Christy Mathewson: From Rogue to Gentleman

Last night I crawled out of a hole and set off for Powerhouse Books in DUMBO to see Will Leitch of Deadspin and Chad Harbach talk about baseball. The sky was ominous already and the backdrop to their discussion was forking lightning over the bridge. If this had been a game, it would have been called.

Leitch has written voluminously about baseball for New York and as the founding editor of Deadspin, a site that is better known for athlete scandals than sports coverage these days. Beyond his debut THE ART OF FIELDING, following the fortunes of a college-baseball player at a small town in Wisconsin, Harbach wrote the introduction to a new edition of PITCHING IN A PINCH, a 1912 guide to baseball written by former Giants and Reds pitcher Christy Mathewson. Mathewson still ranks among the top MLB pitchers and was known in his time as a virtuous gentleman He famously never pitched on Sundays, although Leitch pointed out that at the time his league had very few games on Sundays anyway, so it wouldn't have been that difficult to stand on his conscience.

According to Leitch and Harbach, PITCHING IN A PINCH aimed to do the opposite of what Jim Bouton's BALL FOUR (which they called the best baseball memoir out there) did decades later: It legitimized baseball, considered a "rogues' game," for the thinking viewer and classed it up in print. This was but one of many differences our hosts expounded upon between baseball back then and now, including lower player autonomy and their tendency to take side jobs outside of league play. Mathewson also played pro football for a bit, while other players in his era would be paid $3,000 a week to star in off-season vaudeville shows (which Leitch compared to a Derek Jeter type getting $5 million a week to be on Broadway -- unimaginable!). Some of these economic conditions persisted into the time of BALL FOUR but the idea had already entered the public imagination of the noble sportsman who plays for love of the game -- a Mathewson type for certain.

Now it's fairly common for players to write (or cooperate with someone who is writing) a splashy memoir about their game, but PITCHING IN A PINCH is more about the game than it is about him. Yet it also served as an unwitting memorial to Mathewson's career: Four years after it was published, he retired from play in order to manage; later, he served in France during World War I where he caught the tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. He would eventually be one of the first five players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame along with dudes like Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb.

The event was hosted by Penguin Classics who is publishing the new edition of PITCHING IN A PINCH, and it's fairly rare that classics reissues get readings like this -- but a welcome change. Perhaps the house is trying to distinguish itself in light of the forthcoming Random Penguin juggernaut, a merger that was recently approved by the EU. (I know the new entity will really be called Penguin Random House. Just leave me to my illusions.) 

Filmbook for Friday: "Moneyball" trailer

(If this doesn't render right, here's the direct link.)

First thoughts:
1. I humbly request every movie with Philip Seymour Hoffman in it include a title card reading "A Philip Seymour Hoffman Joint," just for maximum delight.
2. Brad Pitt seems to be going down that George Clooney path of picking roles above his actual acting ability... and I'm okay with that. (I say this without having seen "Tree of Life," although going to rectify that one soon. Also, I believe it was Filmspotting that first put forth that theory re. Clooney, although I can't remember when and which host.) He'll always be Chad to me.
3. This book is 2 years behind Michael Lewis' other adapted project, THE BLIND SIDE, but seems to be going for the same market? Jonah Hill looks very uncomfortable doing that. (But funny.)
4. Speaking of Hill, his role was originally to be played by Demetri Martin. What a spectrum of men those two encompass. Oh, and in case you didn't keep up with all the director changes, behind the camera here is not Steven Soderbergh but rather Bennett Miller ("Capote," another Philip Seymour Hoffman Joint).
5. When Pitt tells his kid not to read the Internet... o hai Sorkin!

Earlier: my review of MONEYBALL,

If they don't win it's a shame

Apparently if you try to bring your e-reader to Yankee Stadium, you might run into some trouble with security under the umbrella of a "laptop" ban. For iPad users too! (See also: various cafes.) This is both funny and infuriating, and if you're asking, "Why would anyone want to bring an e-reader to a baseball game?" try spending an hour-plus on the subway to get there.

