Headnote: One of the thing I like about the Pandemic Baseball Book Club is that it’s a kind of “one stop shopping.” Instead of posting about various authors, projects, and events, all I’m doing here is cutting and pasting their weekly newsletter. Do take a moment to read the author Q&A. I find them particularly interesting as they discuss the arduous process of bringing their projects to press.
Paul Aron has spent a lot of time considering baseball books, including professionally as a book editor at both Doubleday and Simon & Schuster, where he acquired and edited a number of baseball titles.
He’s put that consideration into The Lineup, a just-released review of essential baseball books unlike any you’ve seen. Rather than revisit the well-trod Top-10 trope, Paul has identified titles that have most impacted baseball and society at large, and explained exactly how that is so. In addition to his primary essays, he also takes a more truncated look at 50 additional books—a compendium that can leave you tracking down and enjoying baseball titles for years to come.
You can also find Paul in the NOW UP AT PBBCLUB.COM section of this very newsletter, interviewing Chris Lamb about the book Stolen Dreams. The guy’s a regular Swiss Army Knife.
Read on.
***
ASK AN AUTHOR
Paul Aron
The Lineup: Ten Books That Changed Baseball (McFarland, July 6, 2022)
What’s your book about?
Previous books have talked about the best baseball books, which is not the same thing as the most influential baseball books. The books I discuss have not only changed the game of baseball, but in many cases have even changed the course of American history.
The book is about books that have not only changed baseball, but in some cases America at large. That sounds like a big stretch, I realize. It’s hard to imagine any book, let alone a baseball book, can change the course of history, but I hope this will make readers at least consider the possibility. For example, Satchel Paige’s 1948 book advanced the cause of integration, and Glenn Waggoner’s 1984 book about Rotisserie League baseball fueled the growth of fantasy sports—and also of USA Today and even the Internet.
What’s one noteworthy thing you learned doing research?
I didn’t know how much Ring Lardner’s baseball writings influenced Hemingway and Fitzgerald. When Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon was published in 1932, he sent Lardner a copy inscribed “To Ring Lardner, from his early imitator and always admirer.” I also didn’t realize how many critics noted that there was much of Lardner in Fitzgerald’s characters, including Gatsby, and Abe North in Fitzgerald’s unfinished novel, Tender is the Night. That said, Hemingway and Fitzgerald also made disparaging remarks about Lardner, saying that he was limited by his subject matter. It wasn’t until later that critics took baseball writing seriously as literature.
You called one of Satchel Paige’s books more influential than Jackie Robinson’s. Why?
Both Paige and Robinson authored books published in 1948, soon enough after baseball’s integration to capture the moment and to advance the cause. Yet it was Paige’s 1948 book, Pitchin’ Man, that better captured this moment. Unlike Robinson, Paige had a long history in the Negro leagues, and his book captured more of the flavor of an era when Blacks celebrated a culture that would fundamentally change American society. Moreover, it was Paige who, through his much-publicized exploits in the Negro leagues and his barnstorming against major leaguers, forced white sportswriters, fans and, ultimately, officials to recognize that Blacks belonged in the majors. In Pitchin’ Man, Paige and coauthor Hal Lebovitz captured the mix of cockiness, folksiness, humor and genuinely awesome achievement that comprised Paige’s image.
(To be clear, I am of the opinion that no baseball player transformed the game and the nation more than Jackie Robinson. What I am arguing is that Robinson’s 1948 book was not as important as Paige’s.)
What surprised you?
One surprise was how tame the sex was in Ball Four. Back when it was published in 1970, a lot of people were shocked by the talk about players and sex. The foreword warned the book should be rated X, and since it came out the year I turned 14, I readily sought out the sex scenes. Re-reading Ball Four, I was struck by the fact that the book isn’t titillating at all—and what sex there is makes one cringe in this post-Me Too era. To learn about sex, I would have been better off reading two other bestsellers from the same time period: David Reuben’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask) or Terry Garrity’s The Sensuous Woman.
It turns out that what made Ball Four impossible to put down, then and now, was not the sex but the unflinching honesty about life in the big leagues. Bouton talked about sex, yes, but also about how general managers negotiated salaries and how players took “greenies.” He portrayed general managers as stingy and manipulative, coaches as officious and petty, and players as often immature, insecure, narrow-minded and generally unheroic. Ball Four was a countercultural strike against the baseball establishment. It was baseball’s Woodstock.
Any other surprises?
Another surprise for me was how much Bill James’ Baseball Abstracts influenced people outside baseball. Anyone who read Moneyball or saw the movie knows that James’ type of statistical analysis influenced general managers and managers. But sabermetric-like thinking extended to other sports—Patriot coach Bill Belichick, for example, was noted for not punting on fourth down after his statistical analysis concluded that other coaches were generally too conservative about going for first downs. James’s type of thinking extended to political analysis, most obviously via Nate Silver, who went from predicting player performances to predicting election results. When I spoke to people in financial services companies, they discussed how they, too, had learned to base their decisions on non-traditional numbers. It’s impossible to say to what kind of influence James had on this, but it’s worth nothing that at one point Morningstar, a global financial services firm, instructed its analysts to read James’s work and apply it when judging mutual funds.
