Author: Michael W Jackson

The Whiz Kids and the 1950 Pennant (1996) by Robin Roberts and C. Paul Rogers, III.  

Good Reads meta-data is 390 pages, rated 4.27 by 33 litizens.
Genre: Non-fiction.
DNA: baseball.
Verdict: Mr Rogers and Mr Roberts tell all.
Tagline: You can take the boy out of the ball game, but you can’t take the ball game out of the boy.

Forward by novelist James Michener published by Temple University Press perhaps in recognition of the social impact of sports, which seems more enduring than institutionalised religion these days. Hope, salvation, compensation, distraction from woes, identification with something larger and meaningful, sports gives these to a lot of people.

First half of the book is a history of the Philadelphia National League Franchise from 1915 when it went to the World Series to 1949 when, after long years in the wilderness, it made into the first division with a winning record. Robin Roberts (1926-2010) was one of the Clydesdales who pulled that wagon into the Winner’s Circle.

Based on extensive interviews with surviving members of the 1950 team and written largely from Roberts’s point of view, a modest and unassuming one. It recounts many games and the stresses and strains both on and off the field with a candor made possible only by Jim Bouton’s barrier breaker Ball Four of 1970, which might have been the first book about baseball to acknowledge that players were fallible and friable human beings. The Society for American Baseball Research has opined that Bouton’s is the most influential book ever written about baseball for that reason. Amen to that!

In these pages Roberts and Rogers give credit where it is due to the players who made the 1950 Philadelphia Phillies champions. A few tidbits follow in no particular order.

There was a new manager in 1949, replacing an aggressive and assertive fellow who did a lot of yelling while the losses mounted. In came Ed Sawyer, called the Professor by his players because he had an advanced degree in biology, a subject he had taught at Cornell where he coached the baseball team. Sawyer was, to say the least, mild-mannered. He seldom convened team meetings, never tried to motivate players by yelling at them, conceded the importance of family lives (births of children, illness of spouses, deaths of parents), did not tell pitchers what to do, and never, and this is much stressed in the book, second guessed after the fact what anyone did. So different from so many ex post facto coaches and so-called colour commentators who always know what should have been done.

Aside from creating an atmosphere of calm confidence, Sawyer also convinced the ownership to invest in new uniforms with a red pinstripe, perhaps to capture some of the reflected glory of the New York Yankees blue pin stripes.
Sawyer was the antithesis of the most well known and still remembered manager of that era, Leo Durocher, who always made himself the centre of attention, and over-managed enough to earn a McKinsey degree. He would certainly fit in the way the game is played these days: over-managed.
Sawyer believed in putting the players on the field and letting them do what they did best.

That was not always possible. To wit, All-Star first baseman Ed Waitkus missed most of the 1949 season and seemed unlikely for the 1950 season when a stan shot him. It’s a long story and none of it is good. A woman became obsessed with him, her apartment was plastered with all manner of his pictures and newspaper cuttings from the sports pages that mentioned his name. Then one day, perhaps, realising she would never possess him, she exercised her constitutional right to bear arms and in a hotel hallway shot him with a rifle. He did recover from the lung injury but was never quite the same again. This incident, by the way, is the seed of Bernard Malamud’s love letter to baseball, The Natural (1952). Justice being what it is, she was never tried but confined for psychological assessment and then released in 1952. Waitkus did not press charges but the team hired a body guard for him when she was released. Details can be found in John Theodore’s Baseball Natural: The Story of Eddie Waitkus (2002).

