Abbey doggedly zig-zagged his way through the loosely knit minor leagues with uneven progression. He was an anomaly as a lefty second baseman early on before he moved to the outfield, where he played in the majors. Abbey was called one of the greatest outfielders of the mid-1890s. Off the playing field, he was a journalist, who rose from the managerial ranks of the Falls City Journal to the managerial ranks of the Washington Post. More than a dozen years after he retired as a player, he pursued a role as an umpire in the amateur baseball leagues of Washington, D.C. Abbey gained great popularity in Washington as a player and an umpire, but he suffered a succession of devastating personal losses later in life.

Charles Scofield Abbey was born on October 14, 1866, on a farm near Salem, Nebraska,3 to Wallace W. (W.W.) and Alzina (Worth) Abbey. Abbey’s parents were prairie pioneers. W.W. had been a captain in the Union Army during the Civil War. After the war the Abbeys moved from Illinois to Kansas-Nebraska Territory, where W.W. farmed and Alzina kept house. Charlie had four sisters. Alzina died in 1893; W.W. then married Lillis Rhodes in 1895. The two had a daughter and a son.4

Abbey attended Falls City public schools.5 After his schooling he assisted in the clerk’s office of the United States district court in Lincoln.6 In 1885 he began “the study of law with Judge (Isham) Reavis.”7

But Abbey didn’t become a lawyer. Instead, he became increasingly interested in baseball, as did Falls City. On June 19, 1885, the Falls City Journal impatiently asked, “Where is our base ball club this summer?”8 The Falls City Daily News opined on July 30 that “Falls City needs a base ball club, if she expects to keep pace with St. Joe [Missouri] and Atchison [Kansas].”9 Two weeks later the same paper announced that a baseball club had been organized in Falls City, with Charley Abbey as a left fielder on the club.10 However, baseball wasn’t yet a full-time occupation for Abbey, who in 1886 also was “a student of the college at York [Nebraska].”11

On December 1, 1886, the York Republican reported that “C.S. Abbey left for Falls City … to take a position on the Journal. … His father has bought the paper, and the style of the firm will be W.W. Abbey & Son.”12

Abbey’s newspaper assignment gave him ample opportunity to pursue his burgeoning baseball interests. In late August 1887 it was reported that “he will play ball with the [Falls City] Blues. As a second baseman Charlie is hard to beat, and as a hitter he will greatly strengthen the sluggers. He is one.”13 He was named team captain14 and locally was touted “as good a second baseman as there is in Nebraska outside the league clubs.” With Abbey at second base, the Blues’ infield was described as one “that will paralyze any club in the state that employs no professional players.”15

In mid-February 1888 the Falls City Daily News forewarned that if “Falls City is backward in organizing a club, Dave Reavis will sign with the Stellas [Nebraska] to play short, and Charley Abbey with the Humboldts [Nebraska]. Should these two ‘standbys’ leave Falls City it is feared that base ball will have little recognition here.”16 Abbey didn’t leave — he maintained his ties to the home team, at least for a while.17

In early July 1888 the Beatrice, Nebraska, newspapers chronicled the creation of a “new base ball club … known as ‘Thrift’s garlands.’”18 “The Beatrice baseball club is the finest in the state,” proclaimed the Falls City Journal.19 The Falls City Daily News reported that “Charley Abbey has been playing ball with the ‘Garlands’ of Beatrice. It is a noticeable fact that the ‘Garlands’ have won every game in which Charley participated.”20 The Garlands concluded their ’88 season, amassing a record of 23–2, and broke up. The Beatrice Republican said, “The club has been quite an advertisement for the city, almost every paper in the state having given the Garlands of Beatrice a notice in its columns.”21

Abbey became “business manager and local editor” of the Falls City Journal in January 1889.22 Then in mid-May he left Falls City and took a position on the Kearney (Nebraska) Enterprise,23 while playing first base with a club in Kearney. On August 9 Abbey’s Kearney team completed a statewide road trip, going 12–0, while twice blanking state champion Grand Island. Abbey also tied for the lead in hitting.24

At 22, Abbey decided to become a professional baseball player with the Des Moines Prohibitionists of the Western Association (WA). The Falls City Journal noted that “Charley Abbey is getting quite a reputation as a baseball player. He played left field for Des Moines … at Omaha and received some very complimentary notices from the Omaha papers.”25 During a six-game stint, he went 9-for–24 (.375).

That Christmas Abbey reported he had signed with Des Moines for $1,500 (equivalent to roughly $47,000 in 2022) for the 1890 season.26 But he didn’t join the Prohibitionists, who subsequently relocated to Lincoln on August 1. Instead, Abbey played the ’90 season with the St. Paul Apostles of the WA. The Apostles carried 13 men on their roster, with Abbey one of two potential right fielders.27 Near season’s end, Abbey was the Apostles’ leading hitter.28

That winter he toiled as a clerk in the auditor’s office in Sioux City.29 During the off-season the Omaha Daily Bee opined that many Omaha fans “would like to see Charley Abbey wearing an Omaha uniform next season.”30 However, Omaha didn’t sign Abbey in ’91.

The Falls City Daily News said St. Paul opened the ’91 season with a win over Cincinnati (Cincinnati was not a member of the WA that season). Reportedly Abbey clubbed six extra-base hits — a homer, two triples, and three doubles.31 In an April 25 3–1 win over Lincoln, Abbey singled twice and tripled. The Nebraska State Journal proudly noted, “These Nebraska grown boys always are hard to beat.”32 Abbey had grown to 5’8½” and weighed 169 pounds.

On June 21, the Omaha Daily Bee asked, “What has become of Charlie Abbey?”33 The answer came in mid-July: The Falls City Journal reported that “Charley is a member of the Duluth [Minnesota] ball team but is laid up with a sore knee and will remain at home until able to go to work again.”34

The Apostles had moved to Duluth on June 8, but Abbey didn’t follow them. He was on the St. Paul roster only six weeks, playing in 24 games. He disappointed, hitting a career low .198, his sore knee possibly a factor. However, on July 27 Abbey was called up by the Portland [Oregon] Gladiators35 of the four-team Pacific Northwestern League (PNL). He played the outfield in 38 games, hit .262, and stole 14 bases. Portland finished 58–40 and won the ’91 PNL pennant.

In 1892 Abbey joined the Columbus (Ohio) Reds of the eight-team Class A Western League (WL), after the collapse of the WA. He played in 65 games and hit just .230. The Reds finished first with a record of 46–26, but the WL folded on July 11, largely because of wet weather and a lack of fan support.36 Abbey remained in the Upper Midwest to close out ’92 playing for the Ishpeming-Negaunee [Michigan] Unions and the Marinette [Wisconsin] Badgers of the Wisconsin-Michigan League.

The Falls City Journal announced Abbey’s resignation from the role of editor in mid-March 1893. He was departing for Chattanooga, Tennessee,37 where he played 94 games for the Chattanooga Warriors of the Class B Southern Association. He was an outfielder and walloped .313, with 29 extra-base hits, including two home runs. He also pitched a complete game and won. Abbey was a skilled defender: “Charlie Abbey the old Omaha fielder (sic) made the most sensational catch in centerfield yesterday that was ever witnessed here. … [It] looked like a ‘homer,’ but Abbey turned, sprinted to the fence … and nailed it with both hands over his head.”38 Abbey also was the Warriors’ team captain.39

In mid-August, the Falls City Journal proudly proclaimed Abbey’s promotion to the major league: He had accepted “a proposition from the Washington, DC, team of the National League. … [We] are glad to hear of his continued advancement.”40 His signing with the Senators was “upon the recommendation of Gus Schmelz,” who managed Abbey at Columbus, and Chattanooga, acting as a scout for J. Earl Wagner, the Washington owner.41

Abbey premiered on August 16, 1893. He played 31 games in left field for the last-place Senators under future Hall of Famer Jim O’Rourke. Abbey batted .259, with 25 of his 30 hits being singles. He collected 12 RBIs and stole nine bases. He fielded .937. His major-league debut, however, was tainted by the death of mother in October.42

In 1894 Abbey, now 27, manufactured his best season for the 11th-place Senators. He batted .314, had 51 hits for extra bases, drove in 101 runs, stole 31 bases, and received 58 bases on balls, all career highs. He scored 95 runs and clouted seven homers. In the outfield he handled 407 chances while recording 344 putouts (second in the league), 26 assists and six double plays, while committing 37 errors for a .909 fielding percentage. Abbey appeared in 129 of the 132 games that Washington played that year.

National League Umpire Tim Hurst regarded Abbey as “one of the best outfielders in the league. … [He] is fast enough to play in any team in the league. He picks out the good balls delivered … with rare judgment. He is a hard hitter, a brilliant fielder and the best baserunner in the team.” Best of all, he “plays ball from start to finish, and has no time for kicking.”43

During a 9-6 loss to the Cleveland Spiders June 5, Abbey hit a first-inning two-strike inside-the-park home run to deep center field off future Hall of Fame great Cy Young.44 He also demonstrated another weapon when “(Piggy) Ward … scored on Abbey’s bunt and marvelous slide to first. It was a very pretty play.”45 In a June 22 drubbing of the Boston Beaneaters, 26–12, Abbey had a five-hit game.46 The Nebraska State Journal on July 8 declared that “Abbey is [the] most popular Washington player.”47

After a July 20 12–8 loss to the Baltimore Orioles, it was printed that “Abbey is deserving of credit for excellent throws from the field to third base and home respectively.”48 However, one Washington Times scribe, after a doubleheader loss to the Orioles on August 1, wrote that “Abbey’s baserunning was very amateurish and he should have been severely reprimanded.”49

The Senators scored a 6–2 win over Young and the Spiders on August 16, with Abbey tripling, scoring once, and stealing two bases.50 The Senators routed the Chicago Colts, 14–3, on August 23 and moved out of last place while Abbey recorded four singles, a triple, a run scored, and a stolen base.51

National League President Nick Young candidly discussed the challenges of forming a new baseball association in the October 20 Evening Star. Among his observations and opinions, he called Charlie Abbey “one of the greatest outfielders in the league.”52

That fall, Abbey became a dual sport athlete. “In 1894, a group of baseball owners … created the nation’s first professional soccer league, the American League of Professional Football (ALPF). … The owners allowed the baseball managers to run the soccer clubs. … Joining [Washington Senators] manager Schmelz from the baseball side was Charlie Abbey, the only Senator to suit up for both baseball and soccer entities.”53 The October 20 Evening Star said “Abbey … understands the game and promises to be as conspicuous … as he was in the great national game.”54 He played pro soccer just that one year.

The Senators departed on March 2, 1895, for spring training in Charleston, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia.55 The Omaha Daily Bee reported two weeks later that future Hall of Famer “Buck Ewing declares that Charlie Abbey is the best fielder in the country.”56

Abbey didn’t replicate his ’94 output in 1895, but he still led the league in defensive games played, 133, and assists with 34. He was second in double plays turned as an outfielder with eight, but his error total was 34. He fielded .902. Abbey hit a respectable .275, cracked eight home runs (five was the NL average in ’95), a career high at all professional levels, and knocked in 84. He also stole 28 bases.

A July 14 game in Cincinnati, won by the Senators 6–3, was witnessed by 12,000 fans. The game summary headlined: “Charlie Abbey the Star.” The sportswriter stated that “Abbey’s fielding was the best that’s ever been seen on the local grounds. Twice during the game, he prevented the home team from winning by sensational catches.”57 In a lopsided 17-5 loss to the New York Giants on July 30, Abbey homered off future Hall of Fame pitcher Amos Rusie.

The Washington Times in mid-September lauded Abbey as player, journalist, and role model. “Charlie Abbey … is one of the fastest fielders in the business. … Charlie is a scribe during the winter season. … [He] has worked on the staff of several Southern papers. … [No] player stands higher in the estimation of the baseball public than this gentle fielder, of the Washington club.”58

On August 20, in an 8–7 loss to Cleveland and starter Young, Abbey stroked four hits, including a double and triple.59 The Evening Star speculated, “If Charlie Abbey had hit the ball throughout the season as he has been hitting it during the past six weeks he would be up among the first dozen sluggers of the league.”60

In an 8-5 win over Boston and future Hall of Fame pitcher Kid Nichols on September 28, Abbey singled twice and scored two runs. The Senators finished in 10th place.

