Books

Hit & miss

A new book about St. Louis' old Gashouse Gang knocks it high and deep. The latest on Jackie Robinson falls short.

By ALLEN BARRA
Published April 22, 2007

Branch Rickey, the smartest baseball executive in the game's history, was the architect of two of the most colorful baseball teams ever, the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals Gashouse Gang and the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, with whom Jackie Robinson made his major league debut. John Heidenry's The Gashouse Gang is the best book yet on the former, one of those rare volumes that makes you wish you could go back in time and follow a team for an entire season.

The '34 Cardinals won the National League pennant and beat a powerful Detroit Tigers team in the World Series, but even if they had accomplished neither of those, they would have led the major leagues in nicknames: Ripper Collins, Frankie "the Fordham Flash" Frisch, Pepper Martin, Leo "the Lip" Durocher, Ducky Medwick, Buster Mills, Kiddo Davis, "Wild Bill" Hallahan, and, of course, the Dean Brothers, Dizzy and Daffy.

"They don't look like a Major League ball club," wrote Frank Graham, a prominent period sportswriter. "Their uniforms are stained and dirty . . . They spit out of the sides of their mouths . . . They are not afraid of anybody."

The perfect heroes for America in the Depression, the Gashouse Gang was a "squad of quarreling, slovenly brilliant misfits . . . the unique product of a particular time and place," brought together by a "nonimbibing Methodist who would not even watch them play on a Sunday because his religious principles forbade it."

Heidenry gives the first truly serious account of a team that, despite its championship credentials, has been pretty much treated by baseball historians as a joke. "Despite their antics," he writes, "and their often abrasive relationship with each other, the Gashouse Gang never lost its fierce desire to win."

Not that these Cards didn't earn their reputations as inspired screwballs, thanks largely to their ace right-hander. "This country may need a good 5-cent cigar," Dizzy Dean once told a reporter, "but what the Cardinals need is more Deans." (Dizzy and brother Daffy won 49 games that year.)

Rickey left the Cardinals for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1942, and it took decades for the franchise to recover. St. Louis' loss was Brooklyn's gain, and the team Rickey helped put together has probably inspired more books per championship than any other: The Dodgers won just one World Series, in 1955, five years after Rickey had left the organization.

*   *   *

That's part of the problem with Jonathan Eig's Opening Day. Eig's previous book, Luckiest Man: The Life and Death of Lou Gehrig, succeeded largely because it was a fresh take on a familiar but not-much-written-about subject. But Jackie Robinson is, after Babe Ruth, the most written-about player in baseball history.

There's not enough new information to justify another book about Robinson, particularly one that focuses primarily on the 1947 season. Eig seems particularly concerned with debunking myths that have built up around Robinson, such as the famous story that Pee Wee Reese put his arm around Jackie in support of his teammate during a period of the worst taunting. But the same subject was addressed at length in Arnold Rampersad's definitive Jackie Robinson, A Biography. (Something like that may have happened, but not, Eig thinks, in Robinson's rookie season.)

Eig also downplays the two men's friendship in contradiction to Robinson's passionate letter of appreciation to Pee Wee, which appeared on the flyleaf of Robinson's book with Carl Rowan, Wait Till Next Year.

Eig gives little credence to the long-held view that several players on the St. Louis Cardinals were planning to strike if Robinson took the field. He seems unaware that Cardinals outfielder Terry Moore and other St. Louis team members confirmed the near-strike to Roger Kahn.

Opening Day is an odd and unsatisfying book. There's a rushed, condensed feel to it, as if Eig were trying to paraphrase from all the previous Robinson literature. "Sixty years after his debut in major-league baseball," writes Eig in his epilogue, "Robinson's stature as an American hero has never been greater . . . the story of his rookie season is told again, handed down like folk lore." Alas, it also has been told in books a great deal more substantial than Opening Day.

Allen Barra writes about sports for the Wall Street Journal.

The Gashouse Gang

How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin and Their Colorful, Come-From-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series - and America's Heart - During the Great Depression

By John Heidenry

Public Affairs, 304 pages, $25

Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season

By Jonathan Eig

Simon & Schuster, 323 pages, $26

[Last modified April 19, 2007, 12:38:44]