 10 with his first solo album, “If That’s What It Takes.”
“I think Mike had it in his mind that he wanted to pursue a solo career,” Simmons said. “I didn’t feel like he could do that and shoulder that pressure of working with the band. But, really, at the point that he did that, we had all kind of reconciled ourselves to the fact that we needed a break. I know, speaking for myself, at that point, I pretty much had called everybody and told them I needed to take a break from this thing to do something else. I was kind of tired of touring and so on.
“And so that’s kind of where things changed, and Mike had a successful solo career, so even when the band got back and reformed, he was pretty busy fulfilling commitments that he already made, making a good living. And I think there’s something to be said with, you know, being the driver in that regard. I think he enjoyed — still enjoys — being in charge of his career and what he’s doing.”
What happens next with the Doobies remains to be seen.
“I don’t know where this will end up, with this contingent of the band the way it is now,” Simmons said. “I know Mike is really enjoying it. In some respects, there’s something to be said for having a bunch of guys that you enjoy playing with and are bearing some of the burden, as it were, when you’re up there entertaining — having other people singing songs and talking to the audience. You don’t have to do it all yourself.
“I know he’s enjoying that part. And you know we’ve always had a great friendship, especially Mike and I. We stayed in touch over the years so this is a real reunion in terms of having an opportunity to play together again and have some fun. And that’s really what it’s all about — having fun.”