The Senators opened the ’96 season on April 16 with a 6–3 win over the New York Giants. Abbey’s play in right field was outstanding. He “had done the bulk of the work, accepting nine chances … one of them a circus catch. It was the old Charley Abbey, he of 1894.”61

Despite some decline in hitting and fielding, Abbey’s base stealing acumen remained keen. In a 9–5 win over the Orioles in late April, “Charlie Abbey … in the ninth inning … stole home. … [He] got a big start while Arlie] Pond wasn’t watching … It was a daring play and further discomfited the Orioles.”62

During an 18–5 loss to the Reds May 26, Abbey again flashed signs of past brilliance. “The fielding play of the game was Abbey’s catch of Frank] Dwyer’s long fly to center. … The strawberry blonde made a great sprint backwards, caught the ball, and held it as he stumbled to the ground.”63 However as the season wore on, a critique in the Evening Star complained that “Abbey is playing a shaky game.”64 An item from the Morning Times said the Senators might trade Abbey to the Louisville Colonels. The Washington Times objected, and the deal didn’t develop.65

Abbey’s big-league career appeared to be losing steam. He collected just 79 hits in 79 contests in 1896. His batting average closed at .263. Still, he stole 27 bases. In the outfield, he committed 16 errors in 132 chances, and fielded a career-low .879. He also pitched two innings, allowing one earned run, with no decision. After the season, the Evening Times reported that “Charley Abbey, the utility outfielder, is engaged on the Washington Post.”66

Prior to the 1897 season opener, the Washington Senators team went to the White House and met newly inaugurated President William McKinley. The Senators invited the commander in chief to their season opener. Purportedly a baseball enthusiast, McKinley said he would attend if his schedule permitted.67

The ’97 Senators reached the first division of the 12-club National League, finishing tied with the Brooklyn Bridegrooms for sixth place. After the team started 9–25–2, Schmelz was replaced by Tom Brown on June 9. The Senators went 52–46–1 the remainder of the year.

Abbey’s season also got off to a slow start. On May 23 he was batting under .200,68 but by June 1, he was hitting .255 and fielding .947.69 His baserunning, however, was described as “wretched” in the Washington Times, which suggested benching him.70 Less than a week later, in a 9–3 victory over the St. Louis Browns, Abbey’s play drew favorable comparison with that of future Hall of Famer, Willie Keeler. Abbey “snatched a line hit … while on a dead run” looking into the sun.71 Brown later said, “Charley Abbey was another crackerjack of a sun fielder.”72

In a 7–2 win over Brooklyn on August 13, “Abbey was exceedingly fast and his lightning throw … cut Fielder] Jones down at third.”73 But on August 19, in his final game with the Senators, Abbey went 0-for-4 in a 10–4 loss to the Chicago Colts and future Hall of Famer Clark Griffith.74 Washington released Charlie Abbey on August 21.

Over a five-year major-league career, Abbey had a .281/.351/.404 slash line in 452 games. He stroked 493 base hits, 132 for extra bases, including 19 home runs, with 280 RBIs. Abbey stole 93 bases and accumulated 709 total bases. In the outfield he handled 1,112 chances, recorded 920 putouts, with 92 assists, and committed 100 errors. He generated 19 double plays and fielded .910.

Abbey wasn’t quite finished as a player. He joined the Providence Clamdiggers of the Class A Eastern League on August 25. The Omaha Evening Bee noted that since Abbey had joined the Providence team, they’d won nine in a row.75 Abbey played in 30 games with Providence, recording 31 base hits for a .274 batting average. That stint brought his professional baseball career to an end.

After the season, the Evening Star announced Abbey’s betrothal to “one of Washington’s most charming girls, Miss Felicita Roman.”76 The Fall River (Massachusetts) Globe boasted, “The bride is said to be one of the handsomest young women in Washington.”77 They were married October 11, 1897, in Washington, D.C.78

In November 1899, the couple welcomes a daughter, Lucille.79 The Abbeys resided in Washington, D.C., and six years later, on January 7, 1906, a son, John Roman, was born to Charlie and Felicita. Sadly, the infant died from neonatal jaundice seven days later.80 Little more than two weeks hence, Abbey was injured in a bizarre hit-and-run accident. The Washington Times reported that he “was knocked down and run over by a Le Droit Park car at Fourteenth and E Streets northwest yesterday morning (January 30).”81

Abbey’s encounter was reported in multiple national newspapers, which is how the Falls City community learned of his misfortune. To spare them anguish, he deliberately had not told his family and friends about what happened.82 Naturally, there were conflicting details about the sequence of events, but according to a lawsuit later filed by Abbey, he was walking along Pennsylvania Avenue before sunrise near the Washington Post building. He looked west and saw a streetcar speeding toward him and assumed it would slow down and stop as required, but it didn’t — it sped up. He shifted to avoid being hit but stepped in a low-lying spot and fell, his left arm caught on the track. The front and back streetcar wheels ran over his left forearm doing irreparable damage.83 Abbey got up, walked into the office of the Post and referring to his injury, said “This looks pretty serious.” It was. He was rushed to the hospital where surgeons amputated his left arm above the elbow. He remained for treatment and recovery.84

A year later, Abbey sued the Anacostia and Potomac River Railroad company “for the loss of his left arm by the alleged negligence of the defendant.” The damages sought were $25,000 (about $765,000 in 2022). The railroad company proposed a settlement of $7,000, but Abbey refused that offer85 and continued the suit. The February 22, 1908, issue of the Washington Herald referenced the case as No. 45, in Circuit Court No. 1 under Justice Wright. No newspaper report of a court decision was found, however.

Ten years after he retired from baseball, Abbey also retired from the Washington Post. The June 18, 1907 Washington Herald reported that Abbey “has taken a position with the Fidelity and Casualty Company of New York” in the insurance industry.86

But the game brought him back again. The July 14, 1910, Washington Times noted that Abbey had filled in as an umpire in a Suburban League game and “made a big hit with the crowd.”87 The Evening Star noted that umpire Abbey “has now gone through six games without a kick being made, which shows that there is class to his work.”88 During the ’97 NL season, he had acted as an arbiter at first base for two games.

Abbey’s selection “as the official umpire of the Departmental League” in late March 1911 was met “with general approval.”89 But two months later Abbey resigned from the post to devote “more time to his personal business.”90

By 1914 the Abbeys had relocated to Seattle, Washington. The Seattle Star reported a break-in and theft. Their home “was entered by burglars last night [September 10]. A quantity of valuable jewelry was taken.”91

Abbey’s father, W.W., passed away on April 13, 1916, at Falls City. Charlie was unable to return in time for the funeral on April 16.92

According to the 1920 federal census, Abbey and Felicita were divorced, and he was residing as a lodger in Seattle. His occupation was listed as solicitor in the advertising industry.93 Felicita had married William R. Duff on November 26, 1917, in Washington, D.C., and Lucille, a government clerk, lived with them.94

The January 25, 1923, Falls City Journal printed letters from former residents, who reflected on their experiences living in Falls City. John Towle, Omaha, wrote: “I recall … when Charley Abbey was the Managing Editor. He not only was a great base ball player himself, but he took an interest in the games of younger boys. He would even permit us to write accounts of our games and publish our scores in full in his columns.”95

Abbey, 59, died April 27, 1926, in San Francisco, California. His death occurred “On Arrival [at] Park Emergency Hospital.” The fatal cause was “Rupture of dissecting aneurism of ascending aorta.”96 In other words, he bled to death internally.97 Abbey was laid to rest in the family plot at Steele Cemetery, Falls City, Nebraska. His headstone is marked “CHARLIE.”98

Acknowledgments

Thank you to the Falls City, Nebraska, Public Library staff for introducing me to John Martin, great-nephew of Charlie Abbey. John then introduced me to his son, Chris, the family genealogist. Chris Martin answered many questions via e-mail, provided some Abbey family history, and shared several links to unique photographs of Abbey. Their assistance was invaluable.

This biography was reviewed by Bill Lamb and Will Christensen and fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and Alan Cohen.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-almanac.com, Baseball-reference.com, Retrosheet.org, SABR.org, and StatsCrew.com.

Notes

1 history.nebraska.gov, It was the first of two official nicknames for the state of Nebraska, 1895.

2 Thomas Beer, The Mauve Decade: American Life at the End of the Nineteenth Century, New York: A.A. Knopf, 1926.

3 “Charles S. Abbey Dies in California,” Falls City (Nebraska) Daily News, May 5, 1926: 1.

4 Abbey family tree, ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/180615832/person/222348930967/facts

5 “Charles S. Abbey Dies in California.”

6 Nebraska (Lincoln) State Journal, February 8, 1885: 8.

7 Falls City (Nebraska) Journal, April 3, 1885: 5.

8 Falls City Journal, June 19, 1885: 8.

9 Falls City (Nebraska) Daily News, July 30, 1885: 3.

10 Falls City Daily News, August 13, 1885: 3.

11 Falls City Journal, June 25, 1886: 5.

12 York (Nebraska) Republican, December 1, 1886: 3.

13 Falls City Daily News, August 26, 1887: 5.

14 “Falls City Vs. Sabetha,” Falls City Journal, August 26, 1887: 5.

15 “Baseball Notes,” Falls City Journal, August 26, 1887: 5.

16 Falls City Daily News, February 17, 1888: 5.

17 Falls City Daily News, April 13, 1888: 5.

18 Beatrice (Nebraska) Republican, July 7, 1888: 3.

19 Falls City Journal, August 7, 1888: 8.

20 Falls City Daily News, September 14, 1888: 7.

21 Beatrice Republican, October 13, 1888: 1.

22 Verdon (Nebraska) Vedette, January 11, 1889: 5.

23 Falls City Journal, May 17, 1889: 8.

24 Falls City Journal, August 9, 1889: 5.

25 Falls City Journal, September 27, 1889: 8.

26 Falls City Daily News, December 27, 1889: 5.

27 “Flashes from the Diamond,” Omaha (Nebraska) Daily Bee, April 6, 1890: 5.

28 “Talk in the Grandstand,” Omaha Daily Bee, September 21, 1890: 16.

29 Omaha Daily Bee, February 8, 1891: 13.

30 “Miscellaneous Sports,” Omaha Daily Bee, October 19, 1890: 9.

31 Falls City Daily News, April 17, 1891: 2.

32 “Base Ball Briefs,” Nebraska State Journal, April 26, 1891: 2.

33 “With Your Morning’s Coffee,” Omaha Daily Bee, June 21, 1891: 16.

34 Falls City Journal, July 17, 1891: 3.

35 Falls City Daily News, July 31, 1891: 3.

36 W.C. Madden and Patrick J. Stewart, The Western League: A Baseball History, 1885 through 1999 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2002), 32.

37 Falls City Journal, March 17, 1893: 8.

38 Omaha Daily Bee, April 16, 1893: 18.

39 Falls City Journal, August 18, 1893: 5.

40 Falls City Journal, August 18, 1893: 5.

41 Omaha Daily Bee, September 10, 1892: 11

42 “Charley Abbey Loses His Mother,” Omaha Evening Bee, October 31, 1893: 2.

43 “Notes of the Players,” (Washington, DC) Evening Star, June 2, 1894: 7.

44 “Second Won by Cleveland,” Washington Times, June 6, 1894: 4.

45 “An Exciting Game,” Evening Star, June 12, 1894: 7.

46 “No Trouble with Lovett,” Washington Times, June 23, 1894: 4.

47 “Baseball Notes,” Nebraska State Journal, July 8, 1894: 10.

48 “Not The Umpire This Time,” Evening Star, July 21, 1894: 18.

49 “Won Both Games,” Washington Times, August 2, 1894: 4.

50 “Senators Again Victorious,” Washington Times, August 17, 1894: 4.

51 “Smothered The Colts,” Washington Times, August 24, 1894: 4.

52 “‘Uncle Nick’ Undisturbed,” Evening Star, October 20, 1894: 3.

53 A Moment of Brilliance—An American Soccer History Blog, “The First Professional Soccer League in America and the Senators of Washington,” Part One, January 4, 2014.

54 “Notes,” Evening Star, October 20, 1894: 3.

55 “Senators Start South,” Washington Times, March 3, 1895: 3.

56 Omaha Daily Bee, March 17, 1895: 19.

57 “Charlie Abbey The Star,” Omaha Daily Bee, July 15, 1895: 6.

58 “What The Bleachers Say,” Washington Times, September 15, 1895: 7.

59 “Tried to Mob the Umpire,” August 21, 1895: 5.

60 “May Have Trouble,” Evening Star, September 21, 1895: 7.

61 “Broke All Records,” Evening Star, April 17, 1896: 8.

62 “Orioles’ Feathers Flew,” Washington Times, April 29, 1896: 3.

63 “Diamond Dust,” Washington Times, May 27, 1896: 3.

64 “The Senators Out West,” Evening Star, July 21, 1896: 9.

65 “Objects to Further Trades,” Washington Times, August 13, 1896: 3.

66 “Baseball Notes,” Evening Times, October 19, 1896: 3.

67 “Moving Very Cautiously,” Washington Times, April 18, 1897: 7.

68 Omaha Evening Bee, May 23, 1897: 18.

69 “Work Of the Senators,” Evening Star, June 1, 1897: 7.

70 “The Senators Shaken Up,” Washington Times, June 6, 1897: 4.

71 “The Senators Win Again,” Washington Times, June 11, 1897: 6.

72 “Baseball Brevities,” Pittsburgh Press, March 7, 1898: 5.

73 “Win The Fifth Straight,” Washington Times, August 14, 1897: 6.

74 “The Colts Win the First,” Washington Times, August 20, 1897: 6.

75 “Sports Of the Day,” Omaha Evening Bee, September 13, 1897: 6.

