Dizzy Days in Baseball History

Branch Rickey’s contributions to baseball history are enormous, from the creation of the minor league “farm system” to the grooming of Jackie Robinson to break the color barrier. His life and work have probably filled more book pages than those of any 10 baseball executives combined.Rickey was the architect of two of the most colorful baseball teams ever, the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals Gashouse Gang and the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, with whom Jackie Robinson made his major league debut. John Heidenry’s “The Gashouse Gang” (Public Affairs, 304 pages, $25) is the best book yet on the former, one of those rare volumes that make you wish you could go back in time and follow a team for an entire season.The ’34 Cardinals won the National League pennant and beat a powerful Detroit Tigers team in the World Series, but even if they had accomplished neither of those, they would have led the major leagues in nicknames: Ripper Collins, Frankie “The Fordham Flash” Frisch, Pepper Martin, Leo “The Lip” Durocher, Ducky Medwick, Buster Mills, Kiddo Davis, “Wild Bill” Hallahan, and, of course, the Dean Brothers, Dizzy and Daffy. “They don’t look like a Major League ball club,” wrote Frank Graham, a prominent period sportswriter. “Their uniforms are stained and dirty. … They spit out of the sides of their mouths. … They are not afraid of anybody.” The perfect heroes for America in a time of the Depression, the Gashouse Gang was “a squad of quarreling, slovenly brilliant misfits … the unique product of a particular time and place,” brought together by a “nonimbibing Methodist who would not even watch them play on a Sunday because his religious principles forbade it.”Mr. Heidenry gives the first truly serious account of a team that, despite its championship credentials, has been pretty much treated by baseball historians as a joke. “Despite their antics,” he writes, “and their often abrasive relationship with each other, the Gashouse Gang never lost its fierce desire to win.” Not that these Cards didn’t earn their reputations as inspired screwballs, thanks largely to their ace right-hander. “This country may need a good five-cent cigar,” Dizzy Dean told a reporter from the Post Dispatch, “but what the Cardinals need is more Deans.” (Dizzy and his brother Daffy won 49 games between them that year.)Branch Rickey left the Cardinals for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1942, and it took decades for the franchise to recover. St. Louis’s loss was Brooklyn’s gain, and the team Rickey helped put together has probably inspired more books per championship than any other — the Dodgers won just one World Series, in 1955, five years after Rickey had left the organization.That’s part of the problem with Jonathan Eig’s “Opening Day” (Simon & Schuster, 323 pages, $26). Mr. Eig’s previous book, “Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig” (2005), succeeded largely because it was a fresh take on a familiar but not much written about subject. But Jackie Robinson is, with the exception of Babe Ruth, the most written about player in baseball history, with solid biographies from, among others, Maury Allen, David Faulkner, and most notably, Arnold Rampersad, with his monumental and definitive “Jackie Robinson, A Biography” (1997). And that doesn’t even include anthologies such as “The Jackie Robinson Reader” (1997), and”Jackie Robinson Between the Baselines” (1997), Robinson’s two autobiographies, and the memoirs by Robinson’s’ wife and daughter. Did I forget to mention Jules Tygel’s “Baseball’s Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy” (1997) and Roger Kahn’s “The Boys of Summer” (2005), perhaps the most critically acclaimed of all baseball books?There’s simply not enough new information to justify another book about Robinson, particularly one that focuses primarily on the 1947 season. Mr. Eig seems particularly concerned with debunking myths that have built up around Robinson, such as the famous story about Pee Wee Reese putting his arm around Jackie in support of his teammate during a period of the worst taunting. But the same subject was addressed at length in Mr. Rampersad’s Robinson bio. (Something like that may have happened, but not, Mr. Eig claims, in Robinson’s rookie season.) Mr. Eig also plays down the two men’s friendship in contradiction to Robinson’s passionate letter of appreciation to PeeWee, which appeared on the flyleaf of Robinson’s book with Carl Rowan, “Wait Till Next Year” (1960).Mr. Eig gives little credence to the long-held view that several players on the St. Louis Cardinals were planning to strike if Robinson took the field. He seems unaware that Cardinals outfielder Terry Moore and other St. Louis team members confirmed the near-strike to Roger Kahn.“Opening Day” is an odd and unsatisfying book. Robinson’s previous chroniclers are scarcely mentioned in the index, and there is no bibliography provided (though Jules Tygel is credited in the acknowledgments). There’s a rushed, condensed feel to it, as if Mr. Eig were trying to paraphrase all the previous Robinson literature. “Sixty years after his debut in major-league baseball,” he writes in his Epilogue, “Robinson’s stature as an American hero has never been greater. … The story of his rookie season is told again, handed down like folk lore.” Alas, it’s also been told in books a great more substantial than “Opening Day.”Mr. Barra is the author of “The Last Coach — A Life of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant” (Norton).

Dizzy Days in Baseball History

Dizzy Days in Baseball History

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