Baseball Week 2: Speaking of Vengeance

Out of all the baseball books I was looking for, THE BASEBALL CODES made it to my local library first, so I started it before any of the other books on this jaunt. I know I mentioned earlier in the week that this was the 'dark side of baseball' tour, but let's review what baseball can't do: It can't unite a city, it can't avoid the tentacles of human greed, it can't save the world from Commies.

THE BASEBALL CODES chronicles the pettiness of Major League Baseball players across a couple of dimensions, from really spectacular fights to etiquette surrounding pitching and sliding. Professional sports looks a lot more exciting than your average cube farm, but the same clash of personalities and agenda-pushing runs rampant there, amplified by the attention every small gesture gets.

What separates acts like players throwing at other players and sign-stealing from outright misbehavior is that, to a certain degree, these behaviors are expected and welcomed, and the victims are expected not to take their grievances to the press. It's been a while since I saw the word "omerta" tossed around so much, and given that certain players in this book are willing to go on record, it's possible that this tradition is peeling away along with the worst on-field deliberate injuries. The crew of Common Sense Dancing recently opined that fighting in professional sports is "stupid and pointless," and I think that's true of some fighting; I prefer the kind that not only does not result in any injury but from the cheap seats plays out in spectacular silent-film pantomine. (Dear David Wright: NEVER CHANGE.)

Authors Turbow and Duca don't limit themselves to punishment and retaliation: One altruistic phenomenon I had not known about was the unspoken respect for players who are about to break a record or reach a career milestone, and how some of their opponents will step lightly or even help them when it's not strategically savvy to do so. This is not how I grew up playing the few sports I did, but again, it's a professional courtesy.

THE BASEBALL CODES reads more like an almanac or one of those treasured collections of related anecdotes I used to read as a kid, that were just long lists of related facts or stories... so it's better to dip into every once in a while than read straight, particularly if (like me) you want to stop and look up players mentioned in the book. This was all somewhat shocking when I started this book, before I had read about Cicotte throwing Game 1 or Jim Bouton getting his spikes nailed to the clubhouse floor. But after all that, it took on a dimension of playground justice, the type of passive-aggressiveness that takes place in every office.

Tomorrow: Odds, ends, miscellany.

Filmbook: "Eight Men Out" (1988)

Aiee... Hollywood. It could have been much worse for EIGHT MEN OUT than John Sayles' adaptation, which is remarkably faithful to the book until the last half-hour when it does some truly impressive acrobatics and basically invents its own ending. Maybe it was too faithful up to that point, which would explain why it was so flat.

I guess I shouldn't have been surprised to see some of the characteristics I disliked in Asinof's book exaggerated for the film audience. Buck Weaver isn't just "the All-American boy," he makes impassioned speeches at the drop of a hat! (Including robbing David Strathairn as Eddie Cicotte of a chance to do his own speechifying, and that should be illegal.) Michael Mantell's Abe Attell isn't just a shady character, he needs to narrow his eyes all the time and speak in a creepy Spot-Conlon-from-Brooklyn* monotone. And the whole thing is scored in phony Jazz Age music, just in case we forget that it's The Past. I don't even want to know the direction given to D.B. Sweeney as Shoeless Joe, who plays Jackson as not so much illiterate as prone to prolonged blank stares -- "head injury patient," I guess.

There are some neat moments in this film; I appreciated John Mahoney as Kid Gleason, the Sox manager who can't explain why his team is falling to pieces around him, and Kevin Tighe is precisely slippery as "Sport" Sullivan, one of the gamblers involved in the fix. There's a great (albeit brief) scene with John Anderson as Kenesaw Mountain Landis that I didn't remember from the book. But this movie just doesn't execute the way it should. Sayles' reliance on devices like the "montage of newspaper headlines" and the "little kids with no connection to the plot, but useful receptacles for speechifying" got old. Casting himself as Ring Lardner did little to convince me of his earnestness towards the plot.

