* Neo-classics?

Several new titles consider World Series past. Two — by Joe Posnanski and Mark Frost — deal with the 1975 Red Sox-Reds contest, which was highlighted by Carlton Fisk’s game-winner in the sixth game, the closest to that point Boston had come to winning a title since 1918.  The next most recent is Perfect, by Lew Paper, which examines the participants in Don Larsen’s 1956 no-hitter. Then we go all the back to that 1918 match-up between the Red Sox and the Cubs in Sean Deveney’s The Original Curse, which ponders whether Chicago threw those games, setting up the Black Sox scandal the following year. And finally, we have Mike Vaccaro’s The First Fall Classic, another Red Sox feature, this time against the New York Giants.

All that was a long way to get around to the fact that former NY Times sportswriter and author Gerald Eskenazi reviews the titles by Vaccaro, Posnanski, and Paper in this Wall Street Journal piece.

* RK interview: Thomas Oliphant

I conducted this interview with the author of Praying for Gil Hodges for Bookreporter.com in 2005.

* * *

Bookreporter.com baseball specialist Ron Kaplan interviewed Pulitzer Prize winner Thomas Oliphant about PRAYING FOR GIL HODGES, his bittersweet memoir about growing up as a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the joy of celebrating their only World Championship in 1955. Oliphant, the Washington columnist for the Boston Globe, discusses what the team meant to the Flatbush faithful, what Jackie Robinson meant to America, and why intellectuals gravitate to the national pastime.

Bookreporter.com: Why did you write PRAYING FOR GIL HODGES?

Thomas Oliphant: I had this stone in my shoe all my life, and it came out talking with close friends. This memory didn’t die and get buried, only to be resurrected. It has always been, I think, because it’s a bittersweet story. There’s a lot of disappointment — personal and baseball — in there, and a lot of joy. But it was sort of teetering on the edge when I saw that little sign on that bridge in Indiana.

The first thing I did was call Doris [Kearns Goodwin, author of WAIT TILL NEXT YEAR] just because I knew she would get such a kick out of it. That book is poetry. And it was like, for once in your life would you shut up and tell your story and get it out of your system? My friends who are psychologists and shrinks say it’s a heck of a lot cheaper than five years of therapy.

It was a political year, 1998, and there was a hot House race in Southern Indiana near Bloomington, the university town. I was driving down a country highway, and as I narrate, the first thing I saw was a little sign that said “Princeton.” A little bell went off and then about five or six miles later there it was — the Gil Hodges Memorial Bridge. When I stopped the car, got out and sat on it, I let memories wash back over me. One of the things I appreciated in a way I hadn’t throughout my life was that all of our really honest memories are bittersweet. I mean it’s not worth it if it’s just joy.

By the time I got back in the car, I was ready for a friend, a wife, and an agent to persuade me to get off my skinny butt and do this.

BRC: A huge part of the book deals with you and your father.

TO: Absolutely! I was part of a “Dodger family” — we of course weren’t the only ones, we’re weren’t unique, and maybe we weren’t even totally typical. But this was at a time when America was still a largely blue-collar country. Everybody was just two or three missed paychecks away from catastrophe — struggling, not quite succeeding.

Everything about the Dodgers immediately pre- and post-World War II was eminently understandable to ordinary American families, not just [in Brooklyn]. Part of the task, I thought, was to try to understand the resonance. This is unique. There was no 50-year recognition last year for the Giants upsetting the Indians. There wasn’t any 50-year recognition even two years ago for the start of the Yankees’ [World Series] winning streak that probably will never be equaled again.

To me, it’s like a two or three stage rocket. First, Brooklyn: It has the largest Diaspora of any chunk of real estate in America, Ellis Island included. The experts who’ve done the demography figure that one in five — some even argue one in four — Americans either lived there or had a relative or ancestor who did. It’s the most important gateway in the country. You say “Brooklyn” anywhere in the country and it has a resonance that The Bronx and Queens don’t have.

