Author: fartheroffthewall

“Walter Alston: The Rise of a Manager from
the Minors to the Baseball Hall of Fame”

The author:
Alan H. Levy

The publishing info:
McFarland
216 pages
$35
Released Feb. 12, 2021

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Powells.com
At Vromans.com
At L.A.’s The Last BookStore
At PagesABookstore.com
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Indiebound.org
At Bookshop.org

The review in 90 feet or less

In Tom Callahan’s glorious 2020 book, “Gods at Play: An Eyewitness Account of Great Moments” (W. W. Norton & Company, 304 pages, $26.95,” landing just before the 2002 MLB regular season finished), the sportswriter gracefully reflects on many of his experiences tied to baseball’s greatest moments and people.

Like a visit with Walter Alston.

The “famously colorless manager” of the Dodgers, as Callahan starts, “screeched up on a deafening motorcycle, handed me a stuffed pheasant fresh from the taxidermist, and said, ‘Hold onto this will you?’ … ‘Hop on.’ And we zoomed away.”

Alston was going to pull a prank on a friend – he would put this upholstered bird on a branch way up in a tree, coax a pal to blast it with his shotgun, and everyone would have a great laugh when it exploded. Weeb Eubank, best known as the coach of the New York Jets’ 1969 championship coach and a fellow graduate of the University of Miami at Ohio, was Alston’s accomplice.

How’s that for Midwest side-splitting humor?

When the writer and manager had time to talk, Alston told him: “Baseball is as simple or as complicated as you want it to be … Did you ever play catch with your father?”

“I did,” Callahan answers.

“When fathers and sons stop playing catch, baseball will no longer be our national pastime,” Alston replies.

Think about that.

As the conversation continues, it reminded us not so much about how Walter Emmons Alston of Venice, Ohio became the Dodgers’ Hall of Fame-certified manager starting at age 42 in 1954 and lasting through age 64 in 1976 – 2,040 wins in 23 seasons, a .558 winning percentage (third best of those with 2,000 wins), four World Series titles (’55, ’59, ’63 and ’65) and seven NL pennants.

He did all that on top of having just one official tantalizing MLB at-bat etched onto his permanent record.

This Moonlight Graham moment was a late 1936 September call-up with the St. Louis Cardinals, in the last few innings of the last game of the season. One at bat. A box score and summary exists.

He would spend 13 seasons in the Cardinals’ farm system, but for this moment, a 24-year-old Alston was a big boy, rushed into the game as a defensive replacement for future Hall of Famer Johnny Mize at first base in the eighth inning. That could have been it. But when Mize’s place in the lineup came around — two outs in the bottom of the ninth, tying run on — Mighty Alston struck out against the Cubs’ Lon Warneke, “The Arkansas Hummingbird.”

As Callahan recounts, it allowed Alston’s dad, Emmons, to eventually tell him: “You were a major leaguer, Walter. You are a major leaguer. And I’m proud of you.”

Stories like this bring us back to baseball. Books like this one by Levy, a professor of American history at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania, give us more excavation opportunities to learn more about those in the game we thought we already knew plenty.

In our collection of more than 200 Dodger-related books and bios, two autobiographies of Alston exist. One that he did with Jack Tobin just before his final season of 1976, “A Year At A Time,” was a reference to having a series of one-year contracts with Dodgers management. Ten years earlier, Alston did a book for Doubleday called “Alston and His Dodgers” with Si Burick.

“The Bona Fide Legend of Cool Papa Bell:
Speed, Grace and the Negro Leagues”

The author:
Lonnie Wheeler

The publishing info:
Abrams Press
352 pages
$28
Released Feb. 9, 2021

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Powells.com
At Vromans.com
At The Last BookStore in LA.com
At PagesABookstore.com
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Target.com
At Indiebound.org
At Bookshop.org

The review in 90 feet or less

In documenting any parts of the incredible Negro League baseball history, when an author can’t differentiate fiction from fact, and the pursuit of a true and accurate biography becomes one more hand-woven by legend and other indisputable yarns, perhaps there’s frustration in the process for the researcher and the reader.

Or, it’s one very cool, dog-gone delightful journey.

