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“Baseball: The Turbulent Midcentury Years”

The author:
Steven P. Gietschier

The publishing info:
University of Nebraska Press
624 pages; $44.95
Released July 1, 2023

The links:
The publishers website
At Bookshop.org
At Powells.com
At Vromans.com
At TheLastBookStoreLA
At Skylight Books
At Diesel Books
At {Pages: A Book Store}
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Amazon.com

The review in 90 feet or less

We offer a brief (as brief as we can muster) apology. We acknowledge most of our reviews in this series – not only this year, but in years past – have unraveled.

They can go long. Turbulently long, perhaps.

In our defense, we simply enjoy the reviewing and writing process. As well as the research, memory retrieval, and dot-connecting. But when you see the reviews linked in a social media post, and it says something like “estimated read time: 18 minutes,” who are we fooling?

Perhaps. But here’s our argument: If we feel it’s compelling, interesting and entertaining, the reader, as a partner in this journey, can decide whether to quit or go forward. We have read plenty of long pieces in newspapers, magazines and — yes — baseball books that we stick with because we didn’t expect it to be something we couldn’t put down, or we find it runs out of steam and we’d wish an editor could have worked with the writer to shape it better.

We can’t Bill Simmons ourselves into self-importance. We used him as a reference of someone in the sports journalism world who seemed to make it OK to go beyond the traditional 800-word essay and insert himself far too much into the pounding-out-paragraphs process.

That said, consider this:

For what may end up as the largest book we review this year – in excess of 600 total pages, with about 600 reference books listed in nearly 30 pages of bibliography, along with 40-plus pages of notes – save whatever time you’d spend on our otherwise excessive glowing review and invest it into this epic undertaking.

It ain’t heavy lifting. It’s high heat. It’s history come alive and brilliant. You’ll end up far more educated than you anticipated.

Steve Gietschier, an Ohio State grad with a Masters and Ph.D. in history and once an archival consultant for The Sporting News, comes from a place where he taught American history, sport history and the history and culture of baseball at the liberal arts Lindenwood University in St. Charles, Missouri. He retired, as many did, in 2020. He edited the 2017 book “Replays, Rivalries and Rumbles: The Most Iconic Moments in American Sports,” which, if you ever saw the cover, you’d not forget it.

Here is your chance to audit Gietschier’s master class in what happened to baseball between the Great Depression and its expansion West.

Imagine sitting there among the students, with Gietschier at the lectern, reading aloud the very first line in the introduction: “This book is a scholarly work exploring the history of organized baseball during the middle of the twentieth century.”

Go on …

He credits the past work of Harold and Dorothy Seymour with “Baseball: The Early Years” in 1960 followed by “Baseball: The Golden Age” in 1971 and “Baseball: The People’s Game” in 1990. He acknowledges the massive work also done by his cohorts at the Society of American Baseball Research. He admits he is inspired that “the time has come for a new summing up,” examining the game from the depths of the Great Depression in the 1930s to the migration West at the end of the 1950s and early 1960s.

There are 14 chapters built around a particular figure in baseball that segues into the game’s history at that point. They go as follows:

Chapter 1: Connie Mack / Baseball deals with the Great Depression.