Secondly is this idea of struggle and underdogs. It is an essential part of American mythology because it’s so true. In the late forties and early fifties, when most of America rooted from afar because there were only sixteen teams in fourteen cities — not one south of Washington or west of St. Louis — the hard luck underdog, or the hard luck struggler, was the easiest thing with which to identify. The Yankees were almost like the Roman Empire — the majestic winning machine that you were in awe of. The Dodgers came closer to being America’s team based solely on that perception.

But then the clincher for me that I think people have forgotten is that race played a huge role. I noticed in studying the Black press in the early fifties that it was routine for the Dodger train to pull into a city on a road trip late in the evening. There would be a few hundred people on the train platform, almost all of them black men with their sons, just to get a glimpse of their heroes.

And that produced a whole chunk of America that at least in September identified with [the Dodgers] simply because of the enormity of what they had accomplished at a time when nothing else good in America was happening [for them]. One of the things I fixated on after the third out of Game Seven in 1955: it’s two months, almost to the day, when Rosa Parks doesn’t give up her seat on that bus. And yet in ‘55, if Newcombe was pitching, the Dodgers routinely put five African American ballplayers on the field. And there were still four teams at the time that hadn’t yet integrated.

BRC: Why did you name the book for Gil Hodges?

TO: I was looking for a metaphysical story. [During one World Series, when Hodges was having a particularly rough showing, a Brooklyn priest told his congregation, "It's too hot for a sermon. Go home, keep the commandments, and pray for Gil Hodges."] [A]nd it had the additional advantage of being true, because my father was from rural Indiana [as was Hodges] and to me Hodges just seemed to embody the stoicism, the purpose with which the Dodgers confronted adversity. He wasn’t a jovial man; he was more of a majestic figure and all the parents in Brooklyn wanted their kids to be like him. You don’t complain, you don’t shout, you don’t quit. And it was really true. I guess what we didn’t know is that he kept a lot of it bottled up. [Hodges died of a heart attack in 1972 at the age of 48.]

BRC: Is Hodges your favorite player?

TO: It doesn’t work that way with the Dodgers. This is where the politics of this discussion comes in. It is definitely a collective appeal. You do not have anything that approaches Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle. I mean, [Duke] Snider obviously does as a ballplayer, but I mean in terms of adulation. It’s Dodgers first, ballplayers second.

BRC: Was Jackie Robinson’s importance to the team overstated or justified?

TO: I wanted to check, dig more deeply than that, and go beyond 1947. After I talked to the African Americans who were involved at the time in helping to make this happen and then making it work, as well as the people with more national experience and some memory (Vernon Jordan is a very good example), I realized that most of us have forgotten the fact that nothing was happening after WWII ended. Nothing. You couldn’t even get a vote on the Senate floor for legislation outlawing lynching. Branch Rickey singed Robinson three years before Truman’s executive order [integrating the Army]. In the black community, the disappointment and anger of returning vets thinking “well, maybe now after what we’ve done…” was palpable. But what made Jackie Robinson so special was that he was involved in a team sport that just happened to be the national pastime, and this was the first segregation barrier to fall. The country understood this when Robinson came up in 1947, no question. It was a huge occurrence that helped pave the way for what would come immediately thereafter.

BRC: What about minority ballplayers? Is there an appreciation for the pioneers like Jackie Robinson, Joe Black, Roy Campanella and Don Newcombe?

TO: I think a lot of us have forgotten how the Dodgers also taught America, before it learned from any other venue, what immigration means. On a typical day in 1955, if Newcombe was pitching, you had Newcombe, Campanella, Jim Gillian, Jackie Robinson and Sandy Amoros on the same field. That’s a majority. And this was ten years before the bill passed Congress outlawing segregation in public accommodations. That’s a pretty big deal. And what I discovered, which I didn’t fully appreciate as a boy, was how big this was in the African American community throughout the country.

BRC: Do you think today’s players appreciate what their athletic predecessors did?

TO: We forget. This has long since become part of history, and history has a different resonance from something current. There won’t be a 75th anniversary event. This is it. The important pieces of the historical memory have pretty much gotten their due. But understanding how vital the Dodgers were to post-World War II American history is very important because it was huge. It just wasn’t noticed at the time.

