Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

by Stephen Jay Gould

  Second, a restricted dose of H-mode books soon becomes both dull and limiting. I like all three of the books I have chosen for my H-mode counterpart to Marvin Miller—Teddy Ballgame’s career on the fiftieth anniversary of his greatest year (Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures, by Dick Johnson and Glenn Stout); Mickey’s finest season thirty-five years ago (My Favorite Summer 1956, by Mickey Mantle and Phil Pepe); and Bobby’s transcendent moment of 1951 (The Home Run Heard ’Round the World, by Ray Robinson)—all well written, accurate, and fun to read.

  But the sameness of the genre begins to wear thin after a while. The two books that treat a specific time (Mickey in 1956 and Bobby in 1951) both begin with a scene-setting chapter in standard form: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The books are eerily similar. We learn what was on TV, who topped the charts of pop music, the content of newspaper headlines, the price of a hamburger. All three books then proceed in chronological fashion, for hagiography is a form of narrative, while criticism is analytical and tends to focus on issues rather than sequences.

  But the books also differ in some ways. Ted Williams is full of well-chosen (and well-reproduced) photos and other pictorial memorabilia, and the biographical chapters include short essays written by some of baseball’s literary groupies, including David Halberstam, Donald Hall, George V. Higgins, and, as I must admit, yours truly (on the statistics of Williams’s .406 season). My Favorite Summer is particularly well constructed. The 1956 season was Mantle’s triumph, climaxed by Don Larsen’s perfect game (including Mantle’s saving catch) in the World Series. But the chronology of old seasons cannot be as interesting as the usual stuff of drama, and I would have thought such a format difficult to sustain. Phil Pepe, Mantle’s “as told to” writer, solves this problem by deftly following a chronological sequence, but using each major incident for a well-paced digression. Mantle’s batting in the All-Star Game with Williams prompts a little essay on his reverence for the greatest of all hitters; the introduction of Don Larsen, one of most committed of old-time drinkers, provides an occasion for a discourse on Mantle’s own legendary, late-night escapades.

  For those benighted enough not to know the context of The Home Run Heard ’Round the World (though I don’t know why I bother, for such folks can’t be fans and probably abandoned this essay long ago), the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers maintained the greatest of all rivalries (I loved the Giants and hated the Bums; their joint departure for California in 1958 began the serious decline of New York City). In 1951, the haughty Bums were thirteen and a half games ahead in mid-August and the race seemed over. But the Giants fought back and tied the Dodgers at the end of the season, prompting a three-game playoff. They split the first two games, and the entire year hinged on the finale. The Giants entered the ninth inning behind 4–1, and all seemed lost. But they scored a run and had two men on when Bobby Thomson came up, unfurled his bat to October’s breeze, and hit the pill heard ’round the world. Russ Hodges, the Giants’ announcer, broke into joyous babbling. Red Barber, the Dodgers’ man, simply broadcast: “It’s in there for the pennant.” Red Smith wrote in his next morning’s column: “The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.”

  If a season seemed implausible, you wouldn’t think that a moment could fill out a whole book. But Ray Robinson prevails, particularly for New Yorkers like me who lived through the event with maximal passion. Predictably, most of the book fills out the entire season, the personalities, and the finer points of baseball’s deepest rivalry. But several final chapters treat the moment itself, and Robinson does not run out of things to say. I particularly enjoyed the “where were you when?” final chapter, where many celebrities and ordinary folks recall their spot—for my generation knows this as well as the next remembers where they were on November 22, 1963. I, at age ten, was glued to our newly purchased first TV, home alone after school. I have never known a greater moment of pure joy in my life.

  How, then, shall we deal with relationships between the H-and Q-modes, the two deep valleys that house nearly every baseball book (with very few able to maintain a position on the sharp ridge between)? I have thought about this for years, have played with many solutions, and have finally come to the decision that we must leave the two modes alone in their different realities. We need both, but they cannot be combined. They exist like oil and water in a jar—immiscible—and all lovers of the game must own a jar with both components in their separate layers.

