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“The Pioneers of Japanese American Baseball”

The author: Rob Fitts
The publishing info: Self published, 70 pages, $19.99, Released Feb. 20, 2021
The links: At the publisher’s website

The review in 90 feet or less

If not for Japan, baseball’s return as part of the Olympic movement might still be stagnant.

After an odd disappearance of 13 years, the sport returns to the Summer Games in Tokyo – already a year delayed because of the COVID-19 outbreak. And as restrictions remain to help prevent another spike in the virus, it has been determined that only those already living in Japan will be allowed to watch the six-nation tournament scheduled to start on July 23 and end on Aug. 5.

From where we sit (and often to so reading), the sport seems to be in good hands this turn as it hits another historical moment in its evolution.

On the official website for the 2021 Tokyo Games, baseball is explained as a game where “two teams of nine players aim to score the most runs by striking a ball and running round a sequence of bases to reach the home plate. The team with the most runs after nine innings of batting and fielding wins. The teams rotate between batting and fielding, with each session called an inning, and switch when the field team gets three opposition players out.”

Hit the “more” button – don’t you thought you owe it to yourself, having invested this much already? – and it continues: “The pitcher throws the ball from a mound toward the catcher which the batter attempts to hit and get around the bases to the home plate.”

Everything else is just gravy.

Baseball as the on-and-off Olympic sport over the years seems to be tied to whomever is the host country and wants to capitalize on its popularity. It launched at the 1904 Summer Games in St. Louis, then fell into demonstration mode for ’12, ’36, ’52, ’64 (in Tokyo), ’84 (in L.A.) and ’88 (South Korea, after Japan wanted to hold out). It was finally made its modern debut a medal event in Barcelona in 1992, with eight teams, and Cuba winning the gold (Japan the silver, the U.S. was fourth.) In ’96 in Atlanta, it was Cuba-Japan-U.S. The 2000 Games in Sydney, Australia is where Tommy Lasorda managed the gold-medal champions. It stuck in 2004 Athens (Cuba-Australia-Japan) and 2008 Bejing (South Korea-Cuba-U.S.) and then was dropped.

It’s back now, isn’t scheduled to be in the 2024 Games in Paris, and returns in 2028 in Los Angeles.

One shouldn’t have to educate the ninos of native Angelinos about how popular Japan baseball has been more than 100 years prior, especially in this city.

Continue reading “Day 6 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews in 2021: It takes more than Wa to want to know more about the Japanese history” →

“The Best Team Over There: The Untold Story of
Grover Cleveland Alexander and the Great War”

The author:
Jim Leeke

The publishing info:
University of Nebraska Press
280 pages
$29.95
Released March 1, 2021

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Powells.com
At Vromans.com
At TheLastBookStore in LA.com
At Pages ABookstore.com
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Bookshop.org
At Indiebound.org

The review in 90 feet or less

Imagine how upside down Los Angeles would be if there was this war building on the other side of the world and just as the baseball season started, Clayton Kershaw was plucked off the roster to put on another uniform and serve his country.

Imagine how the city of Chicago faced that dilemma when its future Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, at age 31 — a year younger than Kershaw — found out he was among the many big-leaguers drafted to serve in World War I. He’d throw three games to start the 1918 season, then head to basic training in Kansas, then off to France with the other Doughboys.

It would be a story made for Hollywood. But not one well told.

There’s this horribly false impression we all shouldn’t have that Alexander, born in rural Nebraska and named after the 22nd president of the United States who held office at that time (and circled back to be the 24th president), looked an awful lot like Ronald Reagan, the actor who would become the 40^th leader of the free world.

No more than Gary Cooper really looked a lot like Lou Gehrig, but that’s the lasting image thanks to the image makers of the time.

The 1952 Warner Brothers flick called “The Winning Team” soft-tosses Reagan, years after he played George Gipp in the Knute Rockne biopix, as what was assumed to be the lead role of Alexander – better known as Alex or Pete or Ol’ Pete. The title sequence declares this to be the “true story” of his life. IMDB.com graciously refers to it as “an average and generally somewhat interesting.” The 6.5-out-of-10 stars seems generous.

It’s as much a “baseball” movie as it tries to follow the “Pride of the Yankees” template to push it as a drama/romance. Doris Day, as Alexander’s wife, Aimee, is the true lead, but Reagan had to do a lot of heavy lifting with not only a better-than-average pitching motion but also many scenes to show the anguish and distraught circumstances of Alexander’s troubled existence. “Pride of The Yankees” landed about 10 years earlier. It also came out about 13 months after Gehrig’s early demise from ALS.

Continue reading “Day 5 of 2021 baseball book reviews: What really happened to ‘Alexander the Great’ during the Great War?” →

“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.

Continue reading “Day 4 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews in 2021: On top of Ol’ Smokey” →

“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.

Continue reading “Day 3 of (at least) 30 baseball book reviews in 2021: The coolest of Hall of Fame nicknames still rings a bell” →