Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Howard, in your research for the book (which I am currently reading and 
enjoying), did you come across any research which might prove or disprove 
the legend of Bill Veeck and the Phillies? 

In 'Veeck As In Wreck,' Veeck wrote of a plan he hatched to buy the 
Phillies in 1943 and stock them with an all-starteam of Negro League 
players, only to have his plan foiled when news of it leaked out to the 
other owners. However, researchers have been unable to uncover any 
evidence of this beyond Veeck's claims.
  

    
Ruth was Catholic, but _ naturally _ not a particularly devout one. 

And Harry Hooper, to my knowledge, was all right...

<alden>, the history of integrated baseball did disappear before
Robinson, but reemerged in a couple of pretty good books. The original
National League was integrated with Bud Fowler, Moses Fleetwood Walker
and Frank Grant. Walker's brother also played, I believe for a team in
(Toledo?)Ohio or Cleveland (I'm not at the house right now, so I can't
look it up). 

It all ended when Cap Anson of the White Sox threatened a boycott of
the entire league if blacks weren't banned. 

   
The reason, <alden>, is because baseball is a closed institution,
beyond at times even the federal government. The owners have made the
rules, set them in stone, and until 1966 (the advent of a real players
union) was untouchable. It's the same reason the reserve clause lasted
100 years, and labor is such the acrimonious topic that it is. 

<ruz>, That's a great question about Veeck. I enjoyed very much the
SportsCentury documentary on him (ESPN for once avoided the showtime
and got to the facts) and everyone in the game speaks well of him, even
for a maverick. 

But that Phillies story has always intrigued me. I tend to think that
it was more bluster than bite for one reason only: to try something
like that, in 1943, when the all-powerful Commissioner Landis has been
on record against integration, it cannot leak. 

That it did, made me a little skeptical about the claim. I believe
that Veeck had good intentions, but may have spoken a little loudly and
killed any chance of making it happen. 

That's why Rickey was so secretive in '46 when the wheels finally
turned.

 
  

    
What was Rickey's motivation, in your opinion? (I haven't read up on this
since I was 10, and I suspect kids' books on Robinson may have glossed 
over a detail or two.)
  

    
I know you're asking Howard, but in my opinion Rickey acted out of equal 
parts desire to right a huge wrong, and desire to gain a competitive edge.
  

    

That's my guess too.
  

    
I third the motion. Also, and I have never read this anywhere, but I
wonder what Rickey saw in the political climate at that partcular
moment to go forward when no one else could. How did he know the coast
was clear? 

 I suspect the reason is he and Walter O'Malley had agreed to see this
thing through no matter what, which means he cleared the coast
himself. 
  

    
And God bless 'em.
  

    

As we move on the publicity trail, Jonathan Yardley wrote a nice
review of the book, while snipping at me for not being a "prose
stylist" as J. Anthony Lukas (well who the hell is?), the big question
thus far has always focused on Tom Yawkey, and whether or not he was a
bigot. 

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A6075-2002Sep11.html

It is funny, and perhaps I am thinking too much about along racial
lines, but very few interviewers have asked about the experiences of
the players, which was probably my chief reason for doing the book,
instead opting to focus on whether or not the powers in charge of the
Red Sox were racists.

The reason for this, I suspect, is that people are more interested in
the team as a whole and its moral direction. At a reading I had at the
Boston Public Library, we talked about this concept and one older black
guest said, "The reason is because only the most well-read whites care
about black history. It's not part of our radar as a country." 

Wow. What a depressing thing to say. 
  
  

    
Depressing but nevertheless true, alas.
  

    

I think the man's probably right.   Howard, I believe it was in Ken Burns'
"Baseball" one of the people posits that Jackie Robinson is THE most
important figure in the civil rights movement of the 20th century, and
should be considered as more critical than MLK, since what Jackie did came
first, and all the important work of the Reverends King, Jackson et al took
place while standing on Jackie's shoulders.   The more I think about this
the more sense it makes, especially given the stage on which he performed,
the levels of excellence he acheived, and the nearly superhuman efforts he
must have gone through to endure the horrific abuse, especially in the first
years of his career.
Where would you place Robinson in the important events of baseball history
and American history?
  