  Please do not misunderstand me. Hagiographical and quotidian are not true vs. false, exaggerated vs. accurate. Both are equally true, but partial. Hagiography is myth in the honorable, not the felonious, sense. There are no lies in My Favorite Summer, only a partial account in the H-mode. But to understand Mantle fully, you need both modes. In the current, H-mode book, Mantle presents the mythological line on salary: I loved the game so much, I couldn’t even think of such issues. He writes:

  After the 1955 season, the Yankees sent me a contract for $32,500. To me, that was all the money in the world. My dad probably didn’t make that much combined all the years he worked in the mines. I didn’t even try to get the Yankees to give me more. I just signed the contract and sent it right back. I couldn’t wait to go to spring training to get ready for the 1956 season.

  But Mantle also wrote a Q-mode book in 1985, The Mick. Here he writes with bitterness about yearly run-ins with George Weiss, his paternalistic, mean-spirited boss. After the 1957 season, which (on paper) was even greater than his 1956 year, Weiss had the audacity to propose a $5,000 pay cut. (The denigration continued. Mantle took a $10,000 pay cut before the 1961 season; he responded by hitting fifty-four home runs, his highest total, and inspiring teammate Roger Maris to break Babe Ruth’s record with sixty-one.) Most revealing are Mantle’s long descriptions of his financial worries at the height of his career. He was especially concerned about a failing bowling alley that he had started to secure his long-term financial future. His fears reached their peak in 1957:

  I was also getting migraines worrying about my once-flourishing bowling alley. Competition had sprouted faster than a field of wild daisies…. My alley was not luxurious…. And here I am holding a five-year lease. At $2,300 a month there were those nights after closing time where I’d stare at the ceiling and imagine myself drilling a hole through the floor of the banks above to let some of their money trickle down.

  Can you imagine anyone of Mantle’s status worrying about, or even thinking of establishing, a bowling alley today? A modern Mantle could make three times $2,300 for each at-bat, and could secure his financial future in a single season.

  May I venture an analogy to the hoary issue of science vs. religion? This is a supposed conflict, more accurately a pseudoconflict, shouldn’t exist at all, but flares up only when one side invades the domain of the other. As inquiries into empirical and moral truth, these subjects form necessary components of a complete life. But they integrate no better than H and Q, or oil and water. Each of us needs to carry a jar with the two layers. Yet some of the world’s greatest troubles, intellectual and otherwise, arise from movements by one realm into alien territory—the oxymoronic “scientific creationism,” or religion improperly masquerading as science, to choose a prominent contemporary example.

  Similarly, in baseball, great and unnecessary troubles arise when one mode invades the legitimate domain of the other. We often label the H-mode passion for events of the pre-Miller era as false and phony because Q-mode oppression was then so real. But Babe Ruth became the greatest icon of America; Lou Gehrig lived and died with nobility; and Bobby Thomson hit that home run, bringing joy or despondency to millions. These splendid men, and their marvelous achievements, are degraded if we deny their legitimacy because the quotidian reality of baseball as a business stressed a different theme. In fact, one might argue that their achievements and their passion became even more admirable because they played with all their heart while patronized and cheated by management.

&n
bsp; Even more perniciously, hagiography has always slipped into the Q-world of contracts to gain a great ideological leg up for management: “Hey guys, we are actually paying you to play a game. Just take what we offer and shut up.” This is the very incursion that Marvin Miller fought so long, and with complete success. Thanks to his victory, we can now properly separate the modes and, for the first time, treasure both—for Q is no longer oppression, and H can therefore give us unalloyed pleasure.

  In other words, we want a détente for this two-sided Rashomon. We need a sporting equivalent of the Status Quo, the proper noun, not the common phrase. The Status Quo is the agreement signed in 1852 to regulate the unseemly turf wars among various Christian factions within the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, site of Christ’s crucifixion, in Jerusalem. Under this agreement, times for lighting lamps, opening windows, and saying masses are strictly regulated; and territory is subdivided to the inch. The factions do not love one another, but they survive in imposed and separate harmony mingled with tension—and they do supposedly share a common purpose. Let the H-and Q-modes of baseball commentary execute a similar, if unwritten, pact. They share the common goal of bringing the best in baseball to a nation of fans.

