Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

Foreword by David Halberstam

Editor's Note

Seventh Inning Stretch: Baseball, Father, and Me

REFLECTIONS AND EXPERIENCE

Streetball from a New York City Boyhood

The Babe's Final Strike

The Best of Times, Almost

Innings

More Power to Him

Rough Injustice

Tripping the Light Fantastic

Fenway Crowns the Millennium

Times to Try a Fan's Soul

Freud at the Ballpark

A Time to Laugh

HEROES LARGE, SMALL, AND FALLEN

Mickey Mantle: The Man versus the Myth

Dusty's Moment

This Was a Man

The Greatest Athlete of the Century

The Amazing Dummy

The Glory of His Time, and Ours

Eight More Out

NATURE, HISTORY, AND STATISTICS AS MEANING

Left Holding the Bat

Why No One Hits .400 Anymore

The Streak of Streaks

Letter to Joe DiMaggio, January 3, 1985

The Creation Myths of Cooperstown

The Brain of Brawn

Baseball's Reliquary: The Oddly Possible Hybrid of Shrine and University

Jim Bowie's Letter and Bill Buckner's Legs

CRITICISM

Diamonds Are a Fan's Best Friend

Angell Hits a Grand Slam with Collected Baseball Essays

The Black Men Who Integrated Big League Ball

Baseball and the Two Faces of Janus

The H and Q of Baseball

Sultan of Sentimentality

Baseball: Joys and Lamentations

Good Sports & Bad

S
tephen Jay Gould was one of the great public intellectuals of the second half of the twentieth century, a man of science who by dint of a formidable, relentless intellect, an insatiable curiosity, and an exquisite literary sensibility turned much of the nation (as well as millions of people in other nations) into students in what became a great extended classroom. Technically he was a paleontologist, which meant to most of his fellow citizens, that he was in the dinosaur business, but I thought of him operating under a broader mandate as a kind of all-purpose historian-detective, working on a span of time which covered a mere three and a half billion years, looking for a glitch here and a glitch there that would mark the extinction of one species and the perpetuation of another, intrigued always as to why one species of mammal—human beings—ended up on two legs and, in William Faulkner’s well-chosen words, not merely endured but prevailed, when all around us, bigger, more powerful species disappeared. The race that we run, he seemed to be reminding us constantly, was neither to the swift nor the powerful.

I think of him as a man on the job all the time, not merely scouring the latest pile of dinosaur bones for newer, more updated truths, but fascinated by the most trivial developments in the world of snails, as well as changes and adaptations in the world of baseball. To Steve Gould all of these areas had their truths, and even more remarkably, their truths were often interconnected. He was the least narrow of intellectuals: what made his intellect so admirable was his ability to connect seemingly separate developments and truths in one field to developments in another; he could connect dots where few of his colleagues could even see the dots, let alone relate them. He was the most luminescent and valuable of citizens, able, as true intellectuals are (one thinks of the towering sociologist David Riesman), to rise above the boundaries of his own chosen profession and see things that others could not. He was able to take what were seemingly tiny bits of evidence, add historical and cultural dimension, thus giving them larger meaning, and enhancing their value. He could take big ideas and, through his skills as an analyst and writer, make them small, thereby making their truths infinitely more accessible. Equally important, he was capable of taking what were seemingly small truths and, through the proper interpretation, make them large, imbuing them with an importance and a dimension they otherwise lacked.

Nor was he simply some brilliant self-isolated figure, distanced by the very nature of so superior an intellect from much of what was around him; rather, he was in the best sense a major player in the ongoing national arena of debate, the most engaged of public men, not just a witness to the human comedy around him but a joyous appreciator of it. The descendant of an immigrant family which had escaped from an infinitely crueler Europe, the complicated, often painful lessons of assimilation were palpable in his own childhood, as were the uses of adversity. The scions of his generation of newly arrived, highly ambitious Jewish families were involuntarily well schooled in the uses of adversity, in the constant exhortations to work harder than those around them. He had flowered in the new pluralistic, post–World War II American democracy, and had great admiration for this society’s possibilities, as well as a thoughtful wariness of its excesses. As his friend the distinguished First Amendment attorney Martin Garbus said of him—“his was the most imposing of intellects, one that seemed to have the widest possible uses, made all the more valuable to those of us around him because it was blended with a rich, enduring personal humanity—Steve was an almost perfect amalgam of great scientist and great humanist.”

He was in all ways a valuable, pluralistic man, liberal in the best and broadest sense of the word; his liberalism was not merely an endorsement of a temporary fashionable political dogma, but liberalism in the better, classic sense: an abiding openness to new ideas and new forces. He understood earlier, and much more clearly than most of his peers, the public uses of science, and the ancillary lessons in history that science was capable of producing. He was a Darwinian, valuable in the ongoing debates with the creationists, in a debate he surely felt should have ended long ago. But he was a tempered Darwinian, he did not believe in a society where the powerful, armed with an arsenal of pseudoscientific data, could impose their will without restraints on those less blessed. He knew that was good for neither the weak nor the strong; even more, he knew that that those who appeared weak were not always weak, and those who appeared strong were rarely that strong.

