The Year of Blue Snow (2013) editors Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin.
Good Reads meta-data is 351 pages, rated 3.77 by 13 Philly Phanatics.
Genre: Non-fiction; Species: Baseball.
Verdict: It still hurts!
Tagline: Perfect hindsight.
Cold weather came early and a curtain of freezing snow fell on warm summer dreams when Chico Ruiz stole home on 21 September 1964. So the end began, after leading the National League for 150 days, World Series tickets already printed in the city of Brotherly Love (and are now in mint condition on Ebay where I got mine to fulfil a vow I made in 1964), the bottom fell out. This tale of woe is the baseball season of the Philadelphia Phillies, a sect which I followed as devotedly as any believer in miracles. Then came the fall of the curtain and no cognitive dissonance could disguise the crush of reality.
This compendium offers brief and anodyne biographies of every member of this team on the roster even if only for a few days, including coaches, radio announcers, general manager, and owner. The groundskeepers are not included, though one is pictured. These sketches were compiled from the biography project of the Society for American Baseball Research web site, from whence comes the neologism ‘sabermetrics.’ It is a bland biographical reference work in the main. Most of these individuals have Wikipedia entries from the same source, like manager Gene Mauch, Congressman Jim Bunning, Chris Short, Ed Roebuck, Tony Gonzales, Rubén Amaro, Dick Allen, John Herrnstein, John Callison, Art Mahaffey….
At the back it includes several essays second guessing with the unerring perception of fifty years of hindsight every move, starting lineup, call, and choice during the downfall. Management decisions, roster changes, use of relief pitchers, catchers, pitch selections, signals to bunt, rotation, stolen base attempts, steps off the first base bag, and more are considered in a forensic investigation to find fault, apportion blame, and mourn. The result is thoroughgoing but superficial. For even more gruesome detail see John Rossi, The 1964 Phillies (2005). Then there is Greg Glading’s unintelligible 64 Intruder (1995). This latter seems to have been translated from Klingon by a Romulean.
Although the most fatuous assertion, with statistical analyses and diagrams, proves that Ruiz should not have tried to steal home. None go quite so far as to say that he did not steal home, but that will surely come in our world where truth is fiction and fiction truth, as the Post-Modernist of Hollywood have it.
Elsewhere Ruiz is defended with footnotes: https://sabr.org/journal/article/1964-phillies-in-defense-of-chico-ruizs-mad-dash/
The fact is the St Louis Cardinals had more stamina, and they had Bob Gibson. Enuf said!
Ruiz acted on Fate’s initiative, not the manager’s. A runner on third in the 6th inning of a scoreless game with two outs and the team’s best hitter at bat down two strikes means stay put. According to that same conventional wisdom the pitcher used a windup not a stretch. And yet…. At that moment the Phillies were leading the league by 6 1/2 games. Yet they finished third by losing this one and the next 9 games in a row, ten straight. Two wins in those 10 would have been enough. Even one might have led to a playoff game. At the time it was the longest leading margin that late in the season to fail but fail it did.
Pedant’s corner: ‘Blue snow’ is a rare optical effect of deep and dense snow drift seen in slanting light. In this case the remark is attributed to Gus Triandos, number two catcher for the team. He meant that it was a rarity for a team like the Phillies to do as well as they did, when a number of average players combined to have exceptional seasons. Certainly, it is true that this season was a career best for several of them, hereafter the only way was down.
On the experience of the failure, one of his teammates likened it to swimming in a long, long lake for a long time and then, within sight of the further shore, cramping and drowning. That was Octavio Rojas, outfielder.
That capped a summer in which my first serious girlfriend unexpectedly dumped me, I broke my arm through my own stupidity, my first car bit the dust after two weeks, and there was no joy from Mudville to salve those wounds and woes, but rather it compounded them.