Next up on the essays shelf:
The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker
The Only Game in Town is a collection of sports writing from The New Yorker. So far, I have excerpted from the following collections: Life Stories (profiles), The Fun of It (Talk of the Town pieces), and The New Gilded Age (financial writing), and Secret Ingredients (food writing).
The New Yorker obviously isn’t known for its sports coverage, and when they do cover something it is usually from the side. There’s a very interesting “New Yorker” angle. Roger Angell, naturally, who was an editor there for many years, is known mainly for his sports writing. His baseball writing has been anthologized and also released in multiple collections. It is an incredible body of work. He wrote big stories, and he wrote small ones. He wrote about giant superstars, and he wrote about the journeymen who are the bread-and-butter of the sport. He also wrote eloquently and beautifully about the mystique of the game. Many try to imitate him. Well. Everyone who writes about baseball tries to imitate him. He is the one who set the bar. His love of the game itself is clear in every single word he writes, and it’s not just the game, it’s what it MEANS. He doesn’t go too big or broad with it, because that would make it maudlin and sentimental. No, he was smart: he kept it personal. Baseball means something to HIM. He was interested in many things in life, but baseball was his topic. Every element of it fascinated him, the way players think, the way players analyze, the diversity of the crowd, the smell of the grass. If you love baseball, Roger Angell understands why. He can say it for you.
There’s only one piece by Roger Angell in this collection, although it is dedicated to him, and David Remnick’s introduction is a tribute to Angell, what he brought to the magazine, his standard of excellence, what he did for younger writers. The topics in the collection are really broad, which is part of the fun of it.
There are the profiles: one of Shaquille O’Neal, one of Tiger Woods (fascinating, in light of what went down, scandal-wise, although whatever, I can’t get worked up about some guy’s sex life. Please.) Speaking of scandal, there’s a piece about Lance Armstrong that makes me see RED. There are personal pieces, one by a guy who became obsessed with betting on horses, one by a woman who has a lifelong love affair with Ping-Pong. There are pieces on surfing, long-distance swimming, the Olympics, football, baseball, and everything else.
The collection leads off with Angell’s sole piece, ‘The Web of the Game’, which is both a description of an outing he took to see a baseball game at Yale University, and a profile of Smoky Joe Wood, who played for the Red Sox in the early 10s and teens of the 20th century. He lived a very long life, and was a baseball coach at Yale. He died at the age of 95. Red Sox fans have the memory of Smoky Joe Wood etched into their DNA although very few people alive now ever saw him play. He was a pitcher known for a fastball so fast that it stirred up smoke behind it (that’s where his nickname came from). His stats are impressive, and there are a lot of firsts, as in he set records that others would then have to try to beat.. He was on the Sox from 1908 to 1915 and pitched the legendary 1912 World Series against the New York Giants.
Handsome devil, too.
He got injured in 1913. A relatively minor injury, he broke his thumb, but it messed up his pitching arm for good. He just could not get it back. He pitched through the pain, and the Red Sox loved him, and hung in there with him, waiting for him to recover. But full recovery never came. When Roger Angell shakes Joe Wood’s hand, the 91-year-old man winced, because it was his right hand (the one that had been injured) and Angell gripped it too hard. Angell wrote a very haunting piece about Steve Blass, a pitcher who “lost it”: one day his pitches went wild and he lost control of the ball. Theories abound as to what happened. Smoky Joe Wood’s injury was clearly the culprit. Baseball players are athletes. They know pain. They know sacrifice and endurance. And they know there is the kind of pain you can push through, and there is the kind of pain that stops you. Sometimes it’s a mystery to others looking on what the hell happened.
Smoky Joe Wood was traded to the Indians eventually, but the fondness for him in Boston remained. To this day.
When Angell decided to track him down, Joe Wood was still living in New Haven, long retired from his gig as head baseball coach at Yale University. He was 91 years old. Fans still made their way to his door, after all those decades, to get his autograph, to hear him talk about his time in baseball. He was kind and generous to those who wanted to talk to him. But hanging out with a pressman might be a different thing. He might not be open to that. So Angell describes how he sort of engineered an outing in New Haven, to go watch the Yale team play in an important game against St. John’s in the NCAA – whoever won that game would move on to the World Series of college baseball. Angell loves the Yale Stadium (the piece begins with an ode to how sweet it is), so he had a friend-of-Wood’s invite Wood to the game with a couple of other old pals – so that they would all be at the game together, a casual environment, and maybe Angell could just sit with him and soak up … whatever the hell he said.
Which is pretty much how it went down.