That the creationists were still on the offensive late in the twentieth century, and that their newest proponents used the most modern means of communication to propagate what he considered myth-based views did not greatly surprise him. He was too wise and shrewd an intellectual to believe that good ideas which were science-based would, ipso facto, because of their elemental truths always triumph. He understood far better than most the power of passion bred by adversity. And he knew that the late-century backlash of the creationists in America was produced, if by no other force, by the most involuntary impulse to survive and live as in the past, on the part of people who thought the society as they knew it, and where they were most comfortable, was changing, driven by forces of modernity that they despised and felt were corrupting all that they treasured.

Stephen Gould was—perfectly in keeping with his own view of how immigrant families go through the process of Americanization—the most passionate of baseball fans; even his immigrant grandfather, born as he was in Hungary, liked going to games as a way of becoming that much more American, and it was through his own father, a court stenographer, that Steve eventually fell in love with the game, the Yankees, and Joe DiMaggio, in no particular order. That a bright, not particularly athletic child would love baseball was the most normal of possibilities in newly minted American homes at that time. There was less competition from other sports in what was essentially a pre-television, pre-entertainment–age childhood. Baseball was very accessible (all you had to do was turn the radio to 1010 and hear the honeyed voice of Mel Allen), and even if a child was not a gifted athlete, baseball offered early intellectual traction. It had all those wonderful numbers, batting and earned run averages that somehow seemed to unlock both past and present. Besides, the Yankees seemed to win all the time, which was comforting in a world where there were enough other defeats. In addition baseball is, as Bart Giamatti, the former president of Yale and later commissioner of baseball, once told me, the first thing a child can discuss with his or her parents—matters of sex and politics and religion are far beyond reach, but baseball offers a rare commonality and gives the very young an enviable social connection with their elders. Steve Gould’s father took him regularly to Yankee games as a boy, offering him an almost textbook example of the role baseball played in the Americanization of its newest citizens, how it allowed them to feel more
American
. Equally important, he came of age in New York at a wonderful time, the late forties through the mid-fifties, a golden age of baseball in the city of his birth, when a subway series was virtually a given each year. Though born and raised in Queens and not the Bronx, he became the most dedicated of Yankee fans; in all other things, one friend noted, Steve always rooted for the underdog. But not in baseball; the Yankees were rarely the underdog.

And so we have in these pages the great distinguished scientist at both work and play, studying a world he loves, that of baseball, and producing some of his most lyrical writing. What better field for study could there be for someone who was fascinated by the mutations of societal change, the impact upon a given institution by forces produced by the society around it. After all, in his lifetime the changes in the game were quite profound and yet the game remained essentially the same. When he first became a fan in 1949, there were only sixteen big league teams, St. Louis was a western city and Washington a southern one. The teams played more often than not during the day, on grass, and traveled by train. The games were broadcast on radio. Owners had complete dictatorial power over players—they could offer a player a preselected salary of their choosing, and a player’s only recourse, if he did not like the number, was to retire. Though Jackie Robinson had just integrated the National League and Larry Doby the American League, it was still a very white game. But it did reflect the changing demographics of America. On the Yankee team that faced the Dodgers in the second game of the 1949 World Series, there were four children of the new Italian immigration to America—DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Berra, and Raschi—in the starting lineup.

Fast-forward to today, thirty teams, eleven of them in the Sunbelt (if you count the Bay Area teams), the game always on television, teams traveling in chartered jets around the country, games played mostly at night, often on artificial surfaces in domed stadiums, with power having passed from owners to players, and some players making as much as $18–25 million a year. Ethnically, of course, it has changed as well. On occasion during the 2001 and 2002 seasons, his beloved Yankees fielded a lineup with seven black and Hispanic players. Thus baseball was a wonderful subject for him, something that essentially stayed the same (except for the designated hitter rule, which he quite predictably hated) and yet reflected the quite dramatic social and legal changes in the society around it.