Tomorrow: Putting out the fire with gasoline and Jonathan Mahler's LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING.

*"Well I say... that what you say... is what I say." Anyone?

Baseball Week 2: So This One Time Papa And I...

Ernest Hemingway makes an appearance at the beginning of Philip Roth's THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL, as the force driving an embittered sportswriter to write his magnum opus instead of succumbing to the siren song of old age and whining. Smitty's got a compelling story: His career was ruined when baseball's 'third' league, the Patriot League, was buried amid rumors of Communist infiltration during World War II. Decades later, his vote for Patriot League star Luke Gofannon for the Baseball Hall of Fame goes uncounted, and Smitty's acres of prose have similarly been forgotten. Isn't it shameful what happened to the Patriot League and the scrappy bottom-of-the-division Ruppert Mundys of Port Ruppert, New Jersey? who nearly made a miraculous comeback during their all-away-games season of 1943?

Beyond just the zaniest Philip Roth novel I've never read, this may be the most bonkers book I will have read all year. From introducing characters named Base Baal (who, it is noted, was not named after the sport, but rather for his bad behavior) and Gil Gamesh to a subplot involving the Mundys' good-natured manager acting as a baseball missionary in Africa, there is no silliness left unturned here, with Smitty's bombastic opinions (including the stance that alliteration is what makes writing great) woven through. The descriptions of the lineup alone had me giggling softly to myself on many a subway ride -- apparently some of them are based on real players, though I couldn't find a definite concordance.

I'm not shocked that it's not canon Roth, but why had I never heard of this book before coming across it by chance while searching for a copy of THE GHOST WRITER last summer? I would recommend this book over the overrated THE NATURAL six days out of seven. I found a USA Today article describing it as one of Roth's "least known works," which is what happens when you have a career as long and varied as he has had. Still, it was jarring to see some of the same themes in his late great THE PLOT AGAINST AMERICA, here treated for humor -- jarring in the opposite way I would have expected: I found the later work a little less profound for the capers to which it is applied here. When did Philip Roth become... so serious? I'm sure I am the last person to notice, but as someone who didn't really find any humor in PORTNOY'S COMPLAINT, I conveniently forget or elided that phase. It's a shame! And if you feel like this, you should definitely read this book in haste.

Tomorrow: John Sayles' 1988 adaptation of "Eight Men Out," starring pretty much every character actor who could be spared to put on a uniform. Also, John Cusack!

Baseball Week 2: Say It Ain't So, Eddie

If Eliot Asinof couldn't do it, I doubt anyone could. The author's account of the 1919 "Black Sox" scandal is so meticulous, it sometimes seems as if Asinof had been pressed up against the players' hotel room doors with a glass in his hand, eavesdropping on their conversations -- untrue in any sense, since EIGHT MEN OUT was published over 40 years after the series in question. He sifts through contemporary news stories and columns and court transcripts galore, but he can't tell us why eight members of the Chicago White Sox would decide to throw the World Series, believe they could get away with it, and (to a certain extent) go on with their lives.

There are a lot of unbelievable facets to the Black Sox scandal, and I don't really want to spoil them for anyone who, like me, may be going into this book with only a vague outline of the scandal. But here is your vague outline: Eight players on the White Sox, gathered by first baseman Chick Gandil (whose Wikipedia picture could not be less flattering), made an agreement with a gambler, a former boxer and a gangster -- with their innumerable intermediaries, anyway -- to throw the Series against the Cincinnati Reds for $100,000. The gamblers bet against the Sox (favored to win) and make oodles of money. Everybody wins until American League president Ban Johnson seizes an opportunity to humiliate the White Sox owner and promote himself as anti-gambling and decides to investigate the rumors that had swirled around the previous year's series.

