Sports Biblio Digest, 11.24.19: Ravaging the Soul of Baseball
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Remarkable Life of Dorothy Seymour Mills; Dizzy and Daffy Dean’s Barnstorming Tour; A New History of the Big Ten; College Football’s Infamous Cold Case; When Harvard Saved Football; How Chaminade Slew the Giant; Remembering Bill Lyon
* * * * * * * *
There’s no suitable language in the English that I could employ (without a torrent of profanity) to properly condemn the decision by Major League Baseball to drop affiliations with more than 40 minor league teams, all in the name of accelerating its development of high-level prospects, and for continuing to try to pay peanuts to virtually everyone else.
The possible hit list includes some of the most storied clubs in the minors, and whole leagues could be snuffed out, including the venerable New York-Penn circuit that in recent years has stretched to New England. The response from baseball commissioner Rob Manfred was weak tea, predictably so in what’s becoming an uninspiring tenure atop the game.
While there are clubs that have decaying facilities and little community support, is this any way to be a good steward of the game? Grassroots baseball is where the heart and soul of the game has always been, and the minor leagues evoke more than just small-town pride and nostalgia.
It’s where fans not fortunate to live near big-league cities go to keep their connections with the game, and possibly see a future All-Star or two at least once or twice, if they’re lucky.
Starting in 2021, all of the Rookie Leagues—all of them—would be gone. The draft would move from June to August, and major-league teams would be allowed a limit of 150 players under contract in their organizations.
This isn’t about whittling down underperforming minor league organizations or uprooting from rundown ball parks. It’s about skimming costs. And for those teams left behind? They could sign up for a new independent “Dream League” of undrafted players, but they’d have to carry all the costs MLB teams once did, including salaries and insurance.
New York Sen. Chuck Schumer, whose state would lose five teams, has mentioned revisiting baseball’s anti-trust exemption (which ought to have been done away with decades ago), but political heavy-handedness is not a real solution.
The “120 Plan” may make some consolidated sense when it comes to relocating high minor teams near the big-league club (which is the case here in Atlanta, with the Braves’ AAA affiliate in the suburbs and a good Class A stop about an hour away).
But that’s not what’s driving all this. While it may be plausible to restructure the minors (as has happened in recent years in hockey), this wasn’t done with any good-faith effort to work with the leadership of minor league baseball.
There have been plenty of strong responses from the Fourth Estate, including a Reds’ minor league chronicler, who couldn’t stop laughing at MLB’s professed concerns about the low pay of minor league players:
“Major League Baseball teams pay the players. The only thing stopping the players from being paid poorly is the unwillingness of Major League Baseball to pay them better. The fact that they brought this up is actually incredible. Not only because, well, they decide what to pay them, but the fact that they as a group, spent millions of dollars lobbying Congress to change the laws on the books so that they wouldn’t be forced to pay minor leaguers more than minimum wage and for no more than 40 hours per week regardless of how long they actually worked.”
I’ll leave all of this revolting nonsense for now by quoting Bill Madden of the New York Daily News, who broke the story (along with the NYT), and who noted that Major League Baseball would be saving only around $20 million a year:
“For this, is MLB really prepared to destroy baseball in the grass roots communities of the lower minor leagues, put dozens of owners out of business with no equity to show for it (not to mention hundreds of ballpark employees), invite millions of dollars of lawsuits, risking Congress stripping them of their anti-trust exemption, and, most importantly, losing hundreds of thousands of baseball fans, many of them in 6-16 age bracket, forever? These are the same communities in which MLB has conducted clinics and outreach programs in an effort to ‘grow the game.’ The same communities where baseball fans, who can’t afford, or can’t travel to, major league ballparks, have a chance to develop and nurture a love for the game through the future big league stars that play in their towns every year.”
A Most Remarkable Life
One of the many pleasures of compiling this newsletter over the last four years is being gobsmacked by discoveries that the truly serious historians/fans/sports junkies absorbed years ago. Such was my surprise to learn about Dorothy Seymour Mills, who died this week at the age of 91, and who co-wrote some of the landmark books of baseball history with her late husband Harold Seymour. It was only in 2011 that she was credited for the scholarly trilogy “Baseball: The Early Years,” “Baseball: The Golden Age” and “Baseball: The People’s Game” when Oxford University Press republished the books.
