Around the diamond
The prevailing saw these days is that baseball, that former titan of American sports, is hopelessly out of stride with our fast-paced times. As someone who believes that the times aren’t so much fast-paced as people have found new ways to be inefficient, and as a baseball believer to the last, I find this more an indictment of culture than of a sport. None is more companionable than baseball, which is there every night, just about, for you to hang out with, an ever-reliable chum.
The best baseball writing shares this convivial spirit, which might be why baseball lit pulls rank on the writings that we tend to get from the other sports. If you’re a regular baseball reader, you know that there are an assortment of vantage points that make for lively engagement. Consider “Baseball Maverick,” by former San Francisco Chronicle A’s beat writer Steve Kettmann, a multiseason tour of the life of a general manager.
That man is Sandy Alderson, Mets honcho, and you get a sense of how absurdly Kafkaesque modern baseball negotiations and metrics can be. Kettmann sometimes can’t control himself and starts blasting out the exclamation points like fungoes — settle down, man — but watching agent Scott Boras try to play Alderson into signing shortstop Stephen Drew — citing his .264 career batting average over someone else’s .259, as though this were worth millions of dollars more — is enough to induce a Popsicle headache. Long gone are the days of grumpy management types barking orders and threatening cuts, and this feels more akin to “Office Space” than anything that ever featured in Mudville.
On that more purist score, “Pedro,” Pedro Martinez’s autobiography, ought to be like a 21st century version of Christy Mathewson’s charming “Pitching in a Pinch” (1912), as Martinez is the veritable Yoda of modernday pitchers, and more cocky than Pecos Bill. Problem is, having listened to hundreds of Martinez interviews, I can tell you that this book sounds nothing like him, but, wouldn’t you know, entirely like co-author Michael Silverman. The prose reads like something out of Wikipedia, which is a shame, as Martinez is one salty dog, with a knack for fashioning phrases that function almost as musical ear-worms.
Even artificially voiced Pedro, though, can whine with the best of them, and he still sounds as if he wants to pop various members of the Boston media, whom he always thought were ripping him. “I guess I deserved all of that scorn: I was 10-3 with a 2.29 ERA in late August, with 166 strike- outs in 149 2⁄3 innings. Pretty bad, I know.”
Though I’m dead sure Martinez has never said, as he does here, “I pretended to be affronted,” it is fairly awesome, in a turn-ofthe-20th-century old-timey baseball way, when he tells batters, before the fact, that he is going to drill them. And Martinez’s Candide-esque game-day secret for focus? “I turned to flowers, my first love, to keep my mind off the clock.” The pitching don as green thumb. “On the mornings and early afternoons of my starts, I would dive into my flowerpots and flower beds, clipping off dead leaves, weeding and puttering, until it was time to leave for the ballpark.” Cultivate that garden, K-master.
Billy Martin was an even more complicated man than Martinez, and Bill Pennington’s bio is one of those books that feature so much investigative legwork that your own legs start to feel wobbly. The genius tag makes me uneasy, as I’d say Martin was more a frothingly intense competitor than some Socrates of the dugout. I remember turning on sports newscasts to learn that George Steinbrenner had hired or fired Martin again, and that saga is on full display here, but it’s nice to see just what Martin accomplished with the ’69 Twins, a kind of decade-later version of the ’59 White Sox, but with Harmon Killebrew launching bombs.
Pennington spent a goodly amount of time with Rod Carew, who must surely be one of the most underrated all-time greats, and a player who owed a lot of what he became — as a speed merchant, bunter and threat to steal all bases, including home — to Martin’s tutelage. Both were scrappers, both were hotheads, and Martin had no ego in the race, to speak, and saw in Carew the skills he never had, but which he could help maximize.
The running buddy good times with Mickey Mantle read like a dossier of enviable fun and inevitable tragedy, following the contours of a Ring Lardner baseball story. Drinking tends to mix with brawling. The image of Martin on a bus, a paper cup of Scotch in hand, working himself up into a lather to attack Reggie Jackson, and instead electing to call both his star hitter and his owner outright liars, is pure Martin.
You see a guy screwing himself over, in large part because certain values — loyalty, for instance — meant almost too much to him. By the normative standards of everyone else, anyway. “But like all heroes in Greek or Shakespearean tragedies, the protagonist was flawed, and his cause, while honorable in his mind, was diminished by his methods,” as Pennington writes. And certainly had there been a baseball version of “Holinshed’s Chronicles,” the Bard would have found much to do with Billy Martin. Martinez, presumably, would have gotten to sound like Martinez. Stage lights, stadia lights.