Two pieces by Tim Wiles of the National Baseball Hall of Fame follow. The first, written in 1999, reports on the late writer’s keynote address to the annual Cooperstown Symposium, a gathering of academicians to discuss eclectic topics within the greater baseball universe.
The second article considers Asinof’s novel, Man on Spikes.
Asinof: a Baseball Life
by Tim Wiles
It’s been quite a week here in Lake Cooperstown. The staff of the Baseball Hall of Fame Library had a mini-Hall of Fame Weekend with the back-to-back hosting of the eleventh annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, followed without pause by the bang up celebration on Saturday of what might be called Founders’ Day, the 60th anniversary of the opening of the Baseball Hall of Fame. Both events were tremendously successful and satisfying, I think, and of course, bear repeating. Letters in the Dirt focuses on the Symposium, and in particular, on its keynote address, given Wednesday afternoon by Eliot Asinof, a grizzled, veteran writer straight out of central casting.
Best known in baseball circles for writing Eight Men Out, the classic nonfiction account of the 1919 World Series and its “Black Sox scandal,” Asinof also has a fascinating life story of his own, parts of which he related in his lecture. This columnist sat in the audience thinking that there are no stories better than our true life stories, at least if we have lived lives as full as Asinof’s.
Our speaker began by quoting the oft-cited dictum of Jacques Barzun “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Asinof noted that he once asked Barzun (now there’s a meeting I would have liked to eavesdrop on) to explain his famous remark, and that Barzun admitted that he didn’t know exactly what he had meant. Some of the best writing on cultural matters is impressionistically drawn, as was Barzun’s essay. The rest of Asinof’s speech wove threads of autobiography with trenchant commentary on the heart and mind of America.
It was Asinof’s 60th anniversary in Cooperstown as well, though we didn’t know it when we booked him to speak. In 1939, he was a self-described “hot shot college ballplayer,” who was recruited to play on Doubleday Field for a U.S. amateur team vs. a group of local all stars during the summer of ‘39. Asinof recalled the portable lighting system that had been installed for the night game, and the fact that the local pitcher hit the all-stars first batter in the mouth, delaying the game while all of his teeth were collected. Asinof batted second, swung at the first two pitches, and made for the dugout. Then the ump called him back for his final cut, which presumably was strike three. As the chief researcher at the Hall, I will try to look this up for a future Dirt installment, but I would be pleased to hear from any locals who attended this game.
While Asinof’s speech was impossibly rich with stories which I would like to relate, I will focus on the following three which illustrate, to Asinof, how baseball either doesn’t reflect the heart and mind of America, or reflects it all too well.
In 1940, the young Asinof was embarking upon a career as a professional ballplayer, signed by the Phillies, who sent him to a low-level farm club at Moultrie, Georgia. After a long trip from New York, he disembarked in Moultrie at about five in the afternoon, the streets busy with people walking home from work. Making his way to the ballpark for his first game as a Moultrie Packer, Asinof saw a black woman approaching him with a baby in one hand and a bag of groceries in the other, and instinctively stepped aside to let her pass. A moment later, the long arm of the South landed on his shoulder from behind, and Asinof was arrested for being courteous to a black woman. A month or so later, Asinof, a good hitter by all the evidence I’ve seen, hit a triple during a home game. It just happens that the “Colored” seating section was behind third base, and stories of Asinof’s chivalry had circulated among the fans in that section. They gave him an ovation for his hit, and he responded by tipping his cap. He was fired the next day.
The next season saw him sent to Wausau, Wisconsin, presumably a place where the young ballplayer would not rouse the rabble with his dangerous racial attitudes. Asinof played well for the Lumberjacks, but the outcome was the same; he was fired. This time his offense was that he was Jewish. In the midwest in the 1940s, that’s one strike against you, but the situation became untenable when the team owner’s teenage daughter developed a crush on a Jewish ballplayer. Even if her attention is unrequited, as was the case, there were some things we just couldn’t tolerate back then.
World War Two interrupted the ballplayer’s career, and Private Asinof, who became Lieutenant Asinof with the help of an old buddy named Hank Greenberg, was posted to Adak Island, far out in the Aleutian chain, to defend our interests in the north Pacific. Lieutenant Asinof had plenty of time to write, and a fine critic and mentor in one of his superior officers, Dashiel Hammett. Asinof would write for the base newspaper, raking the muck of Adak, and Hammett would advise him: “You’ve brought me the what, Eliot, now go back and bring me the why.” It would be fine advice for a writer who would later produce not just Eight Men Out, but also one of the finest baseball novels ever written, Man On Spikes. This once-forgotten 1955 classic was reissued last year by Southern Illinois University Press, which will also publish Asinof’s new baseball novel, Off Season, next year.
After the war, Asinof spent a couple of seasons as a clothing salesman in New York, working on his writing and founding a high level semi-pro baseball league. When the league folded, mostly due to the advent of television, which was a better entertainment option than sitting outside watching semi-pro ball, Asinof went into writng full time. Sardonically, Asinof parodied Barzun last week, saying, “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better watch television.”