  Last year, I participated in a baseball seminar in Philadelphia. I sat on the dais, surrounded by the great pitching heroes of Philadelphia’s only World Series in my lifetime—Robin Roberts (of the 1950 team) and Tug McGraw, who got the last outs in 1980, when the Phillies won their first World Series ever. I felt moved to note this passage of H-mode history in my remarks—from the Phils’ noble failure in my nine-year-old youth, to their success in my maturity. I said that, although the Phils lost all four games to my Yanks in 1950, people forget that all were close (the first three decided by a single run), and that the Series was far more exciting and closely matched than most people remember. I added that although Roberts lost the second game, he had pitched magnificently, losing 2–1 on a homer by my hero Joe DiMaggio in the tenth inning. Roberts stopped me in the middle of my speech and went to the podium. He said: “I want to thank you for remembering that; so few people do. We were good, and it meant so much to us.”

  I looked at Roberts, a former hero now aging, and felt suffused by H-mode warmth. But then I remembered: the same Robin Roberts was the primary agitator, the thorn in the side of management, the campaigner for players’ rights and better contracts, the man who, above all other players, bears responsibility (and honor) for hiring Marvin Miller. Is there a “real” Robin Roberts to stand up? Is the H-mode man who spoke so movingly to me any less genuine than the Q-mode player who brought Marvin Miller into baseball? Let us instead be thankful that personalities and institutions display such interesting variety.

  Sultan of Sentimentality

  Film reviewed:

  The Babe, directed by Arthur Hiller and starring John Goodman as Babe Ruth

  No one, from the most revered statesman to the most feared outlaw, has surpassed Babe Ruth as an American folk hero. Japanese soldiers shouted “To hell with Babe Ruth” as they engaged our men on various Pacific Islands. And an Englishman, forced to respond to an American’s taunt of “Go f——the King” during a barroom argument, could only retaliate, with majestic equality, “Go f——Babe Ruth.” The Babe, to cite a cliché of stunning accuracy in this case, was “larger than life” in all ways—from his physical size, to his appetites (food and women), to his accomplishments (his fifty-four home runs in 1920 exceeded the total of every other team in the league but one).

  First published as “Say It Ain’t So, ‘Babe’: Myth Confronts Reality” in the New York Times, April 26, 1992. Reprinted with permission of the New York Times.

  This irreconcilable combination of myth and humanity makes the life of a legend particularly hard to capture in film or biography. Babe Ruth, once served so badly by William Bendix in a 1948 film that appeared just before his death, has been sorely cheated again, this time by a fine actor who looks the part (John Goodman), but who could not overcome an irredeemable script and concept. (The task is not impossible; Gary Cooper triumphed as Lou Gehrig, in a moving, if somewhat maudlin, performance in The Pride of the Yankees—with Babe Ruth, playing himself in a supporting role, as a fine addition to the cast!)

  The Babe is an unqualified failure because the film chooses to follow the most vulgar, cardboard, clichéd version of myth, and ignores both the richness of humanity and the beauty of legend in its subtler and laudable meaning. I do not complain with the prissy fastidiousness of an academic touting a highfalutin theory about veracity, or of a baseball aficionado taking pious and egotistical delight in uncovering every trivial departure from fact. I accept without question the right, even the necessity, for fictionalization in historical films. (In my own domain, I love Inherit the Wind as drama, even though the script is grossly inaccurate, in a studied and purposeful way, as an account of the Scopes trial.) For example, I don’t mind that The Babe epitomizes Ruth’s relations with his fellow players by pretending that one central friendship, with third-baseman Jumping Joe Dugan, pervaded his entire career, for such focusing makes good drama. (Dugan was not with Ruth during his early days in Boston. They became close when Dugan joined the Yankees in 1922, but Dugan left New York after the 1928 season, and therefore missed the last six years of Ruth’s Yankee career.)