Lonnie Wheeler, who ends up finishing his time on the planet with this project, leaves us with a perpetual smile and pure enjoyment in not just finding out more about Baseball Hall of Famer James Thomas “Cool Papa” Bell — for all that was wrong about why the Negro Leagues existed, Bell was one of many unable to ushered into the more wide-spread “Big League” movement — there is a way that skillful prose and the turn of a simple sentence in what might otherwise be a difficult double play makes the experience far more appreciated.

And Wheeler admits for many years, he struggled to find a way to do this. More on that soon.

But for starters, how cool is this: You may know that line Satchel Paige told about how Bell was “so fast that when he goes to bed, he can turn out the light and be under the covers before it’s dark” … it has its roots in L.A.

Saunter over to Chapter 13, page 143. There’s another dose about the value of the California Winter League and its impact on interracial baseball in the early part of the 20^th Century (which we previously learned from William F. McNeil’s incredible 2008 book, also by McFarland). As Wheeler amplifies, this was an annual respite where black players could come to L.A. as “a place to regroup and thrash some white teams.”

Los Angeles had its own All-Black White Sox Park in Boyle Heights (not so much in South L.A. as is recorded here) for the start of it in the 1920s, but then games moved to the Pacific Coast League’s far more credible Wrigley Field (future home for the inaugural years of the 1961 Los Angeles Angels). Accounts of these lucrative out-of-season contests between the White and Black All Stars of their day were endorsed by “the Los Angeles press …(that) took the maverick attitude that good baseball is good baseball.”

Wheeler decides the genesis of the Paige-Bell yarn “almost certainly derives from the 1934-35 Winter League season” as Paige and Bell, as roommates in a hotel or boarding house that had some funky fluorescent lighting. Bell recalls it as an opportunity to dupe Paige – and even take some money from him. Bell realized that when he hit the off switch, as the lights took a few seconds to flicker off, he says it was “the only time I ever saw Satchel speechless. Anyway he’s been tellin’ the truth all these years,” as Bell recounts in a 1981 Negro League reunion, documented in a St. Louis magazine, and given new examination here.

“Singled Out: The True Story of Glenn Burke:
The first Openly Gay MLB Player and Inventor of the High Five”

The author:
Andrew Maraniss

The publishing info:
Penguin/Random House/
Philomel Books
320 pages
$18.99
Released March 2, 2021

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At the author’s website
At Powells.com
At Vromans.com
At The Last Book Store in LA
At PagesABookstore.com
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Indiebound.org
At Bookshop.org

The review in 90 feet or less

Glenn Burke, through the unassuming prism of a Young Adult story-telling format, can become living history for adults who might have been too young to know what was really going on when they once were aware of his existence.

Consider being of the age where you actually saw and experienced Burke play Major League Baseball. You had some of his Topps cards. Watched him run or throw or chase down a ball in the Dodger Stadium setting. Thought it was curious how he made it onto the Dodgers’ star-studded 1977 World Series roster and then ended up in the starting lineup.

In the grand scheme of the Dodgers’ mid-to-late ’70s NL dominance, Burke’s trade to Oakland actually made sense when presented to the public through the team’s publicity department, no matter that teammates were telling the newspaper reporters that something wasn’t right. We captured this from a distance, going through our own high school experience, paying attention but unaware.

Dance forward a few years. As we’re in college processing the art and craft of journalism, there’s the salacious teaser on the October 1982 issue of Inside Sports that read: “The Dodger Who Was Gay.” Is this what they do to sell magazines? If this was so groundbreaking, why wasn’t he named, or his photo on the cover? Was it just something far more curious, and far less serious?

When that issue landed, there was a subsequent media-made coming-out party. A somewhat less-than-revealing Burke sit-down interview with Bryant Gumbel on NBC’s “Today” show (which apparently made Gumbel nervous, we now read). There was also an L.A. Times piece Randy Harvey did on Burke headlined “Tired of Torment, Burke Searches for Inner Peace.”

Burke was outspoken during his career, but never revealed the fact he was a homosexual, the story explained. Within the context of our life and times, it still wasn’t registering an awful lot of anything mainstream.

But in the last 10 years, things changed. Evolved is a better word. Better understood is more spot on.

