Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (2 page)

Baseball really begins for Steve Gould in the 1949 season, DiMaggio’s last great year, when he missed the first two and a half months of the season with aching feet and then came back in late June to lead the Yankees to a three-game sweep in Boston, a series in which he hit four home runs and knocked in nine runs. If I have any regret, reading these pieces, it was that Gould did not seem to have made a comparable connection to Ted Williams, whom I think he would have adored. For someone who was fascinated by the complexity of human behavior and its effect on performance (“the human heart in conflict with itself,” to use another phrase of Faulkner’s), it has always struck me that Williams is a much more interesting, much richer subject than DiMaggio. I can just imagine Gould and Williams together—Gould with his wondrous, shrewd, and relentless curiosity, and Williams with his exuberant spirit, his ferocious and on occasion belligerent intelligence, delighted because he had finally found someone smart enough to understand him: “No goddamn it, Professor Gould, when I said pitchers are dumb by breed, I meant exactly that,
pitchers are dumb by breed…. Yes, of course pitchers are a breed—what else would they be? Why you ought to know that—I thought they told me you were a smart Harvard scientist!
”

I’d have loved to have been a fly on the wall for that one. After all, Williams’s own philosophy (though he was technically a political conservative and Gould a liberal) paralleled Gould’s with some surprising similarities, and Gould would have loved one of Williams’s elemental truths of both baseball and life: “God gets you to the plate, but from then on, you’re on your own.” That is, natural talent has a lot of to do with the earlier rounds of selection in any enterprise, but what you put into it on your own, how hard you work and how much passion you bring to it, how much you study to improve yourself matters equally—it is our mark as individuals, our passions, our visions, our commitment on occasion to something larger than ourselves, which sets us apart. Fittingly, no baseball player ever studied the game more closely, worked harder to build himself up physically (especially in an age when players accepted their bodies and did not try to improve them) than Williams. He was, as much as any player I can think of, someone who reflected the qualities in a society that Steve Gould wrote about so well, the achievement of a seemingly ordinary man fighting not inconsiderable disadvantages, who raises himself to a position of excellence out of his own fierce will. For certainly there was a central theme which distinguished Gould’s most important work: he was wary of classification of people by race and by ethnicity. Here he was well ahead of the curve; he understood that continuing breakthroughs in science—the coming of DNA with its awesome implications—would likely create an ever greater instinct to categorize people and to do it too quickly, based on what are presumed to be genetic characteristics, as if to rephrase Tolstoy, your genes are your fate. He was, in effect, the anti–bell curve man; other forces, he believed, determine our character and fate more than sheer DNA. He did not like people being pigeonholed based on presumptions about them, presumptions that had nothing to do with their character and their individuality. (As such, I believe he would have been fascinated by the revelations which came out about Williams, just about the time of both of their deaths in 2002—of the fact that May Williams, the ballplayer’s mother, was half Mexican, and there was a virtually secret part of the Williams family, something which surely, given the prejudices of Southern California in that era, must have had something to do with Williams’s exceptional rage to excel.)

Steve Gould, it should be said, was a devoted and somewhat ritualistic fan. One of the reasons he loved baseball so much was because the past casts so important a shadow on the present: players are measured not just against those whom they play today, but against those who have gone before them. Other sports did not catch his fancy. His friend Dershowitz was a serious basketball fan as well as baseball fan, but he could never get Steve to buy in on basketball, arguably our most balletic and athletically demanding sport. It simply did not move him, and he could not be reconnected with his boyhood as he was when he watched baseball. By contrast, when he watched baseball, the man could become a boy once again. He had learned to keep score as a boy, and as a man, ever meticulous, he still kept score. When he was a boy, he had always gone to games by public transportation, getting a feel for the excitement of the crowd even before it got to the stadium, and as a grown man he still demanded that he and his friends go to games by public transportation, never by car, in no small part because he still liked getting a feel for the mood of the crowd. In addition, though he liked eating well in good restaurants, no amount of pressure from his pals could convince him to go to a good restaurant and eat well before a night game. That was not the way it was done, because it was not the way it had been done when he was a boy. If he was going to a ballgame, he was going to eat at the game. Hot dogs it would be, not coq au vin.

At the game he was the most attentive of fans. Others might see a baseball game, with its languid rhythms, as a chance to get together and talk of other things, but not Steve Gould. He was not there to socialize. He was appalled once when Dershowitz brought a cell phone to a game and actually took incoming calls. Dershowitz might just as well have endorsed the DH rule. Gould protested vigorously and it did not happen again. He was there to see the game, to watch the field at all times, with one eye if need be on the scoreboard. He loved the subtle byplay of the game, certain pitchers against certain hitters in tight situations. Once he had gone to a game with his longtime editor, Ed Barber, and it was one of those nights when Roger Clemens was pitching and was absolutely on top of his game. About the eighth inning, Gould showed Barber his scorecard, and Clemens’s line went something like this: eleven strikeouts and two hits, and one or two walks. Perhaps in all, a hundred or so pitches thrown. As he showed this statistical update to Barber, Steve turned as if to the crowd itself, and said, talking about the game Clemens was pitching, but perhaps more important, the whole scene, and the pleasure of being a part of it, his words as much as anything an epitaph for his own exceptional and occasionally magical life, “Isn’t this wonderful!”

