This Month
Michael Street Reviews Peter Keating's DINGERS! A Short History of the Long Ball
Monday August 13, 2007 12:30pm
A-Rod's 500th. Sammy's (and Griffey's soon-to-be) 600th. Thomas's 500th. Barry's 756th (and beyond). This has been one hell of a year for home runs, and Peter Keating's DINGERS! is perfectly poised to capitalize on it. Packed with facts both well-known and obscure, crammed into a deceptively small and glitzy package, this book will tell you more than you ever thought was possible to know about longballs and the major leaguers who have hit them. Keating's style is light and engaging, and the only people likely to dislike this book are those who also dislike heavy graphics or multitudinous charts (especially ones featuring baseballs). Everyone else should get their fill of four-bagger facts and will stand prepared to spout off a wide range of trivial bits for each milestone home run they see this year.
Keating breaks down the book into longball eras, from the pre-Ruthian Deadball years through the "Hyperinflation" years of Sosa and McGwire to the present "Deflation" era since 2005, leaving Keating precariously perched on the precipice of predicting the present. But this is more than a book of stats, names, cold facts, and eras, as Keating traces the trajectory of the homer and its effect on the game. It's not hard to read in between the lines and snappy graphics to see Keating's true intention, which isn't so much an argument for or against the home run, so much as how these mammoth taters have changed America's pastime, and why.
The design is clearly influenced by ESPN: The Magazine, as sidebars and blue-and-orange graphics (making Mets fans feel right at home) fairly drip from every page, interrupting Keating's narrative for a page or three at a time. The faint of heart may have problems with the jittery, ADD-influenced pace, and it's easy to get overwhelmed by the volume of information Keating is pumping at you. But, like an experimental film or a new videogame, once you accustom yourself to the pace and presentation, you'll be amazed at what you're absorbing.
For example, Keating has a page for the top home-run hitters of each decade, roughly corresponding to their place in the book's chronology. These pages are instructive not only for the names and rankings (who'da thunk Gil Hodges and Eddie Matthews hit more in the fifties than Mickey Mantle?) but also for the comparisons. Witness when Gavvy Cravath's 116 in the 'teens leaps to Ruth's 467 in the twenties.
Keating's many, many stats and graphics will have you doing just this: thinking and comparing one to another. Some are light and almost frivolous ("Most Home Runs By Players with the Same Name"), others new and revealing ("Home & Road: Hank Aaron," intended to debunk the myth that Aaron would have hit more long balls in a friendlier home park than capacious County Stadium). Much as he does with his prose, Keating uses these graphics to view the home run from every conceivable angle, starting as many arguments as he settles along the way.
The thread running through these graphics and sidebars is the story of the home run, which has become (to many fans) synonymous with the game itself. It was not, of course, always so. The home run might as well not have existed in the early years of the game, when round-trippers were born of speed, misplays, or cavernous ballparks. One player, Jim Creighton, actually killed himself with a home-run shot in 1862, twisting his midsection so mightily (in an era when batters stood rigidly and awkwardly upright) that something audibly snapped inside him and he died four days later. No wonder nobody swung for the fences back then.
Then, of course, came Babe Ruth, fueled by alcohol and beef by-products, whose colossal arithmetic changed the game forever. Why bunt, steal, hustle and slide your way around the diamond when one wallop from this rotund court jester showed you could simply saunter? Both because of his example and the changes wrought upon baseballs (tighter, whiter and replaced when they flew out of play) and pitchers (forbidden from spitballs, shine balls, and other "underhanded" methods), the home run suddenly became a central part of the game.
Homers shot steadily higher, with a moderate dip during the war-depleted forties, until the sixties brought bigger ballparks, night baseball, and the expanded strike zone. Then, the long-ball rise leveled off for a decade or so, before players adjusted to these new wrinkles (and the league lowered the mound and shrank the strike zone) and homers rose again through the late seventies and eightes. These ups and downs were mostly products of environment: rules, parks, and to a lesser extent, improvements in equipment and conditioning techniques. Like its rule-tweaking cousins in the NBA and NFL, MLB managed largely to stay within itself, adjusting the game through things they could control.
Then we hit the juiced era of the late 1980s and 1990s. Ballplayers will tell you that drugs have always been a part of the game, from the liniments of the early days to the ubiquitous "greenies" of the seventies. But these largely enabled players to endure the crushing grind of baseball's long season, to take the field when their unmedicated brethren couldn't. Uppers may have made players think they could hit the ball to the moon, and might have helped their reaction times, but they didn't do much to benefit the physiology of the players themselves.
But the onslaught of "performance-enhancing drugs," from steroids and presteroids like androstenedione to Human Growth Hormones, veterinary drugs, and the infamous "clear" and "cream" of BALCO, would change the look of the players and the feel of the game. Suddenly, everyone started hitting home runs, records weren't broken but shattered, and even shortstops looked like weightlifters and launched moon shots.
Keating makes the case that weight training, and the various "supplements" that both legally and illegally assisted in it, were responsible for making the difference in the "hyper-inflated" years of the 1980s and 1990s. Not the new ballparks, altered strike zone, or juiced baseballs—it was the ballplayers themselves who were juiced. He indicts the league and the media for turning their collective backs on the burgeoning problem, which finally broke in the early 2000s, when McGwire's body was "literally ripping away from its frame," a condition expressed as patellar tendonitis. Our red-haired home run hero came down to earth, and like any drug-induced euphoria, we all came down equally quickly, deciding homers aren't so exciting when they're so common (and likely ill-gotten, too).
And with that, Keating steps off his soapbox and pulls up his tour bus at today, when it's hard to tell if the backlash against the steroid monsters of yore (if a few years ago counts as "yore") will bring the dinger back down to "respectable" levels, or if this is just another blip in the meteoric rise of the long ball. His last chapter begins in 2005, with the "hairpin" turn predicted by Sports Illustrated that same year, and with the equally salient observation that any home-run decline during that season was well within statistical norms. That is, perhaps performance-enhancing drugs are either not the whole story, or not entirely gone from the game.
Appropriately, Keating finishes the book (as he finishes each era) with a profile of the greatest home run hitter of his time: Alex Rodriguez. As many pundits, including members of our own message board, have noted, A-Rod stands ready to shatter Bonds' record, assuming good health, and nobody can argue that this supple, lithe infielder has been hitting anything harder than the weight room. A-Rod's figure today looks much as it did when he broke in with Seattle in 1994, giving us all the hope that the next Home Run King will be indubitably a clean one.
As timely as the perfect swing on a fastball, DINGERS! will educate without infuriating, even if it fails to entirely immerse itself in the most controversial topic in this, the most controversial of home-run years. Then again, Keating's point is not to speak of today's version of the longball, but to trace its origin, rise, and various dips and adjustments along the way to today. This is history more than commentary, and enjoyable history, at that. The kind of book that can be read cover-to-cover or in small, discrete chunks, DINGERS! is a steroid-free smash out of the park in a year that needed one. The juice in this book is entirely the legitimate kind, the peculiar rush we all feel when our favorite player connects bat with ball and sends it flying out of the confines of the playing field, making us all believe that anything is possible.
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