Chapter 2: Branch Rickey / The farm system

Chapter 3: Kenesaw Mountain Landis / Survival of the minor leagues

Chapter 4: Ed Barrow / Building the New York Yankees

Chapter 5: Larry MacPhail / Night baseball arrives

Chapter 6: Hank Greenberg / Ethnicity in baseball, and its thriving on the radio

Chapter 7: Don Barnes / World War II launches

Chapter 8: Yogi Berra / Players in the armed forces return

Chapter 9: Tom Yawkey / Disruptions in the game

Chapter 10: Bill Veeck / The Pacific Coast League rises

Chapter 11: Red Barber / Desegregation

Chapter 12: Ford Frick / Lawsuits and the rise of TV

Chapter 13: Henry Aaron / West Coast relocation

Chapter 14: Bill Shea / The Continental League idea

The 10th and 13th chapters may be most interesting to West Coast folk who’ve read various accounts on why baseball moved this direction, and what impact the PCL had on its decision. The title quote for Chapter 13 — “I have long desired to see California” — comes from Abraham Lincoln five weeks before his assassination. The nuggets of info from Chapter 14, meanwhile, include how Jack Kent Cooke, who’d eventually bring professional hockey to Los Angeles (and buy up the Los Angeles Lakers, the Forum, and the L.A. Daily News), was involved with trying to get Toronto a franchise in the upstart Continental Baseball League that never happened, but forced MLB expansion instead after the Dodgers and Giants fled New York for California.

Here’s the plan: Take each of the 14 chapters as a week’s worth of a semester-long course. There’ll be no quiz at the end. No thesis paper due. The only guarantee is you’ll be smarter.

There is also this disclaimer by Gietschier himself: “To be a baseball fan is, in a certain case, to be a student of baseball history.  … But a historian striving to write with some degree of objectivity must attempt to keep the passion of the fan in check or even dismiss it. My first history professor, Carroll Quigley, told his Georgetown University freshmen that the historian’s job is twofold: To see things as they really were and to see that they could have been different. If this work approaches these two targets, it will have accomplished much.”

It does, and it did.

Just the gratification that you’ve completed one of the most industrious, entertaining and informative pieces of baseball history you’d ever want to ease back into an easy chair and enjoy.

Author Q&A

We were fortunate to connect via email with Steve Gietschier to see if we could extract more context on his project:

Q You write in the introduction that “the time has come for a new summing up” of the Midcentury years of baseball in the 1900s. What inspired you to take on this task?

A I first began thinking about a book like this when I met Dorothy Seymour Mills many years ago. She was the widow of Dr. Harold Seymour, and together they had written a trilogy of works that were general histories of baseball from its origins up until about 1930. I asked Dorothy what she would think if someone picked up the ball where she and her late husband had put it down, and she said that would be a wonderful idea. At the time, I was not thinking that I would write this book, but when I asked many friends in the baseball history community if they wanted to take on this task, they all said no and that I should do it. After talking to the late Dan Ross, then the director of the University of Nebraska Press, I decided to say yes. It was daunting, to say the least.

Continue reading “Day 21 of 2023 baseball books: History, coming in hot & heavy, with a Midcentury modern approach” →

“The Tao of the Backup Catcher:
Playing Baseball for the Love of the Game”

The author:
Tim Brown
with Erik Kratz

The publishing info:
Twelve Books/Hachette
304 pages; $30
To be released July 11, 2023

The links:
The publishers website
The authors website
At Bookshop.org
At Powells.com
At Vromans.com
At TheLastBookStoreLA
At {Pages: A BookStore}
At Target
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Amazon.com

The review in 90 feet or less

At our local favorite literary browsing spot, Dave’s Olde Book Shop in Redondo Beach, we found in the vintage/collectables section something called “Complete Sports” magazine. From July, 1948. Original price: 25 cents.

The cover lures us in to find a “book-length baseball novel” inside called “Hit Away Holler Guy!” by T.W. Ford. The artwork is fabulous from the brown musty pages of newsprint numbered 6 to 42. It becomes a full experiences for all the senses.

The premise, from the table of contents: “The new backstop was a real holler guy – but he would have to be the Angel Gabriel himself before he would wake up those eight dead men on the diamond!”

The magazine cover is all taped together. It is missing not only the back cover, but it ends with a torn page 129.

It is a piece of baseball history, held together by tape and staples and love.

Just like a real catcher could appreciate.

What does this tale published 75 years ago have to do with the essence of catchers having some secret powers? Can they really will people out of their graves back on the diamond? Is this some Field of Nightmares?

The demands on any Major League Baseball backup catcher might feel as if that includes being akin to a grave digger. Who really wants to do it? But, hey, we need it done, and you’re available. Isn’t this a path to dig one’s own hole into oblivion?