I
n the months before his death on May 20, 2002, Steve Gould had been hard at work on this volume. The subject had come up between us in the seventies, when Steve began to write his vibrant essays about baseball for
Natural History
and elsewhere. Early on, he had displayed a unique skill in blending his science and his game in a way that humanized the former and deepened the latter. We agreed then that there would be a baseball book but that it must wait in line. He had in mind
The Mismeasure of Man
,
Wonderful Life
, and of course there followed hundreds of essays gathered into his wonderful collections as well as long work on his final scientific statement that became
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory
.

So, time passed. Steve lived a busy life, constantly balancing teaching, research, writing, speaking, travel, and a personal life that prominently featured baseball, as well as, tragically, the first onset of his cancer, over fifteen years ago. But by late 2001 he was ready to go out to the literary ballpark. In 1992, his friend Stephen King had written him a letter suggesting that Steve “devote a small but not inconsequential block of time” to writing a novella-sized memoir about baseball, a pivotal exhortation. In the introductory piece that follows, Gould says that this book “exists to fulfill a promise” made to King, meaning the memoir to come.

Steve went to work, first gathering all of his writings on baseball, choosing and revising the pieces to accompany the memoir and lining up an order of presentation. He’d always been good at titles, and the title here is his. This was the same procedure Steve had always used in turning his various essays into book form. At last he turned to the long, personal work which was to have been the book’s cornerstone, only to be overcome by the cancer that would take him from us. Game and enthusiastic to the end, Steve called in the early spring of 2002 to assure me that he would deliver the book, and he has. He had left it, neatly organized and in good hands, in his office at Harvard. With the revised earlier essays, designed to accompany the memoir, were two new pieces: the warm introduction to this volume and his fond—and analytical—story of a boyhood spent playing stickball on the neighborhood streets of Queens, as far as he could go with the longer work.

We at Norton are proud to present this book, and we are grateful to Patricia Chui for her invaluable work and to Kay McCauley who so professionally smoothed the way.

Steve Gould loved baseball; and he loved the New York Yankees, loved them not so much because they were champions, but because they were
his
champions—he’d grown up with them. Millions of readers have, in a way, grown up in science with Steve Gould. With this last legacy, he offers to us a celebration of both as only he could, with depth, grace, wit, and passion.

Edwin Barber
W. W. Norton & Company
September 2002

Introduction and Rationale

T
his introductory and longest piece of the book exists to fulfill a promise made to one of my best baseball friends, author Steve King, who wrote to me in late October 1992: “I think you should set aside a small but not inconsequential block of time—three weeks, maybe a month—to write a long (20,000 to 30,000 words) ‘linchpin essay’ that would place your love and knowledge of baseball among the other landmarks of your rather remarkable life.”

Obviously, I appreciated the implied compliments in Steve’s remarks. But I quickly resolved to follow his suggestion for a set of more literary and personal reasons. I have published eleven volumes of essays, ten from my monthly series in
Natural History
magazine that ran to three hundred successive pieces, without a break, from January 1974 until January 2001, and an eleventh (
Urchin in the Storm
) based primarily on essays originally published in the
New York Review of Books
. I have been writing about my serious dedication to baseball (in a wide variety of formats, from short op-ed statements to fairly lengthy articles) since the early 1980s; and I suppose that, for at least fifteen years, I have been intending to collect these baseball scribblings into a volume once enough material had accumulated. Steve King’s suggestion of a decade ago (I began this “novella” in mid April 2002) made my resolve firm, but the press of other commitments and the need to accumulate more material made this palindromic year of the new millennium an appropriate time to begin in earnest.

As much as I have loved and followed baseball all my conscious life, I never thought, before deciding to “cash out” Steve’s suggestion in an opening novella, that I would ever try to discourse (at any length or seriousness) about why the game continues to hold me so tight after more than half a century of serious and continuous rooting. After all, one loves what one loves, and unless the activity causes clear and intrinsic harm to others, no explicit defense need be provided for following one’s bliss.