76 “Engaged Permanently,” Evening Star, October 9, 1897: 11.

77 Fall River Globe, October 11, 1897: 6.

78 Abbey family tree, ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/180615832/person/222348930967/facts

79 Abbey family tree, ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/180615832/person/222348931599/facts

80 Abbey family tree, ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/180615832/person/222356834470/facts

81 “Charley Abbey Will Get Well Say His Physicians,” Washington Times, January 31, 1906: 1.

82 “Charlie Abbey Terribly Injured,” Falls City Tribune, February 9, 1906: 1.

83 “Nebraskan Brings a Suit,” Nebraska City News Press, January 26, 1907: 3.

84 “Charley Abbey Loses Arm,” Falls City Daily News, February 9, 1906: 8.

85 “Nebraskan Brings a Suit,” Nebraska State Journal, January 25, 1907: 8.

86 “Charles Abbey Takes New Post,” Washington Herald, June 18, 1907: 4.

87 “Suburban League,” Washington Times, July 14, 1910: 15.

88 “Suburban League,” Evening Star, July 16, 1910: 8.

89 “Departmental Umpire Meets with Approval,” Washington Times, March 23, 1911: 12.

90 “Departmental League,” Evening Star, May 23, 1911: 13.

91 “Player Plucked,” Seattle Star, September 11, 1914: 11.

92 “Wallace William Abbey,” Falls City Daily News, April 18, 1916: 1.

93 Abbey family tree, ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/180615832/person/222348930967/facts

94 Abbey family tree, ancestry.com, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/180615832/person/222348931593/facts

95 “Absent Falls City People Extend Their Best Wishes,” Falls City Journal, January 25, 1923: 12.

96 Charles S. Abbey, National Baseball Hall of Fame file, which included State of California Death Certificate, issued October 26, 1993.

97 Cotton O’Neil Manhattan (Kansas) medical staff explanation, May 2022.

98 “Funeral of C.S. Abbey Held This Afternoon,” Falls City Journal, May 6, 1926: 1. Grave site information provided by Chris Martin in e-mail to the author, April 19, 2022.

Addie was born in New York City on February 6, 1910, as Robert Richard Addonizio. He was the fifth of ten children of Antonio and Teresa (Spaziante) Addonizio, Italian immigrants who came to the United States late in the 19th century. (One of Addie’s seven brothers was Johnny Addie, a renowned ring announcer at Madison Square Garden from 1948 to 1971 who worked more than 100 world championships.) At the time of Addie’s birth, the family lived in Greenwich Village, but later moved to Mount Vernon, a suburb north of the Bronx.

After graduation from Mount Vernon High School, Addie enrolled in the journalism school at the University of Alabama, where he joined the boxing team. In a retrospective of Addie’s career, Thomas Boswell wrote in the Washington Post: “Addie was that rare youth who couldn’t figure out what he liked to do better – slug it out with a middleweight or write poetry and songs.” Addie recalled that in his second bout, the Southern Conference champion knocked him down 13 times, but Addie kept getting up. “Finally,” said Addie, “he was so tired he couldn’t raise his hands and I knocked him out.”1

After graduating from Alabama, Addie held a variety of jobs before joining the staff of the New York Journal-American. He left that job in 1938 to work for the Washington Times (later Times-Herald). Initially hired as assistant sports editor, he also served for a time as a general reporter. At one point his coverage of a sensational murder trial put him on the front page for 26 straight days.

When the United States was drawn into World War II, Addie enlisted in the Army Air Corps, ultimately rising to the rank of captain. For a time he was assigned to the Royal Air Force as a radar controller at Uxbridge, the radar center for the defense of London. One night Prime Minister Winston Churchill, a regular visitor to the center, brought along Generals Eisenhower and Patton. When Addie was asked by Patton to explain the entire operation, he told the general to wait because he was busy dealing with a German air raid.2 A later assignment was to temporarily administer cities in France and Germany that had been liberated by the Allies. “It was my misfortune,” he would later write, “to be the first one on the scene at both Dachau and Buchenwald, two of the most infamous of the Nazi concentration camps. The scar has never healed.”3

After the war Addie returned to the Times-Herald as a full-time sportswriter. In February 1949 he married professional tennis player Pauline Betz. As an amateur, she had won the US Open Championship in 1942, ’43 and ’44, then again in 1946, the same year she also won the Wimbledon title and appeared on the cover of Time magazine. After being barred from major championships in 1947 for simply considering becoming a professional, she played professionally until 1960. In 1965 Betz was elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame. The couple had four sons: Robert (Rusty), Jon (adopted), Gary, and Richard (Rick) Addie, and a daughter, Kim, a prize-winning poet and novelist who reclaimed the original family surname of Addonizio.

Addie’s career was interrupted again in 1951 when he was called into service during the Korean War. This led to another encounter with General Eisenhower, who was then in France as supreme commander of NATO. While escorting a group of American newspaper publishers interested in interviewing Eisenhower about a possible run for the presidency, Addie was assigned to deliver a secret message to the general. When asked by Eisenhower if he was a career service officer, Addie, who felt at ease with even the most eminent personalities he encountered, replied, “Hell no, I’m a sportswriter who was recalled in the Korean war.”4

They discussed sports for a while, then Eisenhower asked Addie for advice as to what to say if the publishers were to ask him about the presidency. Addie suggested that he say he was focused on his job with NATO but that he would not entirely rule out the possibility of entering the presidential race. That, said Addie, led to many US papers saying for the first time that Eisenhower might become a presidential candidate. Later, when Eisenhower was president, he said to Addie: “I don’t know whether to thank you or damn you. Look at all the time you’ve taken away from my golf.”5

After two years in the service, Addie returned to the Times-Herald. When the paper was purchased by, and merged into, the Washington Post in 1954, publisher Philip Graham asked Addie to stay on. With the two papers, he served as the Washington Senators beat writer for 20 years until the team moved to Texas in 1971. Addie was proud to say that he never missed a day covering the team. After the Senators’ departure, Addie covered the PGA tour until his retirement in 1977.

Two of his favorites among the Senators were managers Charlie Dressen and Gil Hodges.

Dressen, with whom Addie played gin rummy and went to the race track, “was a delight to be with because each day was a new chapter. He was like a sparrow always flitting about and chirping about what he intended to do on the field.”6 Addie and Hodges, a golf partner, would visit Indian graves when the team was in Kansas City, looking for artifacts. When Hodges left Washington to become the Mets manager, he sent Addie a note thanking him for his friendship and support, adding, “I honestly don’t know of another sportswriter who is more honest and respected than you.”7

Addie kept himself busy in his years at the Post. In addition to covering the Senators, for many years he wrote six or seven columns a week as well as a column, “Addie’s Atoms,” for The Sporting News from the mid-1950s to the mid-’70s. In 1967 he served as president of the Baseball Writers Association of America, and in 1981 he was selected by his fellow baseball writers to receive the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, for which he is recognized in the “Scribes & Mikemen” exhibit in the Library of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. In the late 1970s he served on the Hall of Fame Committee on Baseball Veterans.

An unabashed sentimentalist, Addie was known as a fan’s sportswriter, a title he gladly acknowledged. “I wrote like a fan because I always was one,” he said. “I wrote like one of the players’ friends because I was that too. And I always emphasized the good.”8 His daughter, Kim, confirmed her father’s passion for sports. “He was in love with baseball,” she said. “He loved the human aspect of the game. He was a fan, and he was a real newspaper man. I remember him typing at the kitchen table on his old Smith-Corona.”9

In his 1977 retrospective, Thomas Boswell wrote: “Among sportswriters, Addie was most unique for the affection he inspired both among those who read him and among those about whom he wrote.” Addie clearly enjoyed being part of the sportswriters’ community. In a column for The Sporting News at the time of his retirement, he wrote: “Always, there was a great camaraderie in the fraternity. If you missed a quote that made a good column or a good dressing room story, there was always someone to refresh your notebook. Sportswriting always was for the free souls and once was the last rampart of opinion free from editorial nudging.”10

His light touch as a writer reflected his amiable and self-deprecating personality, which endeared him to many prominent athletes and other public figures. A well-known personality in Washington, Addie was immediately recognizable because of his trademark red socks and dark glasses. (The socks were a fashion choice, but the dark glasses were a necessity; shrapnel from a bomb blast in World War II had made his eyes sensitive to light.)

Addie worked at a time when sportswriters were more or less on an equal social and economic footing with people involved in sports. This meant that a writer, especially one as affable as Addie, would not only report on the people he covered but also socialize with some of them. In Sports Writer, the memoir he published in 1980, Addie recounted leisure-time encounters with athletes, coaches, and managers at local watering holes, card tables, and race tracks.

When the book was published, Morris Siegel, Addie’s former colleague at the Washington Post, wrote: “Those who have been privileged to be sportswriters could not have chosen a more qualified authority to speak for us. Addie was indeed a sportswriter, and a gifted one at that. It was all he ever wanted to be.”11

Several of Addie’s anecdotes involve athletes indulging their fondness for beer and booze, as well as their ingenious methods of avoiding curfew. The night before the fifth game of the 1956 World Series, Addie was at El Boracco, a New York nightclub, with Yankees pitcher Don Larsen. At 4 a.m. Addie left in order to get a few hours’ sleep before covering the game. According to Addie, Larsen, who would pitch the first and only perfect game in World Series history that day, “lingered a little longer.”12

One time Addie himself contributed to the delinquency of three players. Invited to a party at the home of a friend in New York, he asked Senators sluggers Jim Lemon, Harmon Killebrew, and Bob Allison to go along. When they reminded Addie that manager Cookie Lavagetto had a strict 11 p.m. curfew, he assured them that since Lavagetto was a pal of his they needn’t worry. When the players returned to their hotel around one a.m. they each found a note from Lavagetto telling them they were fined $200. When Addie went to Lavagetto the next day to accept blame for the incident, the manager said he would rescind the fines if the Senators won both games of that day’s doubleheader against the Yankees. Addie passed on the message to the players, then against all odds the Senators did sweep the doubleheader when Lemon hit a homer in each game and Killebrew and Allison hit one apiece.

While Sports Writer contains any number of interesting autobiographical tidbits, it is mainly a collection of his memories of sports figures, from the obscure to the world-famous, as well as of notable figures in politics and show business. Among the more prominent figures with whom he had more than a professional relationship were Vince Lombardi, Ted Williams, Rocky Marciano, Babe Zaharias, Sam Snead, Ben Hogan, and Red Auerbach.

The most famous gathering place for athletes and celebrities in the 1940s and ’50s was Toots Shor’s New York City saloon, a favorite haunt of such notables as Joe DiMaggio, Bob Hope, and Frank Sinatra. Addie shared many recollections of time spent at Shor’s hanging out with Shor himself, athletes, fellow sportswriters, and celebrities such as Jackie Gleason and Don Ameche. Noted journalist and commentator Bob Considine, another regular at Shor’s, who wrote a biography of the saloonkeeper, was godfather to Addie’s daughter, Kim.

Working in Washington, Addie had the opportunity to establish close ties with an array of Washington dignitaries interested in sports. Two of his close friends were Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White (an All-American halfback at Colorado), and General Nathan Twining, chairman of the Joints of Staff. He knew every president from Truman through Ford, except for Kennedy. He did, however, know Kennedy’s sister Kathleen, who worked with him at the Washington Times-Herald before World War II and had a desk across from his. When he returned to the paper after the war, Kathleen’s desk was occupied by a young photographer named Jacqueline Bouvier, the future wife of John F. Kennedy. They did not see each other after she left the paper, but in November 1963 Addie was approached at a restaurant near the White House by Dave Powers, an assistant to President Kennedy. Powers said that the president knew of Addie and that he was sure that Kennedy would like to talk about sports with him. He then told Addie that he would arrange a meeting when the president returned from his trip to Dallas the following week.

One indication of the range of friends and admirers Addie acquired over the course of his career was the dozens of congratulatory notes and telegrams he received upon retiring in 1977. Among the well-wishers were President Carter, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, League Presidents Lee MacPhail and Chub Feeney, Judge John Sirica, Angelo Dundee, Red Auerbach, Sonny Jurgensen, Arnold Palmer, Jack Nicklaus, Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, and Billy Martin.

Kim Addonizio said of her father: “He was very warm, a big-hearted person. Often I wouldn’t see him when I was young because he’d come home late and I was asleep. I asked him to wake me when he got home. He would, and then I’d sit on his lap and we’d watch TV. He had the soul of a poet. Retirement was hard for him. Writing was his life.” 13

Addie concluded a personal retrospective he wrote for The Sporting News when he retired with the following: “Maybe I’ll get used to living a day without a deadline. Or maybe it will be like the great line Jimmy Cagney, the actor, wrote. He tells about an old man who was crying and was being comforted by a young girl. ‘Old man,’ she asks, why do you weep?’ He answers: ‘I thought that the years of my youth were mine to keep.’”14

Bob Addie died of cardiac arrest on January 18, 1982. He is buried in Saint Gabriel Cemetery, Potomac, Maryland.