His favorite ballplayer, as these pages will make abundantly clear, was Joe DiMaggio, the greatest player on the greatest team in baseball at the historic moment when Steve Gould first discovered the sport. When he was a boy, he and his father had once gone to a midweek game against the hapless St Louis Browns and his father had caught a foul ball off DiMaggio’s bat. In time DiMaggio signed the ball for him. If he was idolatrous of few other things or people in his life, he idolized DiMaggio (“He was the glory of a time that we will not see again”). Late in his life he taught a class at Harvard jointly with Alan Dershowitz, the noted law school professor and a close friend, and they argued constantly over DiMaggio. Dershowitz, originally from Brooklyn, was a devoted Dodger fan, and thus a Yankee hater; he would readily admit to DiMaggio’s greatness as a player but saw all kinds of flaws in him as a man, flaws that remained invisible to the worshipful Gould. In this case, at least, the adoration of the great scientist looking out at a chosen icon late in his life was no different from that of the little boy sitting in Yankee Stadium in the late forties, holding his father’s hand and hearing how great a player DiMaggio was. Of the two great hitting achievements of 1941, the year he was born, he was vastly more impressed by DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game streak than he was by Williams’s .406 batting average. Was this, others might wonder, the purely scientific importance of the streak, or was it as well the enduring charisma of a childhood hero?

The collection of these pieces shows Steve Gould at his best, and readers will readily understand the richness and complexity of his mind. There is a lovely small piece composed on the death of Babe Pinelli, the umpire who had called Don Larsen’s perfect game in October 1956. The final pitch to Dale Mitchell, a pinch hitter and twenty-seventh batter, with the count 1–2, was just a little high and outside. “Strike three!” said Pinelli. Naturally enough, Mitchell groused about the call. Gould, the historian-as-umpire, calls the play for Pinelli and against Mitchell—“A man may not take a close pitch with so much on the line. Context matters…. Babe Pinelli, umpiring his last game, ended with his finest, his most perceptive, his most truthful moment.” Another wonderful piece is about Dummy Hoy, a deaf and dumb player, who played for fourteen years from 1888 to 1902. It is powered by Gould’s rage against the cruelty of the era, the stupidity of the nickname, and the demeaning forces with which Hoy had to contend. In Gould’s words Hoy emerges as one of the most gifted, intelligent players of his time, a man admirable in all ways. And there is his long essay on the disappearance of the .400 hitter, a rumination on why no one is likely to do it again, on how the forces both inside and outside of baseball have changed the context and made it so unlikely.

To place Steve Gould’s baseball life in proper historical perspective, one should note that he was born in September 1941, a month before Mickey Owen dropped the third strike on Tommy Henrich in game four of the World Series, a mistake that cost the Dodgers not merely the contest but a 3–1 lead in games and greatly improved the Yankees chances of winning the Series. And he died some sixty years later in May 2002, just as Jason Giambi was making his debut as a free-agent Yankee first baseman, but perhaps even more important, as Alfonso Soriano, the young Dominican infielder, rose to superstar status. He and I never talked about Soriano, but I presume Steve would have been thrilled by Soriano’s almost miraculous ascent to greatness, by the quickness of his bat, the amazing strength in his seemingly slim body, the explosiveness and elasticity in his muscles, and the fact that early in his major league career it was almost impossible to get him to lay off pitches and work his way on base by walking. This, I think, is the part that Steve Gould would have loved, the deep sociocultural imprint of Soriano’s native culture, and the fact that, as they say, you don’t get off the island (the Dominican Republic) by taking pitches and walking.

In the second part of his life, positioned permanently in the Boston area by dint of tenure at Harvard, he became a season-ticket holder at Fenway Park and something of a naturalized Red Sox fan as well, and there is in some of his later writing a rare compassion and affection for the Red Sox. (Because I was born in the Bronx, about eight blocks from Yankee Stadium, but grew up partly in New England, and later ended up with a house on Nantucket, I have considerable sympathy for what are, if not divided loyalties, at least dual, or partially shared loyalties.) He loved Fenway Park, came to appreciate the complexity of being a Red Sox fan, and sired a son who was a Red Sox fan. That meant that he could still easily go to games and sustain his love of it; baseball, as readers of this book will soon understand, was not merely a source of pleasure, though certainly it was that, but it soon became one more field on which a great detective could test his intellect. Steve Gould believed in what might be called the contingency of history theory—that is, history is not a simple unbroken, almost predictable line of progress with certain almost guaranteed givens and thus assured outcomes. Rather, it is filled with pitfalls and ambushes and there are land mines everywhere; occasionally it is almost whimsical in the course it chooses. If you rewind certain sections of history and try to replay them, he believed, things might come out very differently: the Confederacy, say (these are my examples not his), might triumph at Gettysburg, Rommel might defeat Montgomery in North Africa, and Mickey Owen might hold on to the third strike from Hugh Casey. Interestingly enough, Dershowitz believes that Gould’s view of baseball informed his larger view of history, rather than the other way around, because baseball is so accessible and it is so easy to see what might have happened in the outcome of a game with just the smallest of changes, say a different relief pitcher throwing to Bobby Thomson in 1951, or perhaps Casey Stengel in 1960 bringing in Whitey Ford for the final outs against the Pirates.