With the baseball season winding down, two books commend themselves as worthy companions for the hot-stove league that will begin as soon as the last pitch has been thrown. One is a fascinating historical review; the other is a personal memoir.
“Bottom of the Ninth,” is not, as the title might otherwise suggest, a novel along the lines of “Shoeless Joe,” W. P. Kinsella’s tale that became the revered (by baseball fans) film, “Field of Dreams.” Instead, it is a non-fiction work by Michael Shapiro, who also wrote “The Last Good Season.” That book chronicled the last pennant-winning season (1956) of the Brooklyn Dodgers, before the team left for Los Angeles in 1957.
“Bottom” (subtitled “Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself”) covers much the same era, but from a decidedly different vantage point. This time Shapiro reveals, in great detail, the efforts of a small group of men, led by the legendary Mr. Rickey, to form a new major league. It would have been called the Continental League, and would have had eight teams, all but one in cities previously not occupied by American or National League teams. The sole exception would have been New York City, which had just lost the Dodgers and the Giants.
The book is must reading for anyone with a desire to learn what happened behind the scenes in the attempt to expand baseball dramatically at a time when football was just beginning to show its potential (since realized in spades) to overtake the sport as America’s national obsession.
And Shapiro offers the history in a highly readable form, weaving secret meetings that took place off the field into recreations of exciting events that took place on it. He devotes an entire chapter, for example, to the great (some say the greatest ever) World Series of 1960 between the Yankees and Pittsburgh Pirates. And he describes specific plays with the authenticity of a sportswriter who was at the games.
He also makes the behind-the-scenes stuff something of a whodunit mystery. We know going in that the league is not going to happen. (It was scuttled when both the American and National Leagues announced they were going to expand by two teams each in 1961 and 1962 respectively.) But we don’t know, until Shapiro discloses the details, whom the key players were in nipping the grand plan in the bud.
Shapiro reveals it all in this fascinating, thoroughly engrossing book.
For a completely different kind of baseball book, however, Josh Wilker’s “Cardboard Gods” might be as good as it gets. “Cardboard” is a memoir built around the baseball card collection of the author. Those cards, collected when he was a pre-teen, cover the years 1974-1980, during which Wilker grew from a seven-year old, struggling to keep up with his older (by three or four years) brother, to a fully pubescent thirteen-year old, struggling with things like girls and masturbation.
Wilker is a terrific writer, which is reason enough to enjoy his book, but he is also a lover of the game, which makes it a perfect read for the fan who sees in the sport something more than balls and strikes, something perhaps approaching the metaphysical.
Using the cards of specific players as his jumping off points, Wilker reveals how it felt to be a misfit in his peer group and how his oddly-structured family (his mother lived with her lover and her husband, who was a literal third-wheel who seemed pleased enough to be such) was a source of both comfort and confusion (how could it not be?) for him.
It isn’t a typical American tale by any means, but it is, in its own way, uniquely American nonetheless, which is, in part, what gives the book its appeal.
But the baseball cards and the baseball players and their teams that Wilker writes about have an appeal of their own, and he doesn’t ignore that fact. Rather, he chooses and uses the players to reflect on his own life, thereby creating a minor masterpiece, to wit: a memoir that is more heavily historical and far less egocentric than perhaps any other.
And, if “Cardboard” (subtitled “An All-American Tale Told through Baseball Cards”) isn’t an entirely upbeat read, it is most certainly a beautifully rendered one. Like the game itself, it is full of anxiety, passion, joy and heartache: the perfect companion for those long months when the ballparks are empty.
(“Bottom of the Ninth,” published by Times Books, Henry Holt and Company, and “Cardboard Gods,” published by Seven Footer Press, are both available from Amazon.com and other on-line outlets as well as most book stores.)