(First aside: We remember once finding out on the back of a Topps baseball card that the Pittsburgh Pirates’ Richie Hebner dug graves in the offseason. As a hobby? As we look for that card, check out the West Michigan White Caps minor league team (Hebner played for the Detroit Tigers for three seasons in the 1980s) as it once gave away a Hebner bobblehead about 10 years ago … it looks like this. The story goes that Hebner dug graves as part of his family business for more than 30 years. From his SABR.com bio: “He began earning $35 per grave in the off-season at home in Norwood, Massachusetts, working the nine Jewish cemeteries his father William supervised. Once, his dad criticized him for digging a grave too shallow. Hebner retorted, “I never saw one get up from it.”)

In scout parlance, the backup catcher is referenced as a “C2,” with a small No. 2. Like we’d see in a science class looking at a periodic table of elements.

Erik Kratz is the protagonist in this true-to-life assessment of his career as the “C2” no matter where he went – spending time on 14 MLB franchises during 19 seasons in organized pro baseball.

In every instance, Kratz becomes a vital part of the team’s chemistry and bonds with players, managers and bullpen throwers on a lot of important levels.

These dudes came to tonight's #NLCS game each wearing one of the @MLB jerseys worn by @ErikKratz31.

Of course Kratz showed love. pic.twitter.com/edkou8Irlj

— Cut4 (@Cut4) October 20, 2018

Kratz, who walked away after the 2020 season with the Yankees (his second tour), had one stop with the Angels, but don’t try to remember it – after the Houston Astros released him in May of 2016, the Angels picked him up and stored him away in Triple-A Salt Lake City, for 19 total at bats. Kratz may never know why they did that: To nurture an up-and-coming pitcher, perhaps.

Yes, like Crash Davis.

Because, at the time, the Angels had banked on 33-year-old Geovany Soto, the former Cubs All-Star, as their main catcher, but he only lasted 26 games because of injury. They pulled in 25-year-old Carlos Perez for 87 games, and 26-year-old Jett Bandy for 70 games. Juan Graterol got in for nine games as a backup. But Kratz never got a shot.

These 74-88 Angels needed all the help they could get, if only to warm up another arm. They ended up using 30 pitchers that season, from Al Alburquerque to Tim Lincecum, Jered Weaver to Huston Street and even one game from Andrew Heaney. Tyler Skaggs even threw 10 games.

As it turned out, the Angels became a bridge in Kratz making some odd history that season.

The Angels traded him to Pittsburgh in mid-June, and after a couple days in Triple-A, he came up and did something that no one in the game had since 1879. Topps baseball cards even put out a special limited edition tribute to him.

On June 21, the Pirates had Kratz throw an inning at the end of a blowout loss to save their bullpen against the San Francisco Giants. Kratz ended up with one inning of scoreless relief. He even struck out Brandon Belt on a 52-mph knuckleball.

A few months earlier, the Houston Astros had treated him with the same urgent need. He surrendered two runs and three hits in one inning “of work,” as the cliché goes in the broadcasting booth.

That made Kratz the first player in 140-some years to both pitch and catch for two different teams in the same season.

Cool enough, Kratz would end up as the Milwaukee Brewers’ starting catcher in five of their seven-game NL Championship Series games against the Dodgers in 2018 — and also pitch in three games for the team that season, one inning each. He also made two final appearances for the Yankees, in 2020, at age 40.

His career pitching line: 7 games, 7 innings, 5.14 ERA, 32 batters faced, one walk, three Ks.

The @yankees hat they gave us to wear to commemorate 9/11 is sweet! ⁦@FoulTerritoryTV⁩ #kratzhatz pic.twitter.com/3wDGKpMXdO

— Erik Kratz (@ErikKratz31) June 22, 2023

Through the quick prose quotes of Kratz, channeled through seasoned sportswriter and author Tim Brown, who already has two New York Times’ bestsellers on the market in helping tell the stories of former MLB pitcher Rick Ankiel and Jim Abbott, the story flows from chapter to chapter in a way that’s as much enlightening as it is entertaining. As Brown says in the intro: “They are not merely backup catchers, but front-line people.”

