The Smartest Book in the World

by Greg Proops

  Going to a ball game was very different in the 1800s. First of all, the smells were pungent and present, sweat from the days with no AC, horse mess, open grills, cigar smoke, spilt beer from the barrels. The sounds were wild vendors hawking nuts and lemonade, marching bands, organized groups of drunken rooters belting parody songs about the players—JFK’s grandfather Honey Fitzgerald was part of them. The teams rode from the hotel to the grounds in an open wagon singing their team anthem. Bystanders threw rocks and coal and every manner of junk at them. They banged on pots and pans and burned effigies of the players outside their hotel rooms at night to hector the players. The parks were not always enclosed, so long balls could roll way into the field. Carriages with gay parties parked in the outfield. People milled everywhere and were not shy about joining the action. Gamblers infested the stands, betting on every pitch. No dugouts for the players, bats lay on the ground near the crummy wooden bench and the water pail. At big games, crowds stood on the field in the outfield. They pushed back when the home team hit one and rushed in when the opposing team hit one. Players spiked each other, spit tobacco juice at the umps, and grabbed at each other’s belts to stop them from running or scoring. Cops wore high hats, ladies carried parasols. From the start, vendors sold sausages, fries, ice cream, beer, and, yes, whiskey in one daring and louche league. Papers and players called fans “kranks” and later “bugs” (as in crazy). Kranks threw glass bottles at each other and the umps and the players. No one wore numbers. All the players were Irish or Dutch, meaning German American. It was loud, violent, drinky, played in the daylight, and brief; most games were under two hours.

  Sensibilities were shockingly different then. Dwarves and hunchbacks were mascots. Black children were on the bench as good-luck charms; the players rubbed their heads before batting. Cross-eyed Women were bad luck, but finding a hairpin a boon. Racist nicknames were hilarious. Teams had to fight to stay at nice hotels, as they were considered like show folk or carnies. Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.

  Early Heroes of The Smartest Book

  In the nineteenth century nicknames were descriptive and flowery. This one is a peach: Bob “Death to Flying Things” Ferguson, who scored the winning run against the Red Stockings that stopped their winning streak. Bob was an honest guy when everyone was crooked even if he had a terrible temper. He also smashed a guy’s arm with a bat while umpiring.

  There were several deaf players in the early game and they were all nicknamed “Dummy.” Meaning the impolitic deaf and dumb. “Dummy” also of course meant stupid. Dummy Hoy played in the bigs for fourteen years after a childhood disease left him deaf. He was highly intelligent and could speak in a squeaky voice. He lived to be ninety-nine years old, and though he was born in the Civil War, he threw out the first pitch at game six of the 1961 World Series. That is continuity in an ever-changing universe. You can look it up.

  Tony Mullane was a good-looking bigoted pitcher from Ireland. His nickname was gloriously “the Apollo of the Box.” He was big with the ladies. He also played on the integrated 1884 Toledo team that featured Moses “Fleet” Walker and his brother Welday Wilberforce Walker. They were the first and last blacks in the majors till Jackie Robinson. Mullane didn’t drink or smoke, but was enthusiastically racist and would not look at Walker’s signals. He said openly that he disliked Negroes and threw whatever he wanted. He became a cop in Chicago. Enchanting character. Now he could run for Congress in North Dakota.

  Pete Browning was a superb hitter for Louisville, and his bat is the first Louisville Slugger. School was an issue for Pete, and his truancy and health problems left him a functional illiterate. He had nasty mastoiditis, which made him deaf and subject to blinding headaches. He drank real hard on and off the pitch and was a notoriously sketchy fielder. Great when sober or not in pain and dastardly when he couldn’t be bothered. Pete won a load of batting titles and would announce himself loudly when debarking from trains as “Pete Browning, the champion of the American Association, the Beer and Whiskey League.” He spoke to his bats and gave them Bible names like Gabriel. He also retired them when he felt they had no more hits in them. You ain’t seen eccentric till you met Mr. Browning. While on a night mission, he saved a child by pulling him out from under a mule-driven streetcar. He joined the outlaw Players League where he played for the beautifully named Cleveland Infants, and defected to the Pittsburgh team when Cleveland folded. That team stole a few players and became known as the Pirates. Browning also consorted with prostitutes so much that in addition to his mighty nicknames the Gladiator and the Louisville Slugger, he was known as “Pietro Redlight District Distillery Interests Browning.” Fans loved him everywhere he played. He was deaf, loud, flamboyant, a great hitter, and drank like the very devil. That, my friend, is colorful. No power shakes or spinning. No Pilates and low-impact sport shoes. No faux sobriety, worrying about drugs, performance enhancing or not. No taking the Lord on board and asking for guidance, just an old-fashioned, painful, furious, and exuberant life lived quickly, painfully, and wildly.

