Fall Guys
ROSSI, JOHN P.
Fall Guys The 1978 Yankees a quarter-century later. BY JOHN P ROSSI All real baseball fans, especially long suffering Boston Red Sox ones, know what happened in 1978. Just mention the name Bucky...
...He weaves in quotes from Robert Browning, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, and Robert Frost, among others...
...Hunter, Kahn shows, was anything but a simple country hick...
...The cast of characters suits Kahn's flair for vivid, if sometimes over-the-top prose...
...The portraits of the key actors in the 1978 season are gems...
...Numerous villains fill Kahn's book, but the closest thing to heroes are Al Rosen, the former Cleveland all-star third-baseman, brought in by Stein-brenner as president of the Yankees, and Bob Lemon, the Hall of Fame pitcher, who replaced Martin as manager and guided the Yankee comeback...
...Kahn also argues that Jackson was not recognized as a great hitter at the time, arguing it was the result of racism...
...Kahn's book contains flashes of good writing, as one would expect from an old pro who has been covering sports, particularly baseball, for fifty years...
...Kahn paints an unforgettable portrait of that Yankee team...
...Still, Roger Kahn can hardly write a bad book, and October Men is a good read for any baseball fan...
...Like Lemon, Hunter was someone easy to like...
...There is Martin, the managerial genius, whose suspicions of those around him drove him to drink and out of baseball more than once and eventually contributed to his death in a car accident...
...His portrait of Jim "Catfish" Hunter is warm, affectionate, and insightful...
...But then he implies that Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial received recognition because they were white...
...Some parts are contradictory or repetitious: Kahn mentions the sale price of Babe Ruth twice and gives different figures each time...
...There are also digressions that wander from the drama of the 1978 season, especially a long prologue that is little more than a padded history of New York baseball...
...He learned the job of baseball executive under Steinbrenner's trying leadership, quickly left the Yankees, and achieved great success with the Houston Astros and the San Francisco Giants...
...He gives Don Zimmer, the feisty Red Sox manager, credit for holding an injured team together as the season wound down, instead of blaming Zimmer for the team's collapse...
...Curse of the Bambino"—the loss of Babe Ruth to New York in 1920—was hard to take, but at least he was Babe Ruth and so gave New York an excuse for winning...
...Just mention the name Bucky Dent in Boston and watch the faces change color...
...My favorite portrait is of Jackson, the immensely talented and intelligent power hitter whose boast that he was the "straw that stirred the drink" irritated many of his teammates and led them to despise him...
...Gossage in 1977 with the Pirates won 11 games, saved 26, and struck out 151 batters while compiling a 1.62 ERA...
...Some of Kahn's assertions are also questionable...
...And that's just crazy...
...In October Men, Roger Kahn brings that season alive so Red Sox fans can relive their angst...
...He didn't approach those figures for the Yankees in 1978...
...Perhaps that's true...
...Goose" Gossage, the relief ace, had a "nice but not great year" before signing with the Yankees in 1978, he insists...
...Rosen always behaved like a gentleman and never embarrassed himself, something rare on the 1978 Yankees...
...How can a book peopled by egomaniacs like Reggie Jackson, overbearing owners like Steinbrenner, or near paranoids like Billy Martin not be interesting...
...October Men focuses on the dramatic comeback the Yankees staged to erase the fourteen-game lead the Red Sox held in early August...
...Jackson's lifetime batting average was .262, thirty-six points lower than Mantle's, eighty-two points lower than Williams's, and sixty-nine points lower than Musial's...
...Lemon took over the Yankees when the team had hit bottom as Martin self-destructed...
...His new book seeks to do the same for a great team of the 1970s: the brawling, squabbling New York Yankees of George Stein-brenner, Billy Martin, and Reggie Jackson...
...Kahn has a weakness for showing off his learning...
...Kahn is the author of one of the most influential baseball books ever written, The Boys of Summer, his sad but touching memoir of what happened to the great Dodgers dynasty of the 1950s...
...The John P. Rossi, a professor of history at La Salle University in Philadelphia, is the author of The National Game: Baseball and American Culture...
...It vividly captures one of the most memorable seasons in baseball history, and it stands out among recent serious baseball writing...
...He brought a degree of class to an otherwise classless team...
...Bucky Dent was just, well, Bucky Dent: a player who wouldn't be remembered at all, except that he helped the Yankees defeat the Red Sox, once again...
...Calling everyone "Meat" (a term of affection in baseball), he calmed an overwrought team, let them play to their own considerable talents, and eventually led them to victory in a one-game playoff over the Red Sox...
...There is the General Patton-obsessed Steinbrenner, learning how to run a baseball team...
Vol. 8 • April 2003 • No. 32
