→ April 10, 2013
→ By

42.

This week’s episode of Behind the Dish includes my conversation with John C. McGinley, who plays broadcaster Red Barber in 42 and was a fantastic guest. I also have a new column up discussing recent outings from three young NL starters – Jose Fernandez, Matt Harvey, and Julio Teheran.

The Jackie Robinson biopic 42, opening nationwide on Friday, is a superficial, Hollywood-ized version of the part of Robinson’s life from the Dodgers’ decision to add a black player to their organization until the end of his first season in the majors. A complicated person going through an emotional trial largely unthinkable to viewers today, Robinson is reduced in this film to an intense, brooding, slightly reluctant hero, on screen to be worshiped rather than admired for his strengths and his flaws.

The movie limits itself mostly to two years, 1946 and 1947, and simplifies the story to one where the Dodgers quickly identify Robinson as the player to help them break the color bar, let him dominate the International League for a year (taking just moderate abuse from white players and fans), and bring him up to the majors for a perfunctory tour of the racists of the National League. At nearly every step, Robinson responds to the abuse, mostly verbal with a few attempts to injure him, on the field, always providing the well-timed homer or the easy stolen base to shut up, even for a moment, his antagonists.

Only once do we see Robinson truly respond to the torrent of hate from whites, combined with the weight of expectations from blacks, in the way we’d expect any human being to respond, giving the film its pivotal scene and the one point where Robinson felt like a real person, rather than a two-dimensional character descended from Mt. Olympus. The movie needed that scene, as a catharsis for any empathetic viewers who could only imagine the pressure building up inside Robinson, as he isn’t allowed to respond to taunts or humiliations except with his abilities on the field. What 42 also needed, but didn’t get, was smaller instances of Robinson facing the frustrations – days when he might have gone 0-for-4, failed to come up big in a critical situation, and merely empowered the bigots who said he didn’t belong on the field with white players. Instead, we get trivial scenes of domestic bliss, powered by the beautiful Nicole Behairie in a wasted role as Robinson’s wife Rachel.

Even the process of getting Robinson to the big leagues is far too easy. Branch Rickey’s decision is shown as impetuous, and the internal debate within the Dodgers’ front office (which never seems to include the actual owner of the team) is minimal. The trio of executives select Robinson from a stack of folders on players with scouting reports and biographical information, but we never see the Dodgers actually scout anyone – eventually one of the executives tracks down Robinson’s Negro League team, coincidentally right after he has emerged from a whites-only bathroom at a gas station, and summons him to Brooklyn. The year in Montreal is barely shown, and the decision to promote Robinson to the majors is a formality. While 42 doesn’t make it look easy for Robinson, it does make the journey look a lot smoother than it actually was, an emphasis on Robinson himself that detracts from the magnitude of what he accomplished in reality.

Two aspects of the movie stood out as reasons to see it despite its weaknesses. One was the array of strong performances in leading and secondary roles. Chadwick Boseman (Robinson) does his best with limited material, as he can’t display more than two or three emotions over the course of the entire film, but has a strong enough on-screen presence to command scenes where he sits at the center – except, of course, when Harrison Ford, playing Branch Rickey, is in the room. Ford shocked me with his portrayal of Rickey, one because the script itself did a strong job of depicting Rickey as less than perfect, but also because Ford, even when blustering as Rickey blustered, didn’t chew up entire scenes – he dialed back enough for everyone else, even Boseman, to maintain a presence on the sceen. (We also didn’t get quite enough of Rickey’s motivations for breaking baseball’s unofficial but fifty-year-old color bar; the anecdote he tells Robinson near the end of the film was likely true, appearing in every Rickey biography I’ve read, but the movie doesn’t give the detail that makes the story even more compelling.) Alan Tudyk (Wash from Firefly) is frighteningly effective as the racial-epithet-spewing manager Ben Chapman, whose treatment of Robinson on the field may have led to the early end of his managing career, while McGinley hits his accented, staccato Red Barber impersonation to the point where I wouldn’t have recognized McGinley’s voice if I hadn’t seen him on screen. I wish Leo Durocher had stuck around in the story longer (in reality, that is) so we could have seen more of Christopher Meloni in that role, and thought Andre Holland was largely wasted in a one-note role as sportswriter Wendell Smith, where they made him look less like a writer of the ’40s than like he was about to break into the chorus of “Jerk Out.”