Sources

Addie, Bob. Sports Writer (Lanham Maryland: Accent, 1980).

The Sporting News

Washington Post

Bob Addie file, Baseball Hall of Fame Library

Telephone interview, Kim Addonizio

Thanks to Kim Addonizio and Bill Francis (Baseball Hall of Fame Library) for their assistance.

Notes

Some boys dream of a life in the circus; others, like Lee Allen, dream of a life in baseball. Born in 1915, he was the son of a Cincinnati attorney who served three terms in Congress. Having seen his first Reds game while still in knee pants, Allen was a regular at Redland Field (later Crosley Field) by the time he entered Hughes High School. Whether he cajoled the principal into letting him escape from class early, as some romantic accounts have it, or whether the school day ended before the late afternoon games began, Allen got to the ballpark every day in time for the first pitch. Paying his way into the grandstand, he positioned himself in the upper deck near the press box where he one day hoped to work.

Readers of the Cincinnati Enquirer soon noticed that Jack Ryder’s “Notes of the Game” column often included an exact tally of how many balls and strikes each pitcher had thrown. Ryder was a good reporter, but these data were supplied by Allen, who charted every pitch while munching on a steady supply of food from the concession stand. Later he earned seventy-five cents a game for telephoning out-of-town scores from the Western Union ticker in the press box to the scoreboard. “I lost money on that deal,” Allen remembered, “I used to spend about a $1.50 a day for ice cream, soda, and peanuts.”

After graduation, Allen matriculated in psychology at Kenyon College in the same class as Bill Veeck. He covered baseball for the campus daily but in truth didn’t know what occupation to pursue. In 1935 he somehow managed to tour the Soviet Union with newsman H.V. Kaltenborn and was far out of touch with baseball until reaching Moscow where Ambassador William Bullitt let him read back copies of the New York Times.

After Kenyon, Allen enrolled in the Columbia University School of Journalism. But after little more than one semester, he was invited to join the Reds as a paid assistant to Gabe Paul, then the team’s publicity director and road secretary. Allen stayed with the Reds as they won consecutive National League pennants in 1939 and 1940. When the United States entered World War II, Allen was rejected for military service because of high blood pressure. In 1942, he took a civilian post with the navy and was shipped out of Seattle to work as a laborer on Kodiak Island, Alaska. After a year or so, he returned to Cincinnati to replace Paul, who had been called to the service.

All the while, Allen was accumulating the foundation of an outstanding collection of baseball books, manuscripts, and notes. As he recalled later, “a book — The Baseball Cyclopedia by Ernest J. Lanigan — got me started. I always loved baseball, but I wasn’t very good at playing the game. I wasn’t fast enough. But I still wanted to be a part of it and this was a way I could do it.” He began to build a variegated career as a baseball researcher, putting in stints for two Cincinnati newspapers, appearing on radio and later television and even working a year for The Sporting News. “It was my observation of Taylor Spink,” he said “that taught me the only real happiness is in one’s work.”

Still, as many baseball researchers have learned, breaking into print for profit requires not only talent but also luck. “You just can’t get out of college and say, ‘I’m a writer; hire me,'” Allen once reminisced. While working with the Reds he saw that G.P. Putnam’s Sons had begun publishing its series of club histories. He wrote to them cold, “and a fellow wrote back saying they didn’t know anything about me as a writer and that they hadn’t decided who they would assign the Reds book to.” Putnam told him to take a stab at it. “I wrote the book, they accepted it, and it got me started.”

That first book, The Cincinnati Reds (1948), led in turn to 100 Years of Baseball (1950) and The Hot Stove League (1955), an absolutely marvelous collection of unusual research and anecdotes, many of which eventually made their way into anthologies. These books established Allen as a recognized expert who could make a living from his passion. On Cincinnati’s radio station WSAI, for example, he once challenged listeners to write in — this was before talk shows — giving the names of former players for him to identify. On May 23, 1952, while working in Philadelphia, Allen and Phillies manager Eddie Sawyer engaged in a “Baseball Talkathon” from 11:15 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. on KYW. The pair answered questions telephoned to several operators and forwarded to moderator Jean Shepherd.

In early 1959, the National Baseball Hall of Fame announced that Allen would replace retiring Ernest J. Lanigan as historian. It was a propitious appointment for both the Hall and Allen who brought with him to Cooperstown not only his knowledge and research skills, but also a vast baseball library. The mover who trucked the books from Cincinnati said they filled fifty-five cartons and weighed 5000 pounds. Allen, who began his new job with no advance instructions, had a firm idea of how he would proceed. “I hope to make the office of Historian of the Hall a place where anyone may write for information about almost any phase of baseball history and receive accurate replies.”

The Allen family — Lee had married Adele Felix the previous August — settled into Cooperstown just a few months before the birth of twins Randall and Roxann in October 1959. The new father nevertheless dove into his work with a great deal of gusto. Ensconced in the old library on the second floor of the museum, Allen established a daily routine that included meeting a steady stream of visitors, answering mail as soon as it arrived, and chipping away at the long-range research projects he set for himself. His workdays soon stretched to twelve hours and his weeks to seven days.

One of these assignments involved uncovering the date and place of death for nineteenth century National Leaguers. Another had him breaking down the number of games outfielders had played in left, center, and right fields. “No one has ever separated outfields before,” Allen told Sports Illustrated shortly after he began. “When Zack Wheat is inducted into the Hall of Fame this summer, I’ll be able to tell him how many games he played in each field.”

Allen’s major effort was to collect biographical data on the 11,000 men he estimated had played in the major leagues to that point. In this mammoth task that would grow into the first edition of The Baseball Encyclopedia, he labored with other pioneers in baseball research, including John Tattersall, S. C. Thompson, Frank Marcellus, Karl Wingler, Harry Simmons, Allen Lewis, Joseph Overfield, Clifford Kachline, and Paul Rickart.

After a while, the Allens decided to spend the summers in Cooperstown and the winters in Boca Raton, Florida. Allen used the trips back and forth as opportunities for extended research odysseys. He would visit one remote hamlet after another, prowl through graveyards and courthouse records, and gently pump as many townspeople as necessary for the information he was seeking.

Allen did not sit on his research. He turned it into a long list of articles, innumerable speeches to dozens of groups, and a series of books renowned for their original insights. In The National League: The Official History (1961), for example, he used his unprecedented access to league documents and correspondence to throw new light on pivotal events such as Fred Merkle’s “boner” and Hal Chase’s involvement in fixing games.

In the companion volume, The American League Story (1962), Allen related how president Ban Johnson moved the Milwaukee franchise to St. Louis, home of The Sporting News, and how in 1903, type for the peace agreement between the leagues was set in that newspaper’s composing room.

Basking in the success of these books, Allen accepted an additional commission, a column in The Sporting News. “Cooperstown Corner” ran from April 4, 1962, to May 31, 1969, a total of 133 times. It began as a biweekly feature whose regular appearance was sometimes delayed for lack of space. After August 24, 1963, it was printed much more sporadically: twice during the rest of that year, nine times in 1964, six in 1965, and not at all in 1966. In June 1967, the column resumed a biweekly schedule. It proved to be so popular that it became a weekly feature in February 1968, and remained so until Allen’s death. The last two columns appeared posthumously.

Simultaneously with the column, Allen wrote other books: a joint history of the Giants and the Dodgers, a collection of biographical sketches written with Tom Meany, lives of Babe Ruth and Dizzy Dean, and a history of the World Series published in 1969 as professional baseball observed its hundredth anniversary.

Surely, Allen must have looked forward to this centennial. For one thing, he now went to work in the new National Baseball Library, opened in 1968 as a separate building from the Hall of Fame. For another, the celebration commemorated events in his native city. He contributed a special essay on the Red Stockings of 1969 to The Sporting News and journeyed back to his hometown in May for a ceremony honoring Cincinnati players. After presenting a silver plate to Edd Roush as the greatest Red of all time and participating in the attendant festivities, Allen climbed into his car for the long drive back to Cooperstown.

When he reached Syracuse on the morning of May 20, he stopped and called a cab, complaining of chest pains. Two hours later, at St. Joseph’s Hospital, he was dead of a massive heart attack. If the truth be told, Allen had not been a well man. Undoubtedly, he worked far too long and too hard, ate, drank, and smoked too much, and had probably suffered an earlier heart attack several years before. Still, his death was a shock to the baseball world that had come to treasure him.

Sources

A version of this article was originally published as the Introduction to Cooperstown Corner (SABR, 1990), a collection of Allen’s columns that had run in The Sporting News in the 1960s.

In compiling this piece, the author mainly used Allen’s clipping files in the archives of The Sporting News in St. Louis (where the author works). He also spoke with Lowell Reidenbaugh, who was Allen’s contact with The Sporting News and remained on staff with the paper for many years afterwards.

Indeed, if Roger Angell’s story were presented to Roger Angell in fictional form—which could happen because his primary profession has been not writer, but fiction editor—he would be justified in rejecting it for implausibility, for a plot with a bit too much coincidence and permutation, within a setting of decidedly too much elegance and sophistication. As yarns go, this one has been a doozy.

The tale begins on September 19, 1920, in New York City. The household into which Roger (no middle name) Angell was born was far from ordinary. His father, Harvard-educated Ernest Angell, was a Wall Street lawyer who would eventually become the New York regional director of the Securities and Exchange Commission as well as national chairman of the American Civil Liberties Union. His mother, Bryn Mawr-educated Katherine Sergeant Angell, was a writer and editor who would be among the first recruits to The New Yorker magazine following its 1925 founding, and would retain a prominent role there for 35 years.

It was from his father—who’d grown up in Cleveland, and remained a lifelong Indians fan—that young Roger was given a warm introduction to baseball. Writing in 1970, the son quotes the father:

“We had Nap Lajoie at second. You’ve heard of him. A big broad-shouldered fellow, but a beautiful fielder. He was a rough customer. If he didn’t like an umpire’s call, he’d give him a faceful of tobacco juice. The shortstop was Terry Turner – a smaller man and blond. I can still see Lajoie picking up a grounder and wheeling and floating the ball over to Turner. Oh, he was quick on his feet!”1

Ernest wasn’t just a fan, he was a seriously competitive ballplayer far into adulthood, in the local-nine pick-up manner of the era. And, as his son describes it, “my father sailed through Harvard in three years, but failed to attain his greatest goal of making the varsity in baseball, and had to settle for playing on a class team.”2

Angell describes his father:

… lean and tall, with long fingers, brown eyes, and a sense of energy about him. … Handsome and dashing in the flattering, tightly cut suits and jackets of the 1930s (like Gary Cooper, he remained unstuffy in a vest), he strode swiftly, banged doors behind him, and swarmed up stairs, appearing always on the verge of some outdoor errand or expedition. Bravura came naturally to him …

It was this spirit, brought to mountain climbing, to figure skating, to tennis and trout fishing, to skiing and canoeing and gardening and so forth, that sometimes inspired us in the family to call him The King of the Forest.3

And so the never-deskbound “King of the Forest” instilled in his boy a deep avocation for not just baseball—Roger was a pitcher into high school until developing a sore arm—but many other sweaty pursuits, including golf, horseback riding, ice skating, swimming, tennis, and most especially, sailing. Father and son were both raised in circumstances of abundant comfort (if not plain wealth) and both pursued careers of engrossing intellectual challenge, yet both eschewed the ever-available temptation to passively let the flesh soften. This Teddy Roosevelt-style gung ho embrace of the physical realm by an otherwise bookish sort rests at the heart of the perspective of Angell’s first-person-narrative baseball writing.

From his mother Roger Angell inherited his gift for comprehension and mastery of the written word. Moreover, he was afforded the opportunity to essentially replace her at The New Yorker, and sustain a most unique family legacy half a century further. Nevertheless, Angell’s relationship with his mother wasn’t always easy:

Most memories of my mother are affectionate and cheerful, but still center on the bottomless worries and overthoughts that descended on her late in her life. And not always so late, come to think of it.

… For her a fistful of candy never had a chance against the complicated right thing. She loved us all, anxiously and bemusedly, but forgot to hand out kisses because we were great runners or really good-looking or the smartest kid on the block. Stuff like that went without saying, only she never said it.

Nancy Franklin, in a remarkable piece about my mother in The New Yorker in 1995 (she’d never met her), wrote, “It’s funny; as an editor she was maternal but as a mother she was editorial.” This made me laugh, not cry, and it has come to me over time that my own way of loving her was often simply to try to cheer her up.4

Even with formidable advantages, Angell’s childhood knew emotional pain. Ernest and Katharine divorced when Roger was eight:

One explanation for the divorce was that my father, who went to France in 1917 with the A.E.F. [American Expeditionary Force] as a counter-intelligence officer—he spoke French and some German—adopted a Gallic view of marriage and was repeatedly unfaithful to my mother after he came home. Another was that my mother had fallen in love with E. B. White, a colleague of hers at The New Yorker ….

