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Queen of the Negro Leagues:
Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles

The author:
James Overmyer

The publishing info:
Rowman & Littlefield
$35
271 pages
Released in April 8, 2020

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At Indiebound.org

The review in 90 feet or less

Claire Smith, a recent recipient of The Baseball Writers Association of America’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award for her contributions to baseball writing as a reporter and columnist, did a piece on Effa Manley for TheUndefeated.com this month that began:

“If you look deep into the history of the Baseball Hall of Fame, you will find one club owner enshrined who would fit seamlessly into the worldwide cultural revolution that is 2020.
“Effa Manley co-owned the Newark Eagles of the Negro National League with her husband, Abe, and her words and deeds from more than 80 years ago would be just as relevant today.
“We’ve marveled as millions in nascent rainbow coalitions have found their voices, sparked by the killing of George Floyd, a Black man, by police in Minneapolis. The footage of a policeman’s knee bearing down on Floyd’s neck caused revulsion throughout the world.
“In this year of celebrating 100 years since the first Negro League game, I can’t help but wonder if Manley is somewhere asking what took the world so long to catch up with her. She lived Black Lives Matter before it was a mantra and a movement.”

As Smith pointed out: In 1939, Manley had vendors at New Jersey’s Ruppert Stadium sell buttons that read “Stop Lynching” for a buck a piece, and the funds went to support legislation in Congress aimed at making the federal government address lynching. That claimed about 6,500 Black lives between 1865 and 1950, according to the Equal Justice Initiative in Alabama.

“Lynching remains a federal conversation in 2020,” Smith adds. “In June, Kamala Harris, the only Black woman in the U.S. Senate, was among three to sponsor legislation to finally make lynching a federal hate crime.

“Manley’s fight eight decades ago was before a suddenly ‘woke’ sports world acknowledged the often deadly dangers of living while Black in America.”

It’s time a lot of us woke up to Effa Manley.

The 2006 inductee into Cooperstown for how she keep the Negro Leagues vibrant, and progressive, can be a useful reference these days when one wonders what current MLB ownership are awake to what’s happening in the world.

In Smith’s piece, she also finds a spot to talk to James Overmyer, a voice on the SABR committee for the historical preservation of the Negro Leagues and did his first edition of this book in 1993 as “Effa Manley and the Newark Eagles,” and then updated it in 1998 under the title “Queen of the Negro Leagues”for the American Sports History Series by Scarecrow Press. Continue reading “Extra inning baseball book reviews for 2020: An emphasis on how Effa Manley was the woman of her time” →

Baseball in St. Louis:
From Little Leagues to Major Leagues

The author: Ed Wheatley
The publishing info: Reedy Press, $39.95, 240 pages, released April 1, 2020
The links: At the publisher’s website; at Amazon.com; at BarnesAndNoble.com; at Powells.com; at Indiebound.org

The review in 90 feet or less

St. Louis’ unchallenged claim as the “best baseball town in America” may come from years of assumed merit. It used to mark the location of major league baseball’s most Western destination — even while there were credible pro baseball leagues all over California and beyond.

It’s still odd to us that the stadium, which continues to have its magnetic view of The Gateway Arch along the banks of the Mississippi River, is also just a block or so away from the Old Courthouse where Dred and Harriet Scott’s battle for their freedom from slavery started in the 1840s and became a large part of why we even got to a Civil War.

The history of St. Louis and its 160-plus years of baseball, as presented here in a slick photo-album type layout with so many precious, archival photos and other memorabilia as procured by local historian Ed Wheatly, deeply involved in the St. Louis Browns Historical Society.

It speaks to its amateur leagues and Negro Leagues, to all its famous sons who have populated Major League Baseball rosters. Even, of course, a mention of  Eddie Gaedel. The residents learned the game from the radio calls of Harry Caray and Jack Buck, and before that, from local Cardinals legend Dizzy Dean and France Laux. It could support two big-league teams at one point – a professional home game nearly every day between April and September.

As Wheatley writes in the forward:

“For St. Louisans, it has truly been a blessing that bonds the community and continually repairs our losses. It provides the positive daily diversion for the generations that endured the hardships of two world wars and the poverty of the Great Depression, and it held us together through times of civil and social disorder. Baseball has been there for all generations, young and old, from the days of horse and buggies to today’s world of drones. Baseball survives these transitions and takes St. Louisans around the bases with hope and recreation. It has been a constant in St. Louisans’ lives since the days of the Civil War.”

Did we have to come full circle so soon?

Continue reading “Extra inning baseball book reviews for 2020: Meet us in St. Louis and have a Ted Drewes cup of frozen custard at the ready in a Cardinals’ plastic hat” →

The Milwaukee Brewers at 50:
Celebrating a Half-Century of Brewers Baseball

The author: Adam McCalvy; introduction by Bud Selig and Mark Attanasio, forward by Robin Yount
The publishing info: Triumph Books, $40, 256 pages, released May 19, 2020
The links: At the publisher’s website; at Amazon.com; at BarnesAndNoble.com; at Powells.com; at Indiebound.org

Turning 50:
The Brewers Celebrate a Half-Century in Milwaukee

The author: Tom Haudricourt; introduction by Bud Selig
The publishing info: KCI Sports Publishing, $24, 136 pages, released May 15, 2020
The links: At the publisher’s website; at Amazon.com; at Powells.com; at Indiebound.org; at Bookshop.org

The reviews in 90 feet or less

How do you drink in the fact the Milwaukee Brewers have been a Major League Baseball team for 50 years? Even at the expense of the Seattle Pilots’ misfortunes? Or the Milwaukee Braves abandoning the city to move on up to Atlanta?