  Was it better then? No way. No antibiotics, no counseling, no pension. On the other hand, he didn’t have to hear Justin Timberlake play on the jumbo screen when he went to bat. And nothing was sponsored by a credit card.

  What They Call Dead Ball

  The most awesome baseball book about the early twentieth century is The Glory of Their Times by humanist and fan Larry Ritter. He crossed the country with a reel-to-reel tape recorder in the early ’60s interviewing ancient players in Laundromats and old folks’ homes and on their porches. Players with romantic monikers like Rube Marquard and Wahoo Crawford reminisce about riding carriages to the park, watching young Babe Ruth prank on the elevator, and playing with maniacs like Ty Cobb and Rube Waddell. It is a world of checkers and blue-plate specials, of nickel haircuts and streetcars pulled by horses. One ball, black from tobacco juice that all the players chewed, was used the whole goddamn game. It became lumpy with hitting and foul with mud and dirt and spit. Hard to see and harder to slug. They only replaced balls when they absolutely had to. That and the peppiness of the pellet are the big differences between before 1920 and after, when Babe Ruth rose like a titan.

  Twentieth-Century Madness

  The noughties and teens were the kooky most. Fans kicked down fences and rushed the field during the World Series. Pitchers pushed through seething crowds, and players ran for their lives after games and used bats to fight their way through the fans. “Bugs” banged on pots and burned players in effigy outside their hotel rooms all night. Today we have metal detectors and worry about terror at sporting events. In the early 1900s, it was still as wild as could be. We are and always were the terror.

  Managers used wind-up toys and puppies to distract the distinctly flaky, if not fully mentally challenged, Rube Waddell while pitching. Rube was a tall, strange left-hander who could throw as hard as anybody. He was a freak even in those crazy days. The Rube ate ice cream by the quart and snorfed beer by the bucket. In the minors he would show up at game time in his street clothes and come through the grandstand taking his shirt off while the crowd went bananas. He would run and put on his uniform and yell, “Let’s get ’em.” He chased fire trucks because he loved to. After striking guys out, he would do backflips off the mound. The fans worshiped him. Managers hated him. He was what they then would call “touched.” Today he would be diagnosed with ADD or maybe autism. He got married a lot and drank so much he was called “the Sousepaw.” He passed away quite young after he caught pneumonia from helping out in a flood but was a singular star. Headstrong and unable to be homogenized.

  Ty Cobb is justly known as a scrappy, violent, and racist baller who regularly slid into guys with sharpened spikes and hit black people whom he perceived as mouthy. His mother killed his domineering father when he was away at his first gig playing minor league ball. This horrible moment did nothing to help his iffy disposition. He carried a gun and fought every other teammate on the Tigers his rookie year. He jumped in
to the stands to beat up a heckler who had no hands and was suspended. Cobb had a sociopathic fear of failure and little regard for other people’s feelings, even those of his wives and children. He drank, cheated, played golf with Henry Ford, and was one financial wizard. He played in Detroit when cars were just getting popular. He rolled with captains of industry and, being from Georgia, he was hip to a new investment called Coca-Cola. He died with millions of dollars and on the sly was supporting other players. His cruelty on and off the field was riveting to the WWI-era crowds. But he was never beloved. There wasn’t much to love. ’Cause he is unsupportable as a human. But he is considered the greatest player for ages. His teammates called him “Peach,” but he wasn’t. Then came the Babe.