BRC: What is it about baseball that engages such scholarly affection inspiring so many writers who can be considered “intellectual,” such as George F. Will, Jay Stephen Gould, Charles Krauthammer — and yourself — to write about the game?

TO: A lot of us like to do it just because it’s a way of emptying our own notebook. Some of it is embarrassing and I think that’s why you see writers take refuge in statistics. To me, every time you get to a number, you fail. I don’t understand all of what’s made it so important in American history, but I’m positive that memory and these insoluble arguments will go on forever.

BRC: What’s your favorite baseball anecdote?

TO: One time Babe Herman was playing right field. There was one out and a man on third. And somebody hits a fly ball to him. He comes under it, catches it, puts the ball in his pocket, runs off the field, and the run scores. I don’t think you can ask for a better mental picture of what fun [the Dodgers] were and how creatively terrible they could be.

However majestic 1955 was, I think it’s the memories that made them so human and worth loving.

* Review: Forever Blue

From journalists/sports guy Paul Oberjuerger, this considered assessment of the new Walter O’Malley/Brooklyn Dodgers book by Michael D’Antonio.

Upshot:

What makes this book important? The author had access to “tens of thousands of items” from the O’Malley family archive. And, naturally, that O’Malley-centric material tends to paint Walter O’Malley in a kinder light.

If only Walter O’Malley hadn’t always made me think of Lionel Barrymore playing the black-hearted banker “Old Man Potter” in the movie, “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

You remember Mr. Potter. The man who owned everything in Bedford Falls except the virtuous and populist George Bailey. Old Man Potter was the man who was determined to make everyone crawl and beg.

Had to put that last part in; big Jimmy Stewart fan here.

* RK author profile: Troy Soos

Apropos of the interview I did with Favorite PASTimes, here’s a profile on Troy Soos, author of the Mickey Rawlings series of historical baseball mysteries, I did for the Summer 1998 edition of The Mystery Review, a defunct Canadian publication.

* * *

The manicured grass of the baseball field doesn’t grow under Troy Soos’ feet. The Cincinnati Red Stalkings, the fifth in the Mickey Rawlings mystery series (Kensington Books), is due out this spring. And he’s already working on his next book. And the one after that.

Mixing well-researched fact with fiction, Soos depicts the travels and travails of Mickey Rawlings, a journeyman ballplayer in the early 20th century. Rawlings possesses a keen mind, if mediocre athletic skills. He must contend not only with the tenuous nature of the athlete’s career, with all its peculiarities and Runyonesque characters, but with becoming enmeshed in the murders that somehow crop up at each of his venues.

As a young man, Rawlings left home to pursue his dream to become a professional ballplayer. His journeys took him to factory towns where work was often secondary to playing for the company team. He caught the eyes of major league scouts and wound up on the Boston Braves of 1911, only to be released after the season. He hooked up with the crosstown Red Sox, where his exploits begin.

In his debut, Rawlings must deal with a Murder at Fenway Park. By the time his train arrives in Boston, he’s missed his first game with his new team. Except for the guard who lets him in, there’s no one left to greet him as he wanders the tunnels of the new stadium – no one except a bloody corpse. Now he has to prove to the authorities thathe’s not the murderer. Before long he will also need to be wary not to become the next victim.

During a recen t conversation with Soos from his home in Winter Park, Florida, the author discussed the complexities of the historical mystery novel.

Soos was born in New Jersey in 1957, two weeks after the Brooklyn Dodgers migrated to the West Coast. He attended his first major league game in 1963, primarily to see Duke Snider, a former Dodger winding down his career with the fledgling New York Mets. Watching his idol sparked a lifelong interest, not in modern baseball, but in the game’s history.

* Review: After Many a Summer

The Providence Journal posted this review of yet another account of the Dodgers’ (and Giants’) move to California.

Upshot:

To the dwindling circle of Brooklyn Dodger fans, Walter O’Malley will forever remain a despised #@%&*. If they can bring themselves to read it, Murphy’s book will reinforce their notion.

