In A League Of His Own. - Review - book review

Commonweal, August 11, 2000 by Maurice Timothy Reidy

Red Smith on Baseball
Foreword by Ira Berkow
Ivan R. Dee, $24.95, 347 pp.

Writing about baseball isn't easy. Don't let the flood of ink spilled on the subject fool you. Most baseball writing alternates between being too weepy (see novelist W.P. Kinsella) or too serious (see political columnist George F. Will). It is the rare writer who can mix the humor, nostalgia, and intelligence that good baseball writing requires. (I'm thinking of the New Yorker's Roger Angell.)

Red Smith (1905-82), a graduate of Notre Dame, is considered by many to be the dean of baseball writers. He got his start as a beat reporter who covered the Saint Louis Browns and worked his way up to nationally syndicated columnist for the Herald Tribune. Near the end of his career, he joined the New York Times. While he wrote about many sports--including boxing and horseracing--Smith's primary subject was baseball. This volume is a collection of columns from 1947 to 1982.

At first blush, Red Smith seems to come from the Will school of baseball writing. Like Will, Smith is known for the erudition he brought to his work. In the columns gathered here, he throws around words like "ennui," "elan," "celerity," "phlebitic," and "riposte" like an SAT test-prep instructor. He drives points home with literary references. When the Dodgers and the Giants left New York in 1957, he quoted Robert Browning: "Just for a handful of silver he left us, just for a riband to stick in his coat." He was called the "Shakespeare of the Press Box" and was a favorite of English professors.

This may all sound like a recipe for a Pulitzer--Smith in fact won the prize in 1976--but does it make for entertaining copy? In short, the answer is yes. Shakespeare knew how to please the crowds--and so did Smith. Smith knew how to have a good time. On a particularly slow day in spring training, for instance, he tried to come up with the greatest "B" team of all time (with Yogi Berra behind the plate and Home Run Baker on third, of course). On another occasion, he chronicled a Yankee game by simply describing the antics of Casey Stengel--baseball's clown prince--as he wandered the dugout.

Smith was incredibly funny, and some of the best columns are those in which his wit matches his intelligence. Take his column on the sportswriter for the American Communist party's The Daily Worker. (Yes, they had a sportswriter.) According to Smith, the writer, one Lester Rodney, must dream that "in a truly democratic society...Comrade Stanislovov Musial, of the Louisgrad Cardinals, would not strive to hit line drives against Comrade Maxim Surkont, of the Bostonik Workers, because all men would be brothers and Comrade Musial would not do injury to his fellow man."

Smith also had a knack for conjuring up the perfect image. Hank Greenberg hit a ball "on a line flat as an old beer." Brooklyn's pitching staff was "as shabby as a reporter's wife." Spitball pitchers were the "saliva set." Or, my favorite, Bugs Raymond of the New York Giants was "a man with magnificent stuff who never touched milk." As Wilfrid Sheed wrote in the New York Review of Books in 1982, "To quote these felicities is to suggest they were rare. On the contrary: they were the sparkplugs in every single column."

Though this volume is not meant to be read from beginning to end, it is set up so the reader can relive the excitement of the annual pennant races. You can follow the Giants in 1951 or the Dodgers in 1955. Or--if you're a glutton for punishment--you can read about another World Series win for the Yankees.

The columns that fare best over time, though, are those that take place behind the scenes or in the off-season. In one instance, Smith described Red Barber--the legendary radio announcer for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Yankees--calling an away game with the help of a telegraph. (In those days, announcers didn't travel with the teams.) Barber spent the home games memorizing the statistics and mannerisms of the players so that he could translate the telegraph's "Reiser up--bats left" to "'And here's Pete Reiser. Hitting .283, 106 base hits. He's having a tough year, fighting that bad shoulder. Dickson will pitch carefully to him. Reiser up, square stance, he's one of those square built guys, not very tall....'"

Although baseball fans will be familiar with the major figures in these pages (Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, etc.), the other names can seem a little, well, inside baseball. It is useful to have a friend at hand to help parse the baseballese. I had to call my father about Bobo Newsome (journeyman relief pitcher) and Happy Chandler (ex-Kentucky governor who served as baseball commissioner in the 1950s), among others.

Still, this book isn't a relic bound for some Cooperstown storage room. Smith's argument against the designated hitter, for example, is still compelling. "It relieves the manager of all responsibility except to post the lineup card on the dugout wall and make sure everybody gets to the airport on time." (Full disclosure: I'm a National League fan.) Furthermore, his analysis of the problem of income inequality among teams foreshadowed the biggest problem facing baseball today.