Sports Biblio Digest, 3.29.20: An Opening Day Without Baseball

News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture

Also In This Issue: Vin Scully’s Pick-Me Up; Italy’s Game Zero; Let Them Play Golf; 50 Great Sports Books To Read; 30 Best Sports Movies Of All Time; The Aura of Michael Jordan; Queen of the Negro Leagues; Rutgers’ Forgotten Champions; Remembering Bill Bartholomay, Jimmy Wynn and Curly Neal

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A little more than 25 years since the Major League Baseball season was ended by a strike that cancelled the World Series, the sport once again faces a potentially long work stoppage.

While management and the players’ union were working on a new Collective Bargaining Agreement, the subject of when they might go back to work overshadowed everything.

The COVID-19 pandemic that has shut down most sporting activities and large events around the world came as spring training was wrapping up. On Tuesday, on what would have been Opening Day, MLB did its best to give fans some connection to the event.

Opening Day at Home was convened like many activities these days—schools, church services, musical concerts and business meetings—”virtually,” thanks to advanced technology.

The next best thing to being there was good enough, I suppose, but the longing for a new season in the flesh, at the ball parks, with the attendant sounds and the smells and the feel of spring, has accelerated.

It just doesn't feel the same, as few things have felt the same these last few weeks, nor will they return to being what they were. Serving up classic games is something that’s happening all over the sports world these days, and that's been some comfort.

The Social Distancing Baseball League doesn’t cut it for me any more than Commissioner Rob Manfred’s letter to the fans, but I’m pretty hard to please.

Labor conflicts have been the source of most of baseball’s interruptions. You’ve got to go back 102 years to examine how a global pandemic affected the game, although it didn't stop it.

This week, a new book exploring that very subject was published with incredible timing. “War Fever,” by history professors Randy Roberts (Purdue) and Johnny Smith (Georgia Tech), examines the 1918 flu pandemic and that year's World Series in Boston, as World War I was coming to an end.

(The authors previously collaborated on a 2016 book about Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.)

The Red Sox, led by Babe Ruth, were playing the Chicago Cubs, and the Series had been moved up to September and the season shortened. With millions sick and dying from what was called the Spanish Flu, the illness didn’t spare ball players.

Ruth had been infected during spring training, and one day during the season fell seriously ill. After a misdiagnosis, he landed in the hospital, and recovered.

But the rest of the season was a struggle to complete, as the pandemic, and the war, continued on.

The talks now center not on when games might start, but when might they end. Christmas? Will this too, be a shortened season, or contested in a split fashion like 1981, prompted by a strike?

How much baseball will be played this year? Baltimore Orioles General Manager Mike Elias expressed the sentiments of many:

“As soon as we can go, we all want to go play baseball. I think it will mean a lot to the country when we’re back playing baseball again, too. So the sooner the better. But I think that we’ll take what we can get, too. We just want to play.”

Official baseball historian John Thorn:

“As an historian, my crystal ball works very well in reverse, and not so well in the future.”

We are to be sure, in absolutely unprecedented times, which call for creativity.
Dan Barry of The New York Times unfurled this dash of imagination, blending in many of the game’s great and intriguing personalities into one heckuva fantasy Opening Day contest. Only the teams were fictitious:

Don’t misunderstand: This game between the New York Gothams and the Cincinnati Greens mattered, but in ineffable ways beyond the columns of wins and losses. It mattered so much that complaints about baseball’s slow pace yielded to the universal wish that this game would last forever.

Yet these consequential baseball matters were instantly made trivial by unsettling developments far from any ballpark. Yes: a difficult off-season. Make that a horrific one.

But on the open field of the collective mind, the sun played peekaboo with cottony clouds, the air suggested but did not demand a sweater, and the gates opened in welcome to a ballpark with infinite capacity.

There is another welcome consolation, however, and it is a magnificent one, certainly much more soothing than Rob Manfred: The one and only Vin Scully.

If he can’t make you feel better in a very trying time, nobody can.

A Few Good Reads

On Feb. 19, Valencia traveled to Milan for a European Champions League soccer match against Atalanta. The unheralded Serie A side from Bergamo hadn’t been on such a gigantic stage in years, and brought along from a nearby region of northern Italy 2,500 fans.

A third of Valencia’s team become infected with COVID-19, and the virus Atalanta and its fans brought back to Bergamo has made it one of the biggest hotspots on the planet for the pandemic. Two days after the game, the first confirmed case of the virus was made public in Italy, and Spain also has been devastated by its spread;

• The global sports culture that’s so much more accessible today—largely via the proliferation of television and other media—is suffering the same fate as local, small-town and low-level sports endeavors, and thus the pandemic has shown “that what globalisation giveth to sport, it can just as easily taketh away;”

• The Australian Football League season had just gotten underway as the COVID-19 outbreak took hold, and like baseball, there are questions about what happens when the lights come back on;

• The director of a lower-level football club in Australia writes about the possible impact the closure will have on community clubs like his;

• The BBC put together a compendium of previous soccer hiatuses in England, mostly during wartime;

• Need something to read without games? These 50 ought to last long after sports resumes;

• Need some baseball books to read? Here are a dozen new ones that ought to get you through the hiatus;

• Need something to read about hockey? Here’s a half-dozen, plus one;

  

• Need something to watch? One writer’s list of the 30 best sports movies of all time;

• How ESPN is scrambling to fill the massive void of live sports programming;

• The Athletic has similar issues, as writers have been trotting out their favorite stories and the subscription platform has extended its free trial period from a week to 90 days;

• Some sportswriters at newspapers are being reassigned to virus and other non-sports coverage, but there are concerns over the long haul for job security as local news outlets figure to bear an especially heavy brunt in the coming months;

• An undefeated high school basketball team priming for a state championship in Kentucky is like many others, wondering what might have been;

• The 1918 flu epidemic as it affected the Indiana Hoosiers football team, which stayed on campus and practiced after other students were sent home;

• Social distancing on the links should be less of an issue than other sports, and so Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports argues to let them play golf;

• Many public parks are closed due to the virus, but wilderness is all around you.