It was television, and movies, in fact where Asinof had much of his early success as a writer. After a while, that too would come to an end, as he found himself blacklisted by the House un-American Activies Committee and Senator Joe McCarthy. In the end, it didn’t matter much to Asinof, who found a way to write on, this time in books. Many years later, after the passage of the Freedom of Information Act, Asinof approached the FBI to find out why he had been blacklisted. The thin file on this threat to America contained only one item, though that one piece of evidence was enough to end his career. In the late 1940s or early 1950s, Asinof had signed a petition outside Yankee Stadium urging the Yankees to sign their first black ballplayer.
Did our old friend Jacques Barzun hit the nail on the head when he said “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game…?” You decide.
Following up on last week’s column on aquatic baseball, no one has yet come forward to help me stage an exhibition of the sport, though I did get some clever comments. Chris Jennison of New York City emailed to say that he supposed aquatic baseball would give new meaning to doing “the wave.” He also talked about throwing his submarine pitch. One of the library interns suggested that a “sinker” might be an effective pitch to throw in this game. Keep those witty comments coming, folks! In addition, be looking for a Letters in the Dirt column sometime this winter about ice baseball, as played on skates regularly in the 19th century.
It was a pleasure this summer to meet Eliot Asinof, the author of the book Eight Men Out, on the subject of the 1919 Chicago Black Sox, which became a fine movie a few years back. Asinof was in town to scout out the annual Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture, hosted each summer by the Hall of Fame and SUNY Oneonta. Next year he will be the keynote speaker for the event. In the wake of his visit, I decided to read his 1952 novel Man On Spikes, which has recently been reissued in paperback by Southern Illinois University Press as part of their “Writing Baseball” series of books. In the interest of full disclosure, I must mention that I am on the editorial board at SIU press, though I had nothing to do with the decision to republish this particular book.
I highly recommend the book, which I finished this afternoon, while sitting on my front porch enjoying a summer day so lovely that one could only be in Cooperstown. I suppose other locals might say that it was hot this past Sunday. After all, the thermometer did climb past eighty. But for someone raised on the great plains, the recent heat and humidity are but pale echoes of my past. Humidity, to an Iowan, is defined as air so thick and wet that one is fairly confident that if he attempted to fall flat on his face, the air would hold him up. But as I was starting to say, Man On Spikes is a great read for baseball fans with a literary bent. It stands on it’s own as a novel pretty well, too, even if one is not a baseball fan.
Published in 1952, the novel tells the story of Mike Kutner, a young man born to play baseball. Unlike Roy Hobbs in Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, however, Mike Kutner is not blessed with great raw talent but rather with an incredible will to win and to succeed. His love of the game carries him through about ten minor league seasons, each of which is more heartbreaking than the last, as the protagonist climbs toward his goal of playing in the major leagues. He is interrupted several times along the way by such things as having to fight in the second World War, and various personal differences with indifferent management who, among other injustices, fail to promote the successful Kutner because he wears eyeglasses.
Interestingly, though, Kutner does not tell the story. Rather, Asinof uses a technique which I don’t believe I have seen before: each chapter is told through the eyes of a person in Kutner’s life, and not until the final chapter do we get one devoted to the protagonist himself. The book is arranged chronologically, beginning when Kutner is in school, and the chapters are arranged thus: the scout, the father, the manager, the old ballplayer, the clown, the sergeant, the reporter, the Negro, the sister, the commissioner, the wife, the junior executive, the mother, and finally, Kutner’s chapter, entitled “the rookie.” This technique keeps the book quite lively, as our perspective keeps changing.
Asinof is to be praised on many levels for this book. As a former collegiate and minor league baseball player, he gets his details impeccably correct, and his game action sequences are both entertaining and creative, often opening up on field possibilities which had been, up to this point, undreamed-of by this reader. Game action descriptions are often the bane of baseball fiction: either the author depends too heavily upon them to move the plot along, or else he or she doesn’t know enough about baseball to write the action well. Asinof is guilty of neither mistake.
I note that three of the fourteen chapters describe the worlds of women in Mike Kutner’s life, a rather revolutionary approach for sports fiction in 1952. The stories of Kutner’s sister, wife, and mother are empathetically and convincingly told, revealing as all the other chapters do that Mike Kutner is not a cardboard baseball card, he is a human being, and so are those whose lives are intertwined with his. Each chapter usually has some surprise in it as well, as when the father throws his son’s baseball mitt into the furnace, not the stuff of Hollywood-esque fictions about baseball. Or the revelation that the commissioner is relatively powerless to help Kutner when a corrupt owner blocks his path to the majors, essentially because Kutner is so good that the owner is making money on him at the minor league level.
Asinof’s book is in fact a good summation of the labor relations situation that many players found themselves in in the 1940s and 50s. It is also a particularly good portrait of race relations in the game, written just a couple of years after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby integrated baseball in 1947. Overall, it creates an impressionistic portrait of the world of minor league baseball at mid-century, when the game was still the unchallenged national pastime. I highly recommend the book to those who like to read about baseball, particularly the minor leagues. When I last checked, the book was available at the Hall of Fame bookstore, and is also available in the Hall’s library, if any readers are interested in taking a look.
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is available on Amazon.com,
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