I also thought the baseball within the film was depicted reasonably well, particularly the visuals – creating fields and crowd scenes that looked somewhat appropriate for the time (although, like the entire film, everything is far too bright and clean). The movie relies heavily on apocryphal incidents, like the time Pee Wee Reese may or may not have put his arm around Robinson on the field in Cincinnati and practically read his teammate his eulogy while everyone else waits around for them to finish. The actual movements of players passed the eye test, however, perhaps in part because the extras included a number of former pro players, including one name in particular that jumped out at me during the closing credits. Even the stolen base sequences, which had to be the hardest to film, were good enough for the big screen – not perfect, but I doubt most viewers will be bothered by the catchers’ arm actions or the timing of Robinson’s jumps.

I could see 42 becoming a popular film because of the appeal of Robinson as an American hero – a veteran who destroyed one of the most visible examples of segregation in America, an achievement with tremendous symbolic value that presaged the civil rights movement of the two decades that followed it. But canonizing Robinson was unnecessary; a film that depicted Robinson as angry, frustrated, and flawed would not reduce his myth in the least. It is easier to believe in heroes who are human. The script of 42 tells us twice that Robinson may have been superhuman, and that lionization diminishes his legacy, and us in the process.

* I haven’t read Blackout: The Untold Story of Jackie Robinson’s First Spring Training, but came across it when researching the epilogue’s claim about Ed Charles (which this book apparently confirms). If any of you have read it, I’d like to hear whether it’s worthwhile, as the description on amazon implies that it has more of the ugly details of Robinson’s trials in that first year.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,
→ February 16, 2013
→ By

The Machine.

I broke two of my reading guidelines when tackling Joe Posnanski’s The Machine, his 20010 book about the remarkable 1975 Cincinnati Reds, focusing on their larger-than-life personalities as much as he does on the way they steamrolled through the National League. The first rule is that I almost never read baseball books. Baseball is work; reading is pleasure. When work invades pleasure, it becomes work. So I keep them separate as much as possible. The second rule is that I try not to read books written by people I know, especially if I count them as friends (as I do Joe), because then if I don’t like the book, I am faced with the difficult task of keeping my mouth shut, which, as many of you surely realize, is not something at which I am particularly skilled.

The good news is that I liked The Machine quite a bit – not as much as I loved The Soul of Baseball, which isn’t really a baseball book anyway, just a book about some people who played the game, but that’s an absurdly high standard. I won’t pretend to give The Machine an objective review, so I’ll focus on why I would recommend it.

I turned two during the 1975 season and have no memories of the Big Red Machine other than my parents telling me about those teams (including their dismantling of the Yankees in the 1976 World Series) when I was first becoming a baseball fan about five or six years later. Posnanski does a good job of keeping readers in the flow of the season, which started slowly for the Reds but turned into a romp that didn’t end until they faced the Red Sox in October, while also weaving in short but telling anecdotes about the team’s central personalities – primarily Rose, Anderson, Morgan, and Bench, and if you need their first names, well, you’re probably not the target audience here anyway.

Posnanski does a good job of humanizing Rose and Morgan, both of whom needed it for obvious yet totally unrelated reasons, while somewhat demythologizing Johnny Bench, who was one of baseball’s last true Hollywood stars, although he’s now better remembered for Krylon commercials and his gigantic hands. (Truckasaurus.) Rose doesn’t come off as sympathetic, just as pathologically driven; you won’t forgive his transgressions, but you can at least somewhat understand how he reached that bottom. Morgan, meanwhile, comes off as the cerebral player we all thought he was, given his stat lines, but that he did his best as an announcer to convince us that he wasn’t. (Disclaimer: I’ve never met Joe Morgan, and have no idea what he’s like as a person or as a student of the game.) Anderson, Tony Perez, Davey Concepcion, and Ken Griffey (Sr.) don’t get quite the same treatment, although I found the quiet rage of Griffey, still evident in contemporary quotes within the book, more reminiscent of Barry Bonds than of Ken Griffey, Jr., who had more of a reputation in baseball circles as an idler and a bit of a diva.

The Machine kicks into high gear at the end of the book when the nobody-respects-us Red Sox reach the Series and finally give the Reds the test they didn’t have all season. Those games were dramatic and come off as such on the pages, especially the epic Game 6, which Posnanski evokes through quotes and stories, including Rose’s boundless enthusiasm for what he correctly identified at the time as one of the greatest games in baseball history.

Posnanski mentions the team’s ethnic makeup and players’ obliviousness to it a few times during the book, but I wonder if that was truly a coming of age for MLB players post-Civil Rights Movement or just a function of winning breeding good chemistry. Was it unusual at the time to have a lineup – and the book is mostly about the lineup – that was so racially balanced? Did contemporary news sources see it as a big deal? In 1960, it would have been, and in 1980 it would scarcely have been noticed. I don’t know where 1975 fell on that continuum.

