Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

by Stephen Jay Gould

  The voluminous commentary on baseball’s last pennant races has not generally linked our loss to this key issue of regionalism and its virtues; yet, surely, the wider significance lies squarely in this vital debate. I cannot think of a more important or more pervasive example of precious and legitimate regionalism than the traditional structure of baseball’s regular season. No one is excluded; everyone has a regional team, now that baseball has expanded throughout the nation and into Canada. The traditional system works; nothing is broken. The local rivalries animate schoolyards, living rooms, and bars; teams—especially the older ones—define a major part of the soul and substance of cities and regions. Why would we surrender something so valuable?

  The regular season represents regionalism; postseason play is national. The traditional balance has been just right—a long time of local sharing, followed by a short and intense national contest. Why are we about to downgrade the regional part (while perversely retaining its admirable length after eviscerating the meaning)? I want to travel on the subway to Fenway Park, argue and kibitz with my seatmates Jay, Jenny, and Jeff, follow games in the morning paper; I don’t want to spend a month in front of my TV screen watching round after round of eliminations in an ascending series labeled like laundry soap. The elimination of a meaningful pennant after a 162-game struggle, and the addition of a new round of playoffs, is like installing a Pizza Hut in my corner grocery store—and I resent it.

  2.

  Arguments about historical loss suffer a grave difficulty in any attempt to persuade. How can anyone know what they haven’t experienced? Why should younger fans feel an attraction for something they cannot know, especially when most social trends threaten regionalism and boost commercial standardization? Our hope can only lie in testimony from people who have experienced the pleasures of regionalism as fans and players. We can identify a key time and place for the best of a better way (though I will admit to a certain unfairness for the rest of the nation)—New York baseball during the late forties and fifties, when my native city boasted three of the greatest teams that ever played our game, a unique confluence that continues to produce a substantial literature of remarkable quality and variety. I dedicate this year’s review to the best years of New York baseball—a symbol for a preservationist battle no less important than any fight ever made to save a building. New York lost its soul when the Dodgers and Giants moved, and when Pennsylvania Station died in wreckers’ rubble.

  Wilfrid Sheed, in his introduction to My Life as a Fan, recounts an intellectual’s lament about time spent on sports:

  So there they sat for years, the hours spent mulling and brooding, living and dying over various sports, adding up to a monument the size of a small city to wasted time and attention. Other writers might have gold deposits stashed all around their backyards, but I just had this heap of slag…. Yet from time to time I would gaze wistfully at my slag heap twinkling in the sun and ask myself whether it might not be worth at least something?

  I am delighted that Sheed, a marvelous writer well known to readers of this publication, has decided to join passion with profession—for I regard his book as the best testimony to baseball’s hold upon us, and to its frequent (if threatened) internal beauty, since Roger Angell started writing his incomparable prose.

  Sheed entered the world of baseball as a double outsider in childhood—first as a foreigner with Australian and British roots, and second as a proto-intellectual who discovered (as I did) that sports knowledge gives you a niche (marginal perhaps, but still a niche) in boy culture:

  He has a place in the gang, though a humble one like a court jester’s. “Ask Sheed—he knows everything.” You have to be a little weird to know all that stuff, and weird can never be the best thing to be, but you’re all right, you’ve turned your powers to benign, good-guy purposes. “What do you do, sit up all night and study that stuff?” There is no right answer to this, but you’re probably better off with “Yes.” It’s better to be a crank than a genius. Otherwise you can try “It’s just a knack,” and try to make up for it with dreadful schoolwork.

  Sheed came to Philadelphia in 1940, as a nine-year-old refugee from the Blitz of London. His memories are therefore ten years older than mine, and begin with the bittersweet experience of rooting for a truly terrible local team (the old Philadelphia Athletics). But Sheed soon traded up: “Thank God I had balanced my portfolio with the Brooklyn Dodgers.” He therefore knew, as a young man, the joys of New York baseball at its best, including the transcendent moment for his guys (not for mine), when the Bums beat the Yanks for their only World Series victory in 1955, and he (but not I) experienced “the unholy glee that exploded in a million bars and living rooms and offices and came pouring into the streets of Brooklyn on a wave of pure happiness.”