Kratz won’t be known as the guy who had 881 MLB at bats and only had a -0.1 WAR. He’ll now be known as someone who channeled his Souderton Mennonite Church believes into someone who knew what the job entailed, and did it, to support his wife and three kids. It’s where he learned his resilience, team-over-individual mentality, endurance, wisdom, patience, common decency, focus and following his heart.

In a story that ran in the Sporting News in September of 2020, just before he walked away, the reporters noted that Kratz had teared up when talking about how what he’s been as a mentor to Hispanic teammates with the New York Yankees. That’s just the kind of guy he is, and Brown also documents it. Kratz could also likely see the end of his pro career at that moment. It all caught up with him.

Brown manages to includes many recognizable names who’ve spent much of their career in that “C2” role – the Dodgers’ A.J. Ellis and Drew Butera (now an Angels’ bullpen coach), one-time Johnny Bench backup Bill Plummer and what it was like to spend his career behind a Hall of Famer never to get an inning in during all those playoff and championship runs, current Angels manager Phil Nevin (who converted to a backup catcher just to stay in the game at one point), plus Bobby Wilson, Jake Paul and even the poetry of Dodgers’ backup Austin Barnes stuffing the last ball used in the 2020 World Series into his back pocket for safe keeping after Julio Urias’ strike out. Rewards come far and few between, and the back up catcher must seize them when they happen.

There’s also a splendid discussion with former Angels manager Mike Scioscia (at one time, briefly the back up to Steve Yeager with the Dodgers) and the closed-door strategy sessions he put all Angels catchers through with his tutelage that only made them smarter and better at their position.

This books also makes us appreciate more what the Dodgers had for a brief time earlier this season in Austin Wynns.

The 32 year old was needed when Will Smith went out with a concussion. They designated him for assignment on May 1. Wynns got into six games, hit .154 but had an RBI double. The Dodgers were his third team in five seasons, including two stops in Baltimore and one in San Francisco. He has nine minor-league seasons logged already. Expect him to be on speed dial by any MLB team that finds itself up to their hips in alligators some day.

It can’t be an everyone Wynns-win situation for everyone. But it’s a necessary role.

They live the life, as Brown writes in the introduction, “with a grim sense of humor, a prorated paycheck and a handshake for understanding.” They are the “unlicensed therapists and hard-knock lifers whose careers wander off in unexpected directions, just like their fingers.”

“I always joke,” says Chris Gimenez, who had 10 seasons in the big leagues with six teams, “that backup catchers are three-quarters psychologist and one-quarter actual baseball player.”

Maybe someday Wynns gets into the MLB manager ranks, following Nevin, Bruce Bochy, Joe Madden, A.J. Hinch and David Ross. And he can write his own book.

It’s a smart move.

And if you're really, really nice to him he'll read it to you over the phone… We're pretty proud of our ode to Erik and all of those who work at the game and at life. I hope you give it a shot. https://t.co/ZA6VMhDEFl

— Tim Brown (@ByTimBrown) June 4, 2023

Author Q&A

We caught up with an email exchange with author Tim Brown, our former L.A. Daily News colleague who recently moved from many years in Southern California to South Carolina with his wife:

Q When in your sports writing career did you figure out that not only are the best baseball stories found in the corner of the locker room, but that the backup catchers were really the most front-line people?

A I think backup catchers are so good at reading people they recognized right away I was probably in need of some guidance. Major league clubhouses can be difficult, intimidating places, especially if you’re new to the job and aren’t finding a lot of friendly faces. So when somebody takes the time to help you through your dumb questions, educate you on the game, confide in you that he, too, sometimes feels unsure of himself, that resonates.

