Two books on baseball, one on its history, the other on the longest game
By Dave Sheinin,
The prevailing myth about baseball’s invention, that Civil War hero Abner Doubleday drew the whole thing up out of his imagination during a stopover in Cooperstown, N.Y., had long been debunked by the time John Thorn, the noted baseball historian, set out to write “Baseball in the Garden of Eden.”
But before Thorn, in his engaging book, gets around to explaining baseball’s true origins, he spends some time on the remarkable Doubleday myth — which was not merely exaggerated but wholly made up. Having resolved to “set matters straight,” Thorn writes, “I found myself more engaged by the lies, and the reason for their creation, and have sought here not simply to contradict but to fathom them.”
What Thorn finds is that the Doubleday myth stemmed from universal human foibles recognizable today — “jingoism, greed, or overweening ego.” Someone, namely Albert Spalding, a former star pitcher and club executive turned sporting-goods and publishing magnate, wanted folks to believe that baseball was “purely of American origin” — as opposed to having derived from similar English games — and so he set about making it so, essentially inventing its invention.
As for the true story of baseball’s origins, it was obviously more complicated than that. Baseball, Thorn says, “had not one father, but several, though none named Doubleday.” If you love history or baseball, you will enjoy Thorn’s impeccably researched tome; if you love both, you will be mesmerized.
Various bat-and-ball games that one might recognize as embryonic forms of baseball were being played in New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as far back as 1735. “Baseball,” Thorn writes, “appears to have sprung up everywhere, like dandelions, and we cannot now expect to identify with certainty which of these hardy flowers was truly the first.” When the New York version ultimately prevailed during the Revolutionary War, it was less because of its superiority — Thorn calls the Massachusetts version “richer in variation and possibility” — than because of its creators’ willingness to embrace three influences that increased the game’s popularity: a friendly stance toward gambling, a recognition that statistics should be compiled and an understanding of how to obtain publicity. That remains a fairly solid, if basic, formula for any sporting venture.
“Why,” Thorn asks rhetorically, “do the origins of baseball matter today?. . . Because baseball provides us with a family album older and deeper, by many generations, than all but a relative handful of Americans can claim for their own lineage; because the charm of baseball today is in good measure its echo of a bygone age.”
If baseball’s primordial steps are worthy of some 300 pages of scholarship, so, too, is what lies at the opposite end of the evolutionary continuum. On April 18, 1981, the day before Easter, the Class AAA Pawtucket (R.I.) Red Sox and Rochester (N.Y.) Red Wings began what still stands as the game’s ultimate expression (at least as measured by length of game): a 33-inning marathon that started at night, continued through the wee hours of Easter morning and finally, after a suspension of play following the 32nd inning, reached its conclusion two months later.
In “Bottom of the 33rd,” Dan Barry, the talented New York Times columnist, explores every musty crevice and tangential detour surrounding that epic, legendary game. Rather than take the easy road — such as leaning heavily upon the star power of Hall of Famers Cal Ripken Jr. and Wade Boggs, both of whom played in the game but who figure only slightly in the narrative — Barry masterfully pieces together his story from the perimeter in.
You get essays, brilliantly rendered, about the demise of industrial East Coast cities; numerous poignant reminders of how thin is the line between a career that culminates in the big leagues and one that peters out one step shy; random odes to many of the players, coaches, stadium workers and even fans (there were said to be only 19 left in attendance when the game was suspended at 4:09 a.m.) whose fates were bound together that night; and the occasional existential riff about the sheer absurdity of what occurred.
“The night seems to have said something about time itself: the deceptiveness of it; the dearness of it,” Barry writes. “Beseeched by older ballplayers to slow the clock, and begged by the younger players to hasten it, the night chose instead to stop time; to place it under a stadium’s laboratory lights and pin it to the Pawtucket clay.”
The book is both a fount of luxurious writing (a manager’s “glorious invective that resounded through the bare and cavernous stadium like a profane Gregorian chant”) and a tour de force of reportage. Although there are no footnotes, Barry appears to have interviewed the majority of the game’s principals in person, and he describes everything from the decrepit appearance of the ticket booth to the multi-colored scribbles in the official scorer’s scorebook with a perfectionist’s eye for detail.
And in what stands as the book’s coda, in which Barry follows the redemptive, post-career story of Dave Koza, the burly Red Sox slugger who drove in the tie-breaking run but never made it to the big leagues, the author shows Koza driving his children to Cooperstown, where the family gazed at a display case in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In it was “the Louisville Slugger bat that was used to drive in the game-winning single; and a large portrait of the hero who swung it: Dave Koza, former ballplayer, truck driver, recovering alcoholic — dad.”
Dave Sheinin is a sportswriter for The Washington Post.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/two-books-on-baseball-one-on-its-history-the-other-on-the-longest-game/2011/04/27/AFNu3q2G_story.html
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