Johnson didn' really get what he wanted from the revelation of the scandal, nor did gambling in baseball end. The fans didn't really get justice, even though the players involved were famously banned from baseball for the rest of their lives. (Perhaps an over-punishment for Buck Weaver? Hold that thought for a minute.) As reprehensible as what the players did was, justice wasn't served.

Getting back to the why: Gandil was the fixer, but Cicotte -- the only player smart enough to insist on being paid up front -- seemed like the linchpin. In some ways, he's the most tragic figure of the book, or at least that's how Asinof chose to see it. Cicotte's testimony is heartbreaking and disingenuous at the same time. I wanted to believe him, but given how he and his teammates were treated it's hard to know how much he really revealed under oath. (Being told they're signing a document protecting their immunity, when it actually waives their immunity?) If I had a problem with Asinof's account it was in his characterization of some of the players, about which I had similar reservations as with Cicotte's own words: Shoeless Joe is altogether too stupid to know what's going on, depending on his wife to read his contracts, and Buck Weaver is too "All-American" to cheat (but not too much to be in on the fix?) and bewildered when he's forced to share the fate of his fellows. Maybe those didn't seem too general so much as undersourced.

Of course I realized only too late that EIGHT MEN OUT is not the right book with which to kick off a whole week of books about baseball, in that it shows the dark side of the sport. A theme that will carry on throughout the week? Perhaps!

Tomorrow: You may be part of the conspiracy too with Philip Roth's THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL.

Administrative note: Baseball Week: The Vengeance is being pushed back to Aug. 9-15, for the 1.68 parties interested. I have nothing to say for myself, July just got away from me. If you need something to do, might I suggest picking up David Mitchell's excellent CLOUD ATLAS for the AV Club's book club next week? (Plug city! But honestly, it's going to be really fun.)

Baseball Week 2: The Vengeance

Between August 2 and 8 this blog will be all baseball books, all the time. It's late but it's longer than ever! Here's the lineup:

Aug. 2: Eliot Asinof, EIGHT MEN OUT
Aug. 3: Philip Roth, THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL
Aug. 4: Filmbook: "Eight Men Out" (John Sayles, 1988)
Aug. 5: Jim Bouton, BALL FOUR
Aug. 6: Jonathan Mahler, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING
Aug. 7: Jason Turbow and Michael Duca, THE BASEBALL CODES
Aug. 8: Open Forum

Read one, read a few, read them all.

I would like to get a second novel in there somewhere, but the only one that has caught my eye is the 600-plus-page THE BROTHERS K; I will keep looking but no promises.

Your Assistance Please: If they don't win it's a shame

The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd... The Second Pass has a neat post this week about baseball books and recommends some that are new to me, including THE BROTHERS K and CRAZY '08.

Is it time for me to do another baseball book week? I think so! Two solid options I have on hand are Philip Roth's THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL (= one of the greatest book titles ever) and Jonathan Mahler's LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, THE BRONX IS BURNING. What else should I make time for? For reference, the first-rounders were THE BOYS OF SUMMER, THE NATURAL (plus the iffy movie), THREE NIGHTS IN AUGUST and MONEYBALL.

Baseball Week: Stats Are Fun!

Every baseball player comes packaged with a set of statistics, but are they the right ones? That's the central question of Michael Lewis' MONEYBALL, which follows a season with the Oakland A's as they run a team, well, rather differently than others are currently been run.

Team manager Billy Beane, a former baseball player, read the works of a rogue statistician and baseball fan named Bill James, which intended to find out what stats really reveal how valuable a player is to the team. Those stats drive Beane's approach to buying players on the second-lowest budget in Major League Baseball, on which he was somehow able to improve the team's record substantially even after losing its best known players to free agency. So, it's THREE NIGHTS IN AUGUST meets FREAKONOMICS, more or less.