  Baseball had its ass saved by Babe Ruth. The 1919 Black Sox betting scandal had bummed out the public. There had always been gamblers around the game and in the stands. Loads of players had cheated or thrown games for money for years. But when big-time gangster Arnold “the Brain” Rothstein was presented the idea by sharpies to pay a whole team to lose, the wheels went spinning off. Rothstein helped modernize organized crime because he was a genius low-life scum and evidently taught Mafia kingpin Lucky Luciano how to dress. To give you an idea how hard Rothstein was, when he was shot down, the cops asked him on his deathbed who did it: “You stick to your line of work, I’ll stick to mine.” The White Sox were wildly talented and grossly underpaid, and they hated the team owner Charles “the Old Roman” Comiskey. Comiskey had been a player and supposedly had invented playing off the bag at first in the prehistoric baseball times. But like all sincere capitalists, he had forgotten all about the players when he got rich.

  The Sox were open to bribery; it was common and, being Chicago, the whole scandal included stolen testimony and a grand jury acquittal of the players. The wealthy white owners hired a commissioner, a showboat judge with white hair and a stern jaw named Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Judge Landis made many famous rulings and was an autocratic scourge from the bench, but his rulings were almost always overturned. The thing was, he looked the part. He was lantern-jawed and gray-haired and spoke with authority. He demanded absolute power from the owners, got it, and threw the players under the bus. Eight players banned for life, including the famous illiterate slugger “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. Ruth had copied Joe’s swing for his awesome power. Jackson was a proper country boy and had played in his socks in a factory game and got the nickname there. His wife read him the papers, and he waited to order at restaurants till he heard what teammates were getting. He was the best player in the league next to Cobb and, lacking Cobb’s negotiating skill, was getting hosed. He was banned by Judge Landis along with seven other guys on his team. The players took the hit for something the owners were surely on to. Notice it was the players who were impugned. The owners owned the players then and provided no health care or pensions. Injury meant career over. Still, it is called the Black Sox Scandal and not the Older, Icky, Rich, Heedless, White Guy Owners Who Consorted with Mobsters and Looked the Other Way and Threw the Players Out and Kept the Money Scandal. Oh, history, you are so fact-based.

  Landis carried on being staunchly against humanity by refusing to let blacks play till he died. He was petitioned by Wendell Smith and Sam Lacy, among other black writers, to break down the color barrier. But like all great racists, he insisted there was no written rule barring them. He finally passed during WWII and, lo and behold, Jackie Robinson was signed the next year.

  The ’20s That Roared

  Babe Ruth started hitting the Big Apple and all those homers right after the Black Sox Scandal. He diverted everyone’s attention away from the crookedness and made the sport fun. The lore of Babe Ruth looms large and has lasted way after his untimely demise. Charismatic and outrageous, he ate hot dogs by the dozen, shamelessly shagged Women, drank quarts of beer, and powdered giant homers. He stands with Muhammad Ali, Billie Jean King, and Pelé as bigger than the sport they played and more important to history than a mere athlete.

  Ruth was lightly brushed by parenting above his dad’s saloon in Baltimore. By six he was on the street, drinking, smoking, throwing rocks at cops, and being a truant punk. His parents were busy and clapped him in St. Mary’s Industrial School where they scarcely visited him. Baby Babe George learned beautiful penmanship and how to sew at the end of a nun’s ruler. The priests saw early that he was a great ballplayer, and Father Mathias took him under his wing and made him a pitcher on the institutional team.

  They played all over Baltimore, and teenage Ruth, now six-foot-one and rock hard, was a high school legend. He was signed by the minor league Baltimore Orioles and made a ward of the team’s owner, Jack Dunn. Ruth was, according to the players, “Dunnie’s Babe.” He had never been out of the confines of the priests and was as raw and rough as they come. He overate because he couldn’t believe the team would feed you. He chased chicks with something close to fervency, he married a Woman and then somehow forgot about her till years later when she died in a fire and it was revealed they were still married. Of course, he was a good Catholic. He was sold to Boston in the majors and, believe it or not, was a star pitcher. He kicked mad arse in a couple of World Series and then the manager had the idea of moving this guy who always swung from the heels to the outfield. The Red Sox owner needed dosh, so they sold him to the Yankees, where he spent the next fifteen years dominating the universe. They built Yankee Stadium for him. They started winning World Series. Ruth ran riot. When he met King George V, he said, “Hiya, King.” He was the center of attention everywhere he went, and he loved being just that. Ruth would yell at parties, “Any girl who doesn’t wanna fuck can leave right now.”