Now Hear This

• ESPN NBA analyst Doris Burke revealed on Adrian Wojnarowski’s podcast this week that she’s tested positive for COVID-19. The last game she called involved the Utah Jazz. It was a positive test by Jazz forward Rudy Gobert that prompted the NBA to suspend its season, sending shock waves around North America far beyond sports;

• Baseball historian John Thorn talks about the Black Sox scandal with the Transatlantic History Ramblings podcast.

Sports History Files

On Saturday 38 years ago, Rutgers University won its only major national collegiate sports championship when its women’s basketball team triumphed over favored Texas at the fabled Palestra in Philadelphia.

To mark the anniversary, a filmmaking crew working on a documentary about that Lady Knights team activated a YouTube page with full game footage from what turned out to be the last event for the Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women.

Only 16 teams competed in the AIAW tourney that year, and Rutgers and Texas were two of the three ranked teams to compete. That’s because many women’s programs bolted that same 1981-82 year for the NCAA, which had begun sponsoring women’s sports.

Unlike the AIAW, the NCAA paid the traveling expenses for teams, and its championship was shown live on CBS (a national TV contract with the AIAW had been cancelled by NBC a few months before).

Most of the women’s basketball powerhouses went with the NCAA, and leading coaches, including Pat Head Summitt at Tennessee, believed the move was good for the growth of the sport.

Around the time Rutgers cut down the nets in Philly, Louisiana Tech won the first NCAA women’s title. A few months later, the women-led AIAW filed an antitrust suit against the NCAA, which ultimately prevailed in court.

In covering women’s sports for many years, I dug up some of this old history and discovered some fascinating sparring between the AIAW and NCAA. Most mainstream media coverage was sympathetic to the AIAW, but internal jousting among the top women’s sports administrators in the latter organization has been drastically overlooked.

A 2004 book adapted from a doctoral dissertation, “Playing Nice and Losing,” is especially critical of AIAW diehards who expended all their energies—and much more funding than was ever spent on female athletes—to pay for lawyers to battle the NCAA.

Among the AIAW leaders was then-Texas women’s athletics director Donna Lopiano, who continues to claim women’s collegiate sports was set back a decade by the move to the NCAA.

That’s been uncritically repeated in establishment media, but two AIAW apostates, Judith Holland of UCLA and Barbara Hedges of USC, self-published their own recollections of the saga a few years ago and dispute Lopiano’s notion.

Texas went on to win its only national championship in women’s basketball in 1986 under NCAA auspices. One of the Rutgers players, Chris Dailey (in the front center in the poster above), today is the associate head coach of the UConn dynasty.

From the Retro Files

After seeing last week’s “retro” sports theme at the top of this newsletter, former longtime Chicago Tribune writer Phil Hersh sent in this 1995 piece he wrote about the aura of Michael Jordan, loaded with cultural and social analysis on the occasion of Jordan's return to the Bulls after his two-year baseball experiment:

“For all his obvious gifts, it has been equally clear he worked exceptionally hard to refine the raw talent. That he once was cut from his high school basketball team brings him down from the superhuman to a dimension most can comprehend. That he could not simply command himself to master baseball, as Zeus would have done, also reinforces his humanity. That, for at least a year, Jordan was humbled but not humiliated by relative failure in baseball magnified the image of him as someone who can deal with his limitations. Had he hit .300 last year, there would be no way to relate to him at all.”

We’ll be going “retro” and posting all kinds of stories from the past, distant and more recent, not just while sports is paused but after the games resume.

Send your stories (your own or a favorite from someone else) to: sportsbiblio@gmail.com.

Sports Book News

Next month Rowman & Littlefield is reissuing James Overmyer’s biography of Effa Manley, “Queen of the Negro Leagues,” as part of the centenary celebrations of black organized baseball. She and her husband owned the Newark Eagles, and after the Major Leagues integrated she pressed for compensation for losing players (Larry Doby, who broke the American League color line, played for Newark).

In 2006, Manley was the first woman inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

The book is one of several just out or soon to be published by or about women in sports. Another is a memoir by Diane Shah, “A Farewell to Arms, Legs and Jockstraps.” She was the first woman to have a regular sports column in a major American newspaper when she got the nod at the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner in 1981.

Publishers Weekly this week rounded up some of the other forthcoming titles, including a biography of a Cuban immigrant pitcher in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a history of women’s cycling and a profile of Lottie Dod, who won five Wimbledon titles starting in 1887, when she was 15.

There’s a heavy dose of “social justice” and “intersectionality” in some of these books, which is predictable if lamentable. Lela Nargi, who put this roundup together, observes that “editors agree that the breadth of sports stories being published—about contemporary legends, forgotten superstars, and the people who are passionate about them—is strengthening the category" of sports books about and by women.

Passings

• Bill Bartholomay, 91, was a Chicago businessman who formed a group to purchase the Milwaukee Braves, then moved them to Atlanta in the mid-1960s;

  

• Jimmy Wynn, 78 was nicknamed the “Toy Cannon” for his small build but powerful arms and bat speed that produced 291 home runs in 15 seasons, most of them for the Houston Astros;

• Curly Neal, 77, was a master dribbler and ball handler for the Harlem Globetrotters, who followed the legendary Marquis Haynes and elevated the role even further. His 22-year career spawned many movie and television roles, and he was inducted in the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame in 2008.

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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. 199, published March 29, 2020.

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.