    
Well, for me, I'm clearly biased. I don't put as much stock in the
great achievements of players pre-Robinson because Ruth Gehrig, Wagner,
etc... were playing without competing against entire groups of people
_ blacks, Latins, Asians. Therefore, Robinson is the swivel point when
the game became whole. Coupled with the fact that I believe there were
so many people who weren't sure about the "experiment," I shudder to
think what would have happened to integration had he failed on the
field, or worse, ended up in some kind of scandal. That adds to the
pressure to be perfect. 

In the larger framework of American civil rights, I think Robinson is,
even moreso than Muhammad Ali, the most important athlete in American
history. I put him over Jesse Owens only because the black condition
didn't change significantly as a byproduct of his success in the '36
Olympics. 

As Leonard Koppett said, "after Robinson, black people became present.
They were no longer in the background."
  

    

To go back to Boston --

I was astonished to learn from the book that the Celtics were the first 
NBA team to break the color line. I had never heard that before. Do you 
agree with JoJo White's analysis? That the city of Boston would never have 
supported a majority-black team? even a majority-black BASKETBALL team??
  

    
> I was astonished to learn from the book that the Celtics were the first
> NBA team to break the color line.

I'm astonished too! I obviously haven't gotten to that part of the book 
yet. Although espn.com says that Washington beat the Celtics by one day as 
far as playing a black player is concerned, even though the Celtics were 
the first team to draft a black player:

<http://espn.go.com/gen/s/2002/0225/1340314.html>
  

    
How did the Braves fit into this picture? Did they have any black players
before they left Boston? Did they have any kind of support from the black
community? Were they under the same pressure from the cuty councilman to
break the color bar?

As for the Celtics, I think I remember hearing Russell say that they were
the first team to start five black players, but obviously, that came years
later.
  

    
City Councilor Izzy Muchnick went to the Braves first, and was
immediately rebuked. He then went to the Red Sox, which said they would
consider the idea. They weren't serious, but that gave Muchnick hope.
Invigorated, he focused only on the Red Sox.

The Celtics were the first team to start five blacks, and I think it
was 1963, breaking the unspoken rule of never playing more blacks than
whites at the same time.
  

    
Howard, "Shut Out" is published by Routledge, which doesn't usually
publish books of this type. (Its catalog is mostly academic, I
believe.) Could you tell us a bit about the process you endured
shopping the manuscript? And why did Routledge agree to take "Shut
Out"?
  

    
Sure, bring up the painful memories, why don't you? 

It all started back in April or May 1998, when I finished the
proposal. No one wanted it. I remember three publishers distinctly.

Crown: "A good idea, no question. But it's far too regional a book for
us to publish it."

Random House: "A compelling story, but perhaps the book should be
written as a biography or through the experience of one player." But
when they heard the list of black players, they weren't impressed that
Jim Rice or Burks or Mo Vaughn were sexy enough names, and thus took a
pass.

Houghton-Mifflin: "A tremendous idea, but it might be too regional,
and also, we're not convinced that Red Sox fans, the core constituency
you want to buy the book, will purchase a story that isn't laudatory of
their team. A good idea that we don't think will sell. But, if someone
publishes it and it does well, we'd be happy to take another look for
paperback."

So they wouldn't take the risk but would leap in for the reward. 

Then, there was a 28-year old editor at Routledge named Brendan
O'Malley, who happened to be a diehard Red Sox fan from blue collar
Somerville, right on the Red Line past Cambridge, who saw the book, got
it immediately, and demanded Routledge jump on it. 

At the time, Routledge had dreams of moving into the trade space to
enhance their profile. My book was supposed to usher them into new
territory.

Then the economy tanked. 

Then Brendan quit. 


And essentially, the book was an island at Routledge, which had
changed strategies. It was the square peg in the round hole. 


We persevered, them with a book that didn't fit their profile, me with
a contract with no advocates at the publishing house. My new editor,
in fact, told me that she would "never have purchased this book, but
there's nothing we can do about that now."


Yet, it is in stores...no small miracle, really.

 
  

    
Wow, great story.  So are they arranging your tour, or are you doing the
publicity yourself pretty much?
  

    

Brendan was too good for them.   I'm proud as hell to have an *autographed*
copy.
  

