This Month
Michael Street Reviews Donald Honig's Baseball America
Tuesday April 2, 2007 11:30am
Before baseball stole my heart, I never read much history. Dry discussions on the moves of sly politicians, epic tales of brash kings and their conniving courtiers, even the folksy angle of writers like James Agee: none of these did much for me. Baseball history is—well, a different story. Not only do you have talented, larger-than-life figures like Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Dizzy Dean, you've also got quieter figures like Christy Mathewson, Honus Wagner, or Joe DiMaggio, superstars who went about their baseball business with workmanlike dedication and a distaste for the limelight. You can follow successful and near-monopolistic teams like the '27 Yankees, stuffed to the gills with Hall of Famers, or the scrappy, never-say-die, who-the-hell-are-they 1906 "hitless wonder" White Sox. You can cheer for heroes like Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier, or hiss the corrupt Black Sox fixing the 1919 World Series.
The beauty of baseball is that there's room for everyone; like the melting pot of America, you can find just about any sort of guy—or at least any white guy, up until Robinson changed this idiotic racial paradigm—picking up a hickory stick or leather mitt to take his place on the diamond. In spite of this, or more likely because of it, the challenges to baseball historians are manifold: to cut through the layer of myth and legend to find the truth, to maintain an adequate distance from these compelling figures to tell their stories, but not grow so far away that the player's simple humanity is lost. Painting Ruth as a talented clown is no better than focusing solely on the colossal mistakes of Pete Rose. Baseball players are no more or less human than all of us, the only difference being their unbelievable talent at throwing or hitting a little white sphere in a theoretically endless game—and one that has captured the hearts of millions for hundreds of years, and shows no sign of slowing.
Many historians have turned their hands, hearts, and minds to write about this behemoth of myth, metaphor, and statistical gobbledygook, and few are as good at it as Donald Honig. He has written many books on the histories of franchises, superstars and significant eras in the national pastime, but few are as essential as his masterful Baseball America, which traces the rise of baseball through the lives of its players, managers and owners, from the late 19th to the late 20th century. Published in 1985, the book can be faulted only for not predicting the performance-enhancing drugs, labor unrest and hyperinflated free agent contracts with which every contemporary fan is all too familiar.
Instead, Honig casts back to the game's roots, with a viewpoint that is tinged with nostalgia without being overwhelmed by it. He does not gloss over the character flaws of stars like Cobb, Grover Cleveland Alexander, or Rogers Hornsby, but neither does he dwell on them. Recognizing that baseball is a story best told through its prominent participants as well as its historical context, Honig creates a narrative of America's game that braids culture, history and personalities into a book that is entertaining without being light, educational without being pedantic, and eminently historical without being—well, boring. Everyone can learn something from Baseball America, from the naíve newbie who still believes that Abner Doubleday invented the game in Cooperstown to the freakazoid stathead who wants to argue over the relative hitting merits of Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio.
Beginning with a quick banishment of the Doubleday myth—Alexander Cartwright is a better candidate as the game's founder, though no one person can lay solitary claim to the development of the game from its many roots—Honig moves just as quickly to John McGraw, the star player and superstar manager who acted as bridge between old-school and modern strategies. His discussion of "Little Napoleon" leads to talk about Christy Mathewson, McGraw's finest player (and a generally upstanding human being), which leads to Connie Mack (a brilliant manager and a gentleman) and suddenly you're immersed in baseball history, as Honig deftly untangles the biographical skeins of its beginnings, weaving them back together again into a brilliant historical tapestry worthy of the game itself.
Honig tells the stories of teams and their players, of the rules, strategies and technologies that changed the game from McGraw's fierce small-ball to today's smash-and-bash home run assault. His lens moves in and out from world events to conversations between players and their managers, and does it all without losing your interest or taxing your patience. Seeing each player in his proper perspective, amid his predecessors and peers, within his historical era, makes you understand why Rogers Hornsby isn't a household name (Ruth's personality and his long bombs cast too long a shadow) or why Dizzy Dean was such a huge hit (his phenomenal talent, wacky personality and brash braggadocio were just what Depression-era America needed).
And in telling all this, Honig's prose is as smooth and graceful as Ted Williams' swing, which he lauds thusly: "It mesmerized them all. It was too rare and beautiful to envy; it could only be admired and appreciated. Like a command from the heavens, it could make everything on a ball field suddenly hold still: In batting practice they all paused to watch it, teammates and opponents alike. In their tough, manly world, this was the poetry." Poetry, indeed. Honig gives the facts without lecturing, leads you to conclusions without forcing them in your face, and generally makes baseball and history the joy they both ought to be. Every historian should learn to write with his mixture of crisp prose, gentle insight and common sense: I might have come to enjoy history much sooner.
Honig carries the game through the mid-1980s, where free agency had only just begun to crush the ardent team loyalties created by its repressive reserve clause, and when the clouds of Pete Rose, Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds were barely visible on the horizon. Though he has not (to my knowledge, anyway) picked up the threads of the story from where Baseball America drops it off, Honig wisely leaves that task to future historians, who will have sufficient perspective on the game, and for whom the names Bonds, Rose, and McGwire will likely be as soaked in myth and controversy as Cobb, Ruth, and Shoeless Joe Jackson are. But we should not ask Donald Honig to do the impossible and peer into the inscrutable future, any more than we would any historian. Instead, simply delight yourself with Baseball America, a book whose title lives up to the hefty promise of both meaning-laden words within it, the sort of book you wish would never end, like the game itself, the score forever tied, the dugout and grandstand chatter that is both peripheral to, and at the heart of, this magnificent game, spooling out into forever.
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