‘The Web of the Game’, published in The New Yorker in 1981, is lengthy. You get Smoky Joe Wood’s history. You get the story of the Yale game unfolding right before their eyes – and it was a helluva game. One of those games where you realize halfway through that you are seeing something unique and extraordinary, as happens sometimes in baseball. It was a battle of the pitchers. I saw one of those games at Yankee Stadium – Yankees vs. Red Sox – a couple years ago. It was almost boring because nobody got on base … nothing happened … but it had its own excitement because you realized that the pitchers, on both teams, were so dominant that everything – EVERYTHING – was being shut down. It was suspenseful! You get Roger Angell’s thoughts on Smoky Joe Wood’s place in history and what he was like in person, what sort of little old man he was.
The title says it all about the scope and mood of the essay. He is talking about the ties that connect us all, not only in the here and now, but into the past, and Angell … looking at the college kids playing before them … into the future. All of this, past, present, future, makes up a giant interconnected web that we can call Baseball.
Angell has such tight control over his phrasing, his paragraph structure, his vocabulary. He’s not just sobbing into his beer over how beautiful the grass is and how he loves the game. He makes you see what he sees, he makes you see it the way he sees it. It’s a tribute to what players like Smoky Joe Wood added to the game, back in its infancy.
Here’s an excerpt.
The Only Game in Town: Sportswriting from The New Yorker
In the home half of the sixth, Yale put its lead-off hitter aboard with a single but could not bunt him along. Joe Wood was distressed. “I could teach these fellows to bunt in one minute,” he said. “Nobody can’t hardly bunt anymore. You’ve got to get your weight more forward than he did, so you’re not reaching for the ball. And he should have his right hand higher up on the bat.”
The inning ended, and we reversed directions once again. “Ty Cobb was the greatest bat handler you ever saw,” Wood said. “He used to go out to the ballpark early in the morning with a pitcher and work on hitting the ball to all fields, over and over. He batted that strange way, with his fists apart, you know, but he could have hit just as well no matter how he held it. He just knew what to do with a bat in his hand. And baserunning – why, I saw him get on base and steal second, steal third, and then steal home. The best. A lot of fellows in my time shortened up on the bat when they had to – that’s what the St. John’s boys should try against this good pitcher. Next to Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson was the best left-handed hitter I ever saw, and he was always down at the end of the bat until there were two strikes on him. Then he’d shorten up a little, to give himself a better chance.”
Dick Lee said, “That’s what you’ve been telling Charlie Polka, isn’t it, Joe?”
“Yes, sir, and it’s helped him,” Wood said. “He’s tried it, and now he knows that all you have to do is make contact and the ball will fly a long way.”
Both men saw my look of bewilderment, and they laughed together.
“Charlie Polka is a Little League player,” Dick Lee explained. “He’s about eleven years old.”
“He lives right across the street from me,” Wood aid. “He plays for the 500 Blake team – that’s named for a restaurant here in town. I’ve got him shortened up on the bat, and now he’s a hitter. Charlie Polka is a natural.”
“Is that how you batted?” I asked.
“Not at first,” he said. “But after I went over to Cleveland in 1917 to join my old roommate, Tris Speaker, I started to play the outfield, and I began to take up on the bat, because I knew I’d have to hit a little better if I was going to make the team. I never was any wonder at the plate, but I was good enough to last six more years, playing with Spoke.”
Tris Speaker (Wood had called him by his old nickname, Spoke) was the Joe DiMaggio or Willie Mays of the first two decades of this century – the nonpareil center fielder of his day. “He had a beautiful left-handed arm,” Joe Wood said. “He always played very shallow in center – you could do that in those days, because of the dead ball. I saw him make a lot of plays to second base from there – pick up what looked like a clean single and fire the ball to second in time to force the base runner coming down from first. Or he could throw the ball behind a runner and pick him off that way. And just as fine a man as he was a ballplayer. He was a southern gentleman – well, he was from Hubbard, Texas. Back in the early days, when we were living together on the beach at Winthrop during the season, out beyond Revere, Spoke would sometimes cook up a mess of fried chicken in the evening. He’d cook and then I’d do the dishes.”