In her 2004 memoir (excerpt here), baseball’s first female historian wrote that “my star has always been outshone by Seymour’s, and I permitted this to happen. I even believed, and told him, that ‘your work is more important than mine.’ That was like saying, ‘You are more important than I am.’ ”
The Society for Baseball Research also was slow to recognize her work, which included more than 30 books, including a baseball novel, “Drawing Card,” about a female player in the 1920s, and “Chasing Baseball,” about the game’s stats-and-history obsessives and similar creatures. Here’s SABR’s remembrance, which includes related links about Mills, including official baseball historian John Thorn’s profile of her in the SABR Baseball Research Journal.
SABR also has named its lifetime achievement award for women in baseball after Mills, which began in 2017.
A Few Good Reads
The 1934 barnstorming tour of St. Louis Cardinals pitchers Dizzy and Daffy Dean against Negro Leagues players is chronicled in a new book by African-American baseball author and Negro Leagues Hall of Fame co-founder Phil Dixon, who explored the social backdrop of race and media coverage in the Depression era. At the Baseball by the Book podcast, Dixon, a winner of the CASEY award for baseball books, discusses the stars the Dean brothers faced, including Satchel Paige, Josh Gibson and Oscar Charleston, who were still barred from the segregated Major Leagues;
Good news and bad news for the Milwaukee Brewers this week: The club announced it’s bringing back its former ball-in-glove logo as part of a uniform overhaul, recalling the halcyon days of Robin Yount and Paul Molitor and their only World Series appearance in 1982. One player who won’t be donning those threads next year is Brewers’ now former star catcher Yasmani Grandal, who signed a $73-million, four-year free agent contract with the White Sox;
As a $2.6-billion stadium goes up near Los Angeles to serve as the new home for the Rams and Chargers, here's a look at how the NFL is ramping up its efforts in the second-largest market in the United States;
Sports author Jeff Pearlman, who’s written about pro football in four of his eight books, talks to Pigskin Books about his favorite NFL reads and discusses his latest, about the USFL and Donald Trump;
Former Chicago Tribune media reporter Ed Sherman is the author of the newly published official history of The Big Ten Conference, “This is BIG,” with a foreword by outgoing Big Ten commissioner Jim Delany;
In 1959, Northwestern upset Oklahoma in a college football game that’s been suspected of being fixed for decades. At the Chicago Sun-Times, Rob Miech goes long on the story and interviews prominent sports gambler Lem Banker, who claims to have been an eyewitness to a possible case of food poisoning that felled several members of the Sooners the day before the game;
Yale’s wild 50-43 comeback win over Harvard Saturday couldn’t topple the main headline coming out of New Haven: More than 30 arrests after students and others stormed the field at halftime to protest climate change and demand the two Ivy League universities divest from fossil fuels. The game was delayed by nearly 50 minutes and was completed in near-darkness (the Yale Bowl has no permanent lights) when it went to double overtime. It was 100 years ago, following the same game, when Harvard accepted an invitation to play Oregon in the Rose Bowl, reviving an East vs. West format and prompting the Tournament of Roses committee to invest in a new stadium in Pasadena that stands today;
From The Wall Street Journal, a review of “The Greatest Upset Never Seen,” recently published by the University of Nebraska Press, the story of tiny Chaminade College of Hawaii knocking off Ralph Sampson and then-No. 1 Virginia in an early season game in 1982. This is one of several new compelling books about college basketball history. Coming soon: A fresh look at the CCNY point-shaving scandal that rocked the sport in the early 1950s.
Passings
Bill Lyon, 81, was a respected and beloved columnist for The Philadelphia Inquirer, especially as he wrote bracingly in his later years about his battle with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. His colleague Mike Sielski offers this remembrance of his mentor, writing that instead of blustering about a Philly and American sports scene that trafficked heavily in such a commodity, Lyon became “our sports culture’s conscience, the counterbalance to the anger and outrage and warped perspectives.”
* * * * * * * *
The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 187, published Nov. 24, 2019. PLEASE NOTE: There will not be a newsletter next week. The Digest will return on Dec. 8.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.