And, yes, maybe because those guys were in the literal corners of locker rooms, that there would be other players in the figurative corners, where big, strong athletes had all the doubts and vulnerabilities and life traumas of the cab driver who dropped me off in front of the stadium. I did a book with Jim Abbott. When he wasn’t pitching well and was feeling pressure from under performing, he would sit on the team bus, look out the window at the people in their cars and wonder what it would like to have a regular job. In those moments, he’d sometimes wish he were them. And he was a New York Yankee making millions of dollars.

These players, the famous ones whose names you know, they suffer the same insecurities the rest of us are hiding too. Or trying. As I thought about a book that might make the game feel real again, outside the analytical models, statistical tangles and revenue counts that now reach the tens of billions, I kept coming back to the backup catchers. Their honesty about themselves. Their fight to stay with it. The role they play in helping others live with those insecurities and turn them into competitive advantages. Hell, just a guy to share a beer with, who’s been there. Who lives with it every day.

Continue reading “Day 20 of 2023 baseball books: Rye-old catchers, with no real backup plan” →

“Baseball’s Memorable Misses:
An Unabashed Look at the Game’s Craziest Zeroes”

The author:
Dan Schlossberg

The publishing info:
Sports Publishing/Skyhorse
208 pages; $15
Released February, 2023

The links:
The publishers website
The authors website
At Bookshop.org
At Target
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Amazon.com

“The Baseball Maniac’s Almanac:
The Absolutely, Positively and Without Question
Greatest Book of Facts, Figures and
Astonishing Lists Ever Compiled”

The editor:
Bert Randolph Sugar
With Ken Samelson

The publishing info:
Sports Publishing/Skyhorse
480 pages, $19.99
Released April 18, 2023

The links:
The publishers website
At Bookshop.org
At Powells.com
At Vromans.com
At TheLastBookStoreLA
At Skylight Books
At Diesel Books
At Target
At Barnes and Noble.com
At Amazon.com

The review in 90 feet or less

This may be our first baseball book intervention.

When we saw prolific author Dan Schlossberg (with a forward from Doug Lyons) was fleshing out a project of “Famous Zeros” of baseball lore, our attention immediately zeroed into all the opportunities.

The premise is along these lines:

• Nolan Ryan has an MLB record seven no-hitters – in addition to a career-best strikeout total and a Hall of Fame induction. How many Cy Youngs did he win? Zero.

• Roger Clemens has an MLB record seven Cy Young Awards. How many no-hitters did he throw? Zero.

• Kirk Gibson, the 1984 AL MVP and 1988 NL MVP, made how many MLB All-Star teams? Zero.

• How many times did Willie Mays lead the league in RBIs, or Stan Musial lead the league in home runs, despite their prolific career stats in each category? Zero.

• Total World Series appearances for Hall of Famers Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ron Santo, Rod Carew, Andrew Dawson, Phil Niekro, Gaylord Perry, Frank Thomas, Ryne Sandberg, Ralph Kiner, Ken Griffey Jr., Roy Halladay, Ferguson Jenkins, Lee Smith … Nap Lajoie … do we go on? Zero.

It’s all marketed as the “Almost But Not Quite” account of intrigue.

As we plowed through it, we found ourselves jotting notes:

Amount of fun and enjoyment gained past the first few pages: Let’s go with almost zero.

Whatever value and worth this pitch had from author to publisher, it was lacking context. It needed more stories. It needed less a string of zeros that, at some point, zeroed themselves out and were becoming a rounding error.

We came to that conclusion after we hit these shortly into the book:

• 0: Number of Cy Youngs won by Cleveland Indians star pitcher Bob Feller (1936-’41 and ’45-‘56). Because the award wasn’t created until 1957. And then it was just for one pitcher in all of baseball.