Posnanski’s writing has always spoken to me and, as you’d expect, the book absolutely flies – I knocked it off on a weekend trip to LA earlier this month. The friend who gave me this as a gift made a damn good call.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ November 3, 2010
→ By

Mint Condition.

UPDATE: Folks, the line about Old Hoss Radbourn being my alter ego is a joke. I’m not Hoss, but he and I have had some fun with the rumor that I am. He’s incredibly clever and I’m flattered to be thought the source, but it’s not me.

—

I received a comp copy of Dave Jamieson’s Mint Condition: How Baseball Cards Became an American Obsession back in the spring through my connection with the guys at mental floss, but got backed up in my reading between the move and writing playoff previews that I just got around to the book now. If you’ve got any history of collecting baseball cards (I do) or an interest in that tangential part of baseball history, I highly recommend the book, a quick, fun, occasionally funny run through the history of the baseball card, one that disabused me of a handful of card myths I thought were true.

Jamieson, who must be roughly my age as he too collected a hoard of cards that are no longer worth the cardboard they’re printed on, goes back to the origins of the baseball card as a way to sell tobacco, allegedly to adults but, hey, if a few kids caught the leaf habit, so much the better. Many of those tobacco cards are, of course, major collectors’ items today, but what I didn’t realize is that they’re rare not just because they weren’t kept but because they varied so widely – manufacturers would issue many different cards per player, with different brands advertised on the backs or different portraits on the fronts, for example. Jamieson discusses the history and myth behind the T206 Honus Wagner card, but also points out that it’s not the rarest card in history (another card in the same set, the T206 “Slow” Joe Doyle error card, is definitely rarer). Instead, Jamieson posits, the Wagner card became more valuable because it was deemed valuable in the first place: The media attention paid to the card when it sold for record-breaking sums made it more desirable to other, status-seeking collectors down the road.

He jumps forward a bit to the period after World War II when the card industry really boomed with the introduction of Bowman and Topps cards, as well as the latter’s monopolization of the industry that lasted until Fleer won an antitrust lawsuit in 1981. Topps’ actions to create and defend a monopoly occurred at the same time that the MLB Players’ Association was getting started, and while at first the MLBPA was willing to let Topps have its run of the joint, Marvin Miller’s first order of business was to end Topps’ free ride and begin returning that lost value to the players – making the union, which was battling one monopoly in MLB management, a willing partner to another monopoly in the baseball card realm. From there, Jamieson chronicles the rise and fall of the collectors’ boom in baseball cards, drawing much of his material from Pete Williams’ 1995 book Card Sharks, on the formation of Upper Deck and the creative destruction it brought to the baseball card industry, a very good story in its own right.

Jamieson keeps the book from turning into dry history by, naturally, finding and discussing a few notable eccentrics along the way. I particularly enjoyed the section on Woody Gelman, longtime head of Topps’ Product Development team and the creator of, among other icons, Bazooka Joe and the Mars Attacks! series. (I remember seeing Topps’ Wacky Packages as a kid, possibly the first time I ever ran into (or understood) parody in any form, but I don’t think I realized until I read this book that they were a Topps product.) Jamieson also takes us inside the collection of a former owner of that T206 Wagner, and looks at the rise of both card auction outfits, card authentication services, and the “ethical” card doctor who doctors worthless cards to better understand how fraudsters do it to create valuable ones. And I’d be remiss if I omitted the part my alter ego friend Old Hoss Radbourn played in the book, with a quietly extended middle finger in a few early cards of himself. That’s right: Old Hoss may have invented photobombing.

The book ends with a lament on the slow death of baseball cards, a phenomenon for which Jamieson explores various causes but can’t pinpoint a single reason for boys’ lack of interest in something so innate to his (and my) childhood. (I will offer that steroids have jack squat to do with it, since interest in MLB and minor league baseball grew substantially during the “steroid era.”) I do agree with his point that cheapening the core product by adding “chase cards” – prizes, limited edition cards, or other package inserts that weren’t just plain old cards of everyday players – didn’t help, but I think the fact that the cards themselves lack any interactivity is a huge part of why they’ve fallen so far out of favor. If you’re a kid today, what are you going to do with a pack of baseball cards? There’s no game or challenge involved, and I’d be hard-pressed to explain to an 8-year-old boy why I thought baseball cards were fun. They just were. The cards haven’t really changed, but maybe the definition of fun has.

At about 240 pages, Mint Condition is a very quick read, well under four hours for me, but in that short space it managed to fill a gap in my knowledge of baseball history, one I doubt I would have explored on my own since I left my baseball card affinity back the 1980s. Aside from the unsatisfying conclusion and some need for a better copyeditor, it’s well worth your time.

Next up: I’m crawling through the desert of Abdelrahman Munif’s Cities of Salt.

