The Nation's Pulse/Four for Baseball's Good Old Days
Gold, Victor
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...Streak: Joe DiMaggio and the Summer of '41, by Michael Seidel...
...Heywood Broun and Westbrook Pegler come to mind, along with Robert Ruark who, having antagonized every hot-headed baseball player in the American League, was upgraded by his editors to the relative safety of writing about bistros and African safaris...
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...HALBERSTAM: But they had Bob Feller, Early Wynn, Lou Boudreau—NEW YORK EDITOR: Never heard of 'em...
...The Diamond Appraised, by Craig R. Wright and Tom House...
...and in his latest, Summer of '49, about the memorable pennant race between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox that took place forty years ago...
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...Louis Cardinals rather than Brooklyn Dodgers, his book would be considered a baseball classic...
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...T n fairness—outlander's paranoia aside—Halberstam has written a very good baseball book about the good old days, one rich with fresh material and insights into some of the game's heroes...
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...Not to mention, the "His name," they tell us, "was John where his manager chose to play him...
...Casey on the Loose, by Frank Deford...
...Yet, as Halberstam reveals, DiMaggio owned his full share of arrogance, not to say petulance, having the incredible chutzpah to hold out, at the beginning of his third season, for $40,000, when the Yankee front office had generously offered him a contract 35 modern game...
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...Box 228, Somerville, MA 02143 Winner of PC Magazine's Editor's Choice Award S tatus-seeking journalists once rose from sportswriting to covering world affairs...
...As for the Dodgers, yes, their championship did produce a book, by Orel Hershiser...
...They are mystified by the "failure to the Bronx would have been built power of Babe Ruth, the glove of Oz- and John McGraw, the leading man- preserve the memory of a man unique- a decade earlier and crowned with zie Smith, and the character of Lou ager of his day, said he was "the near- ly suited to capture all that is good in the name "The House that Honus Gehrig...
...Victor Gold is The American Spectator's national correspondent...
...I'm not mystified at all...
...his prime playing years with the New to have the answer to that one—a than Branch Rickey, the shrewdest ap- Craig Wright and Tom House, for all York Yankees instead of the Pitts-player with "the speed and daring of praiser of baseball talent who ever their empirical data, fumble for an burgh Pirates, you can bet your Rickey Henderson, the arm of Rober- lived, called the man the most valu- answer but don't quite come up with Cracker Jacks that the stadium in to Clemente, the bat of Ty Cobb, the able player in the history of the game, it...
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...The following season, 1987, the Minnesota Twins won the Series...
...Memorable to whom...
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...David Halberstam, who made his reputation covering the Vietnam war for the New York Times in the 1960s and '70s, has reversed the process...
...In The Amateurs, he wrote about Olympic sculling...
...Or that if Douglas Wallop had titled his fiction The Year the Senators Won the Pennant rather than The Year the Yankees Lost the Pennant, it would have gone into a second printing, much less become a Broadway musical...
...The Cleveland Indians . . . 1948...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1989 THE NATION'S PULSE FOUR FOR BASEBALL'S GOOD OLD DAYS* The Mets, as we are constantly reminded by the New York Ministry of Sports Propaganda and Enlightenment, won the World Series in 1986, a press-shattering event that produced a dozen tomes by such literary lions as Lenny Dykstra and Gary Carter (poor Lenny, traded this year to Philadelphia where, unless there is another book in him about his New York playing days, he will never again hold an autograph party at Dalton's...
...question-of-questions, Who was the Peter Wagner...
...That Ted Williams was a cocky kid everyone knew, but for some reason (probably a New York sportswriters' cover-up), the news that by Victor Gold young Joe DiMaggio was anything but a self-effacing prodigy never reached the boondocks...
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...It is a sore one with this reviewer—the business of New York's hegemony in the baseball publishing world—as readers of these pages may remember from my irrational spasm two years ago over the cascade of books then appearing by and about the New York Mets.' *Summer of '49, by David Halberstam...
...suffice it to note that for even a furrow-browed, deadly serious reporter like Halberstam, books about Washington shakers-and-movers (The Best and the Brightest) and the Super-media establishment (The Powers That Be) are a thing of the past...
...Does anyone really believe that if Roger Kahn's Boys of Summer had been St...
...though now that their second baseman, Steve Sax, has signed on as a free agent with the Yankees, I imagine we'll soon get a load of his memoirs...
...Or that if David Halberstam, at age five, had lived in Shaker Heights rather than the Bronx, and grown up to be an Indian fan rather than a Yankee fan, he could have persuaded a New York editor that the saga of Cleveland winning the American League pennant in the summer of '48 would make a good read...
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...What this says about the trivialization of global coverage and the exaltation of sports coverage in modern American journalism is best left to future historians...
...According to fielders at his position (shortstop), this had had the good fortune to spend logic of baseball stat-historians, claim Wright-House, no less an authority "perfect player" wasn't even on the list...
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...NEW YORK EDITOR: Say what...
...est thing to a perfect player, no matter the game...
...He played from 1897 to So with all of this going for him, Given Branch Rickey's appraisal that greatest ballplayer—not simply hitter— 1917, and if there was something he how is it that in 1982, when Sports II- he was better than Ruth, Gehrig, of all time...
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...couldn't do on the diamond, they never lustrated ran a piece on the ten greatest and DiMaggio, if John Peter Wagner Wright-House, with the relentless found out what it was...
...Nine for Baseball," TAS, September 1987...
Vol. 22 • October 1989 • No. 10