Many think of Roger Kahn and Roger Angell as the two greatest writers of baseball non-fiction. You included Kahn’s The Boys of Summer among the ten most influential books but not Angell’s The Summer Game. Why?
This seems a good opportunity to remind people that I was not choosing the best baseball books but the most influential. There’s overlap between those lists, of course, and both Kahn and Angell deserve to be on any list of important baseball writers. I felt that The Boys of Summer was more influential because it so compellingly conjured up an era—Brooklyn in the fifties—that it very well may have drawn people back to Brooklyn after their families had fled to the suburbs.
While we’re on the subject of Kahn and Angell, I’ll mention that Kahn detested Angell. The writer Alex Belth wrote an excellent story on the two Rogers, and my own experience confirms what he wrote. I worked with Kahn a later book of his titled Good Enough to Dream. Maybe because, like Kahn, I was ethnically Jewish but not religious, he would sometimes vent about the anti-Semitism he faced, and talk about how he felt the literary establishment favored Angell because he was a WASP from Manhattan and not a Jew from Brooklyn. That seemed paranoid to me, but Kahn did write insightfully about the place of Jews in America as well as, more famously, about Jackie Robinson and the Civil Rights movement.
.
What’s one memorable instance of your editor lending direction?
My editor prompted me to expand the book. I had originally planned to focus just on 10 books, but along with the lengthy essays on those 10, The Lineup now also features short entries on another 50 books. Unlike the main 10, these extra titles did not in most cases change the course of American history, but they certainly influenced the game and especially its literature.
How long did the book take?
It’s hard to answer that question because I so enjoyed the process that I didn’t really keep track of time. I was actively working on it for about two years, but I’ve been thinking about this topic for far longer. When I was a book editor it was my job to consider baseball titles. Then again, I’ve been reading baseball books since I was a kid, so I suppose I could say I spent almost much of my life on this.
Buy The Lineup here.
***
NOW UP AT PBBCLUB.COM
When the Cannon Street YMCA All-Star team—the first Black Little League team in South Carolina—registered for a baseball tournament in Charleston, South Carolina, in June 1955, white teams refused to take the field with them. Cannon Street won the tournament by forfeit and advanced to the state tournament, which it also won when the white teams withdrew in protest. Victory in the regional tournament in Rome, Georgia, would have advanced Cannon Street to the Little League World Series, but officials ruled the team ineligible because it had advanced by forfeit. Little League Baseball invited the Cannon Street All-Stars to be the organization’s guests at the Little League World Series, where they heard spectators yell, “Let them play! Let them play!” This became a national story for a few weeks but then faded and disappeared as Americans read of other civil rights stories, including the torture and murder of fourteen-year-old Emmett Till. Stolen Dreams is the story of those Cannon Street YMCA All-Stars, and of the early civil rights movement. It’s also the story of centuries of bigotry in Charleston, South Carolina, where millions of enslaved people were brought to this country and where the Civil War began, where segregation remained for a century after the war ended and anyone who challenged it did so at their own risk. Author Chris Lamb is here in conversation with Paul Aron, author of The Lineup.
***
WHERE WE’VE BEEN
The Twin Bill interviewed Dan Good about Playing Through the Pain.
Erik Sherman (Two Sides of Glory) and Tim Neverette (Covid Curveball) hung out together at Willis Monie Books in Cooperstown, NY, hawking their wares. So too did Mark Armour and Dan Levitt, who pitched Intentional Balk. As best we here at the PBBC home office can tell, these appearances occurred at different times.
***
WHAT THEY’RE SAYING ABOUT US
Tom Hoffarth took his usual deep dive into a baseball book du jour, in his Farther Off the Wall column. This time around it’s Intentional Balk, by the aforementioned Mark Armour and Dan Levitt.
***
WHAT ELSE WE’RE DOING
Dan Epstein (The Captain & Me) worked with Barry Goldberg, who played keyboards for Bob Dylan’s legendary electric set at the Newport Folk Festival in 1965, about that epic performance for the Forward. If you have even passing interest in Dylan, this is a must-read.
Danny Gallagher (Bases Loaded) wrote about labor issues at an auto-parts plant for the Toronto Star.
Clayton Trutor (Loserville) reviewed Rock Me on the Water for Historynet.
Dan Good (Playing Through the Pain) wrote about steroids and the Hall of Fame double standard for NBC News.
Robert Whiting (Tokyo Junkie) wrote about high school baseball in Japan for his Substack.
David Krell (1962) had two pieces published for the SABR Games Project: July 21, 1975 (Félix Millan hits four singles, and Joe Torre grounds into four double plays) and July 24, 1886 (Adonis Terry throws a no-hitter for Brooklyn…or does he?).
Andrew Maraniss (Singled Out) will be taking his kids to home games of the Yankees, Mets, Phillies and Orioles over the next 10 days on family vacation before school starts back up, as part of a mission to see every MLB ballpark as a family before the kids leave the house. This will get the Maranisses up to 18.
***
WHERE WE’LL BE
All times local unless otherwise noted.
Aug. 3: Rob Elias will discuss Baseball Rebels and Major League Rebels in person, as part of Manny’s Mission Summer of Knowledge Series in San Francisco.
Aug. 10: Luke Epplin will be at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown as part of their author series to talk about Our Team. 1 p.m., in person and virtually.
is available on Amazon.com,
Comments on this entry are closed.