    
I've always been an SF Giants fan (grew up idolizing Willie Mays and
am a huge Barry Bonds fan -- people can say what they want about his
personality, but Chris Berman rightly compared his dominance as a
hitter to Wilt Chamberlain's basketball dominance the other night on
ESPN), but I'm also a great baseball fan, *period*, and can't wait to
read your book. 

Question ... how did you treat the Jim Rice - Fred Lynn era in your
book? IMHO, Rice was the superior player, but never got the praise from
the fans/press that Lynn did and, as you stated earlier in the topic,
"Rice seemed beaten down by the climate." How would you characterize
the relationship between Rice and Lynn?
  

    
What a story -- I'm so glad the book got published!
  

    
I can see this book appealing to an academic publisher. It is thoroughly
researched and deeply sourced. It has its moments of soaring rhetoric and
stemwinder storytelling, but it's mostly pretty sober. Frankly, it is not
the book I expected from a newspaper journalist. If I can indulge in a
baseball analogy, it's the work of a starting pitcher rather than a relief
specialist. If I can compare it to academic works, it's more like a
repurposed thesis than a pundit's ploy for talk-show glory.

As a work of history, I see it as a primary source that will belong in every
baseball writer's library. Congratulations for doing that important
groundwork! Do you have more books planned? How do you like the long form of
the book after a career's worth of journalism?
  

    
And the hilarity of it all is this: 

Houghton-Mifflin now called to say they are interested in the
paperback rights. At least they are true to their word.


45: The Jim Rice/Fred Lynn dynamic was an interesting part of the
book, one that was enhanced when Rice talked about the conflict of
which you speak, on page 163:

"Here I am coming into a situation. They had Freddy Lynn. He was
supposed to be the golden child. Mr. Everything. And here comes this
nigger from South Carolina who was every bit as good, and was one of
the top five players in the American League, and it was a different
story. It didn't work out the way everyone thought it would. They
didn't know what to do. I wasn't white. I wasn't Irish and I wasn't
from Boston, but I knew the rules. I wasn't going to say or do anything
that was going to put what I had in jeopardy." 


Rice put me off for two years before talking about this earlier this
year. Sean McAdam, one of the better reporters covering the Red Sox for
the Providence Journal, said this: 

"Maybe it was convenient to play them off as polar opposites. If Lynn
was the carefree Californian, Rice was naturally the opposite, the
sullen black guy. I always thought his bark was bigger than his bite,
but at times he almost seemed to conform to the perception. He never
let people see that he was having fun. He still harbors a lot of
bitterness."
  

    
<alden>, there was nothing better than doing this project. One,
writing a book was so much *fun*! Sure, it was a bitch, too, but fun
because it was your headache. You weren't doing someone else's work,
you were constructing your own arguments, fighting to create your own
structure, and taking the story in the direction you chose. 

Writing now isn't easy, but the 500-word notebooks disappear like
vapor after writing a 135,000 word manuscript. 

And it is very insightful of you to bring up the newspaper vs. book
writer because when I started the proposal, one of the roadblocks from
publishers was the "newspaper people can't carry full-length
narratives" stigma.

I certainly hope I have another few books in me. I had a great
conversation a few weeks ago with Roger Angell, who writes circles
around most _ if not all _ of us and he said he hated book writing.
He's 82 years old, comes from the greatest of literary stock _ E.B.
White was his stepfather _ and he said his first and only book "A
Pitcher's Story" on David Cone, "damn near killed me." 

Of course, he started it at age 79...
  

    
His first and only book that was a book from start to finish, that is;
there are several books compiling Angell's wondrous baseball writing
for the New Yorker. And you're right, Howard: He's the best ever (which
is no slight to Howard, Roger Kahn, Frank Deford or any other fine
baseball writer past and present; Angell is simply above everyone, in
the way Ted Williams was). Every couple of years or so I reread the
long essay he wrote back in the '70s about the difficulty of hitting.
It's a masterpiece about the fundamental, pitcher-hitter confrontation
around which the game of baseball is built. 

May I ask a technical question? You mentioned at the San Francisco
reading that Jim Rice finally opened up to you this past spring. I'm
wondering how you fit this late-late-late information into the
manuscript. Did you have to change much of the material in an entire
chapter, or were you able to pare Rice's comments to fit neatly into an
existing section without changing much around it? Was there a
stop-the-presses! call to your agent?