This month the Book Club is reading David Halberstam’s Summer of ’49, (subtitled “The Classic Chronicle of Baseball’s Most Magnificent Season”). My initial reaction to the selection was negative. “Nobody cares about baseball anymore. And certainly not in January”. Wrong in both cases. The gentlemen in the Book Club all were enthusiastic about the Pirates last summer, until the Buccos imploded. And, thinking about baseball in the dreary days of winter dates back a century to the days of the “Hotstove League”, when small town fans would gather at the pot-bellied stove in the village store and talk about seasons past and future.
Reading this particular book got me thinking about baseball in my youth. One of my earliest memories is rushing out to meet my father as he got home from work and shouting “Pepper run home!” My father was a serious baseball fan and regretted not being able to listen to the World Series games while he was at work. To compensate, my mother would dutifully listen to each game and record relevant details of so she could report them to him. In 1934, Pepper Martin, the star third baseman for the St. Louis Cardinals, played a major part in their come-from-behind World Series win against the Detroit Tigers. The fact that a player was named Pepper apparently impressed me so much that I couldn’t wait to spring it on my father.
A few years later I began to understand the game and, like all little kids of that era, began to collect bubble-gum cards, especially those honoring baseball players. I think they cost a penny apiece, for which you got a brand-new card and a flat piece of bubble gum the same size as the card. My recollection is that the gum was barely chewable and was often immediately discarded. Frequently the card had traces of sugar on it from the gum.
My peak year for collecting was 1941; my focus was on the Topps “Play Ball” series, colorized versions of seventy-two cards issued monochromatically the previous year. Fortunately, I still have a handful of them, which I still treasure. When searching Amazon Prime for the Halberstam book, I came across Baseball Cards at the Edge of War by Todd Marcum, which turned out to be an interesting discussion of the baseball card industry in the prewar years, supplemented by brief biographies of all the player pictured in three different sets – Goudey 1941, Double Play, and (my beloved) Play Ball. Reading it unleashed a flood of memories. I was a Pirate fan that year, enthused over Arky Vaughn, Rip Sewell, Elbie Fletcher, Frankie Gustine, Vince DiMaggio, and (my favorite name) Maurice Van Robays. The Pirates were fourth that year, with a record of 81 wins and 73 losses.
In addition to the 1941 Play Ball cards, I have a few 1938 Goudy “Heads Up” cards. This was a really neat series. Each card has a photograph of the player’s face, superimposed on a cartoon depiction of the player in action. Some of the cards are additionally annotated with tiny sketches and text. For example, one of the notes on the Bob Feller card states “jumped right into big league ball from high school” and is illustrated by a sketch of a young ball player jumping over a fence. There are lots of these cards for sale on E-Bay; a significantly used Bob Feller card can be purchased for $1,300.
The next year, wanting to extend my horizons, I asked my father to suggest another National League team for me to follow; his response was “The Cardinals are this year’s team to beat”. And indeed they were. Ten games behind the Dodgers early in August they came back and clinched the title with a double-header win over Chicago on the last day of the season. With Mort Cooper pitching to his brother Walker Cooper; an All-Star outfield of Stan Musial, Terry Moore, and Enos Slaughter; and a strong infield led by Marty Marion, they capped their 106 wins season with a World Series victory over the Yankees in five games.
As for the Halberstam book, I found it to be interesting, but not objective enough for the general public. The author was fifteen years old in 1949, a non-athletic nerd (very much like me) in love with the New York Yankees, and particularly with Joe DiMaggio. Although the book was published in 1989, it still is dominated by the perspective of a fifteen-year-old. I was eighteen years old in 1949, recently graduated from high school and part of an environment in western Pennsylvania much different from Halberstam’s in the Bronx. There was a steelworkers’ strike here that summer, and jobs were very scarce for inexperienced young men. That year my income was restricted to a handful of lawn mowing jobs. Each afternoon I would end up behind the high school playing softball in the “Unemployment League” with an assortment of older, out-of-work guys who had nothing better to do.
I don’t think we thought baseball was in the midst of its “most magnificent season”. The Pirates finished sixth that year, with a record of 73 wins and 81 losses. Ralph Kiner hit 54 home runs and drove in 127, leading the league in both categories; no one else on the team contributed much. Nonetheless the team was wildly popular. Everyone listened to Rosey Roswell’s radio broadcasts, hoping he would have the opportunity to announce, “Open the Window, Aunt Minnie” whenever Kiner came to bat.
It is nostalgic to remember those bygone years when baseball was indeed America’s favorite pastime, long before professional football and basketball on television elbowed it out of the way. I suspect baseball was just right for the kind of society we were in the 1940s; our society has changed so much since then that baseball’s endearing aspects are no longer attractive to the mass market.