She always insisted that there was no connection between her divorce and their marriage, which came three months after her return from Reno. Whatever. What can be said for sure is that each of my parents grew up with a critically missing parent—she a mother, he a father—and pretty much had to fake it in these roles with their own kids. They worked at this all their lives, though it sometimes pissed you off or broke your heart (choose one) to watch them.5

Following the divorce, young Angell (and his older sister Nancy) lived with their father. But they continued to spend significant time with their mother also, and Angell developed a close relationship with his stepfather E. B. “Andy” White that would last for decades.

White’s primary occupation was editor and writer for The New Yorker, alongside Katharine, but he authored many books as well. He became best known for the highly-acclaimed children’s novels Stuart Little, Charlotte’s Web, and The Trumpet of the Swan, and also co-wrote (with William Strunk Jr.) the writer’s manual The Elements of Style that has been standard issue for college undergraduates since its initial publication in 1959 and four subsequent re-issues.

Angell’s fondness for White was not so much son-to-father (White was seven years younger than Katharine, and ten years younger than Ernest) as nephew-to-uncle:

My mother and Andy White got married in 1929 … and though my sister and I were only weekend and summertime visitors with them after that, I soon felt as much at home at their place—on East Eighth Street and then East Forty-eighth Street, in New York, and then in Maine—as I was with my father the rest of the time.

A fresh household sharpens attention, and one of the things I picked up was that sense of ease and play that Andy brought to his undertakings. Though subject to nerves, he possessed something like that invisible extra beat of time that great athletes show on the field. Dogs and children were easy for him because he approached them as a participant instead of a winner.6

As a teenager Angell was boarded at the elite Pomfret School in Connecticut. His summers were actively busy, often involving ambitious vacations arranged by his father:

I was a New York City kid who knew the subways and museums and movie theaters and ballparks by heart, but in the 1930s also got out of town a lot, mostly by car. I drove (well, was driven) to Bear Mountain and Atlantic City and Gettysburg and Niagara Falls; went repeatedly to Boston and New Hampshire and Maine; drove to a Missouri cattle farm owned by an uncle; drove there during another summer and thence onward to Santa Fe and Tesuque and out to the Arizona Painted Desert. Then back again, to New York.

Before this, in March 1933—it was the week of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s first inaugural—I’d boarded a Greyhound bus to Detroit, along with a Columbia student named Tex Goldschmidt, where we picked up a test-model Terraplane sedan at the factory (courtesy of an advertising friend of my father’s who handled the Hudson-Essex account) and drove it back home. A couple of months later, in company with a math teacher named Mrs. Burchell or Burkhill and four Lincoln School seventh-grade classmates, I climbed into a buckety old Buick sedan and drove to the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago; we came back by way of Niagara Falls …. 7

Following graduation from Pomfret in 1938, Angell followed his father’s path and attended Harvard. In June 1942 he graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English. Barely a month later, with World War II in full flame, Angell was drafted into the U.S. Army Air Force.

He undertook basic training in Atlantic City, then was troop-trained to Lowry Field, outside Denver, for armament school. After further training, he served a long stint at Lowry as a machine gun instructor. In early 1944 Angell was transferred to a Public Relations post in Honolulu, where he became the managing editor of Brief, a weekly magazine distributed to American service members throughout the Pacific theatre. He never saw combat. In his autobiography Angell presents a long list of friends and acquaintances who lost their lives to World War II, and he assesses that he had “not been in the war exactly, but like others back then I’d got the idea of it.”8

While stationed at Lowry Field in October 1942, Angell married Evelyn Baker, who’d been his girlfriend throughout his college years. She was “thin and brown-haired, with a strong chin,” and “tougher than anyone [he]’d met before.”9 They would remain married for more than 20 years, and had two daughters, Caroline (“Callie”) and Alice.

At the conclusion of the war, Angell “observed Christmas of 1945 on the homeward-bound carrier Saratoga, converted to a transport.”10 He was 25 years old, and ready to begin his career.

No suggestion exists that Angell had any ambition other than to be a writer. He and Evelyn “swiftly acquired New York jobs and friends, an apartment in the upper reaches of Riverside Drive, a two-tone Ford Tudor, a bulldog, and … a baby daughter…. The works.”11 He spent his first post-war year avidly contributing to whatever publication would accept his pieces. In 1947 Angell landed his first serious job, with Holiday magazine, an upscale new travel periodical. He would become senior editor, and remain there for nearly a decade.

The Holiday gig provided Angell with not just interesting work and a budding income, but the sort of experience that simply couldn’t be found elsewhere. In his autobiography Angell recounts a particular six-week 1949 business trip to Europe, crossing the Atlantic aboard the French liner De Grasse, in which he and Evelyn rubbed elbows with actor Alfonso Bedoya (who sneered “We don’t need no badges” in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre), with playwright Tennessee Williams, and with novelist Somerset Maugham (at his opulent Villa Mauresque estate in Cap Ferrat in southeastern France).12 Angell was doing just fine.

But in 1956 Angell would take employment with The New Yorker, the job he was perhaps destined to have, and the one he would hold for the rest of his life.

Angell was a perfect fit for The New Yorker, not just because of his boundless ability as a writer and editor, and, of course, his matchless pedigree, but for his breadth of interest and curiosity. As a writer, he contributed a variety of stories, casuals, “Notes and Comments” pieces, movie reviews, and for many years the magazine’s annual Christmas verse under the heading of, “Greetings, Friends!” Within the topic of sports alone, in addition to his baseball pieces, Angell wrote about tennis, hockey, football, rowing, and horse racing. As a fiction editor, among his stable of regular writers were John Updike, William Trevor, and Woody Allen.13

The idea of Angell chronicling baseball for the magazine was not his, but came from editor-in-chief William Shawn (the father of playwright and actor Wallace Shawn). As Angell explained, “Our magazine is in the enviable position of ‘covering’ only those things which appeal to specific writers and editors.”14 Shawn sent Angell to Florida in early 1962 with the task of delivering a piece about Spring Training, and the April 7, 1962, issue of The New Yorker included Angell’s “The Old Folks Behind Home,” a leisurely observation of exhibition games from the perspective of elderly retired fans.

This initial piece was well received, but there was no strategic plan for Angell to contribute baseball articles on a regular basis. “I just kept going,” Angell explained. “I had no idea it would go on this long…. I just went on from year to year because I always found something else I wanted to write about. It seemed to be a good fit.”15

Angell soon settled in to a pattern of contributing two or three baseball pieces a year. He deliberately made no attempt to formally “cover” the sport in the manner of The Sporting News or Sports Illustrated, but instead maintained the perspective of a fan. His vantage point was typically a seat in the grandstand rather than the press box, and he was as likely to focus on fellow spectators and the ballpark experience as the athletes and action on the field. A good example is his consideration of attending a New York Mets game at the Polo Grounds in the summer of 1963, in that antique ballpark’s final season:

The dirt, the noise, the chatter, the bursting life of the Met grandstands are as rich and deplorable and heart-warming as Rivington Street. The Polo Grounds, which is in the last few months of its disreputable life, is a vast assemblage of front stoops and rusty fire escapes. On a hot summer evening, everyone around here is touching someone else; there are no strangers, no one is private. The air is alive with shouts, gossip, flying rubbish.

Old-timers know and love every corner of the crazy, crowded, proud old neighborhood. The last-row walkup flats in the outer-most lower grandstands, where one must peer through girders and pigeon nests for a glimpse of green; the little protruding step at the foot of each aisle in the upper deck that trips up the unwary beer-balancer on his way back to his seat; the outfield bullpens, each with its slanting shanty roof, beneath which the relief pitchers sit motionless, with their arms folded and their legs extended; and the good box seats, just on the curve of the upper deck in short right and short left: front windows on the street, where one can watch the arching fall of a weak fly ball and know in advance, like one who sees a street accident in the making, that it will collide with that ridiculous, dangerous upper tier for another home run.

Next year, or perhaps late this summer, all this will vanish. The Mets are moving up in the world, heading toward the suburbs. Their new home, Shea Stadium, in Flushing Meadow Park, will be cleaner and airier: a better place for the children.

Most of the people there will travel by car rather than by subway; the commute will be long, but the residents will be more respectable. There will be broad ramps, no crowding, more privacy. All the accommodations will be desirable: close to the shopping centers, and set in perfect, identical curves, with equally good views of the neat lawns. Indeed, a man who leaves his place will have to make an effort to remember exactly where it is, so he won’t get mixed up on his way back and forget where he lives.

It will be several years, probably, before the members of the family, older and heavier and at last sure of their place in the world, indulge themselves in some moments of foolish reminiscence: “Funny, I was thinking of the old place today. Remember how jammed we used to be back there? Remember how hot and noisy it was? I wouldn’t move back there for anything, and anyway it’s all torn down now, but, you know, we sure were happy in those days.”16

Angell’s baseball pieces in The New Yorker were a hit, and they became the channel through which he gained fame. In 1972, the first ten years of these articles were collected and published as The Summer Game. The book was critically acclaimed and an immediate bestseller. The notice in The New York Times Book Review could hardly be more laudatory: “Page for page, The Summer Game contains not only the classiest but also the most resourceful baseball writing I have ever read.”17

As the decades flowed, so did Angell’s quietly perceptive and finely wrought baseball impressions in The New Yorker. They continued to be collected and retrospectively presented in book form, to sustained market appetite as well as critical praise: Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (1977), Late Innings: A Baseball Companion (1982), Season Ticket: A Baseball Companion (1988), Once More Around the Park: A Baseball Reader (1991), and finally a “greatest hits” version, Game Time: A Baseball Companion (2003).

In a break from the formula, at the age of 80 Angell wrote A Pitcher’s Story, a book-length study of star pitcher David Cone that is also a thorough examination of the art and challenge of pitching in general.

Altogether Angell’s body of work is quite unlike any other. As Steven P. Gietschier of The Sporting News put it:

Angell is that rare baseball fan who has been able to make a career out of his pleasure. Without abandoning the wonder, the affection, and the detachment that characterize a fan’s kinship to baseball, Angell has fashioned a string of remarkable essays that explore the sport in consistently new ways. His work possesses a grace and elegance previously unknown in sports journalism and has earned a lasting place in the literature spawned by the national pastime.18

Angell was prominently featured among the sage on-camera interviewees in Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary film Baseball. In 2011 Angell was named as the inaugural recipient of the PEN/ESPN Lifetime Achievement Award for Literary Sports Writing, and in 2013 he received the J.G. Taylor Spink Award from the Baseball Writers Association of America, the baseball writers’ equivalent of the Hall of Fame. He is the first non-newspaper writer, and the first non-Baseball Writers Association of America member, to win the Spink Award, which is voted upon by the BBWAA membership.

In February of 2014, The New Yorker published “This Old Man,” Angell’s pondering on the implications of his being still alive at 93. With neither self-pity nor boastfulness—instead, with wry humor—Angell opens with a presentation of a long list of old-guy ailments (arthritis, macular degeneration, shingles, a heart condition, knee trouble, a herniated disk), before assessing:

I’ve endured a few knocks but missed worse. I know how lucky I am, and secretly tap wood, greet the day, and grab a sneaky pleasure from my survival at long odds. The pains and insults are bearable. My conversation may be full of holes and pauses, but I’ve learned to dispatch a private Apache scout ahead into the next sentence, the one coming up, to see if there are any vacant names or verbs in the landscape up there. If he sends back a warning, I’ll pause meaningfully, duh, until something else comes to mind.

… Decline and disaster impend, but my thoughts don’t linger there. It shouldn’t surprise me if at this time next week I’m surrounded by family, gathered on short notice—they’re sad and shocked but also a little pissed off to be here—to help decide, after what’s happened, what’s to be done with me now. It must be this hovering knowledge, that two-ton safe swaying on a frayed rope just over my head, that makes everyone so glad to see me again. “How great you’re looking! Wow, tell me your secret!” they kindly cry when they happen upon me crossing the street or exiting a dinghy or departing an X-ray room, when the little balloon over their heads reads, “Holy shit—he’s still vertical!”19

Though the mood of the piece retains this spunky attitude, Angell devotes much of it to the subject of personal loss, that booby prize awarded to those who outlive their peers: “the downside of great age is the room it provides for rotten news”.20 Like that of his parents, Angell’s first marriage ended in divorce, but a half-century following the breakup Angell here still mentions Evelyn (who passed away long ago), and with warmth. He writes at vivid length about his second wife, Carol Rogge (whom Angell married in 1963; together they had a son, John Henry), who passed away in 2012 at the age of 73, and most achingly he writes about his late daughter Callie, who committed suicide in 2010 at the age of 62.

With the authentic wisdom available only to the very, very old, what Angell writes about most in “This Old Man” is coping: getting by, if not overcoming, difficulty and pain and heartbreak and sorrow. Being Angell, he devotes attention to the many things he loves, including dogs and family and friends and reading and Scotch whisky and (yes) baseball and music and movies and jokes. He also devotes cheerful attention to the subject of sex, and in this undertaking his familiar delicate touch has never been more finely exhibited.