I'm not going to pretend that I understood the statistics in the book well enough to challenge them. Heck, I didn't even know where the word "sabermetrics" came from or what it meant before I read this book. (It's from the Society for American Baseball Research, which James was a major part of and which promoted these new statistics.) I have a feeling that someone better with numbers than I would be able to poke holes in Lewis' explanations, but for me I found them sufficient and easy to understand for the layperson. And like THREE NIGHTS IN AUGUST, Lewis clearly spent a lot of time with the team, just hanging out and observing how these management changes -- especially a shift away from traditional scouting methods -- have affected the team.

At the same time, I can see why some people who cover baseball would disparage the book, and not because they are just jealous. Lewis even pinpoints the primary weakness of the sabermetrics approach: It only takes into account past performance, not future potential. In this model a player is no better than he has been earlier, so a slow starter in the pros would probably never get a shot under the James/Beane model. But the team that Beane assembles makes this evident, as players who join the team don't quite perform as they have on paper. One could also argue that sabermetrics reduce players to numbers, but not in a way that the stats don't already do. I don't think that MONEYBALL's numbers will ruin the way I watch baseball; if anything, it will make me more curious about the stats I usually ignore.

Previously
Dugout Jitters
Is This The Great American Baseball Novel?
Filmbook: "The Natural" (1984)
Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

Filmbook: "The Natural" (1984)

Yesterday I wrote about how I felt underwhelmed by the protagonist of Bernard Malamud's THE NATURAL, who alienated me and didn't really prove his so-called abilities. The Roy Hobbs of the movie "The Natural" has the opposite problem: The film pushes so hard to make Roy a hero that I found myself pushing back, probably because I had just read the book which makes clear that he wasn't a hero.

The plot is virtually identical to the book's: Talented older player with murky past finally gets to the majors, performs great feats. The crowd scenes in this book are very cool, as are the old-timey uniforms and the feeling that this team is really uniting behind Hobbs. Major assistance in this department has to go to the score in creating moments like this (not really a spoiler unless you read the YouTube info):

But as the movie goes on that old alienation came back, only I felt disconnected from the character because he was too good instead of being too bad. And the ending, which is the biggest change from the book, just took the hero worship way over the top for me. It's as if adapters Roger Towne and Phil Dusenberry read the book and thought, "Man, this guy's kind of a jerk. Let's make him totally saintly! Much better."

And in that capacity, having Robert Redford playing Roy didn't help matters. I like Robert Redford a lot, but he was 48 when this movie came out, and no amount of soft-focus lighting could disguise that he had a good decade on Malamud's Hobbs. So he goes around with this halo of light on him, which I'm sure was deliberate, but it made me even less inclined to see the movie's take on the player.

Filmbook verdict: Boy. I don't want to recommend the book or the movie. Watch "Field of Dreams" and read THE BOYS OF SUMMER instead.

Previously
Is This The Great American Baseball Novel?
Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

Baseball Week: Is This The Great American Baseball Novel?

One-word review of THE NATURAL: Really?

The natural of the title is Roy Hobbs, a promising young pitcher headed to a tryout with the Cubs who has a little run-in with destiny along the way. 16 years later, he is finally signed to a major league team, the lagging New York Knights, and becomes not only its box-score salvation but the great batting hope for the sad-sack team manager. Not everyone on the team is happy about his success, though, particularly erstwhile star Bump Bailey, who's dating the manager's niece (with whom Roy is also in love). He finally has his chance at the major leagues, but it may be shorter than even he feared.

It's hard for me to pinpoint exactly what I didn't like about this book, but I'll start here: We don't see enough of Roy's abilities to really understand why he's such a big deal. Except for one quick burst in the prologue (if you will), the guy acts like a brat in the dugout and keeps proclaiming how good he is. When the turnaround comes and his "powers" (such as they are) are evident, I didn't really want to root for him after all that.

