Book Reviews - A Baseball Icon and a Football Time Capsule

I have just concluded reading a couple of old books with a sporting theme that I would like to mention to you now.

The first is Richard Ben Cramer's biography of Joe DiMaggio, "Joe DiMaggio, The Hero's Life." Cramer spent five years researching and writing this book which was published in 2000, one year after Joltin' Joe's death. If you are a baseball fan and have even a rudimentary knowledge of baseball history, you already know a lot of the "baseball stuff" about DiMaggio - the sterling quality of his play, the 10 pennants and 9 World Series championships, and, of course, the epic 56 game hitting streak in 1941. However, as is often the case with such biographies, it is the off the field stuff, the post-playing days life, that make for the most interesting reading. For example, you will learn a lot about Marilyn Monroe in this book.

You will also learn that this most beloved of baseball heroes was not the most lovable of men. He was demanding of those around him, but would turn his back on you and cut you off completely if he thought that you were disloyal to him, or, even worse, using your relationship to him to your advantage. He was cheap and never paid for anything.

This is a pretty long (over 500 pages) book, thoroughly detailed, and sometimes slow moving, but worth reading for those who appreciate baseball history.

The second book is even older, "...And Everyday You Take Another Bite" by sportswriter (now boxing commentator on HBO or Showtime) Larry Merchant. This book was written in 1971 and was Merchant's somewhat iconoclastic view of the National Football League in 1971. I had read this book when I was in college, and I stumbled across it in a used bookstore in Cooperstown last month.

Yes, I said 1971, forty years ago. Think about it. When this book was published, the Steelers had never even made the playoffs, ESPN did not exist, Monday Night Football had been on the air only one year, and that relatively new event on the sporting landscape, the Super Bowl, had only just started using Roman numerals. Bob Sproule had not yet met Marilyn Moellenbrock! I had enjoyed the book when I read way back then, and I thought it might be interesting to see what had changed, and what had not changed, since Merchant wrote this book. It was like opening a football time capsule.

The book opens with Merchant's write-up of the previous season's Super Bowl. It was number V, and it was won 16-13 by the Baltimore Colts on a last second field goal that defeated the Dallas Cowboys. If you recall, the game was an error filled contest - fumbles, interceptions, wacky plays, and inept quarterbacking by Johnny Unitas, Earl Morrall, and, especially, Craig Morton. The sloppy play by both teams was made all the more apparent when set against the hype and bombast that NFL used to stage this showcase event. And this was during a time BEFORE 6:30 kick-offs, four hour pre-game shows, and $3 million per minute commercials. 

In any event, Merchant's first chapter that summarizes the game is a classic.

The book details the pervasive influence that television was exercising over the game. Again, this was before the birth of ESPN, the NFL Network, and Thursday Night Football. So Merchant's warning bells were quite prophetic.

Some of the book is terribly dated. Remember Dave Meggesey? Didn't think so.

However, there is just all sorts of fun memories that can be dredged up reading this book. Such as....

• The 1968 "Orange Juice Bowl" when the lousy Steelers beat the lousy Eagles 6-3 in a game where both teams were "as futile as the law allows." At the time, it was felt that the loser of that game would win the right to draft O.J. Simpson. Ironically, the Eagles won two of their final games and lost the right for the #1 pick. Merchant says that Eagles coach Joe Kuharich thus "refined the art of losing to its finite limit - losing while winning."


• And isn't any book that tells Joe Kuharich stories worth reading?


• Lots of stuff on Joe Namath, which, in retrospect, seem a bit overblown looking back on it.


• Stories about Joe Don Looney. Again, any book with stories about that dude is worth reading.


• Vince Lombardi had only died within the prior year, so Merchant spends some time on him, and how he was officially canonized by the NFL.

Some good stuff. It might be hard to find this book anywhere now, so if you care to read it. I'll be happy to lend it to you.

A Grandstander First: Tennis

Novak Djokovic's string of consecutive winning matches was ended at 43 yesterday by Roger Federer in the semis at the French Open Tennis Championship.

Just goes to show that DiMaggio's 56 game streak may well be sport's most untouchable record!

Book Review: "56"

Actually, the full name of the book is "56, Joe Dimaggio and the Last Magic Number in Sports." As you can no doubt figure out, Kostya Kennedy's book is all about the 56 game hitting streak of Joltin' Joe back in 1941.

Now if you are student of the history of the game, you may be thinking, "what can this book tell us that we don't already know or haven't already read about this seminal event in baseball history?" Well, perhaps there isn't a lot of new ground that can be covered concerning the streak per se, but Kennedy does add some twists to the book that make this well worth reading.

• He sets the story of DiMaggio and The Streak against the background of events that were taking place in the world at the time. Europe was fully engaged in WW II, and President Roosevelt was gearing up the nation to the inevitable fact that the USA would soon be needing to enter the fray. The story of how the whole country stopped - including the action at the baseball parks - to listen to one of FDR's fireside chats is quite compelling.
• Kennedy also paints the picture of the discrimination faced by Italian-Americans, including that directed to Joe himself, at a time when Mussolini was joining with Germany to overrun Europe quite vividly.
• I learned a lot about Joe's marriage to his first wife, actress Dorothy Arnold. Joe does not come across in a favorable light here.
• Kennedy separates the book with several sections called "The View From Here", meaning the present day. In those chapters, he talks of The Streak from the present day, often with current day ballplayers who present their viewpoint on a hitting streak of this magnitude. Of particular interest was the chapter on Pete Rose, whose 44 game streak in 1978 is the closest anyone has come to DiMaggio's 56 game streak. Rose called his 44 game streak "the hardest thing I ever did in baseball." As many of you know, Pete Rose is not one of my favorite human beings, but I'll listen to him when he talks about hitting a baseball.
• (Interesting bit of trivia, in the course of pimping himself out and selling autographed baseballs, Rose goes through about 17,000 balls a year. Only the 30 MLB teams buy more baseballs from Rawlings than Charlie Hustler.)
• In the final chapter, Kennedy goes on in much more detail than needed on the statistical probability of someone, anyone hitting in 56 straight games. He spends a lot of time going on and on about stuff only an actuary could warm up to, but it all comes down to one thing. No mathematician, actuary, or other type of number cruncher can explain it. Hitting in 56 straight games is simply impossible.

So, this is another book that I recommend to the baseball fans out there. I would also recommend that if you like this, you also get a hold of Robert Creamer's great book from 1991, "Baseball and Other Matters in 1941." I read this a few years back, and it's a wonderful story about a season that included many terrific and interesting events, chief among them being Joe D's streak and Ted Williams .406 batting average.

Kennedy's book is also going to prompt me to read Richard Ben Cramer's 2000 biography of DiMaggio, "The Hero's Life." This was a book of my dad's that has been sitting on my bookshelf unread for several years. I need to blow the dust off and read it soon.