The article concludes, indeed, with an affirmation of the ever-invigorating power of the matters of the heart:

Getting old is the second-biggest surprise of my life, but the first, by a mile, is our unceasing need for deep attachment and intimate love. We oldies yearn daily and hourly for conversation and a renewed domesticity, for company at the movies or while visiting a museum, for someone close by in the car when coming home at night.

… I believe that everyone in the world wants to be with someone else tonight, together in the dark, with the sweet warmth of a hip or a foot or a bare expanse of shoulder within reach. Those of us who have lost that, whatever our age, never lose the longing: just look at our faces. If it returns, we seize upon it avidly, stunned and altered again.21

Well into his tenth decade, Roger Angell’s writing continues with burningly profound candor. His latest offering (last? we’ll see if that safe drops) is just the latest in a very, very long line of essays that set a towering standard, whether the subject is the sport we love, or the people we love most deeply.

Published May 15, 2014

Postscript

Roger Angell died at the age of 101 on May 20, 2022.

Notes

Walter Saunders Barnes Jr. was born on November 26, 1860, in Boston, the oldest child of Walter Sr. and Melissa (Aldrich) Barnes.1 Walter’s father, who owned a paper-box manufacturer, moved the family in 1863 to the town of Somerville, an early middle-class suburb north of Boston, where he and his wife raised four children.2 Initially, young Walter grew up in a house on Vernon Street in Somerville, but by 1880 his prosperous father had moved the family into a larger house at 140 Highland Avenue.3

Educated in the Somerville public schools, Barnes graduated from Somerville High School on July 1, 1879, one of 15 students in the college-preparatory course among a total of 34 graduating students.4 He attended Somerville High School for an extra, postgraduate year to prepare for the required entrance exam at Harvard College.5

Barnes was admitted to Harvard College, located in neighboring Cambridge, and graduated in June 1884.6 He played center field on an undistinguished freshman baseball team in the spring of 1881, going 0-for-4 in his team’s 15-2 loss in the annual Harvard-Yale freshman game.7 During his college years, he was a frequent spectator at the South End Grounds to watch the home games of the Boston team in the National League, a habit he once said began in 1871 when his father took him to ballgames in the early years of professional baseball in Boston.

Before becoming a newspaper reporter, Barnes worked five years as a traveling salesman for a book publisher.8 In 1889 he began working for the Boston Post newspaper, where he did general reporting, and in 1891 moved to the Boston Journal to be the night desk editor.9 In 1892 Barnes became the sports editor at the Journal, where, according to one contemporary observer, he transformed the department into “one recognized everywhere as authoritative, and highly prized for the fair and able manner in which all branches of sport are treated.”10

During his early years at the Boston Journal, Barnes had the good fortune to report the games of the Boston team that won the National League pennant four times between 1892 and 1898. He also served as official scorer at the team’s home games. Barnes was a no-nonsense reporter. His game accounts were said to be “the most detailed by any Boston reporter.”11 His writing style was characterized as being “an entertaining, yet conservative and original manner … not given to meteoric flights of speech.”12

Boston became a two-team city in 1901, with a team in the new American League in addition to the established National League team. With eight newspapers competing for reader attention in Boston, Barnes was considered one of the “Big Three” baseball writers in Boston, along with Jake Morse at the Herald and Tim Murnane at the Globe.13 Major-league baseball was now played in Boston nearly every day of the week for half the year (except Sunday, which was prohibited by law in Massachusetts), due to the interlocking nature of the two teams’ schedules.

In 1904 Barnes ran a subscription campaign in the Boston Journal to raise $300 for a trophy to honor Jimmy Collins, the third baseman (and fan favorite) of the Boston Americans, which won its second straight American League championship. In early October, Collins was presented with a silver loving cup that was inscribed: “This cup subscribed to through the Boston Journal is intended as an evidence of the admiration of the Boston public for a great third baseman, a great captain and a good fellow.”14

On August 16, 1905, Barnes, a 44-year-old bachelor, married Hulda Oliver, a 37-year-old nurse who worked at a Boston hospital.15 They remained married for 30 years and had no children. Barnes and his wife initially lived in Brookline, but gradually they moved out to the suburbs of Boston; by 1911 they lived in Wellesley and by 1917 they were in Natick, about 20 miles west of Boston.16 They resided in Natick for nearly two decades, until she died in 1935.17

After working for 15 years at the Boston Journal, Barnes moved to the Boston Herald in November of 1906 to be its sports editor.18 At the venerable Journal, things did not look rosy, business-wise; the paper would be put up for sale in 1911 and eventually merged into the Herald in 1917. The new editor of the Herald, William Haskell, was an old college chum of Barnes from their days at Harvard College in the Class of 1884. Haskell was both publisher and editor of the Herald, having become the newspaper’s majority owner soon after buying out his father’s minority ownership position in 1904.19

What seemed like a shrewd move for Barnes to advance his newspaper career quickly degenerated. In early 1907 Haskell fired Morse, the Herald’s veteran sportswriter. “After a connection of twenty-three years with the Herald, I naturally expected to die in the harness in that institution, but one can never tell,” Morse reported two decades later to his Harvard College classmates in the Class of 1881. “Changes in management bring about changes in personnel; so it was a case of pull up your stakes and go [at] it.”20 Morse’s misfortune at losing his job turned out to be fortuitous for baseball fans (and present-day historians), as Morse created Baseball Magazine, which debuted in May of 1908.

Barnes was a charter member of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, when it was organized in 1908, and held membership card number 1.21 He was the first president of the Boston chapter and an active supporter throughout his newspaper career.

As Barnes struggled to rebuild the Herald sports staff following the departure of Morse, the Herald lost money under the leadership of Haskell. In 1908 the Herald borrowed $1.7 million to keep the newspaper operating.22 Haskell soon reduced the price of the paper to one cent, trying to stimulate demand during the economic depression, and then suspended the paper’s evening edition to cut costs.23 In July of 1910 the Herald went into bankruptcy and in late October was sold to new owners.24

In September of 1910, Barnes found new employment in the midst of the Herald’s bankruptcy proceedings.25 He went to work at the Boston Globe, where William D. Sullivan, who was both city editor and sports editor, hired Barnes to be that newspaper’s fully dedicated sports editor.26 Barnes and Sullivan had grown up together in Somerville (in the same graduating class at Somerville High School) and both were alumni of Harvard College (Sullivan graduating a year ahead of Barnes).

“Sullivan relinquished the second title in 1910 because both the Globe and sports were booming. It was too much for one man to handle, even such a capable one as Sully,” the Boston Globe wrote in 1972 about how Barnes arrived at the Globe. “What he desperately needed was a built-in sports editor of experience to hand the sports department over to, and he wasn’t long in his search. Walter S. Barnes was at the Herald.”27

The Globe was the fourth Boston newspaper that Barnes worked for, following his stints at the Post, Journal, and Herald. The move to the Globe worked out much better than had his move to the Herald, as the Globe thrived under its ownership by the Taylor family. Barnes was sports editor at the Globe for 23 years until his retirement in 1933. Under the nom de plume of Sportsman, he wrote a regular column for the Globe entitled “Live Tips and Topics,” a collection of commentary on a variety of athletic events.

Boston newspapers had a voracious appetite for baseball coverage from 1912 to 1918, as the Red Sox (the renamed Americans) won four pennants in the American League while the Braves (the renamed Nationals) won the 1914 flag in the National League. One of the biggest challenges for Barnes was orchestrating the transition of baseball coverage from Tim Murnane, who had been the Globe’s baseball writer since 1889, to a younger writer. Barnes exercised grace and humanity in handling the Murnane transition.

In 1911 Murnane followed his usual schedule to cover the home games of the Red Sox and Braves, which alternated between the two teams given their interlocking schedules, with some discretion to cover road games when important (otherwise, the road games were reported by a correspondent in that city). When the Red Sox won the pennant in 1912, however, Murnane was often dispatched to cover their road games, requiring another writer to cover the Braves home games. After reporting on baseball for more than 20 years, the 60-year-old Murnane was getting weary of the grind.

For the 1913 season, Barnes split the baseball coverage by team, with Murnane covering the Red Sox and James O’Leary covering the Braves, so that each writer could cover both home and road games as needed. This arrangement lasted through the 1915 season. Barnes tapped Edward Martin to be the heir-apparent to Murnane, as the two men shared the Red Sox coverage during the 1916 season. When Murnane died in February of 1917, Martin assumed the mantle of Red Sox writer, while O’Leary continued as the Braves writer. The dual-beat system lasted for two years, until Martin unexpectedly died in the influenza epidemic in October of 1918.28

“When a close and valued associate passes away, words become so inadequate. Edward Martin was an exceptional man to work with,” Barnes wrote in a memorial to Martin. “In his brief career as a baseball writer he became widely and favorably known. He had an encyclopedic knowledge of players and their records and of games and leading incidents of them.”29

For the 1919 season, Barnes returned to the original concept of having one man cover all baseball in Boston, by tapping O’Leary to cover both teams. Given the lackluster play of both teams during the 1920s, O’Leary didn’t need to travel to many road games. As the ultimate successor to Murnane, O’Leary led the Globe’s baseball coverage for two decades.

During the 1920s Barnes slowly expanded beyond the Globe’s staple sports coverage of professional baseball and amateur college and high-school athletics. For the 1920 Olympic Games in Antwerp, Belgium, Barnes dispatched John Hallahan, the track specialist he had hired in 1914, to Europe to provide on-site coverage of this world sporting event. Hallahan also became the Globe’s specialist in professional ice hockey, when the Boston Bruins became the first American team in the National Hockey League during the 1924-25 season. Hallahan covered the Bruins’ run at the Stanley Cup in 1927 and their winning of the Cup in 1929.

The Globe had less enthusiasm for professional basketball and football as they emerged in the 1920s, given the strong support among the paper’s readers for the college game in these two sports. Barnes provided merely pro forma reports on the Boston Whirlwinds, which competed in the American Basketball League in the 1925-26 season, and the Boston Bulldogs, the local entry in the American Football League in 1926 and the National Football League in 1929.

Having O’Leary on the baseball beat became especially important in mid-decade when radio station WNAC began to regularly broadcast the home games of the Braves in 1926 and the Red Sox in 1927. Baseball reporting became a seven-days-a-week job in 1929 when Sunday baseball games became legal under Massachusetts law, causing O’Leary to be in the press box at Braves Field every Sunday during the baseball season (both teams played Sunday games there until 1932).

Barnes hired two young men who became lions of the Boston newspaper business. Dave Egan joined the Globe in 1926 and Victor Jones in 1928. Their hiring initiated an intramural contest to succeed the aging Barnes as sports editor.30 Barnes worked Egan into the baseball beat in 1932, during a particularly horrendous season when the Red Sox lost 111 games. However, when Egan was not promoted to sports editor when Barnes retired, he left the Globe to work at the Boston Record, where he infamously tormented Ted Williams with his stinging rebukes of the Red Sox star. Jones succeeded Barnes as sport editor in 1933.31 He later was promoted to various management positions focused on the entire newspaper, first as night editor, then managing editor, and last as executive editor.

When Barnes retired as sports editor in 1933, he assumed the title of sports editor emeritus and continued to write his “Live Tips and Topics” column during his retirement years.32 A favorite topic of his during the 1930s was the newly created Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. He devoted numerous columns to his thoughts about the ballplayers who should be enshrined there.

Barnes was one of a select group of veteran writers in 1936 who were entrusted with selecting the first group of nineteenth-century players to be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Barnes advocated for George Wright, Ross Barnes (no relation), and Cap Anson, and was likely the one writer who voted for long-forgotten Boston pitcher Tommy Bond in that year’s election.33 Although none of the candidates favored by Barnes received the required 75 percent vote in 1936, Wright and Anson were both enshrined within a few years.

An official Old-Timers Committee to select nineteenth-century honorees was established in 1939, consisting of Bob Quinn, president of the Boston Braves, and three others (two executives and one writer).34 Quinn later wrote that Barnes was supposed to be a member of the Old-Timers Committee, given his long history of spectatorship and reporting of nineteenth-century games.35 However, Barnes likely demurred given his fading health, so Sid Mercer, a New York sportswriter, was tapped for the committee instead of Barnes.

Walter S. Barnes Jr. died on February 13, 1940, in Brookline, Massachusetts, and is buried in the Barnes family plot at Woodlawn Cemetery in Wellesley.36

Upon his death, the Boston Globe printed numerous tributes to Barnes, a man universally acclaimed as possessing supreme integrity. The “Live Tips and Topics” column made one final appearance, written by the sports staff and filled with their sentiment: “a real gentleman in every sense of the word”; “reprimands always a gentle counsel”; “a nice man, never a harsh word for anyone”; “sunny disposition, always courteous, no shady stories or profanity.”37

“This world has produced no satisfactory substitute for character,” wrote Jones, who succeeded Barnes as sports editor. “A man who wrote sports had to know his business and be sure of his facts,” Jones wrote, so Barnes wrote with “an experienced, judicious fairness and impartiality,” not with “the apt adjective, flowery style, the phony drama” of sportswriting in the 1930s.38

“Mr. Barnes was one of the greatest gentlemen I have known,” wrote Egan, the man passed over for sports editor. “He stood for tolerance and kindness and fairness, and his sweet character has been reflected for more than a half century on the sports pages in Boston, chiefly in the Globe. He lived quietly and died quietly, but his influence will go on for years in the writing of the men he molded.”39

In 1946 Barnes was posthumously recognized by the Baseball Hall of Fame as one of the 39 nonplayers (including 12 writers) named to the Honor Rolls of Baseball.40

Acknowledgments

This biography was reviewed by Len Levin and fact-checked by Rod Nelson.