Fielding the best players in 1950 meant putting Mike Goliat at second base. Previously, he had played first and third, but the team had established players at the corners, and someone had to play second. He volunteered to try, and stuck to it. He made an adequate fielder and a modest hitter, at least above the Mendoza Line. (The cognoscenti know what that means.) But he made two other contributions to the team. According to Roberts, Goliat was a cheerleader of sorts who always tried to get the others to focus on the positive, even in defeat. And also, hidden in the aggregate statistics of his batting, is the fact that he absolutely owned Don Newcombe of the arch rival Brooklyn Dodgers and most of their other pitchers. HIs batting average against the Dodgers was well over .350. Because these Dodgers were locked in a race with the Phillies their ace Newcombe invariably pitched against them and Goliat feasted, typically going 4 for 5 with a couple of extra base hits, and even one of his few home runs. When the Phillies beat Newcombe, and they did, it was because Goliat was scoring. Of course, Roberts is too modest to say it, but it was also because he was shutting out the Dodgers’ many big bats.

Roberts was not an overpowering fastball pitcher like Sandy Koufax nor did he have a table drop curve ball like Bob Gibson, but he did have preternatural control of all his pitches. This mastery was born of practice, but then everyone practices. But a hint at what set him apart is to be found in his comment that he seldom noticed the weather, the crowd, the catcalls, the cheers, the jeers, the wind, the noise or anything else. When he stood on the rubber atop the 15-inch mound there was just him and catcher’s glove. He sometimes had to be told the game was called off because of rain. He hadn’t noticed when pitching in it. More than once he asked his wife if there had been a big crowd at a game. He hadn’t noticed.

The Phillies beat the Dodgers for the National League Pennant in the last game on the last day of the season in the 11th inning at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn against that man Newcombe with Roberts holding the formidable Brooklyn bats to one run, and Mike Goliat getting four hits. Two days later they met the dynamic New York Yankees and were roundly trounced in four games, three by one run. Yes, the Yankees had a superb team and the Phillies were doomed before the umpire said the sacred words of ‘Play ball.’

Ace left-handed pitcher Curt Simmons was called to active duty for the Korean War and left the team in September. The third starting pitcher Bubba Church was hit in the face by a line drive that same month and went on the injury list. Then the fourth man in the rotation was carrying a suitcase on a stairway in a train station when he fell and twisted his back in what became a lifelong disability. When the Series started the Phillies were very long shots with only one of their four starters available, that is, Roberts who had, two days before, pitched an eleven inning game, well over the magic pitch count of today.
But wait there is more! The starting catcher, Andy Seminick, broke his ankle in that last game with the Dodgers. He played on, including the World Series, shot full of novocain and taped toe to knee. This, by the way, was not the last disaster for this team. When Simmons returned the following year, he tested his new electric law mower with his foot. Since it was silent, he could not tell if it was running so he struck his toe under it to see. He saw…a lot of blood and a career-ending injury. (Though in fact with a prothesis and agonising physiotherapy he did make a comeback.)

As quickly as they had arrived at the top they fell to the bottom of the heap for years to come.

The sobriquet ‘Whiz’ was created by the pressmen in spring training in 1950 (p215) to reflect on the fast finish the Phillies had made in 1949 and the very successful spring training they had. (Wherein Roberts struck out Ted Williams in an exhibition game with a slow curve. For the record, Williams had his revenge in the next at bat, hitting a home run off Roberts). The nickname might also have been inspired by the popular radio program of the day, ‘The Quiz Kids,’ who answered all manner of trivia questions. However, the Phillies’ roster was not appreciably younger or smarter (see the reference to a lawn mower above) than those of other teams. Subsequently, it had another application to refer to how fast the Phillies faded from NL pennant contention in the following years.

Partly thanks to the efforts of James Michener and others, Robin Roberts was inducted into baseball’s Vahalla at Cooperstown with a career record of W 286-L 245 with 305 complete games. At one point he pitched 28 straight complete games, five of them had extra innings. Because the Phillies barely averaged 2 runs a game in his tenure, Roberts, one member of the nerd kingdom estimates, lost more than 50 games by one run. In that World Series he pitched 11 earned runs scoreless innings in two games, and yet lost one because of an error. Like many others, he found it hard to quit and hung on MLB for 18 years.