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , ,
→ September 15, 2009
→ By

Nice Guys Finish Last.

Leo Durocher’s Nice Guys Finish Last was re-released today, as one of many good baseball books of the 1970s that had fallen out of print (a category that includes the indispensable Weaver on Strategy, which was out of print before a 2002 reissue). Durocher’s book is rambling, funny, insightful, maybe not all his (did he really say of Judge Landis, “The legend has been spread that the owners hired the Judge off the federal bench. Don’t you believe it. They got him right out of Dickens?”), but absolutely worth the read.

The book doesn’t have much of a narrative structure, working more as a collection of anecdotes presented in a vague chronological order, although more identification of the year(s) under discussion would have helped. The bulk of the book focuses on his time playing with the Cardinals and managing the Dodgers and Giants, with a pretty good balance of straight baseball stories and Durocher’s own antics, mostly involving umpires, like this exchange between him and a frequent sparring partner of his:

And, sure enough, he said it again. “I’ll reach down and bite your head off.”
“If you do,” I said, “you’ll have more brains in your stomach than you’ve got in your head.”
And I’m in the clubhouse.

In addition to being a great baseball book, Nice Guys Finish Last is a bloodletting, as Durocher gets every grudge and bit of dirt off his chest, with many famous names from baseball history ending up the worse for it. Ernie Banks, Milt Pappas, Joe Pepitone, Leland MacPhail (Andy’s grandfather), Happy Chandler, Bowie Kuhn, Branch Rickey, Red Smith, and Cesar Cedeno all show up to play roles in Durocher’s stories and leave with egg on their faces and stains on their reputations. Even Jackie Robinson takes some criticism for showing up to spring training out of shape, while Durocher blames Banks for protecting his own reputation while undermining Durocher’s authority. Of course, I’m not sure how seriously to take some of the accusations, since most are first-person recollections of events that took place five to forty years before the book’s publication, but they made for good reading.

In addition to the unclear writing around certain dates and the question of the accuracy of Mr. Durocher’s memory, his baseball thinking reads today as very old school. He describes hitters by their average, homers, and RBI – although that could just as easily have been the work of his co-author, Ed Linn – and goes on a long rant near the end of the book about, in essence, why he liked scrappy players more than raw-talent players, even though he offers pages of effusive praise of Willie Mays, who was all raw talent but emotionally fragile. Durocher worked for Branch Rickey, one of the most progressive thinkers in baseball’s first century, but many of Rickey’s prized ideas, like working the count, either made no impression on the Lip or didn’t register enough to show up in his memoirs.

Apropos of nothing, one other passage struck a bit of a personal chord with me:

I thought, in fact, of something Laraine had said to me the first time she met Mr. Rickey. Because they were both such religious people I had been confident they would get along marvelously. Instead of the instant rapport I was expecting, there was instant non-rapport. “This man isn’t your friend, Leo,” she told me after he had gone. “I know you think the sun rises and sets on him, but he isn’t what you think he is.”

That’s precisely the sentiment my wife expressed on meeting my (former) boss in Toronto. She always has been a good judge of people.

Next up: William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Ironweed.

Filed Under: Nonfiction Tagged With: , , ,
→ March 30, 2009
→ By

The Soul of Baseball.

If you’re here, you’ve probably already read Joe Posnanski’s The Soul of Baseball: A Road Trip Through Buck O’Neil’s America (still just $5.99 hardcover at amazon.com), so I’m not going to belabor the point – it’s a great, great read, much more than a simple baseball book, but more of a biography of a human being.

JoePo followed Buck O’Neil around the country for a year as O’Neil stumped for the Negro Leagues Museum and more generally worked to preserve the memory of the Negro Leagues as real baseball, rather than the minstrel show of the Hollywood depictions of those Leagues. Along the way, the two men ran into a handful of other former Negro Leaguers and gave us a window into their memories, some told by the players themselves with others retold through Joe’s voice. Some are hilarious, some touching, some downright sad.

O’Neil’s personality – his soul, really – dominates the book, which at times seems to border on magical realism with the incredible effect that O’Neil has on other people, most of whom are complete strangers, and his perceptions of others even based on a look or a few sentences. At the book’s close, my overwhelming thought was, “Wow, I wish I had met him.”

It’s hard to compare it to Lords of the Realm, which I’ve always called my top baseball book, but I’d say I enjoyed The Soul of Baseball more – it’s a serious book but has substantial entertainment value, particularly from the stories about other characters like Satchel Paige, but also from the glimpses into the (then) current lives of Willie Mays, Monte Irvin, and the questionable Johnny Washington.

Next up: Lonesome Dove.

Filed Under: Nonfiction, Sports Tagged With: , , ,