Notes

1 Birth records for Boston in 1860 in the Massachusetts State Archives (Volume 134, Page 100).

2 Federal census records for 1870 and 1880 for Walter S. Barnes Sr., Somerville, Middlesex County, Massachusetts.

3 Somerville Directory, 1871, 1874, 1879, 1881, and 1883. The house at 140 Highland Street still stands and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

4 Annual Report of the City of Somerville, 1879.

5 Annual Report of the City of Somerville, 1880.

6 “Harvard College Class of 1884 Secretary’s Report,” graduation, 1884.

7 “Yale Freshmen 15, Harvard Freshmen 2,” Boston Globe, May 22, 1881.

8 “Harvard College Class of 1884 Secretary’s Report,” third anniversary, 1887; Somerville Directory, 1889.

9 “Harvard College Class of 1884 Report of the Secretary,” twentieth anniversary, 1904.

10 George Tuohey, A History of the Boston Base Ball Club (Boston: M.F. Quinn, 1897), 234.

11 Glenn Stout, ed., Impossible Dreams: A Red Sox Collection (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 16.

12 Tuohey, A History of the Boston Base Ball Club, 233.

13 Donna Halper, “Following the Boston Americans in 1901,” New Century, New Team: The Boston Americans, edited by Bill Nowlin (Phoenix: SABR, 2013), 42.

14 Charlie Bevis, Jimmy Collins (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012), 135.

15 Marriage records for Boston in 1905 in the Massachusetts State Archives (Volume 557, Page 169); “Barnes – Oliver,” Boston Globe, August 17, 1905.

16 Brookline Directory, 1907; Wellesley Directory, 1911 and 1913; Natick Directory, 1917.

17 Federal census records for 1920 and 1930 for Walter S. Barnes, West Central Street, Natick, Middlesex County, Massachusetts; “Mrs. Hulda J. Barnes,” Boston Globe, September 23, 1935.

18 “Harvard College Class of 1884 Report of the Secretary,” twenty-fifth anniversary, 1909.

19 “Boston Herald’s Editor Retires,” New York Times, October 5, 1906; “Boston Herald Changes,” New York Times, April 26, 1904. Haskell became sole owner in 1908.

20 “Harvard College Class of 1881 Report of the Secretary,” fiftieth anniversary, 1931.

21 Paul Shannon, “W.S. Barnes, No. 1 Card-Holder in BBWA[A], 50 Years a Scribe,” The Sporting News, January 19, 1939.

22 “Boston Herald Sells Bonds,” New York Times, May 2, 1908.

23 “Herald Traveler Fifth to Fall in Boston Newspaper War,” Boston Globe, June 19, 1972.

24 “Receiver for Boston Herald,” New York Times, July 8, 1910; “Sale of Boston Herald,” New York Times, October 29, 1910.

25 Articles by Barnes first appeared in the Boston Globe in early October of 1910, with his first “Live Tips and Topics” column on October 3 and a bylined article, “Lynn’s Driving Club Is Thriving,” on October 9.

26 Jerry Nason, “The W.D. Sullivan Years, 1884-1910,” Boston Globe, March 13, 1972.

27 Jerry Nason, “The Barnes Years, 1910-1933,” Boston Globe, March 14, 1972.

28 “Pneumonia Claims Edward F. Martin,” Boston Globe, October 5, 1918.

29 Sportsman, “Live Tips and Topics,” Boston Globe, October 5, 1918.

30 Jerry Nason, “The Barnes Years: A Changing Time,” Boston Globe, March 15, 1972.

31 Jerry Nason, “The Victor O. Jones Years, ’34-‘41,” Boston Globe, March 16, 1972.

32 “Walter S. Barnes Jr.’s Funeral Will Be Today,” Boston Globe, February 15, 1940.

33 Walter Barnes, “Baseball Had Real Stars in Early Days,” Boston Globe, January 5, 1936.

34 Bill James, The Politics of Glory: How Baseball’s Hall of Fame Really Works (New York: Macmillan, 1994), 39.

35 “A Practical Plan for Hall of Fame,” The Sporting News, February 5, 1942.

36 “Sports Writer for 40 Years: Walter S. Barnes of Boston Globe Dead,” Boston Globe, February 14, 1940.

37 Sportsman, “Live Tips and Topics,” Boston Globe, February 14, 1940.

38 Victor Jones, “The Mold Is Broken; Only One Walter; Lost to Sports World,” Boston Globe, February 14, 1940.

39 “Tributes to Walter Barnes,” Boston Globe, February 14, 1940.

40 “Committee Names 11 More for Game’s Hall of Fame,” The Sporting News, May 2, 1946. The Honor Rolls of Baseball were discontinued at the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953.

Barros was born on November 14, 1945 in the provincial capital city of Santiago de Cuba, the second largest city in the nation. It is in the eastern province also called Santiago de Cuba, part of the province known as Oriente before 1976.

His father, a banker and a local radio announcer, and his mother, a hair stylist, were both educated through the Cuban system.

As a child, Sigfredo studied at the elementary school Escuela Activa in Santiago de Cuba and attended the Frank Pais Institute for high school. A good student, Sigfredo left his home province to attend the University of Physical Culture and Sports Science Manuel Fajardo in Havana. “Manuel Fajardo” is known internationally for providing sports education and training to teachers, coaches, and sports specialists in Third World nations.

Like most youngsters in Cuba, he remembers his father giving him a glove and ball when he was 4 or 5 years old. He also recalls his father taking him to a game at Estadio Guillermón Moncada in his home town of Santiago. The matchup was between Havana’s Almendares and the Elefantes de Cienfuegos. Sigfredo recalls seeing the great Cienfuegos pitcher Camilo Pascual and says that he “will never forget Pascual’s curveball.”

He also has been a lifelong New York Yankee fan, but, he says, his father never did like the Yankees. He was impressed with the history of the team. Mickey Mantle was his favorite player. Barros recalls that Mantle could run, field, and hit with tremendous power.

A friend from his hometown encouraged Sigfredo to consider journalism as a career. He was and is still an avid reader, a student of both news and sports, and these interests continue to serve him well in his work as a journalist.

Barros started working at the Granma newspaper in 1971. He started out covering a variety of sports for Granma including swimming, water polo, cycling, fencing, and rowing. It was not till later that he started covering Cuba’s favorite game – baseball. There is nothing equivalent to the BBWAA (Baseball Writers Association of America) in Cuba. For years, Barros had been the primary baseball writer at Granma, along with a shifting series of baseball writers at Juventud Republic.

His daily entry in Granma is essentially a recap of all eight games played in the Cuban National Series. The daily column includes the daily line scores. The newspaper costs one Cuban peso, or about five cents. Only one game is televised each night; he picks up the information about the games over the telephone.

He does write occasional essays, including a memorable and loving tribute to Conrado “Connie” Marrero on the occasions of his 100th birthday and his passing just before his 103rd birthday in April 2014.

As a journalist in socialist Cuba, he faces challenges unknown to his contemporary American counterparts. He has very limited access to the Internet. He works the phone for information. He does not own a car, so his visits to the ballparks are brief as he returns home in the early innings to meet his deadline for the morning paper.

Granma is the organ of the Communist Party of Cuba, so Barros must carefully consider what he can write. His journalistic style is a clear and simple narrative, but devoid of the commentary and analysis that one finds in the US media.

The passion that he has for baseball comes through in his conversations more than in print. He is an astute observer of the politics of Cuban baseball and often critical of decisions informed more by political interests than the need to field the best team to represent his country.

In 45 years, Sigfredo Barros has covered a lot of baseball. He regards Omar Linares, the legendary Cuban third-baseman, as the best player he has seen. He also liked Orestes “Minnie” Miñoso and the passion with which he played. He wonders why Miñoso, who died in 2015, has not made it into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Covering baseball has allowed him to travel outside the island, visiting countries including Japan, South Korea, Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, Holland, Spain, and Panama.

One of his favorite stories is about the first World Baseball Classic (2006), when Cuba made it to the finals against Japan. He shares that “it was a big surprise for everybody, because it was the first time since 1959 that Cuba played against stars in the big leagues. To beat the Dominican Republic, in the semifinals, against Bartolo Colón on the mound, and Papi Ortiz and Albert Pujols at the plate was really great.” His friend and Cubaball “jefe,” Kit Krieger, recalls visiting with “Siggy” at the Palacio O’Farrill hotel on the eve of his departure for Puerto Rico, where the first games were played. Everyone in Cuba was worried that the Cubans would not be competitive against Japan, the Dominican Republic, the U.S., and Venezuela, but Barros told Krieger that the team was a good one and had a chance to win the tournament.

Barros wants his readers to understand the game more deeply and he writes with that goal in mind. His challenge is to write honestly and impartially, not favoring one team. His readers will ask him “which is your team?” because he never writes about one team in particular. He writes about the 16 teams in the National Series. His favorite part of being a journalist is writing a story about the game or tournament, commenting on all that happened, good and bad. His least favorite stories are when he has to go to the airport to meet the team on its return to Cuba, because all the players and team are anxious to be at home, and nobody wants to talk.

One of his favorite players to interview is Yulieski Gourriel, National Team star infielder and widely considered the most talented player in Cuba. Yulieski, one of three sons of Lourdes Gourriel, a star in the Cuban National Series in 1980, played with his home province of Sancti Spiritus until moving to Havana’s Industriales team beginning in the 2013-14 season. Barros compliments him for being very polite and for “knowing how to talk with a journalist.”

Barros covered the historic visit of Cuban major-league players to Havana in December 2015. He relates that Jose Abreu told him, “I am still a Cuban farmer kid” and that it was great to be able to come home to visit. He also visited with Joe Torre, who told him that he was very happy to visit “the country of baseball.”

In Havana, the Parque Central hosts the Esquina Caliente (the “Hot Corner”), a local gathering spot for passionate fans who spend hours discussing baseball, both local and international. Barros is something of a local celebrity and “something like a rock star.”1 He often drops by to visit with La Peña de Parque Central (Havana’s society of baseball historians) only a few blocks from his modest apartment in Central Havana and talk about the current state of béisbol de Cuba.

For him, the current state of baseball in Cuba is uncertain. In 2015, over 100 players emigrated to the Dominican Republic, or the U.S., to play for more money. But that has led to the deterioration of the Cuban teams. He hopes that the “blockade will end, and that Cuban players can play in the big leagues, and then return to Cuba as well.” Barros would like baseball fans outside of Cuba to “know that baseball in Cuba is a sport, it is a religion, a problem of state.” He goes on to say, “We, the Cubans, talk in baseball terms: if you are ‘in 3 and 2’ that means you are in a difficult situation. If ‘she takes you out on the bases’ your wife has seen you with another woman. In Cuba, baseball has colored all aspects of life.”

Barros has two adult children, who are very proud of their father and his work as a journalist. His son Alejandro is a graduate in Language and English literature. His daughter Anelore is a lawyer, who studied international diplomacy and speaks Chinese. Ani spent two years studying and working in Beijing. Barros tells us that they both enjoy baseball and watch the games on television.

What would he do if he were not a sportswriter? Barros replied that he would be an engineer, as he loves to work with numbers and statistics.

He makes a fine sportswriter. You can find his stories on the Granma website.

He also appears as himself in Stealing Home: The Case of Contemporary Cuban Baseball, commonly known as Stealing Home, a 2001 PBS television documentary about Cuban baseball defectors directed by Robert Anderson Clift and Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky.

Last revised: February 23, 2016

Sources

Correspondence with Sigfredo Barros, March, 2015 through February 2016.

Correspondence with Kit Krieger, December 2015 through February 2016.

Havana Times.org

Peter Bjarkman, “Cuban baseball authorities are facing a most difficult situation”, Bjarkman’s Latino and Cuban League Baseball Page, MLB blogs, September 23, 2014.

Notes

Stanwood Fulton Baumgartner was born on December 14, 1894, in Houston, Texas.3 His father, Joseph, was of Louisiana stock; his mother, Jennie, came from Illinois, and Stan was their only child. Joseph sold woodenware for a living, and soon moved his young family to Chicago.