David Halberstam, The Teammates: a Portrait of a Friendship (2003).

Good Reads meta-data is 218 pages, rated 4.04 by 5789 litizens.

Genre: Biography.

DNA: Red Sox Nation.

Verdict: ‘Good at life.’

Tagline: Life goes on.  

The Brotherhood of the Bat was Dominic DiMaggio,  Bob Doerr, John Pesky, and Ted Williams. No pitchers allowed. (Grizzle: while pitchers have to bat, batters never have to pitch. Can that be right?) Baseball brought these four together where they had fused into a lifetime camaraderie.  A couple had become acquainted as teenagers, others later.  One was marital matchmaker to another, and so on. Their children played together and, sometimes, more than that into the next generation. 

The common currency in this unlikely union of such differing personalities was baseball, and specifically hitting a baseball.  Even in their eighties they could and would argue over technique with the bat. By social norms these four had little in common but baseball, and it was enough.  Even when they were no longer teammates, they remained fast friends, though I did wonder how that worked with the draconian fraternisation rules of baseball applied when the teammates were split up, but our author does not comment.   

This short book is a welcome reminder that great performers, in this case athletes, have lives off and on the stage, as well as before and after their careers.  It begins at the end with the death of the singular Ted Williams and works back with empathy and insight.  

The Lonely Hunter: A Biography of Carson McCullers (1976) by Virginia Carr.

Good Reads meta-data is 600 pages, rated 4.23 by 667 litizens.

DNA: Dixie.

Verdict: Meets the standard.  

Tagline: A betazoid.  

Born Lula Carson Smith (1917-1967) this precocious and sickly girl-woman was a prodigy, an ill-fated infante incroyable. At fourteen she dropped the ‘Lula’ name and embraced the androgynous  ‘Carson,’ a family name. When later she married James Reeves McCullers she took his name and kept it, though she did not always keep him or he her.  When Mrs McCullers was 19 she began to write her first novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, hard though it is to believe that an adolescent, and one who was comfortably sheltered, could produce such empathy and insight into its cast of characters, but she did.

‘We are all homesick for a place we have never been called happiness.’ She didn’t say that but it fits. McCullers was a tormented and doomed genius, more often than not, silent and alone, like one of her characters.   

How did this inconsolable soul emanate from a happy home? This is one of the questions the author deals with in a masterful fashion.  It was precisely because she had a supportive and comfortable start in life that her senses extended, almost palpably, to those who were not so fortunate.  When the preteen McCullers visited a travelling carnival, she went to the freak show and stood for hours watching the bearded lady, the enormously fat man, the boy with a flat head, the armless man, the legless woman, the dwarf, the pinhead, Andre the giant, half man-half woman, and other deformities of nature, and she wondered so hard about being them that she became one of them in her mind, on paper: an outcast, a reject, inferior, useless, a freak.  She also wondered about a god that created such beings and then left them to their own devices. 

While McCullers had many writing teachers, a high school graduate, she did not go to college, but rather enrolled in a variety of adult education writing classes.  It was through these experiences that she found her way to publication. Even before The Heart is a Lonely Hunter was published, she had written much of what later become Reflections in a Golden Eye. 

This biography meets my principal test: it shows the adult in the child and the child in the adult. In the girl Carson are the liniments that form the woman McCullers, and in the mature McCullers, the author shows, the sources in the girl Carson. One example is the cocktail of silent introvert and loud extrovert.  Mostly, she was silent and brooding, or perhaps better, soaking up observations of the world and people around her, but she also liked, occasionally, to be the centre of attention, to be opinionated, noisey, and even ill-mannered.  There was no in-between of normal conversational interaction. 

She began telling stories as a child and never stopped.  She was encouraged by her mother who never doubted her genius, and educated in part by her father, the watchmaker who stressed persistence and precision.   