• 0: Appearances by Carl Erskine in the Bobby Thomson game.  The explanation: “Normally a starter, Erskine was a prospective ninth-inning reliever before he bounced a curve while warming up in the bullpen – convincing Dodgers manager Charlie Dressen to summon Ralph Branca instead. Thomson’s three-run homer gave the Giants a 5-4 victory and the NL pennant.” Over the Brooklyn Dodgers, we might add. Just for fact’s sake.

• 0: Houston major-league teams before 1962. Because the Houston Colt .45s, a National League expansion team, began play in 1962.

Then this one put us over the edge, at page 11:

• 0: “Runs allowed by Orel Hershiser during record scoreless inning streak. The star right-hander of the Los Angeles Dodgers worked a record 59 consecutive scoreless innings in 1988. Later that year, he was selected Most Valuable Player of both the NL Championship Series and World Series and winner of a World Series ring and both the NL’s Cy Young and Gold Glove awards. Hershiser was a later MVP in an American League Championship Series.” He won that award, for what it’s worth, while with the Cleveland Indians in 1995, just again for fact’s sake, which really isn’t that important to this entry. If you need a real zero for Hershiser, try this one: With a career .201 batting average included a .356 average in 73 at bats (34 games) during the 1993 season (winning a Silver Slugger Award), how many home runs did he hit in 949 plate appearances over 18 years? Zero. But who really cares?

This was the one that had us throw the book across the room, on page 27:

• 0: “Openers for Lou Gehrig after 1939. He started for the Yankees, had no hits and made an error. On July 4 of that year, he told Yankee Stadium fans he was ‘the luckiest man on the face of the earth.’ He died two years later of ALS.’

That’s how you want to remember Lou Gehrig. Attached to a zero?

If this is “unabashed,” you might try bashing it up.

Still, we saw potential in this. Not to do the proverbial reinvention of the wheel, but what might we have done to make this more enjoyable learning and less a list of “Famous Zeroes” that fizzled out?

Especially when it seemed that, after a certain point, it was just twisting semantics to make it fit something that kind of quickly exhausted itself.

One of our favorite ways to kill time and scatter our brains over the years has been “Baseball Maniac’s Almanac,” which, according to the information stored on the inside pages, started in 2005, reloaded in 2010, 2012, 2016, 2019 and now is back – and by Skyhorse Publishing, which owns Sports Publishing. The price has also jumped $3 since it’s last two issues, so there’s value in that.

Why is “Baseball Maniac’s Almanac,” launched by Bert Randolph Sugar, such a non-trivial pursuit and worthy of a sixth edition (with presumably more to come)? As Bob Costas writes in one of his many book blurb activities: “Being a baseball maniac is a condition which cannot be cured – it can only be treated. So take two chapters of Bert Sugar’s book and then call him in the morning.”

That’s a pretty sick review. Considering Sugar died more than a decade ago.

Continue reading “Day 19 of 2023 baseball books: Trying to win a zero-sum game” →

“Making It Home: Life Lessons From
A Season of Little League”

The author:
Teresa Strasser

The publishing info:
Berkley Books/Penguin Random House
352 pages; $18
Released June 6, 2023

The links:
The publishers website
The authors website
At Bookshop.org
At Powells.com
At Vromans.com
At TheLastBookStoreLA
At Skylight Books
At Diesel Books
At Target
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Amazon.com

The review in 90 feet or less

If we can ask without raising any suspicion: What in blue blazes ever happened to Yasiel Puig?

The quick-reference site Baseball-Reference notes that the now-31-year-old right fielder from Cienfuegos, Cuba who defected/was smuggled into the U.S. through Mexico, has no statistical evidence of playing anywhere in 2023.

The Dodgers, who signed him in 2012, saw him finish second in NL Rookie of the year in ’13, make the NL All-Star team in ’14, featured on the cover of “MLB The Show” video game in ’15, appears in the ’17 and ’18 World Series for them, and then … Poof. One can only be so patient. (We had advocated the Dodgers trade Puig to the Marlins for Giancarlo Stanton right around that ’15 season. Straight up. Stanton returns to SoCal, Puig goes to Cuba-adjacent Miami. It was a missed opportunity once Stanton hit 59 homers and drove in 132 runs during his last year with the Marlins, winning the NL MVP, then defecting to the Yankees).