The relationship between Roy and Memo, the manager's niece, I found pretty off-putting overall, mainly because Roy acts like an entitled jerk around her and expects her to give up her other interests and serve him. Yet I don't think Malamud was trying to make the point that talent corrupts; I think we're supposed to understand that Roy has had a long and difficult life and is on the uncomfortable bleeding edge of greatness. But when there comes a time when Roy has to, ah, choose between divergent paths and his conscience comes into play, I didn't really empathize with him. (More on this tomorrow, when I talk about the movie.)

And there's all this Mystical Stuff With Girls. This book was actually mentioned in passing in THE BOYS OF SUMMER because it came out when Kahn was with the Dodgers, and he talked up its sex scenes to one of the players, but they aren't "sex scenes" per se, more like Totally Weird Interludes. Especially the one by the lakeshore -- anyone want to explain that to me?

Despite all this I did want to find out what became of Roy Hobbs, or maybe I was just waiting for something spectacular. In the end, I was underwhelmed.

Tomorrow, I'll talk about the 1984 movie, "The Natural," based on the Malamud book.

Previously:
Baseball Week: Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

NATURAL Notes

• Play By The Book calls THE NATURAL "not your typical sports book." I concur, although this reviewer from the Peabody Institute Library liked it more than I did.


• A current MLB player named Josh Hamilton is compared to The Natural in the book, although I'm not sure the lesson is the same for both. Hamilton was a promising player who got hurt, got addicted, got clean and returned to hit 28 home runs in this year's All-Star Home Run Derby.


• I don't know much about Malamud at all, but apparently he's fallen out of favor; "Malamud's themes, his passions and his style do not come across as old fashioned: on the contrary, they seem fresh and alive," writes the Guardian. Uh, sorry to heap on, sir!


• Listen to the Malamud story "A Summer's Reading" at newyorker.com.

Baseball Week: Roger Kahn, A Boy Among Boys

I didn't realize it when I picked it, but Roger Kahn's THE BOYS OF SUMMER combines a baseball history with one of my favorite genres -- the journalist's memoir. But Kahn didn't dream of being a journalist as a kid growing up in middle-class Brooklyn -- of course, he wanted to play first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers. His father claimed to have played in college, his grandfather took him to afternoon games and his sister became a fan during a long convalescence. Only Kahn's mother disapproved of the game and tried to get her son to read biographies of Haydn instead of Christy Mathewson's autobiography.

Kahn planned to study law at NYU before a professor noticed he could write a little and recommended he apply to the New York Herald Tribune, then considered the "writers' newspaper" to the boring, pedestrian New York Times. (That is Kahn's opinion and not endorsed by writers of this blog, who never read the Herald Tribune.) Kahn's first sports piece for the Herald Tribune was about a "walking race" between City Hall and Coney Island on Thanksgiving, which he noticed took twice as long as the new elevated subway but saved the 10-cent fare. He subbed in for a few Dodgers games until, at 24, he was tapped to cover the team full-time. And Kahn would probably agree it was fortuitous that not only were the Dodgers still in Brooklyn (they moved in 1958), but they had Jackie Robinson, who played his first game with them in 1947.

Half of THE BOYS OF SUMMER covers Kahn's two seasons with the team, and the other half a series of interviews he did with the players for the book -- a sort of "Where Are They Now?" of professional baseball. Both sections had their strengths, but I enjoyed the seasonal coverage much more for the camaraderie that Kahn depicts among the traveling team (they still took trains at that point!) and the action. When he finds them, most of the players are doing okay, but professionally they're a shadow of their former selves: Mostly salesmen or public faces on larger corporations, they're reminded every day that they once were great.

But Kahn gets some amazing stories as he travels, from George Shuba's secret to batting practice (pouring lead in the bat you use for practice swings) to the moment when Carl Erskine's father threw a curve that broke all the dishes in the house. If those names mean nothing to you now (as they did to me), you'll learn from this book.

Coming up on Baseball Week: Bernard Malamud's diamond myth, Buzz Bissinger's unblinking eye and more.