Covering the bases for opening day
Despite all the abounding badness in baseball since the 1990s, my spirits still soar at the mere words "Opening Day." In Boston tomorrow is it, the day of the year most filled with hope, and here is a bouquet of books with which to celebrate.
The Red Sox's checkered past is the bedrock upon which the team's present, almost irksome, national popularity rests. As such, it is no surprise to find two books delving into its core. Jerry Gutlon's "It Was Never About the Babe: The Red Sox, Racism, Mismanagement, and the Curse of the Bambino" (Skyhorse Publishing, $24.95) is an astute, anecdote-rich journey through the shadow of darkness. Gutlon rehashes the reasons for Harry Frazee's sale of the Babe and his further evisceration of the Sox lineup, showing more sympathy for the notorious impresario than Daniel R. Levitt did last year in his magnificent "Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankee's First Dynasty."
Gutlon really hits his stride, however, when it comes to the 44-year regime of Tom Yawkey, an era of "cronyism, poor management, racism, and downright stupidity" during which key decisions were arrived at by the owner in conference with his "steam-bath buddies." Gutlon goes after this and the succeeding Jean Yawkey period with gusto. Some things are truly shameful: chief among them being the bogus tryout of Jackie Robinson and cavalier treatment of Jimmy Pearsall; others still hurt, among them, the inexcusable bungling and highhandedness that led to the departures of Luis Tiant and Carlton Fisk. And, then, there is comedy, including a bibulous Gene Conley's attempt to fly off to Jerusalem and "Coup LeRoux," Buddy LeRoux's crack at usurping power. And there is also an error, fittingly committed against Dick "Stone Fingers" Stuart, who was also known as "Dr. Strangeglove" - not "Dr. Strangleglove." The book travels through the team's recent glories to the present and includes a nice stash of photos.
" '78: The Boston Red Sox, a Historic Game, and a Divided City" by Bill Reynolds (New American Library, $24.95) is a wide-ranging, zeitgeist-laden account of the terrible year that saw the Red Sox in first place in the American League East by a wide margin in July and humbled by the despised Yankees in October by Bucky Dent's infamous home run. Reynolds describes a blighted team and a racist city, but it's a much-told story and, without anything to add. He pads the pages with by-the-way excursions to such places as the Combat Zone, the Boston club scene, and Chappaquiddick.
In "Becoming Manny: Inside the Life of Baseball's Most Enigmatic Slugger" (Scribner, $25) Jean Rhodes and Shawn Boburg attempt to get a handle on the inner Manny, following his life from sandlot to the majors by looking at the key influences in his life, chief among them his Little League coach, Carlos Ferreira. The book places the blame for this glorious player's departure from the Red Sox on the front office's distaste for the player and on Manny himself, combined with the reliably toxic ingredient, Scott Boras.
Peter Morris brings his historical vision and baseball understanding to bear on the toughest position on the field in "Catcher: How the Man Behind the Plate Became an American Folk Hero (Ivan R. Dee, $27.50).
In the game's early days, both catcher and pitcher merely handled the necessities of getting the ball into play. As pitching speed and cunning entered the game, the catcher's heroic stature materialized. He moved up close to the plate, catching the ball two-handedly with bare fingers, digits serving as shock absorbers to protect his palms. He became "the ultimate embodiment of courage, leadership, resolve, and daring" and was seen to have a mystical relationship to his pitcher. He was also out of commission a good deal of the time with smashed body parts. Nonetheless, the mask, appearing in the mid-1870s, was greeted by fans with ridicule, as was the further addition of chest protector, shin guards, and the padded mitt, all in place by the mid-1880s. "We shall . . . soon behold the spectacle of a player sculling around the bases with stove funnels on his legs, and boiler irons across his stomach," wrote one sports wag. With all this namby-pamby protection, the catcher's prestige disappeared. It began to pick up again in the new century, however, with the advent of tricky pitches: spitball, forkball, fadeaway, knuckleball, and emery pitch (the first pitch to be banned). All this junk called for agility in catching and shrewdness in signaling, eventually leading to the image of the catcher as thinking man. This is a marvelous book filled with anecdotes, illustrations, and exhilarating extracts from the days of gothic sports writing.
Representatives of a unique subculture roam the field of every game in the persons of its umpires. Bruce Weber's "As They See 'Em: A Fan's Travels in the Land of Umpires" (Scribner, $26) is a fascinating tour of what Weber calls "umpire nation." Here is the inside dope on what it means to perform this essential, thankless, and not especially well-paid job. The book covers everything from training to traveling to some of baseball's most controversial calls.
On the East Coast the expression "Walter O'Malley" still causes highfalutin ire and gusts of nostalgia for a prelapsarian age before the Dodgers were uprooted from Ebbets Field and plunked down in Chavez Ravine. O'Malley's family has allowed Michael D'Antonio access to the Dodgers owner's archives, and the result is "Forever Blue: The True Story of Walter O'Malley, Baseball's Most Controversial Owner, and the Dodgers of Brooklyn and Los Angeles" (Riverhead, $25.95). Here we see how Branch Rickey managed to get top dollar for his share of the team while emitting an odor of sanctity and how Robert Moses scuppered O'Malley's plans for keeping the Dodgers in Brooklyn. We find in O'Malley a heads-up businessman who embraced baseball as both business and sport, welcomed the players union, and who kept cheap seats cheap. D'Antonio also revisits the vexed relationship between Jackie Robinson and O'Malley, and other contentious issues, and, in the end, gives a complex, nuanced picture of this key baseball man's role in the game.
"Under the March Sun: The Story of Spring Training" by Charles Fountain (Oxford, $24.95) is a revealing combination of sports and business history. Written in brisk, engaging prose, it sheds light from an unusual angle on American society, from demographic changes through race relations on to park construction in all its dimensions. And as Fountain points out in a characteristically sharp insight, "there is little like [spring training] in the American experience, something whose beginning is awaited impatiently and greeted eagerly each year, yet whose demise is met with indifference, relief, even glee."
Katherine A. Powers lives in Cambridge. She can be reached by e-mail at pow3@verizon.net. 