Listening to this, I sensed the web of baseball around me. Tris Speaker had driven in the tying run in the tenth inning of the last game of the 1912 World Series, at Fenway Park, after Fred Merkle and Chief Meyers, of the Giants, had let his easy foul pop fall untouched between them. A moment or two later, Joe Wood had won his third game of the Series and the Red Sox were champions. My father saw that game – he was at Harvard Law School at the time, and got a ticket somehow – and he told me about it many times. He was terrifically excited to be there, but I think my mother must have relished the famous victory even more. She grew up in Boston and was a true Red Sox fan, even though young women didn’t go to many games then. My father grew up in Cleveland, so he was an Indians rooter, of course. In 1915, my parents got married and went to live in Cleveland, where my father began to practice law. Tris Speaker was traded to the Indians in 1916 – a terrible shock to Red Sox fans – and Joe Wood came out of his brief retirement to join him on the club a year later. My parents’ first child, my older sister, was born in Cleveland late in 1916, and the next year my father went off toe Europe – off to the war. My mother once told me that in the summer afternoons of 1917 she would often push a baby carriage past League Park, the Indians’ home field, out on Linwood Avenue, which was a block or two away from my parents’ house. Sometimes there was a game going on, and if she heard a roar of pleasure from the fans inside she would tell herself that probably Tris Speaker had just done something special. She was lonely in Cleveland, she told me, and it made her feel good to know that Tris Speaker was there in the same town with her. “Tris Speaker and I were traded to Cleveland in the same year,” she said.
A yell and an explosion of cheering brought me back to Yale Field. We were in the top of the seventh, and the Yale second baseman and captain, Gerry Harrington, had just leaped high to snatch down a burning line drive – the force of it almost knocked him over backward in midair. Then he flipped the ball to second to double off a St. John’s base runner and end the inning. “These fellows came to play!” Dick Lee said.
Most no-hitters produce at least one such heaven-sent gift somewhere along the line, and I began to believe that Ron Darling, who was still untouched on the mound, might be pitching the game of his young life. I turned to ask Mr. Wood how many no-hitters he recalled – he had seen Mathewson and Marquard and Babe Ruth (Ruth, the pitcher, that is) and Coveleski and the rest of them, after all – but he seemed transfixed by something on the filed. “Look at that!” he said, in a harsh, disbelieving way. “This Yale coach has his own coaches out there on the lines, by God! They’re professionals – not just players, the way I always had it when I was here. The coach has his own coaches … I never knew that.”
“Did you have special coaches when you were coming up with the Red Sox?” I asked, hoping to change his mood. “A pitching coach, I mean, or a batting coach?”
He didn’t catch the question, and I repeated it.
“No, no,” he said, a little impatiently. “We talked about the other players and the pitchers among ourselves in those days. We players. We didn’t need anybody to help us.”
He ws staring straight ahead at the filed. I thought he looked a bit chilly. It was well past five o’clock now, and a skim of clouds had covered the sun.
Dick Lee stole a glance at him, too. “Hey, Joe, doesn’t this Darling remind you a little of Carl Hubbell on the mound?” he said in a cheerful, distracting sort of voice. “The way he picks up his front leg, I mean. You remember how Hubbell would go way up on the stretch and then drop his hands down by his ankles before he threw the ball?”
“Hubbell?” Joe Wood said. He shook his head, making an effort. “Well, to me this pitcher’s a little like that fellow Eckersley,” he said slowly. “The way he moves forward there.”
He was right. Ron Darling had exactly the same float and glide that the Red Sox’ Dennis Eckersley conveys when he is pitching well.
“How do today’s players compare with the men you played with, Mr. Wood?” I asked him.
“I’d rather not answer that question,” he said. He had taken out his watch again. He studied in and then tucked it away carefully, and then he glanced over at me, perhaps wondering if he had been impolite. “That Pete Rose plays hard,” he added. “Him and a few more. I don’t like Pete Rose, exactly, but he looks like he plays the game the way we did. He’d play for the fun of it if he had to.”
He resumed his study of the field, and now and then I saw him stare again as the heavyset Yale third-base coach on our side of the diamond. Scoreless games make for a long day at the ballpark, and Joe Wood’s day had probably been longer than ours. More than once, I had seen him struggle to his feet to catch some exciting play or moment on the filed, only to have it end before he was quite up. Then he would sit down again, leaning on his cane when he lowered himself. I had more questions for Mr. Wood, but now I tried to put them out of my mind. Earlier in the afternoon, he had remarked that several old Yale players had dropped in at his house before the game to say hello and talk about the old days. “People come by and see me all the time,” he had said. “People I don’t even know, from as far away as Colorado. Why, I had a fellow come in all the way from Canada the other day, who just wanted to talk about the old days. They all want that, somehow. It’s gone on too long.”
It had gone on for him, I realized, for as long as most lifetimes. He had played ball for fourteen years, all told, and people had been asking him to talk about it for nearly sixty years. For him, the last juice and sweetness must have been squeezed out of these ancient games years ago, but he was still expected to respond to our amateur expertise, our insatiable vicariousness. Old men are patronized in much the same fashion as athletes; because we take pride in them, we expect their intimacy in return. I had intruded after all.