Yet I have developed personal answers to the two major questions so often thrown at academics and other professional intellectuals as challenges to their baseball commitments, and my responses might be worth sharing, especially since discussion on these issues never seems to abate. First, why are so many American intellectuals so serious about their baseball commitments? Or (to put the matter more specifically, as this form of inquiry so often does), why has baseball alone among major American sports, with boxing as the only other possible contender, generated so much writing of not insubstantial literary quality? Second, does this favoritism toward baseball arise in any way from the plethora of common claims about baseball’s imitation of the central rhythms and patterns of our lives? Does life imitate the World Series in any way that might transcend lame and meaningless metaphor? Does time begin on opening day in any sense that might help us, at least by analogy, to accept the loud evenings of July 4 or the silly costumes of neighborhood kids on October 31?

I have devised, over the years, a definite way of treating general questions of this sort, including these two particular inquiries—and though my resolutions satisfy me both rationally and emotionally, I cannot claim for them any abiding status as provable or general truths. These resolutions do, however, set a groundwork for permitting me to begin this baseball book with an autobiographical rationale.

I have written two general books (
Wonderful Life
, 1989, and
Full House
, 1996) dedicated to viewing the history of life as a sensible and interpretable unfolding of one actual pattern among the countless alternative (and equally sensible) scenarios that just didn’t happen to attain the privilege of empirical realization. We live in a basically unpredictable world, featuring histories dominated by contingency—that is, actual patterns that make good sense and become subject to interesting and sensible explanation once they unfold as they did, but that could have proceeded along innumerable alternative routes that would have yielded just as sensible a history, but that did not gain the good fortune of actual occurrence.

Thus, if it be true that intellectually inclined American sports fans tend to enjoy and follow baseball at a higher frequency than other popular national sports, I don’t for a moment attribute such favoritism to any inherent property of the game itself. Baseball became America’s pastime for a complex set of reasons, explored throughout this book, but the game is not intrinsically more difficult or inherently harder to fathom than any other major sport—and I therefore reject the common assumption that strong rootership among intellectuals can be related in any important way to the nature of the activity itself.

Rather, I would argue that sports plays an important role in the lives of many people (either by direct participation or by following it as a fan), and that intellectuals roughly match the norms of any other group in their predisposition to such avocational interests. Thus, if baseball has captured the serious attention of many scholarly fans, I would seek no special cause beyond the general appeal of the game among all aficionados of sport. By this argument, baseball holds its favored place as a general phenomenon in the history of American sport, and not because the game holds any special or intrinsic appeal to the intellectually minded fans.

As I argue within this volume, modern baseball coagulated from a variety of stick-and-ball games, played in England and perhaps in other European nations and imported to this country by early settlers. In essentials, the modern form of the game coalesced by the mid-nineteenth century, having evolved as a truly popular sport, played by farm boys and city slickers alike. By contrast, other currently popular team sports, football and basketball in particular, arose primarily as university activities at a time when only a small percentage of Americans achieved any tertiary education. During my childhood in the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, professional football and basketball played short seasons and commanded only quite restricted popular attention. Hockey was, and to a large extent remains, an import from a great land just to our north. (I remember going to a hockey game at Madison Square Garden in the late 1940s and reading in the program that almost every starting player for the New York Rangers was Canadian by nationality.)

And so, I would argue (at least for myself and, I suspect, for most baseball fans of scholarly bent as well) that a serious personal affection for the sport does not follow, either logically or intrinsically, from any particular inherent property of the game’s uniqueness, but rather needs to be explained in the same basic mode as most autobiographical phenomena—that is, as a contingent circumstance that did not have to unfold as it did, but that makes perfectly good sense as a reasonable outcome among a set of possibilities. In this general sense, and for a large array of excellent reasons, baseball became America’s “signature sport.” I can think of no reason why its appeal should be any less or greater among intellectuals than among any other segment of our population. So I would suspect that the appeal of baseball should, at least as an initial hypothesis, be equally strong among intellectually minded fans as among any other group of Americans.

I am not, however, either in this introductory piece or in the book in general, trying to advance general explanations of the appeal or success of our national pastime. Thus, I can only speak for myself and from my own life. If any of my personal reasons apply more generally, then we will need the confirming testimony of others. I view the major features of my own odyssey as a set of mostly fortunate contingencies. I was not destined by inherited mentality or family tradition to become a paleontologist. I can locate no tradition for scientific or intellectual careers anywhere on either side of my eastern European Jewish background. I myself am the oldest member of the third cohort, the offspring of immigrant grandparents who passed through Ellis Island—that is, the generation destined for university education and professional careers outside the garment district and the world of small shopkeepers.

I accepted this circumstance gladly (not that we have much choice in such matters). And I view my serious and lifelong commitment to baseball in entirely the same manner: purely as a contingent circumstance of numerous, albeit not entirely capricious, accidents. In other words, my affection for baseball does not predictably follow from any generality of my being (in a “laws of nature” type of explanation preferred by scientists like myself), but rather from a set of “accidents” arising from the particulars of my personal life.

