Sports Biblio Digest, 7.21.19: Scorching Mid-Summer Reads
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Bob Gibson; Barry Bonds; Sonny Liston; Suzanne Lenglen; From the College Gridiron to La Scala; Sports Fans Gone Awry; Dave Parker; Gaylord Perry and Apollo 11; Yoga and Baseball; Remembering John Paul Stevens and Pumpsie Green
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There’s no overarching theme this week except that it’s blistering hot in the American Northeast, Midwest and many other parts of the country, and staying cool is next to impossible.
This is the time of the year when my interest in anything sports-related really wanes. The baseball All-Star Game has come and gone, another Hall of Fame class is set to be inducted this weekend, and the off-seasons for the NFL, NBA and NHL will soon be coming to an end.
The dog days are good for grilling, getting outdoors (I’m blessed to live near the foothills of the Appalachians and we’re holding up well in a relatively mild summer here in the Southeastern U.S.) and some summer reading, and not much else.
One sad note to pass along before getting into the rest of the newsletter: Cardinals pitching great Bob Gibson’s been hospitalized with pancreatic cancer.
Gibson, who’s 83, will not able to attend to today’s Hall of Fame festivities in Cooperstown, N.Y. He’s on the mind of inductee Lee Smith, a reliever who spent his formative years with the Cardinals.
At The Undefeated, Justin Tinsley makes a moral argument for including Barry Bonds in the Hall of Fame that merits some consideration, but probably won’t sway enough voters to change their minds.
Whatever you may think of what Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and others accused of (or who have admitted to) using steroids may have done, or how personally unlikable they may be, baseball’s ham-handed, Johnny-come-lately crackdown came well into their careers.
It was an expedient reaction under pressure following the completion of the flawed Mitchell Report, but it gave baseball leaders and anti-steroids scolds some concocted moral high ground.
Today’s honors for Smith, Mariano Rivera, Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina, Harold Baines and the late Roy Halladay are well-deserved—Rivera is the first unanimous inductee ever—but future years are looking a bit barren.
Derek Jeter could join his former Yankees teammate next year in the unanimous club, but a glut of worthy candidates on the ballot, and the threshold for induction are making the voters’ work messier than ever. Bonds and Clemens have only three more years to get to 75 percent, and they haven’t reached 60.
Their exclusions figure to haunt the process, but the powers-that-be in Cooperstown seem unconcerned about the frustration and uncertainty over how best to honor the game’s best players, and how much weight their off-field exploits ought to be considered.
A Few Good Reads
This isn’t a new issue but the BBC is taking a fresh look at the mysterious death of Sonny Liston, who was found dead in his Las Vegas home in 1971 in a case some think wasn’t due to natural causes as ruled by the local coroner;
At the Philadelphia Inquirer, Bob Brookover writes about Jayson Stark, winner of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s J.G. Spink Award for media contributions, and his 40-year passion for covering baseball, now for The Athletic;
When Alvin Dark managed the San Francisco Giants in the early 1960s, America’s space race was just getting underway, so he probably thought nothing more of joking that a man would land on the moon before his star pitcher, Gaylord Perry, would ever hit a big-league homer. Those comments were remembered this week during the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. On the afternoon of July 20, 1969, Perry was scheduled to start an afternoon game against the Dodgers just as astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin touched down on Tranquility Base. By the time they stepped on the lunar surface six hours later, Perry had taken a Claude Osteen pitch deep and out of Candlestick Park for the first of his six career homers. Dark by then was managing the Indians;
Former MLB slugger Dave Parker opens up about battling Parkinson’s, his fundraising efforts for research into the disease, and memories of a 19-year career with 339 home runs and two batting titles;
An American researcher has identified the earliest known records of baseball games involving Japanese players—a series contested in the United States in the summer of 1872 between local teams and a group of traveling performers;
When Suzanne Lenglen began play in the 1919 Wimbledon, it was the first step toward her becoming the world’s first full-fledged female sporting celebrity, a run of stardom that continued for most of the 1920s and that still resonates a century later;
Morris Robinson starred in football at The Citadel and the game is not far away from his emotions. But these days the former small college All-American offensive lineman pours himself into music as a bass singer who’s performed at La Scala. For the moment he's serving as an artistic advisor to the Cincinnati Opera and plays a leading role in its production of “Porgy and Bess” that continues through next Sunday;
A review of the newly published “Infinite Baseball: Notes from a Philosopher at the Ballpark,” says the author, Cal-Berkeley professor Alva Noë, packs a lot of compelling meditations in a short book: “We might dig and dig without ever striking the bedrock upon which our affection for baseball is built, but there is value in inquiry—especially in a game like baseball, which makes philosophers of us all;”
I’m on board with this: “Down with Yoga, Up with Baseball.” The simple pleasures and stress relief that come with playing catch in the back yard will never be surpassed by the earnest, high-energy striving in any kind of fitness facility, yoga or otherwise.
Sports Book News
At U.S. Sport History, a new review of “Game Misconduct” by Nathan Kalman-Lamb, which explores the subject of when sports fans go over the line, mindful of the cheering in Toronto when Kevin Durant went down with a ruptured Achilles tendon in the NBA finals;
Howard Bryant’s 2018 book “The Heritage,” about black sports activism, is being developed into a docuseries on Maverick TV;
Olympic figure skater Adam Rippon was a hit at BookCon, ahead of his new memoir due out in October;
Former Chicago Tribune and ESPN.com sportswriter Melissa Isaacson’s book “State,” about her trailblazing Illinois girls high school championship basketball team in 1979, will be published Aug. 13.
Now Hear This
A couple weeks ago we mentioned the 50th anniversary of the first publication of the “Baseball Encyclopedia.” At the recent SABR conference in San Diego, the book’s luminaries gathered with others for a panel discussion, and you can listen to it here.
Passings
John Paul Stevens was a boy growing up in Chicago in 1932 when he attended a World Series game between the Cubs and Yankees, the game in which Babe Ruth reportedly called a homerun against Charlie Root before he hit it. The veracity of that claim is disputed, but Stevens, the retired U.S. Supreme Court justice who died this week at the age of 99, was convinced of it: “Very definitely. He pointed his bat.” A former clerk for Stevens said he talked about that moment often, and with great fondness, long after he became famous himself for landmark legal rulings. Recalls Merritt McAllister, now a law professor at the University of Florida: “Not everyone agrees about the significance of Ruth’s gesture before he hit the shot to center field, but the home run’s trajectory, at least, was settled with reliable evidence. Justice Stevens couldn’t have been happier;”
Pumpsie Green, 85, was the first black player to play for the Boston Red Sox, the last Major League team to be integrated, in 1959. That it happened 12 years after Jackie Robinson broke the color line was one thing; that the Red Sox, with owner Tom Yawkey—resistant to sign black players in general—actually passed on the chance to sign Robinson, has been held up as emblematic of the franchise’s 85-years World Series drought. Green played only 327 games in a big-league career that lasted until 1963; his brother Cornell Green was a star safety for the Dallas Cowboys. Pumpsie Green, who later was a high school teacher and coach in California, returned to Fenway Park in 2009 for the 50th anniversary of his debut, honored as the multi-ethnic Red Sox were in the midst of winning four World Series crowns in the new millennium.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered each Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 174, published July 21, 2019.
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.