Just in time for Opening Day — with the Freeway Series already here, meaning the local ball clubs have returned from spring training in Arizona, and, man, have those Angel hitters been pounding our Dodger pitchers in the exhibitions — there are two just-published baseball books to pore over while the game is on this summer.
And (what should still be) the national pastime is the perfect (televised) game during which to get a little reading in, as you can keep one ear on (South Pasadenan) Joe Davis’s play-by-play of how Cody Bellinger is holding his bat back on his shoulder this year so as to return to his former MVP status after turning into a .165 hitter last season, and not really have to look up at the screen to know what’s going on.
Not so much the case in, say, an NCAA championship basketball game, when the play is screaming fast and you don’t want to miss a head fake.
Both of these new baseball books are co-authored by Occidental College professor of politics Peter Dreier, one with his name first and the other with the main author being Robert Elias, a politics prof at the University of San Francisco.
Dreier has long been a baseball buff, one of these deep-in-the-weeds scholars who follows the arcana of the SABR guys — the Society for American Baseball Research. Both books are dedicated, in part, to the hallowed memory of Terry Cannon. From The New York Times 2020 obit: “Terry Cannon, who created a waggish alternative to the Baseball Hall of Fame with oddball artifacts like a cigar partly smoked by Babe Ruth and unconventional inductees like Dock Ellis, who claimed to have pitched a no-hitter on LSD, died on Aug. 1 at his home in Pasadena, Calif. He was 66.”
Terry created the Baseball Reliquary and the Shrine of the Eternals — meaning a shrine of eccentrics from Greil Marcus’s “old, weird America” instead of Steve Garvey types — which happily found a home at Whittier College before Terry’s death.
And it’s on the eccentrics of many kinds that both these books are focused. They are similar volumes, with artful differences.
One, “Baseball Rebels” (University of Nebraska Press) is “The Players, People, and Social Movements that Shook Up the Game and Changed America.”
The other, “Major League Rebels” (Rowman & Littlefield) is “Baseball Battles over Workers’ Rights and American Empire.”
If you’re a baseball fan, you’re a sucker for the old and the esoteric, and these books will never disappoint. Sure, you can read about (Pasadenan) Jackie Robinson, son of a sharecropper and grandson of a slave, breaking the color barrier in the 1940s and ‘50s. But the first “Rebels” goes way back to “A Novel Game in Philadelphia” in 1869 in which the (White) City Item Club was defeated by the (Black) Pythians, 27-17.
Hey, guys, defense!
But there is also a deep analysis of why the deeply religious (and deeply conservative and penny-pinching) Branch Rickey of the Dodgers was the right owner to bring the African-American Robinson up to the bigs: “He viewed baseball in almost missionary terms, as a sport that enhanced American democracy and opportunity.”
In the second “Rebels,” there’s a wonderful section on pitcher Jim Bouton, later author of the groundbreaking “Ball Four,” in which he dared to tell the warts-and-all stories of life in the majors rather than the Brylcreem version pushed by the PR machine. Of Bouton: “Yankee management and some teammates saw him as a ‘flake’ — too intelligent and outspoken for his own good. He even sat at the back of the team bus, reading!”
And then, thankfully, there’s plenty on pitcher Bill Lee, who grew up in Burbank, with an ancestral legacy in the game that included his aunt Annabelle Lee, a star pitcher in the Women’s Semi-Pro Hardball League: “She’s the one who taught me to pitch.” Later in life, Bill “called for a ban on Astroturf and the law of gravity” during political campaigns in Canada and Vermont. Lee on the designated hitter, now damnably allowed in the National League, too: “one of America’s greatest evils.”
Buy these books for your baseball-besotted buddies, or for yourself. As another season begins, against all the awfulness in the world, they will give you hope, as when you read of former Dodgers’ first baseman Adrian Gonzalez refusing to stay in a Trump hotel during the campaign of 2016, about which he told reporters: “You can draw your own conclusions. They’re probably right.”
Write the public editor at lwilson@scng.com.