How about oversized books.

With “The Milwaukee Brewers at 50,” it’s a slick 12-inch by 10-inch volume that goes 256 pages and runs $40. With “Turning 50,” we’re in the same ball park — 11 inches by 8.5 inches of production value – with about half the pages and not quite half the cost.

Some will take both. Others need to compare and contrast. Continue reading “Extra inning baseball book reviews for 2020: What’s the stein-hoisting limit for toasting the Brewers’ half-century existence?” →

Inside Pitch: Insiders Reveal How the Ill-Fated
Seattle Pilots Got Played into
Bankruptcy in One Year

The author:
Rick Allen

The publishing info:
Persistence Press
$19.95
178 pages
Released May 18, 2020

The links:
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At Indiebound.org
At the author’s website

The review in 90 feet or less

Jim Bouton told us this was an odd organization. Here’s more to see under the circus tent.

If we weren’t completely up to speed with what happened for the one-and-done Seattle Pilots fiasco and relished personal observations from Bouton’s “Ball Four” in 1970, we get past the 50-year mark of the tream’s crash landing at ill-prepared Sicks’ Stadium for even more head-shaking chicanery.

It’s no wonder they lasted just one year and then dragged their tails to Milwaukee. Considering what’s inside this account, it seems like it was a miracle it lasted that long.

It’s also odd how this all came about. Start with the author, Rick Allen.

With a journalism degree from Eastern Washington, a Masters in interpersonal communication from Ohio University and a Masters and doctorate in  public administration from USC, maybe he’s got the right background for knowing how to piece this together, having worked in upper management and executive levels in the higher education, government, and nonprofit sectors and founded two small businesses.

The story about him in the Amazon.com bio says while he was touring southern Africa, Allen found himself at a dinner table listening to funny stories from the former CFO of the Seattle Pilots.

Bob Schoenbachler, who became the Pilots’ chief money guy at the ridiculous age of 21, having done the same job for the city’s Triple-A team (an Angels’ affiliate) the previous two seasons. He provides the thrust of this tale.

Then there is Jim Kittelsby, who was a 29-year-old from the Pacific Northwest who is asked to work for Dewey and Max Soriano, the brothers who took out loans to get a MLB team in Seattle, also having to get another part-owner, Bill Daley, involved with a 49 percent share.

Now let the hi-jinx begin.

Stuff we learned from the Schoenbachler/Kittelsby connection: Continue reading “Extra inning baseball book reviews for 2020: Locating a black box that sheds more plight on the 1970 Pilot error” →

 

Working a ‘Perfect Game’
Conversations with Umpires

The author:
Bill Nowlin

The publishing info:
Summer Game Books
$18.99
308 pages
Released May 29, 2020

The links:
At the publisher’s website
At Amazon.com
At BarnesAndNoble.com
At Powells.com
At Indiebound.org

The review in 90 feet or less

Funny to see MLB umpire Joe West’s name pop up amidst trending Twitter topics recently. Not really for all the best of reasons, of course, but that would be the Joe West Story.

The 62-year-old West admits he’s motivated to continue working for a 42^nd season even during the MLB pandemic protocols. He is approaching the all-time record of 5,375 regular-season games worked, held by Bill Klem, and needs 65 to reach it. Can it be done in a truncated 60-game season, skipping around cities to work, taking days off? He’ll load up his C-pap machine and see what happens to his BMI.

Followers of the game, long-term or now, really aren’t supposed to know much about West, or any umpire, or so we’re told. We recall more human-interest quips that Vin Scully would provide on a Dodgers broadcast about an umpire’s resume — he called a perfect game, worked in the post-season, etc. But the best ones escape our field of vision and stay off our judgmental radar.

We’re not supposed to have a sense of dread when we hear West – “Country Joe” – is apt to insert and assert himself into the game’s ebb and flow as he has conducted his business since the 1970s. There’s also the bedeviling Angel Hernandez, amazed he’s still employed, with all his mysterious methods of arbitration that led to him getting black marks on the MLB judgment ratings.

And really, you had to sue MLB as you still work games?

There have been, for better or worse, autobiographical books of the regal Doug Harvey, the flamboyant Ron Luciano (three of them between 1982 and ’86), Al Clark, Ken Kaiser, Durwood Merrell, Dave Pallone, Augie Donatelli, Eric Gregg …

The only one of real social redeeming value was the 2011 “Nobody’s Perfect: Two Men, One Call, and a Game for Baseball History,” where umpire Jim Joyce combined with the Detroit Tigers’ Armando Galarraga (and Daniel Pasiner) to discuss what happened in the wake of a June, 2010 game when Joyce’s final safe call — replays showed it was an out, but there were no review rules in effect — took away Galarraga’s perfect game.
Continue reading “Extra inning baseball book reviews for 2020: You make the call on what makes a perfect book about imperfect umpires” →