primeideal

This book is better than I'm making it sound. I have a small quibble with it, but it's one of those quibbles that I can't be concise about so I have to spend a lot of words on a digression or two before getting to the nitpicky point.

Posnanski's previous book, "The Baseball 100," was a collection of essays about 100 of the best players in baseball history, as chosen and ranked by him. Obviously there's a lot of subjectivity that goes into this process. Despite all the statistics in baseball, it's not feasible to compare across positions and eras and everything else. Fine. Also, by its nature, the book isn't going to lend itself to an overarching narrative or through-line. But, to the extent that there is a narrative, it's that racism is bad. Because the professional leagues in the late-1800s/early-1900s were segregated, and the Negro Leagues had limited/sporadic organization and record-keeping, we don't have a fair measure of the greatness of players like Oscar Charleston or Josh Gibson. We don't even have a fair measure of the greatness of players of Babe Ruth, because he never had to hit against the best black pitchers.

The subtitle of this book purports to be "a history in 50 moments"; it's actually a lot more than that, there are extra chapters with lists of related funny happenings. And so, there's sort of a countdown of "these are the greatest 50," but it's much more subjective/wide-ranging than even the predecessor. It's more interested in covering a variety of weird and wonderful strangeness than necessarily high-stakes, AL/NL competition. And I very much enjoy this, for what it's worth. This is the kind of book baby!me would have absolutely adored. Many of these events I was already sort of familiar with because baby!me had devoured those books. So it's not just AL/NL stuff; there's braggadocio from the Japanese top level, a home run record from an independent league in Arizona, a trick play in the College World Series, and so on. Great. Cool. As far as "weird and wonderful strangeness" goes, I'm in favor of all this. Hold that thought.

In college I had the opportunity of taking several classes on the history/anthropology of baseball/sports in general. So I may be mixing this up, I'm pretty sure this was the anthropology class, but they quoted the commissioner, when he was establishing Jackie Robinson Day, as saying "No one is bigger than the game--except Jackie Robinson." And then the professor was like, "obviously, we're anthropologists, so it's our job to deconstruct this!" (Not in so many words, but you know what I mean.)

It becomes yet another form of countersignalling (I need a tag for this). Level 0 (the other white National League owners in 1947): "segregation is great and we should keep discriminating against black people." Level 1: "no, segregation is bad, Branch Rickey did a good and brave thing in signing Jackie Robinson." This is the point Selig was making in 1997. Now, you can't really dispute that one, nobody wants to be against Jackie Robinson. But you can level-2 it: "actually, Rickey was a cheapskate; since the Negro Leagues weren't part of the NL/AL structure, he didn't need to compensate the Kansas City Monarchs when he signed Robinson away from them. The white leagues' integration led to the downfall of the Negro Leagues, which was a creative and innovative organization by black entrepreneurs making the best of the terrible situation. There were black sportswriters pushing for integration earlier, but they were dismissed as being communists. Also, Rickey was paternalistic with his religion and his college teammate who wished he could be white, that's creepy." There's enough level-2ing in the discourse that sometimes, we get to the third level! Rickey's religious convictions were sincere, and he had great taste in hymns. You'll have to read the new book to find out, but moment 42 (because Jackie Robinson's number is 42, and now it's retired everywhere, get it?) contains a non-Rickey example of "this seems too good to be true, can we get a source...oh dang someone actually did get a source, good researching, guys."

Okay, tl;dr, racism is bad. And in most walks of life, like voting rights and salaries, we can say: sexism is bad in very much the same way that racism is bad. But not always. It's possible that future generations will look back on the existence of separate men's and women's bathrooms in much the same way we look back on racially-segregated bathrooms with horror. But for now, this is how lots of places do it. Same deal with sports. If you want to make the case that there should be no such thing as separate women's sports, all sports should be sex-neutral, and if that means the rosters turn out to be almost exclusively male in practice, well, that's just life, we're not all athletes: that's a consistent argument, go for it. For now, women's sports exist.