The biographer uses passages from McCullers’s novels and stories to describe and explain Carson’s life because she so closely identified with her deformed characters that she became, at least in her own mind, a grotesquerie herself. McCullers has been a posthumous recruit in the LGBTQAA1 alphabet world.  All part of her Indiana Jones exploration into the far reaches of the human psyche, looking for a bottom to touch and finding nothing fixed and firm. 

She published four novels, many short stories, and several plays.

Let this passage from her first published, though not her first written, work about tweenager Mick Kelly, who goes to bed hungry most nights, indicate the kind of fiction she wrote. Restless, Mick roams her small Georgia town on hot summer nights, and stops to listen to radios emanating from open windows because her family is too poor to own a radio or have the electricity to run it.   

“Then the music started. Mick raised her head and her hand went up to her throat. It was like God walking through the night. The outside of her suddenly froze and only that first part of the music was hot inside her heart. She could not even hear what followed, she sat there waiting and frozen, with her fists tight. After a while, the music come again, harder and loud. It was her, this music, walking in the daytime, in the hot sun. The music boiled inside her. She wanted to hang onto it, to all of it. The whole world was this music and she could not listen hard enough to remember it all. Then the opening music again, but this time with different instruments. It was like a hard hand had punched her. And then it ended. This music did not take a long time or short time. It had no time; it was time.”

Music was McCullers’s even greater passion than prose and she was never without it, Beethoven (Eroica above), Brahms, Mozart, Vivaldi, the Liszt goes on. 

Her horribilis annus was 1944.  Her father died. Her mother collapsed as a result. Carson had three strokes over the year that left her partly paralysed. In between the strokes her recurrent pulmonary affliction knocked her down. During one of the many visits a doctor told her that she could not have children. Then a cancer was discovered. She was accused of anti-Semitism and that wounded her.  Her husband was an Army Ranger and his unit went up the bluff face on Normandy Beach with 50% casualties.  She knew he was a Ranger and she knew his Ranger regiment took the bluff, per the news reporting, and from that source she also knew the casualty rate, but it was weeks before she learned he had survived, though twice wounded. 

Through much of life she was a stick figure with a withered arm.  Several surgeries on a leg to restore circulation did not succeed and it atrophied.  Recurrent stokes. Near constant pain treated with alcohol and drugs. The press photographs required all too often by publishers were agony for her.  She had to psych and pretty herself up, mask her deformed arm in long sleeves and forgo the sling she often wore to keep it out of the way.  She would greet an interviewing journalist or photographer seated so as not to reveal how hard it was for her to move.  The photographs of her standing were choreographed. Yet through this all those voices of the neglected and rejected that had gestated within her leaked out onto the page, sometimes dictated, sometimes typed with the good hand or written.  She was an oracle through whom the speechless spoke.  

Reeves McCullers, that husband, survived Normandy with wounds and later when he was herding German prisoners onto trucks, he waited for the next truck, a German naval officer who was at the head of line read the name stencilled on his shirt – ‘McCullers,’ and in English said, pointing, ‘An unusual name.  Did you write The Heart is a Lonely Hunter?  A very moving book.’  It seems this German had read it in captured booty earlier.  Reeves told the German it was his wife who wrote it, and then he, the German, dug into his kit bag and handed over a piece of Belgian lace, saying, ‘Give it to her from a grateful reader.’  After the war, the textile hung as silent testament on the walls of their digs. Throughout her life, when her health permitted she read and replied to letters from readers.  

Aside: It rivals the story I read elsewhere of the Luftwaffe pilot who on being shot down west of Bradford in Yorkshire, asked his capturers if he might see the Brontë’s cottage before being taken away.  

The book is almost a diary of her day to day life, and I got bogged down in detail that did not, to this reader, add any more understanding of either the author or her works.  In such a forrest few trees were visible.  No doubt those whose accolades adorn the book cover had greater persistence than did I.  

The movies I have seen derived from her books are pale watermarks of the intensity of the original. I expect most of her novels are now banned in Florida.