  Personal testimony provides us with the best way to convey the appeal and value of regional, regular season sport; and Sheed’s memories are more telling than most because of his good writing and gentle humor. Consider this description of his first major league game, at the old bandbox of Shibe Park, Philadelphia:

  The first game still sits there shining…. Aging commuters will remember how the sight of that park brightened the approach to North Philadelphia station. You had only to hop off the train and be in Wonderland (I hopped off myself one day and landed on my nose—you did have to wait until the train stopped). Anyway, it was love at first sight, a love embracing even the light towers and the back of the grandstand. This was going to be a good place. Yes indeed.

  Or this anecdote, about Father Felix, one of Sheed’s teachers at his Catholic school, and an avid racing fan:

  Clerical sports nuts were as common as daisies in the old American church. So Father Felix was probably not the only priest to start pawing the ground come spring and flaring his nostrils…. He would repair [to the track at Monmouth Park, New Jersey] in black pants and a green school windbreaker and bet such dribs and drabs of money as the vow of poverty allowed him. But one day, before he could slide into the men’s room to change into his thread-bare disguise, an attendant accosted him in a scary voice with the words “Don’t you go in there, Father!” “Why not? What’s going on in there?” piped Felix, as a good straight man should, and the attendant wound up and unloaded his high hard one on him. “I seen a lot of priests go in there, Father, and I never seen one come out.”

  Newspapers and radio supplied the continuity for daily play during the great years of New York baseball. Today, most announcers are interchangeable—little personality and less opinion (though with copious facts dredged from computers about such meaningless arcana as the number of doubles Mr. X hit to the opposite field off Mr. Y in night games at Field Z during 1992). But announcers, particularly on radio where more color and information must be supplied, were once as distinctive and as regionally differentiated as the teams they represented.

  New York was fortunate to have two of the greatest announcers, both southerners with deeply distinctive accents, during the glory years—Mel Allen (from Alabama) with my Yankees, and Red Barber (from Mississippi) with the enemy Dodgers. They differed so sharply, and came to define their teams so intently, that when the Bums fired Barber and the Yankees promptly grabbed him, I just couldn’t adjust. Barber announcing for the Yanks sounded like Tokyo Rose singing “God Bless America.”

  Think of any great rivalry between wonderful talents who basically appreciate and admire each other—Pavarotti and Domingo, DiMaggio and Williams. Allen’s style was pure corn. He rooted with gusto. (Who can forget his home run mantra of “going…going…gone”?) He touted his advertisers at any opportunity—home runs were “Ballantine blasts,” and near misses were “foul by a bottle of Ballantine beer.”

  Barber, by contrast, was as cool and even as could be: when Bobby Thomson hit his immortal home run to wrest the flag from the Dodgers in 1951, Barber just stated the fact and then let crowd noises fill the air for a full minute—while Giants announcer Russ Hodges babbled with incoherent joy and, in Barber’s
opinion, totally unprofessional favoritism. He had more useful information in his head than any modern computer and he made the right connections. He may have spoken without overt passion, but he was a master of words and their uses (including impeccable grammar), and his down-home sayings and phrases illuminated the airways. A wet ball that eluded an infielder was “slicker than oiled okra.” As the Dodger starting pitcher began to falter one day, Barber announced: “There’s no action in the Dodger bullpen yet, but they’re beginning to wiggle their toes a little.” I loved both men.

  The very best professionals have such love for their work, and such dedication to their calling, that they cannot stop while life and opportunity remain. Much as I admired Mel Allen and Red Barber in their spring and summer, I think that I appreciate them all the more for their work during their eighties, the winter of their lives. Mel Allen now announces for the major league’s official television journal This Week in Baseball—and how I still look forward to hearing his animated voice. Red Barber died in October 1992, after twelve years as the star of the most popular program ever to run on National Public Radio—his four-minute weekly chat on Friday morning with Bob Edwards (“Colonel Bob” to Red after Barber learned that Edwards, who comes from Kentucky, had officially received this title, one readily conferred upon natives of the state).