  Rather, The Babe fails because its fabric of inaccuracy exploits a common theme and purpose—one that patronizes us and cheapens its fascinating subject. This man of so many facets becomes a sheet of cardboard, with no richness of texture and therefore no capacity to win our hearts (however much the dripping sentimentality of contrived events might temporarily exercise our tear ducts). His accomplishments became so bizarre that no one with a modicum of knowledge about the game—a category including most Americans—could possibly credit absurdity. Ruth did not hit, for instance, an infield pop so high that he had circled the bases before it landed—a ludicrous claim that must make any fan laugh in derision. He did, however, twice reach third base on towering pops that landed in front of outfielders, just behind the basepaths. What is wrong with the reality in this case?

  Even the accurate bits of this film are usually transposed in time to produce a web of maddening anachronism that fatally dilutes a temporal setting otherwise meticulously constructed. I ended up feeling wrenched from history. Nicknames and identifying features of maturity are attributed to entire careers, and we lose the flow of a lifetime. Ruth is depicted as a home run machine from the start. If we were not shown one quick shot of Ruth on the mound, we would never know that he was exclusively a pitcher during his first four seasons in Boston, with a maximum of four homers in 1915. (Why throw the most truly amazing point about Ruth’s career—that he was the best left-handed pitcher in baseball and would almost surely have made the Hall of Fame as a hurler, even if he had never learned to hit?) Ruth is portrayed as bloated and gargantuan from boyhood, but he was firm and trim during his first two seasons. And his nickname at his Baltimore reform school was not Fatso, but Niggerlips (recording another painful reality of American life, totally bypassed in this film). He did not make his famous comment about earning more than the president—“Why not? I had a better year than he did”—while receiving peanuts during his early Boston career, but rather (if he said it at all) as a well-paid Yankee contrasting himself with an inept Herbert Hoover. Lou Gehrig was not called Iron Horse in his first season, before setting a record for consecutive games that earned him that epithet.

  If the accurate bits have been so falsely arrayed, the film’s fabrications became even more disturbing in their common theme of reducing such a multifaceted life to a single dimension of saccharine sentimentality. The Babe wheels out every Washington’s cherry tree of canonical Ruthian lore, and even manages to embellish the old clichés. Here are just two examples. George Ruth Sr. brings his young son to St. Mary’s Industrial School and abandons him forever. We are told that he never saw his parents again. We are even given the impression that he never left the
school-grounds until his “parole” at age twenty to join the Baltimore Orioles (the locked gate swings open and the Babe stares in amazement at the outside world). In fact, Babe was in and out of the school, spending the intervening time with his parents. His mother died young, but he remained on decent, if strained, terms with his father, a saloonkeeper. George Sr. gave his underage son permission to marry, and then threw a party for the newlyweds in the apartment above the saloon. Ruth used his share of the 1915 World Series money to set up his dad in a new saloon—and he worked behind the bar with his father that winter.

  The Babe’s treatment of legend numero uno is even more shameful and manipulative. In the usual version, he visits a seriously ill (or dying) boy named Johnny Sylvester in the hospital and promises to hit a homer for him the next day (in some versions, he makes Johnny promise to get well in return). In The Babe, poor Johnny is so ill that he cannot talk at all. When Ruth makes his promise, Johnny holds up two fingers—and the Babe delivers with a second homer in his last at-bat. In the standard biography of Ruth’s life, Robert Creamer states that the real Johnny was badly hurt in a fall from a horse. A family friend got Ruth to autograph a ball and delivered it to Johnny along with Ruth’s promise to hit a home run in the 1926 World Series. Ruth hit four homers in the series and did pay Johnny a visit afterward. The following spring, Johnny’s uncle approached Ruth to thank him. Ruth, whose inability to remember names was truly legendary, replied “Glad to do it. How is Johnny?” When the uncle left, Ruth turned to his cronies and said, “Now who the fuck is Johnny Sylvester?”