Puig was traded to Cincinnati after ’18, was shipped to Cleveland in a Trevor Bauer deal, fell off the earth, navigated through the Dominican Winter League, the Mexican League and most recently, South Korea’s KBO.

Puig is/was really in a league of his own. And his own undoing. A March, 2022 story in the Korean Herald noted: Though he has gone 1-for-9 with three strikeouts in his first four games prior to Thursday, the Cuban slugger hasn’t seemed fazed by his sluggish performance. Earlier this week, Puig uploaded a video of himself dancing, maskless, in an alley in Itaewon, a popular nightlife district in Seoul, on Instagram. Puig was technically violating South Korea’s mask mandate at the height of the pandemic here. The country reported a record 621,328 COVID-19 cases Thursday morning, with an average of over 380,000 over the past seven days.

If he never plays again, he’ll go out a Hero. As in, his last team was the Kiwoom Heroes, where he hit .277 with 21 homers and 73 RBIs in 126 KBO games. If he’s deemed a villan, it’s because the last we heard from him involved a guilty plea to federal law enforcement regarding bets he placed with an illegal sports betting operation, but then he changed the plea to not guilty because of “significant new evidence.”

As his Wikipedia profile recalls, he was given the nickname “The Wild Horse” by Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully.

We think of him more as “Little League Puig.”

It created a more legitimate visual for us. Because whenever he hit the ball, it seemed he would not stop running until someone tagged him out. And whenever he caught the ball, he knew nothing of what a cut-off man was supposed to do, and overthrew him in an attempt to catch a runner trying to advance.

Sometimes it worked. Often, it didn’t. Live and learn. Like in Little League. Except Puig didn’t seem to do much of the second part.

A Little League Home Run (or LLHR in the scorebook) is something to behold, and Puig occasionally gave us those treats in a big-league uniform. You run and run and run until the defense gives up. It’s the ultimate example of faith that, somehow, you’ll make it home unscathed, and your teammates will celebrate your arrival.

Or, you won’t make it home, and your teammates will groan.

We dare recall a time in July of 2013 when Puig broke up a scoreless game in the bottom of the 11^th inning by hitting the ball over the fence, flipping his bat, and sliding into home plate.

The story the next day in USA Today read: “Yasiel Puig had been relatively quiet since the All-Star break. We say relatively because he was still spectacular in the field and was hitting at an impressive clip, but hadn’t crushed a 600-foot home run while saving a baby from a burning building and simultaneously throwing out Sid Bream in the 1992 NLCS.
“After Sunday, he is quiet no more.”

Here’s the point (finally): When “Little League Puig” took the field, there was as much cringing as there was celebrating life. He didn’t know better. Or did he? It was open for discussion. Often, one couldn’t differentiate if Little Leaguers imitated Puig, or the opposite.

Puig our imitator. 😂 pic.twitter.com/VKcVJK9HFb

— Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians) August 18, 2019

When Teresa Strasser and her father, Nelson, parked their lawn chairs down the first-base line to watch Teresa’s son play (under the managerial guidance of her husband, Daniel), there were cringe moments. But also celebrations of life. It was a reckoning of past ineptness in the parental lessons that were supposed to be passed down to the next generation.

Thanks to the framing of what they watched during the Little League season in Phoenix, the Purple Pinstripes, performing at the Ingleside Middle School diamond, provided the visual setting, but discussions of life and what things from the past meant were far more front and center.

The pace of a baseball game can allow for these meaningful conversations to take place on what can be common ground.

Sometimes books find us for this annual review series in a most delightful round-about sort of way. This is another great example, one best slotted in the biography/memoir category, but as the author points out on her Twitter feed, it’s far more about the intersection of baseball and grief.