And so, several of the moments featured in the book are about women and girls in baseball: a Little League pitcher who learned the knuckleball from Joe Niekro; Jackie Mitchell, who struck out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game; and Dottie and Kit from "A League of Their Own," a (fictional) movie about the real All-American Girls' Professional Baseball League from the 40s. Cool? Diversity, right? I said I liked the weird and cool stuff, so I should like these kinds of highlights, too?

But no, I really don't. Mitchell was likely a gimmick, and Posnanski admits as much: "Jackie Mitchell striking out Babe Ruth is one of my favorite moments in all of baseball history, and because of that, I've never been too interested in the argument about whether it was on the level or not. It probably wasn't. She was a 17-year-old girl, and they were the two best hitters in the world, and the event was supposed to be an April Fools' Day gag, and even Mitchell in her final interview with The Atlanta Constitution said it was a show." Dottie and Kit are, I repeat, fictional characters. At a time when some people's approach to women's sports seems to be "that's nice, girls, you go play your games, but don't you worry about ~winning~ or anything, you're supposed to be ~nice~ and above that sort of thing," it is extremely condescending to have these depictions of women in baseball alongside "yeah, Chet Brewer and Smokey Joe Williams' pitching was unable to be fully appreciated in the 1930s because of racism, we're giving them some of the credit they deserve now." These two kinds of discrimination are not the same!

Now, maybe there's a generational aspect. Like, I'm too young to remember "A League of Their Own" coming out. To some extent, the fictional movie may have regenerated interest/books/history notes about the AAGPBL, which I read about as a kid; I was aware of the real league well before I'd seen the movie. Similarly, when I was growing up, Hank Aaron was the home run king, 755 was the home run record; I read all about Aaron as the mighty slugger who nevertheless faced abuse and vitriol from people who didn't want to see him break Babe Ruth's record. That was all history. When Aaron died a few years ago, a lot of the obituaries/tributes to him were like, "did you know? Hank Aaron suffered terrible abuse and got lots of hate mail! the more you know!" like, yes...I did? Is this just only aimed at people older than me who didn't know about this when it was happening because it wasn't reported on? I'm not that young anymore! Like, baseball fans maybe skew older and love history, but come on, there are a lot of people my age too!

In events that have zero to do with racism or sexism, there is also a chapter about a guy hitting a home run on Father's Day after his dad had very recently died. I think this is supposed to be a "d'aww" moment? But this kind of sentimentality does not work for me. It's from 2010 so it's the kind of thing that would not have been in the books I read as a kid, but I would not rank it up there with some of the others I'm more familiar with.

Okay, so. A good thing the book does is call out the defensive miscues of Alex Gonzalez, who is not the same person as Álex González--they are both shortstops who played an important playoff series against each other. I am a Cubs fan, and the Cubs' Gonzalez misplayed a ground ball that turned into a catastrophic defensive collapse, right up there with Fred Merkle, Jim Joyce, and others in the Blunders chapter. The reason this is important is because much reporting at the time and since blamed one of the fans at the game for the defensive meltdown, which is really not fair, especially because there is more than enough collective punishment in this world without media going "Cubs fans are so monstrous, they blame their own instead of shortstops who can't field." No we do not, sir, we are blaming the shortstops like we should! Posnanski points out that misattributing blame is the real blunder. Agreed.

Another good thing it does is that it highlights the different ways that evolving media covered the games, through the decades; some plays have funny write-ups in the New York Times, Sandy Koufax' perfect game was augmented by Vin Scully's broadcast, the broadcaster got the shot of Carlton Fisk's waved home run because there was a rat inside the Green Monster and he was scared to move his camera. It makes me want to go put together a Youtube playlist of a bunch of the highlights.

Like I said, baby!me was incredibly obsessed with baseball. Adult!me isn't so much--like, the Shohei Ohtani highlight reel is amazing in a what-a-time-to-be-alive way, I probably don't appreciate that as much as I "should," or I just have different hobbies. But that does mean there will be new and exciting things in this book for me. :D