  Red treated Bob like a son. They talked about flowers, cats, and the weather in Tallahassee, where Red had retired. They usually (but not always) got around to sports. Red charmed millions of listeners with his courtliness, his civility, his urbanity, his professionalism, his stubbornness in conducting each conversation on his own terms, and his immense knowledge. I admired all these traits, but I listened because I so loved to hear that wonderful voice from my youth. I will also confess to an experience worthy of the old cartoon series, “The Thrill That Comes Once in a Lifetime.” Red spent one of his broadcasts correcting me for misidentifying the last pitch of Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series (I had called it low and outside, but the pitch was high). What a pinnacle: to be corrected by the Old Redhead!—like learning that God himself, or at least the chief rabbi of all history, deems your work worthy of improvement!

  Of course Fridays with Red is a good book; nothing filled with long excerpts from Red Barber could possibly be bad. But Colonel Bob could have done so much better. He has composed the equivalent of a testimonial or long promotional pamphlet, when be could have written a book about that most elusive, precious kind of relationship, a genuine friendship between men. On the air, Edwards was unassuming, letting Red talk and gently nudging him from topic to topic, and this book contains long and enjoyable extracts from their programs. But I guess the Colonel has been saving his own words for years, and his book contains many editorial statements at too great a length. Moreover, Edwards disrupts his book with long lists of quotations from others, including page after page of eulogistic letters received after Red’s death, with testimonials to Red’s excellence and his own. Red Barber, a man of consummate form and timing, would surely have cut these lines.

  Roger Kahn calls the great era of New York baseball “the most important and the most exciting years in the history of sport.” As a sportswriter for the Herald Tribune, Kahn covered all three teams during these years; he described more than 750 daily and postseason games, and knew all the players. Kahn has also written many fine baseball books, including The Boys of Summer, his affectionate and incisive portrait of the men who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, considered by many as the finest baseball book ever written.

  Kahn’s new book—The Era: 1947–1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World—wisely violates the conventions of sports writing: the accounts of one game after another interspersed with anecdotes about extracurricular adventures in bars and hotel rooms. Instead, drawing on the technique of the best of TV soaps (and I do not say this at all disparagingly, but in praise), Kahn ties together the three basic stories for the three teams, while also including several interesting subplots and tales about particular players and managers.

  Some features of the book seem overly idiosyncratic. Kahn spends a bit too much time on relatively trivial events that happened to involve him. He has also given the book a most curious (and regrettable) imbalance by writing at length about the admittedly thrilling beginning of “The Era” and then hurrying through the equally exciting end. He devotes, for example, a full thirty pages to the marvelous 1947 World Series, describing every game in detail, and for once in the conventional narrative mode (so discordant from the rest of the book that I wonder if this account was left over from an earlier work).

  But he then compresses into the same number of pages all the dramatic events of 1954 through 1957: the Giants’ sweep of the 1954 World Series from the Cleveland Indians, the best team in the history of modern baseball (including Willie Mays’s legendary catch off Vic Wertz, and alcoholic utility outfielder Dusty Rhodes’s great moment of batting glory); the one and only victory of the Dodgers in the 1955 World Series (how could Kahn, of all people, downplay this singular triumph over the hated Yankees?); Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series; and the beginning of the California diaspora.

  Kahn argues that the earlier years were more dramatic and important, but I suspect that he just ran out of gas. I, for one, would have read one hundred more pages with delight (and the book would only then have reached the length of The Boys of Summer)—for Kahn is the best baseball writer in the business, and shouldn’t scrimp.

  New York baseball was a marvel during the days of The Era. Ten of eleven seasons featured at least one New York team in the World Series. Seven World Series were “subway” contests between two New York teams (’47, ’49, ’52, ’53, ’55, and ’56 with Yanks vs. Dodgers, and ’51 with Yanks vs. Giants), while one of ours beat an infidel in two others (Yanks over Phils in ’50, and Giants over Indians in ’54). But the wider appeal of New York baseball lay in the incidents and stories involving the remarkable men who illuminated our athletic stage during The Era.