Continue reading “Day 18 of 2023 baseball books: Good grief is on a diamond not so rough” →

“Baseball’s Union Association: The Short,
Strange Life of a 19th-Century Major League”

The author:
Justin McKinney

The publishing info:
McFarland
277 pages, $49.95
Released Nov. 11, 2022

The links:
The publishers website
At Bookshop.org
At Vromans.com
At TheLastBookStoreLA
At Skylight Books
At Target
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Amazon.com

“Baseball’s Wildest Season:
Three Leagues, Thirty-Four Teams
and the Chaos of 1884″

The author:
William J. Ryczek

The publishing info:
McFarland
273 pages, $45
Released March 10, 2023

The links:
The publishers website
At Bookshop.org
At Powells.com
At TheLastBookstoreLA.com
At Vromans.com
At SkylightBooks.com
At Barnes & Noble.com
At Amazon.com

The reviews in 90 feet or less

More to establish some justice than to insure any sort of domestic tranquility, the imperfect Union Association was formed — or throw together — as Option C for anyone aspiring to play what was considered major-league baseball in 1884, the 14th such season on record for such an enterprise.

It lasted all of one season. These things happen.

For context: Eighteen-hundred and eighty-four was less than 20 years removed from the official end of the Civil War. Chester A. Arthur was sheepishly trying to navigate his way around the White House in the wake of James Garfield’s assassination (and his assassin’s eventual hanging before a live audience as his punishment). The Depression/Recession of 1882-1885 was derailing some of the heralded progress going on during the Gilded Age.

It was a country 140 years ago that was still very short of developing its prefrontal cortex. something still somewhat evident in today’s world.

At baseball-refernece.com, the official existence of all 12 teams (in 13 cities) that came and went in the Union Association, along with details about its 94-19 champion St. Louis Maroons, is rightly placed amidst the data produced by the National League (started in 1876) and the American Association (started in 1882 but exhausting itself in 1891, a decade before the official American League came into being in 1901). This is where you’ll first see the existence of the Milwaukee Brewers, the Boston Reds (sans the Sox) and the Washington Nationals amidst the Wilmington Quicksteps, the Baltimore Monuments and the Cincinnati Outlaw Reds.

It’s where the Legend of Fred Dunlap exists.

St. Louis’ 25-year-old 5-foot-8 second baseman posted his Union-best .412 batting average, 13 homers, 185 hits, 160 runs, .621 slugging percentage and 1.069 OPS in 101 games, which looks practically Hall of Fame worthy. Dunlap, who defected to the Maroons for that 1884 season after playing four seasons for the National Association’s Cleveland Blues, would fade away with the 44-91-4 Washington Statesmen of the American Association in 1891 before dying at age 43, penniless, disabled from an ankle injury. Dunlap was better remembered for being on the 1887 Detroit Wolverines team that won the World Series against St. Louis’ Brown Stockings.

We’ve caught wind of the Players League of 1890. The Federal League of 1914-15. The National Association had also come and gone in the early 1870s. The Continental League, created by Branch Rickey in the late 1950s as a way to force MLB to expand. But anything short of what Bill James had covered in his Historical Baseball Abstract (and making a case the Union League not be recognized as a major league) is the reason why Justin McKinney, inspired by his Society of American Baseball Research brethren, decided to research and document even more about this one-and-done enterprise through newspaper clippings and the Baseball Hall of Fame excavation.

McKinney says his goal from the start is “to convince you that the Union Association is more than just Fred Dunlap, Henry Lucas (the Maroons’ diminutive, free-spending owner and league president), and a debate about league quality. It is about the spiteful magnates, disgruntled superstars, hungry youngsters, drunks, screw-ups, castoffs, anonymities, future stars, never-weres, hangers-on, and fanatics who did battle with the baseball establishment.”

Continue reading “Day 17 of 2023 baseball books: Look for the Union label, talking a walk on the wild side of 1884” →