In 2014, Major League Baseball used its July All-Star Game as a time to recognize Burke as a “gay pioneer” and launched its own department of inclusion, eventually headed up by another former Dodgers outfielder, Billy Bean. To frame the event, a New York Times piece by John Branch headlined “Posthumous Recognition” helped explain things better. Aside from that, an ESPN “30 For 30 Short” 10-minute piece, “The High Five” directed by Michael Jacobs, was another entry point.

A year later, Penguin Books discovered the 1995 self-published book by Erik Sherman that captured Burke in his final days, “Out at Home: The True Story of Glenn Burke, Baseball’s First Openly Gay Player,” and it saw a new cycle of attention. And what ever happened to the plan right about then for Jamie Lee Curtis to produce a biopix on Burke’s life?

Last year, a YA novel called “A High Five For Glenn Burke” crossed our radar for a review, taking a story we were familiar with but turned it into a narrative from a kid who was questioning his own true self in the setting of his Little League team.

Check out the cover of The New Yorker magazine in 1929. Back then, the future of baseball looked pretty … well … futuristic … as now held up for consideration by baseball’s esteemed historian:

We’ve got some 20-20 hindsight, and nearly a century of perspective: Did 2020 mesh tradition with the future, try new things out of necessity that will stay around, provide a new prism for us to process baseball in light of fandom, boredom, distractions, in what we could control and what we couldn’t?

Or was that whole wild, wackadoo COVID-19 experience just a weird dream based on the virus messing with our circadian rhythms?

Bill James uses his newest edition of the 2021 Handbook — does the cover suggest this will now cost us $340 million in payments stretching 14 years? — that his eperience, printed last November and going to press before the World Series even ended, wasn’t all that nutty:

Despite all of the troubles of the 2020 season, I really enjoyed the season. I don’t mean that I enjoyed it more than a normal season; obviously when this is in the rear-view mirror, not many people are going to look back over the seasons and pick this one as a particularly good season. But I thought they made the best of it.

It was kind of a free play. In football, when the defense jumps off side, the offense has a free play, so the quarterback usually throws a deep pass, because you don’t have to worry about the interception, and, if it happens to click, so much the better.

The powers that be treated 2020 like a free play. OK, this season is a mess; let’s go deep and see what we can make happen. Let’s throw everything against the wall and see what sticks.

And it worked, or at least it did for me. I didn’t like ALL of the innovations, but I didn’t hate any of them as much as I thought I would.

It seemed to me that a lot my fellow sportswriters were just absurdly negative about the season. A lot of writers were convinced that there was no way baseball could get through this season, with the constant high risk of Covid-19 outbreaks. Well, that’s OK; people are entitled to their own opinions, but writers continued to write that and say that even after it was really obvious that they were going to make the season work.

I felt that a lot of writers were rooting for baseball’s effort to stage a baseball season to fail. In the end, every game except two was played—two of the revised, 60-game effort. Good for the commissioner, and good for the players, for making it work despite the nattering nabobs of negativism. And I enjoyed the show.”

During the entire experience, we never rooted for failure. Just prayed, for common sense and safety and a little consideration of how others felt. More than 500,000 deaths later, those baseball fans aren’t coming back. That’s a sliver of the tragedy we can’t overlook.That number is a filled Dodger Stadium times 10. And many of the victims are in about a 10-mile radius of the stadium in areas of the city that were badly affected.

We sensed a lot of things that had to go correctly for any sort of success to be proclaimed. Still, that unsettling sight of Justin Turner sitting in a Dodger team championship photo without a mask not long after he was pulled from the deciding game because of a positive COVID test may sum up our anxiety in one vision.

Later in the James Handbook, Mark Simon tried to wrestle with how to process the most significant MLB rule changes — the universal DH, three-batter minimum for relievers, roster expansion, seven-inning doubleheader games, the extra-inning runner on second base – and came to the conclusion that how fans view all of that “may turn out to be what matters most.”

Simon also tried to conjugate the 2020 season in a chapter called “Major League Weirdness” that processed the “the good, the bad, and the weird. A 60-game season produces a lot of good numbers and a lot of bad numbers. But it also produces a lot of weirdness …  (and) this will appear on their permanent records.”

And in our permanent memories.

“The weirdest stat of all is going to be when we look back at 2020 and see a 0 for regular season attendance,” Simon adds. “Weird. And Sad.”