  I didn’t know, for example, that Babe Pinelli umpired at second base in the fourth game of the 1947 World Series. With Yankee Bill Bevens pitching a no-hitter with two outs in the ninth, Pinelli called Dodger Al Gionfriddo safe at second in an attempted steal. Had Pinelli called Gionfriddo out—and Rizzuto, who made the tag, swears to this day that Pinelli was wrong—Bevens would have won his no-hitter. Instead, Cookie Lavagetto doubled to ruin Bevens’s achievement and, almost cruelly, to win the game as well, as two runners, whom Bevens had walked, scored on the hit. Why concentrate upon this incident? Because the same Babe Pinelli, umpiring his last game before his retirement, stood behind the plate when Don Larsen pitched his perfect game in the 1956 World Series—and Pinelli made a controversial final call by declaring Dale Mitchell out on strikes on a pitch that was clearly high and outside (the one that prompted Red Barber’s correction of my error). Was he atoning for a previous miscall?

  Kahn writes best about the ruthless, colorful, crude, imperious, and sometimes principled men who played and ruled New York ball during The Era. What crazy confluence could have brought such people as Walter O’Malley, Casey Stengel, and Leo Durocher together, even in so vast a city? The Dodger boss O’Malley never let a fact stand in the way of a tale and moved the Dodgers to California despite continuing enormous profits in Brooklyn. Kahn tells the story of two prominent sportswriters who challenged each other (one night in a bar, of course) to write down the names of the three worst human beings. Each wrote in secret and produced the same list: Hitler, Stalin, and O’Malley. (Just about right, in my opinion.) Dodger fan Wilfrid Sheed agrees as well, for he brands O’Malley as “this monstrous figure, this walking cartoon. He is the villainous Walter O’Malley, against whom this book is dedicated.”

  Casey Stengel, who managed the Yanks to a record five World Series victories in a row (’49–’53), sometimes acted like a clown and spoke in syntax so fractured that his style gave the language a new term—Ste
ngelese.1 But Stengel only used these mannerisms as a conscious device to lower an enemy’s guard, for he was brilliant and ruthless, a complex man capable of both real tenderness and cutting cruelty. When the Yanks beat the Phils 2–1 in the tenth inning of game two in the 1950 World Series, he remarked: “Yes sir, them Philadelphias is a very fine team, make no mistake. It is difficult to beat them, which is why it took us an extra inning today.” When the Yanks won 3–2 with two out in the ninth inning of game three, he said: “The Philadelphias are very difficult to beat, as I have told you. Why today, as you gentlemen saw, my fine team was unable to beat them again until the very last inning we were permitted to play.” When he took out rookie Whitey Ford for veteran Allie Reynolds to sew up the last game in the final inning, Stengel said: “I’m sorry I had to take the young man out, but as I have been telling you, the Philadelphias is hard to defeat, and I am paid by my employers to defeat them, which is why I went for the feller with the big fastball. Have a nice winter.” Sounds aimless, but edit the relative clauses, introduce some agreement, and you have ordinary English. And look what Casey accomplished: he had swept the opposition in four games, but praised them generously, placated a wounded young pitcher, and tempered a rout with comic relief.

  Stengel always knew what he was doing. After losing the 1957 World Series to Milwaukee, and wishing to frustrate a young TV reporter who had asked the uncharitable question “Did your team choke up out there?” Stengel just said “Do you choke up on your fucking microphone?” and then clawed at his rear end. He later said to Roger Kahn: “You see, you gotta stop them terrible questions. When I said ‘fuck’ I ruined his audio. When I scratched my ass, I ruined his video, if you get my drift.” He could also be cruel. When Jackie Robinson criticized the Yanks for not hiring black players, and then struck out three times in a Series game against Allie Reynolds, a Native American Yankee pitcher, Stengel remarked: “Before he tells us we gotta hire a jig, he oughta learn how to hit an Indian.”