While I’m certainly not the baseball fan I was when I was a kid,
I did catch a few innings of a Colorado Rockies (the team that
competes with the Seattle Mariners for Idaho’s major league
allegiance) game on TV at a friend’s house the other night. I
realize that most major league players aren’t tainted by the
steroid scandals of the last few years, but to watch a game
nowadays is to view an exhibition of brawn. There are few guys as
skinny as “The Splendid Splinter” Ted Williams stepping up to the
plate. With the annual Major League All Star game coming up, all
this reminds me of another one of those dog-eared paperbacks on
my shelves that I sometimes
write about.
It’s titled The Greatest in Baseball (titles like that
are conspicuously absent in our contemporary anti-hero culture),
and its author is Mac Davis, an old-school sportswriter who’s
meager trail on Google leaves me perplexed as to whether he’s
even alive. The book was published in 1962, and I got it through
the “Scholastic Book Services” club in my Catholic grade school
in 1967 at its third printing.
The Greatest in Baseball weighs in at a scant 96 pages,
and is a thumbnail sketch collection (complete with black and
white photos) of 32 men who, as of 1962, had either been elected
to the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York (Babe Ruth,
Lou Gehrig, Ty Cobb, et al.) or were likely to be after
retirement and the five-year waiting period had elapsed (Ted
Williams, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Willie Mays, et al.). It
seems that because of editorial restrictions, Mr. Davis omitted
dozens of great Hall of Famers. In the Introduction he writes:
“Perhaps not all of the players I have chosen will stand
unchallenged as the greatest of all time. But for today, at
least, they are as great as any others who ever played the game.”
As I read through the book I come across all those great
statistics (baseball may be the only human endeavor with
statistics actually interesting). Numbers that a kid in 1962
would have believed were etched in stone. Though 47 years show
several hallowed records broken (Ruth’s 714 home runs; Cobb’s
4,191 hits; Gehrig’s 2,130 consecutive games), while others
remain untouched, if not untouchable (Cy Young’s 511 pitching
victories; Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak; Rogers
Hornsby’s .424 single season batting average).
A look at the photographs of some of the authors of those amazing
numbers show guys that, well, probably didn’t have personal
trainers. George Sisler and Walter Johnson look scrawny in
oversized uniforms that must have flapped in the breeze. Eddie
Collins weighed 150 pounds. James “Rabbit” Maranville at
5’5” was the size of a modern junior high school athlete. Babe
Ruth’s picture is out of context in that it was taken at Yankee
Stadium on a day designated in his honor not long before his
death in 1948. He walks toward the camera grinning and swinging a
bat, but those Yankee pinstripes hang on his cancer-ridden body
like a scarecrow. Two decades earlier in his prime Ruth certainly
filled out his uniform, as old newsreels show the high-living,
pot-bellied home run king trotting around the bases on stick-like
legs.
Some photos display a grinning American optimism sorely lacking
today. Lou Gehrig actually looks like Gary Cooper, who handsomely
and tragically played him in the film biography, The Pride of
the Yankees. “The Yankee Clipper” Joe DiMaggio confidently
swings the bat as he approaches home plate in what looks like a
rural, spring training setting. Jackie Robinson smilingly does
the same, and looks off intently into the distance as if
wondering what the future significance of his being the first
black man to break into the major leagues will be.
Then there’s the money. We’re all familiar with the astronomical
salaries earned by an Alex Rodriguez or a Derek Jeter. Joe
DiMaggio at the height of his career made $100,000 per year.
Others far less. It was common for off-season major leaguers in
the 1940s-'50s to have second jobs. Their athletic fame made it
possible to be associated with nightclubs, restaurants and car
dealerships, and to spend much time glad-handing customers. I
remember as a kid watching those amusing animated Yoo-Hoo
television commercials, where a cartoon Yogi Berra hawked that
tasty chocolate drink (“Me Hee for Yoo Hoo”). Yogi was not only a
great catcher, but a pioneer in the endorsements game. (He’s one
of Mac Davis’s “greatest” still with us, along with Mays,
Bob Feller. and Stan Musial.)
In his classic New Yorker baseball piece on Ted
Williams’ last at-bat home run at Boston’s Fenway Park, “Hub Fans
Bid Kid Adieu,” the late John Updike tells us that “The Splendid
Splinter” didn’t tip his hat to the crowd, nor come out of the
dugout. This was because “Gods do not answer letters.” It was a
different time. “The Yankee Clipper” used to smoke cigarettes in
the dugout. In his spare time, Willie Mays played stickball with
neighborhood kids on the streets of New York. The Greatest in
Baseball informs us that Williams, Mays, Warren Spahn, and
Bob Feller all served in the U.S. military. Pitcher Feller, when
elected to the Hall of Fame in 1962, was asked by a reporter who
he had to thank for a career that saw 266 victories and 2,581
strikeouts (despite a four-year hiatus for World War ll service).
“My father,” he simply said.
My God, what happened to all those baseball cards?
