What are the odds?
In an amazing example of great minds thinking alike, three former writers for the Forward —Jonathan Mahler, Seth Mnookin, and Joshua Prager — have published critically acclaimed books on baseball, each focusing on a different historical event.
The TV miniseries
Jonathan Mahler, author of Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx is Burning (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), had the longest tenure at the Jewish newspaper: four years during the mid-to-late 1990s during which he served — at different times — as Washington correspondent, managing editor, and culture writer.
Published in April 2005, Bronx was named one of The New York Times’ top 100 books of the year and will be the subject of an ESPN miniseries this summer.
Mahler’s is the least sport-oriented. Set in 1977, baseball seems almost out of place in an otherwise “serious” book on the problems that faced New York City that year: a crippling blackout and the ensuing madness it engendered, the Son of Sam attacks, and fiscal and political turmoil. Mahler parallels those issues with the story of Reggie Jackson’s first season with the Yankees.
“The city that summer was a soap opera,” he said in a talk with NJ Jewish News. “Rupert Murdoch had taken over the New York Post and there was a big Yankee scandal on the back page of the Post every day. [Yankees manager Billy Martin and Jackson were epic figures. They came to represent two different eras in New York. Martin was from the 1940s-’50s and Jackson was in the first class of free agents…. He represented the new New York. The conflict on the team was a metaphor for tension throughout the city, he said.
Although born in New York, Mahler’s family moved to California when he was an infant. They returned for a visit in 1977 when he was eight years old. “Those were my first memories of New York,” said the author, who moved back in 1990.
Social networking
Seth Mnookin, the Forward’s city hall reporter from 1999 to 2000, says his writing of Feeding the Monster: How Money, Smarts, and Nerve Took a Team to the Top(Simon and Schuster) — his look at the inner workings of the Boston Red Sox — was “accidental.”
He was looking for something to do after finishing Hard News: The Scandals at The New York Times and Their Meaning for American Media and came up with the idea of an examination of the Sox since 2002, when a new ownership consortium took over.
As hot as the team was, Mnookin said, his project “wasn’t all glory…. I was blown away by how hard everyone there works. The public relations staff, interns, fan representatives [working] 15 hours a day. The Sox seem so beloved in so many ways; I didn’t have a sense of how people deal internally with the negative side of it. When things go well, there’s the expectation that that’s the way it should be.”
Publishers these days have greater expectations for authors to help publicize their work. Mnookin uses a blog and on-line “Q & A” appearances at sites like gather.com to chat with fans and readers. The process can get a bit overwhelming.
“It’s a complete time-****, a black hole, to put it together,” he said. “Once you start to do it, there’s an expectation that you’ll be there every day.”
Now hear this
“There are very, very few moments that literally millions of people remember where they were when they happened,” said Joshua Prager, author of The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World(Pantheon). “JFK’s assassination, Pearl Harbor, etc. For various reasons…Thomson’s homer was one of them. And to be able to write the definitive account of one of those moments was…really a thrill.”
Thomson’s blast capped a dramatic come-from-behind pennant race in which the NY Giants overcame their hated rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. Rumors of cheating by stealing catchers’ signals had circulated for many years.
Prager, who contributed only a couple of pieces to the Forward in the late 1990s, first presented the story in a 2001 article in The Wall Street Journal. He spent five years researching, interviewing, and writing his book. “There are 4,000 endnotes in the book,” he told NJJN. “I wanted people to know where every little detail came from. That was very important for me.”
He also narrated an abridged audio version of his opus. “Once I knew that the publishers wanted to do it, I asked if I would be able to read it. I felt I would be able to do it with the right inflection and [read it] enthusiastically.”
The audio version contains about 30 percent of the printed version, he said. “It was very baseball-centric. The 70 percent of the book that’s not there is basically about the lives of the people, the backgrounds, why they reacted the way they did to this moment, and why it is the moment that it became.”
Prager said recording the book took a great deal of time and effort, but he was satisfied with the finished product and “delighted” to reach a different audience.
So far the reviews have been better than the sales, which, Prager said, is “okay. The truth is, if I were to choose between…great sales and great reviews, I would, every time, choose the great reviews. But my publisher probably wouldn’t agree with that.”
For all the technical skullduggery surrounding the event — using a telescope to steal the opposing catchers’ signs, then relaying the signals through an electric buzzer system to the Giants dugout — Prager was more concerned with the impact the event had on the two principals of the story: Thomson, who hit the homer, and Branca, who threw the ill-fated pitch.
The architect of the whole mess was Abe Chadwick, a humble Jewish electrician. “It was thrilling for me to have sort of a central Jewish character,” said Prager. “He was my excuse, in a sense, to be able to talk about everything from Tisha b’Av…to the prayer Aneinu, which is said on Tzom Gedalia” — the Fast of Gedalia, observed during the High Holy Days — “which was the day that Thomson hit his home run.”
Ironically, Chadwick was a lifelong Dodgers fan. “When I talk about that, I talk about Haman because Chadwick was born on Purim and he was ‘hanged’ on a gallows that he himself built.”
The immigrant game
Mahler, Mnookin, and Prager hope to take their place among other high-profile Jewish writers on the game, including Roger Kahn, Mark Harris, Eliot Asinoff, and Bernard Malamud. Each had his own take on why so many Jews are drawn to the topic.
“Partly it’s because sports are a wonderful means of acculturation, and Jews, like many other immigrant groups, took to them upon their arrival in this country,” said Prager. “And partly it’s due to the simple fact that many Jews are writers. We’ll always take to religion and politics and history, [so] we might as well also look for meaning in sports.”
According to Mahler, “Baseball is the great immigrant game. It’s part of Jewish assimilation and Jewish identity, a great Americanizing role.”
There’s also a nostalgia factor. “In my case, my father grew up in the Bronx, in a working-class Jewish neighborhood in the shadow of Yankee Stadium.”
“In the case of the Forward, there was a real sense…of conjoining of certain poeticness about journalism and a level of inquiry that there was something romantic about it,” said Mnookin. “I think that baseball lends itself to that kind of world view, it allows for that type of project. It is so unique in the ways that it can represent so much about life. There’s a certain kind of mimicking of the poetry of life, and the sort of nostalgia that is an integral part of the Jewish tradition.”
A version of this article appeared in the NJ Jewish News.
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