  The Roaring ’20s were his resort. Fancy open-air cars and camel hair topcoats. Constant arguments with the tiny manager Miller Huggins, including hanging him by his heels off the back of a moving train. By thirty he was fat, and the writers thought he was through. But he gave a weepy speech at the sportswriters’ dinner and said he would not let the dirty-faced kids down. He hired a personal trainer and went on a tear and hit all his famous homers, including the called shot, which was the longest boom, hit in Wrigley Field in Chicago. He fought with umpires and raged at fans like King Kong standing on the dugout waving his fist and screaming, “You’re all yellow!” He guzzled soda, puffed cigars, and swilled beer in the morning. Children worshiped Ruth, they knew nothing of his epic whoring and drinking. He truly loved kids and really did hit a home run that he promised a dying boy. This may surprise you, but in those insensitive times, because of his dark complexion and thick lips, people often thought he was black. The opposing players let him know this through a series of horrid racist taunts. He was like Paul Bunyan if you knew who Paul Bunyan was, and he really did live up to the hype. He waved his cap when he ran around the bases, and late in his career he convinced the Yanks to let him pitch a game, which he did and won, going the whole enchilada. Ruth made movies, did every photo op, embodied the party era, and was the perfect counterpoint to the tedium of President Coolidge.

  The Depression

  The fun stopped when the stock market crashed. Attendance dropped, and that forced the owners to do things like play games at night when people could go, an idea they borrowed from the Negro Leagues. The All-Star Game started in 1933, and, yes, Babe Ruth hit the first homer.

  Dizzy Dean was from either Arkansas or Mississippi, depending on whom he was talking to. He was country as corn and had a wild personality. He followed Ruth during the Depression as the funnest player. His brother Daffy, who was decidedly not, also pitched on the Cardinals with him. He promised before the 1934 World Series, “Me ’n Paul will win ’em all.” When they did, he said, “It ain’t braggin’ if you can do it.” Dizzy barnstormed many seasons in those divided times with the most famous black player, Satchel Paige.

  Dean was a superb pitcher and later a great announcer who made baseball popular on the old-fashioned steam-powered TV. He once said while working for CBS network, “There is a much better ga
me, Dodgers and Giants, over on NBC.” You will never find that honesty in today’s game, where every pitch is sponsored and every announcer wrapped in corporate comfort gauze so as not to upset the apple cart.

  Joe DiMaggio is a sexy part of American history. Tall and regal, husband to Marilyn Monroe, darling of New York when, goddammit, it was New York. Winner of nine World Series, three-time MVP, All-Star in every season he played. Mr. Coffee to a later TV generation. He started right after Babe Ruth split and played till Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle took over. He never threw a tantrum or argued or spit on an umpire or took drugs. He kept to himself, and the writers gave him room. He personified the dignity and aloofness of that era. He smoked and drank half cups of coffee and scared pitchers to death. In 1941, he hit in fifty-six games in a row. No one has done it since. In the minors he had hit in sixty-one games in a row. Joe had focus, poise, and grace. He is a great ballplayer, if not very modern, with his detachment and emotional unavailability. But in that, a pride that left people impressed if not in full swooning awe.

  Ted Williams was known by many names. He gave himself the Kid, but writers dubbed him Thumper, the Splendid Splinter, and most best of all, Teddy Fucking Ballgame. He hit a lot and he hit homers. He also flew planes for the Marines. He was handsome and looked cool in vintage sports clothes. He didn’t wear a tie. He was a sexy fighter pilot. He missed parts of five seasons serving in two wars. He was shot down but would not eject for fear of shearing off his knees, so he crash-landed a flaming jet and leapt out cursing and threw his helmet to the ground. He is the last player to have hit .400, a sacred number because, as of this date, no one has done it since. He is the consummate dedicated professional hitter. Ted possessed a frightening recall of all pitchers and a scientific approach to hitting. He was not good at marriage, fatherhood, or relations with the media. The Boston fans loved him, but the country was undecided until years after he retired, when he became beloved. Ted was outspoken and, though having only a sporadic education, highly intelligent. Ted Williams did not get along with the press and, after the first year, the fans. He refused to doff his cap in the time-honored tradition. In his final game some twenty years after his start in Boston, he hit a home run in his last at bat. The crowd cheered for ages. Ted did not appear. The manager sent him out to left field, where he was relieved by a sub, and he trotted off. The fans went crazy. Ted still did not tip his cap. Of this incident John Updike wrote, “Gods do not answer letters.”