Among these particulars, I would single out two for special emphasis. In fact, I rather suspect that versions of these two factors tend to rank high on the list of contingencies for explaining the inclinations and commitments of many serious fans.

1. Issues of how, or whether, to assimilate to the language and customs of an adopted land stood in the forefront of consciousness for the millions of immigrants (including all members of both sides of my family) who arrived in America during the great wave of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some chose to retain native languages and customs so far as they could, and to assimilate only to the minimal degree required for basic success and solvency. Others consciously abjured their natal tongues and traditions and struggled to speak only English and to learn and practice the history and customs of their adopted land. This second assimilationist group tended to dismiss the traditionalists and newcomers who had not yet made up their minds as “green horns” or “greenies.” My maternal Hungarian grandparents (the relatives I know best and who served as my surrogate parents during World War II, when my father fought in Europe and Northern Africa) were devoted assimilationists who spoke Hungarian only when they didn’t want me to understand, and who took great pride in their accommodation to America. I doubt that they ever understood the limits to their success, particularly as expressed in strong accents that they actively denied, but never lost nonetheless.

Immigrants who opted for assimilation tended to choose particular American institutions or customs as public foci for their commitments. Some veered toward politics of democratic systems that they and their families could enjoy for the first time—as in, for example, the domination of local governments in several major cities by new Irish and Italian citizens. (The WASPs of old Brahmin Boston feared the death of their beloved city when poor Irish immigrants took local political power away from traditional sources, but the Hub persevered and prospered.)

Particularly for men, and especially commonly for Jewish men, a dedication to a distinctively American sport provides the major tactic for assimilation. The three Bs in particular (boxing, basketball, and especially baseball) assumed great importance in the lives of many Jewish and other immigrants. Few Jews grow very tall, so we were probably not destined for basketball triumph as players (although Abe Saperstein put together and coached the Harlem Globetrotters, and many important teams in the early history of basketball—notably the SPHAs, for South Philadelphia Hebrew Association—were formed and staffed by Jewish players).

Boxing and baseball offered stronger possibilities, where champions like Benny Leonard, Max Baer, Moe Berg (a mediocre player, but absolutely outstanding character) and especially Hank Greenberg and, later, Sandy Koufax could become heroes and role models for entire generations, and where even your average city street kid (like me) could play with reasonable success. As a happenstance of personal contingencies, the men of my strongly assimilationist maternal side took up baseball as their major sign and symbol of “Americanization,” and became serious and knowledgeable fans, eager to pass this new tradition to subsequent generations.

Thus, baseball became a centerpiece of family life in my house-hold—and, as several essays in this book acknowledge and discuss, I take pride in being enmeshed within an unbroken string of four generations of serious baseball rooting. The sequence began with my maternal grandfather, Papa Joe, a dedicated Yankee fan from, by his testimony, 1904, when he thrilled to Jack Chesbro’s forty-one victories in a single season—a pitching record that will stand unless the game undergoes radical changes in scheduling and counting—until his death in 1953. All three of his sons followed in serious fandom, although his only daughter, my mother, never really caught the bug despite a personal crush on Mel Ott. (“She thinks a foul ball is a chicken dance,” if I may quote a misogynist line from my father.)

Moving to the other side, my father passed his boyhood rooting for the great Yankee team of Ruth and Gehrig—and his dramatic and detailed memories provided me, a lifelong skeptic in religion, with my closest insight into the potential nature of a deity. In this familial context, my own adoption of serious interest can scarcely be deemed surprising! I must also confess to a feeling of personal pride that my youngest son, Ethan, has now continued a family tradition into a fourth generation—although he grew up in Boston, and three generations of Yankee fandom have now been eclipsed, understandably of course, by his exquisite pain of rooting for the Red Sox, and hoping to live long enough to win another World Series—last achieved in 1918!

2. If we honor the entertainment and real estate industries’ cliché that the three most important factors for success are “location, location, location,” then we must aver, I think, that my being a baseball fan requires no special explanation and should evoke no surprise, whereas we might become puzzled and feel the need for some resolution if I were indifferent to the game. As a pure contingency of my own life, I happened to come of baseball fandom’s age in the greatest conjunction of time and place that the game has ever known: in New York City during the late 1940s and early 1950s. (I was born on September 10, 1941.)

The situation was entirely unfair to the rest of the country, but—hey—you can’t possibly cast any blame on me, so I owe no one any apology. From 1947 to 1957, New York City had the three greatest teams in major league baseball. (Many fans do not understand why a county or borough, rather than a full city, had its own team as the Brooklyn Dodgers. But New York City did not incorporate its outer boroughs into a single city until 1897, so the Dodgers represented an independent city when the team first formed and played major league ball.)