* Bits and Pieces

Time to play a little catch-up:

• From Pressboxonline.com, a Baltimore-sports oriented site, a review of Bert Randolph Sugar’s new coffee table book about the Hall of Fame. “[The author] left nothing out and I can’t think of a better way to educate those whom are grasping for a better understanding of baseball’s history than to give Sugar’s account a long look.”
• From the Magazine History blog, this entry about early articles on  the new national game.
• From the Illinois-based Beacon News, a profile of first-time author John O’Donnell and his new book, Like Night and Day: A Look at Chicago Baseball 1964-1969.
• From NewJerseyNewsRoom, this Q & A with Curt Smith, author of the new Vin Scully biography. Smith will be at the Yogi Berra Museum in Little Falls on Sunday, June 28, at 4 p.m.
• Via a roundabout path, here’s a great piece by Robert Lipsyte on the spate of new books on baseball and steroids, including the usual titles (American Icon, The Rocket That Fell to Earther, A-Rod, Cooperstown Confidential, The Yankee Years, and more).
• Mark Lamster reviews Michael Shapiro’s Bottom of the Ninth in the Los Angeles Times. “Shapiro… does an admirable job telling this complex story. His biographical sketches of Rickey and Webb are especially compelling. But a sausage story is not always the most compelling of reads, and to inoculate himself against that reality, Shapiro has larded up this one by interspersing a second narrative, the story of Stengel’s final years with the Yankees, which is of little relation to the primary action of the book. It’s less than ideal, but Rickey, always an optimist, might have put a positive spin on it: Two stories for the price of one.”

* National Pastime Radio

Several baseball items have popped up on NPR shows in recent days:

Larry Tye, author of the new biography Satchel: The Life and Times of An American Legend, was a guest on Fresh Air. You can hear the show here as well as read an excerpt from the book.

***

Brian Lehrer had this segment on the musical group, The Baseball Project, on Soundcheck (“The Baseball project aims for a hit”).

Listen to the segment here:

***

On June 9, Leonard Lopate hosted Keith Hernandez in a lengthy interview on his new book, Shea Goodbye. I found Hernandez’s honesty about the process of creating the book charming. “It’s not War and Peace,” he said in response to Lopate’s questions about the journal-type format.

Hear the Hernandez segment here:

The same day, Lopate also chatted with Michael Shapiro, author of Bottom of the Ninth about the loss of the Dodgers and Giants and the ultimate birth of the Mets.

Hear the Shapiro segment here:

As an aside, Lopate interviewed John Goodman and Bill Irwin for their roles in Waiting for Godot. What unlikely connection do they share? They both starred as baseball players in feature films. Goodman appeared in the title role in the 1992 movie The Babe, while Irwin did a nice turn as Eddie Collins in John Sayles’ production of Eight Men Out.

Bill Irwin, far left, in "Eight Men Out."

* Review: Bottom of the Ninth

Jonathan Eig, author of Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinon’s First Season and Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, does the honors for Michael Shapiro’s new book on the exit of the Brooklyn Dodgers and the ultimate entrance of the New York Mets.

* Review: Dodgers Past and Present

The Sons of Steve Garvey Blog posted this review of Steve Traver’s new book, one of his many projects this year.

Upshot:

…Dodger fans might already be quite familiar with most of the tales Travers recounts, and he often doesn’t go into the depth necessary to capture the drama of a moment or emotion of the time. That’s unfortunate, as Travers, a former professional baseball player who has written other books about the Dodgers, surely has a perspective that would make it worthy of sticking around on a vignette to spend a bit more time.

But the upside is that the rapid-fire pace allows every page turned or paragraph read has so many memories mentioned and pictures shown, that it’s bound to spark memories on its own. And that’s a fun way to casually read about the Dodgers, celebrating their rich and vivid history.

* Double your (reading) pleasure

From mediabistro.com, this double profile of authors Michael Shapiro (Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself)
and Robert E. Murphy (After Many a Summer: The Passing of the Giants and Dodgers and a Golden Age in New York Baseball).  Shapiro previously published The Last Good Season: Brooklyn, the Dodgers, and Their Final Pennant Race Together in 2004.