The youngster developed his pitching arm on a newspaper route, preferring to airmail papers to apartment balconies rather than trudge up flights of stairs.4 At Wendell Phillips High School, Stan starred as his team’s pitching ace. After graduating, he stayed on the South Side, enrolling at the University of Chicago. In 1912 Baumgartner pitched for the freshman nine in the spring, then joined Amos Alonzo Stagg’s elite football squad in the fall. In 1913 the “sensational southpaw” led Chicago to the ‘Big Nine’ baseball title, then was a “permanent fixture at right end” as the Maroons finished the football campaign undefeated.5

Scouts, including the Phillies’ “Cap” Neal, took notice of the 6-foot, 185 pound left-hander.6 In June 1914, Baumgartner signed with Philadelphia. “Rest assured we have him where he cannot be Federalized,” stated Phillies player-manager Red Dooin, reflecting the established major leagues’ desire to starve the upstart Federal League of promising recruits.7

On June 26, in Brooklyn, the newcomer debuted, facing three batters in relief. Eight appearances later, on September 10, he earned his first starting assignment, taking a loss against the Braves. Baumgartner finished the 1914 season with a 2-2 record (with an ERA of 3.28), over 15 games and 60 1/3 innings. Philadelphia drifted to sixth place, posting a 74-80 record. That fall, Baumgartner returned to the University of Chicago, where he was elected president of the senior class, to finish his studies.

Baumgartner planned to join the Phillies in June after graduation, but could not resist the allure of baseball, and reported to spring training in March. Pat Moran replaced Dooin as the Phillies’ manager that offseason. Philadelphia’s new leader relentlessly drilled his players on fundamentals, instituted an elaborate system of signs, and tutored pitchers at great length on situational decision-making.8 Baumgartner greatly admired Moran, later calling him “the smartest manager I ever played for—or observed in action.”9 The Phillies, rejuvenated by the change in culture and several key offseason deals, captured their first pennant with a 90-62 finish.

Moran leaned heavily on his front-line starters.10 Baumgartner was a project. He possessed an “underhand crossfire delivery,” whose fastballs swept in on right-handed batters as if coming from first base.11 Moran and catcher Bill Killefer worked with the youngster to develop a well-disguised curve ball.12 Game action remained limited. In his sophomore season, Baumgartner posted a 0-2 record (with an ERA of 2.42) over 16 games and 48 1/3 innings. Remarkably, but reflecting Moran’s cautious use of a secondary pitcher, Philadelphia lost each of the games Baumgartner appeared in.13 The Red Sox defeated the Phillies in the World Series that October. Baumgartner was eligible, but saw no action.

Baseball peace, and a larger talent pool, came that offseason. After spring training, the team optioned Baumgartner to Providence. He went 15-12 with the second-place Grays in 1916, before being recalled by the Phillies to pitch four innings in the season finale. By early 1917, it was increasingly apparent that Baumgartner “has not developed as rapidly as Moran had anticipated.”14

In September 1915, Baumgartner married Bernice Blackham, a Philadelphia native. Semipro baseball afforded him the opportunity to remain within the area, and earn at least as much as pitching in the minors. Whatever the motivation, in early 1917, with another season of minor-league service beckoning, Baumgartner signed with the Chester team of the prosperous Delaware County (PA) League. In 1918 Baumgartner pitched in the Bethlehem Steel League. The next year he divided time between two strong industrial teams: the Paterson (NJ) Silk Sox and the Parkesburg (PA) Iron Company’s squad. In 1920 Baumgartner returned to the Bethlehem Steel League.

By 1921, possibly as the best semipro opportunities were waning, Baumgartner sought reinstatement from Commissioner Landis so that he might rejoin the Phillies. On May 9, it was granted.15 The next afternoon, he started against the Cubs, taking the loss after being knocked out of the box in the fourth inning. For another eight weeks Baumgartner and the Phillies struggled together. Manager “Wild Bill” Donovan was fired in late July. His successor, Kaiser Wilhelm, promptly sent Baumgartner down to Kansas City. With the Phillies in 1921, Baumgartner compiled a 3-6 record (with an ERA of 7.02), over 22 games and 66 2/3 innings.

Baumgartner again made the Phillies’ staff out of spring training in 1922. He lasted through May. His Philadelphia record was 1-1 (with an ERA of 6.52) over only six games and 9 2/3 innings. This time, he was sent down to Toronto.

It was a traumatic comeback. The Phillies posted a 51-103 record in 1921, and a 57-96 mark in 1922. What action Baumgartner saw came mostly out of the bullpen. In Philadelphia, this meant the sparse territory between Baker Bowl’s third-base stands and its foul line.16 Malevolent Phillies fans chose Baumgartner as a target. “They used to start hollering at me as soon as I reached for a warm-up ball,” he recalled.17 “Though a big, husky chap he is of a sensitive turn,” a scribe wrote, “and the hooting did him an inestimable amount of harm.”18 In March 1923, Baumgartner was dealt to New Haven. “It probably marks his end as a major leaguer,” an observer noted, “even on paper.”19

Baumgartner was reunited with Donovan, who managed the New Haven squad. The former Detroit ace worked with his charge, ironing out mechanics in his delivery, and restoring his confidence.20 Baumgartner responded with a 21-10 campaign. That offseason he pitched his services to Connie Mack. The Athletics’ leader agreed to give Baumgartner another chance.21

Mack brought Baumgartner along slowly, and the newcomer pitched well in a handful of relief appearances. On May 30, 1924, the last-place Athletics visited New York for a doubleheader against the first-place Yankees. In the second game, Baumgartner relieved Eddie Rommel after six innings, with the Athletics trailing 4-1. Philadelphia rallied, and Baumgartner took a 5-4 lead into the bottom of the ninth. After retiring the first two batters, he yielded a single, a walk, then hit a batter to load the bases, bringing Babe Ruth to the plate. With 50,000 fans looking on, Baumgartner fanned him with three straight curve balls. “The memory of that one strikeout,” he stated years later, “overshadows all the heartaches, lean years, razzing by fans.”22

After this career moment, Baumgartner joined the starting rotation, and produced a career year. In 1924 he compiled a 13-6 record (with an ERA of 2.88, fourth-best in the AL), appearing in 36 games, and 181 innings. Thanks considerably to his contributions, the Athletics rebounded in the season’s second half to finish in fifth place with a 71-81 mark.

The Athletics were on the ascent, but as they returned to winning ways, Baumgartner’s professional pitching career faded. Philadelphia led the 1925 pennant race until a late-summer collapse, landing in second place with an 88-64 record. Baumgartner finished with a 6-3 mark (with an ERA of 3.57) over 37 games and 113 1/3 innings. But his best pitching occurred when the Mackmen played out the string.

Baumgartner started the third game of the 1926 season, but did not survive the third inning. He pitched unevenly over the next six weeks, and was released to Portland. Baumgartner pitched well for the Beavers. But in early 1927 he retired, turning instead to sports writing as a full-time career.

Since the early 1920s, Baumgartner had worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer during the offseason. Initially, it was the police beat, filing anonymous stories, and being paid per piece. In 1924, Gordon Mackay, the paper’s sports editor, recruited Baumgartner to join the sports desk. “He has made good on sheer merit,” the Inquirer’s James Isaminger reported later that year, “He is assigned to all branches of sport, and knows how to handle copy.”23

It was, Baumgartner recalled years later, “a $40-a-week job,” leading him across the gridirons, hardwood floors, squared circles, clay courts, green links, and frozen rinks of the Delaware Valley.24 During the Great Depression, he picked up additional income by refereeing wrestling matches. Baumgartner also frequently pitched for the famed semipro Brooklyn Bushwicks in these years, and faced Negro League stars such as Josh Gibson, Judy Johnson, and Satchel Paige.25

In the Inquirer baseball hierarchy, Isaminger was the senior writer and Baumgartner the junior scribe. In the Philadelphia baseball hierarchy, the Athletics trumped the Phillies, especially as Mack’s second dynasty took three successive pennants beginning in 1929. Isaminger covered the Athletics. Baumgartner emerged as the paper’s Phillies beat writer, a role he held throughout the 1930s.

Over the decade, the Phillies amassed a meager .381 winning percentage, and regularly finished at the bottom of the attendance standings. Until the middle of the 1938 campaign, when they became tenants of the Athletics’ Shibe Park, the team played at the dilapidated Baker Bowl. Allen Lewis, who followed Baumgartner in covering the Phillies for the Inquirer, recalled the conditions for the sportswriters: “The press box was actually part of the upper deck behind home plate. There was chicken wire on both sides.” Once, Chicago scribe Warren Brown whiled away the time by rolling a heavy pipe down the steps of the press section. Club president Gerald Nugent scampered upstairs to scold: “You fellows must remember that we have patrons and you’re annoying them. Patrons who paid to get in.” “What a story!” Brown exclaimed, “The Phillies have paying patrons!”26

Baumgartner’s early game coverage was sometimes labored, with muddled analogies and disjointed sentences. Yet, mostly when the sad-sack Phillies won, his touch could be light and effective. The first two paragraphs on the June 16, 1930, affair between the Pirates and Phillies:

It was just one of the usual midsummer nightmares at the Phillies’ ball park yesterday. For two hours and twenty-seven minutes twenty-five ball players banged and booted the ball all over the lot, committed mental blunders that would have shamed morons and otherwise entertained and bored some 3000 spectators.

The Phillies won of course, 18-14. It is getting to be a pleasing habit these days, and Chuck Klein maintained his sensational hitting streak of twenty-five consecutive games by spanking out a double to left field on his first trip to the rubber.27

As a former player, Baumgartner’s background made for greater insight, while the associated status undoubtedly provided a certain degree of access. He inherently respected those who played the game: “I don’t believe in pointing out the mistakes of players. I’d rather just say what happened and let the reader draw his own conclusion.”28 Baumgartner did not grandstand in print; his ‘editorial we’ was the voice of an inquisitive fan.

The Inquirer suffered from uninspired leadership in this era and, in the Philadelphia morning newspaper competition, trailed the Record in readership. Sweeping change, and a competitive drive for local supremacy, came in 1936 when Moses Annenberg purchased the newspaper. A year later, the new publisher recruited Perry Lewis from the sports desk to launch broadsides against the Athletics and the Phillies, both languishing in last place. Baumgartner steered clear of the controversy. The Inquirer soon overtook the Record in the circulation battle. The Athletics and Phillies remained hapless.29

In September 1940, Isaminger suffered a debilitating stroke and retired. For the next six years, mostly due to wartime constraints on travel, Baumgartner shared beat writing duties with Art Morrow, without either exclusively covering the Athletics or Phillies. In 1941 publisher J. G. Taylor Spink tapped Baumgartner to take over Isaminger’s weekly column on Philadelphia baseball in The Sporting News.

Robert Carpenter Sr. purchased the Phillies in 1943, and placed his son Robert Jr. in the presidency. Young Bob hired Herb Pennock as the general manager, and investments poured into the farm system. Fiery Ben Chapman was elevated to manage the team. In 1946 the Phillies finished in fifth place, their best showing in fourteen seasons. Attendance exploded three-fold. At the Inquirer, Walter Annenberg had succeeded his father as publisher. Baumgartner was presented with the option of taking over the primary coverage for either Philadelphia ball club. He chose the Phillies.30

By this point, Baumgartner was a family man. In 1938 he divorced Bernice, and soon thereafter married Rita Wasekanes. His second marriage produced three daughters: Brenda, Bonnie, and Judi. Phillies spring training became a Florida family vacation. The girls—and Rita’s kid brother Bill—often accompanied their father to the Shibe Park press box. A sense of kinship bonded the Philadelphia sports writing community as well. At one spring training, the Bulletin’s Frank Yeutter badly broke an ankle. Baumgartner and Lanse McCurley of the Daily News anonymously authored his stories as he recovered.31

In addition to his Inquirer writing, Baumgartner’s The Sporting News role expanded to the point where he sometimes contributed four pieces a week. In 1948 he directed his own televised newsreels from spring training.32 In 1953, with Frederick Lieb, he co-authored The Philadelphia Phillies, an entry in G. P. Putnam’s respected series of team histories. His fellow sportswriters appointed him to the BBWAA’s Board of Directors in 1949. A year later, with Happy Chandler’s tenure as baseball’s commissioner in peril, the Boston Globe’s Roger Birtwell proposed Baumgartner as a dark horse candidate “eminently fitted for the job.”33

The Sporting News was the setting for Baumgartner’s best work. In August 1945, he invited Chapman, on a Phillies off day, to take in a Yankees-Athletics match from the “six-story high” Shibe Park press box. Strategic points, large and small, flowed from the resulting story.34 In May 1947, Baumgartner interviewed Mel Ott and Schoolboy Rowe. The matter at hand: a recent controversy where the Giants skipper accused the cagey Phillies veteran of wetting a ball. A rollicking debate on wrong-doing followed, before ending with a wink. “’There is only way to stop it,’ said one Phil pitcher. ‘Make the spitball legal again.’ ‘Oh, that’s a dirty habit,’ said Rowe.”35

A June 1947 piece on the Phillies’ masterly bench jockeying did not delve into the treatment afforded Jackie Robinson as he broke the color barrier. Baumgartner nonetheless conveyed the nature of the psychological warfare the Philadelphians turned upon their foes.36 In September 1949, he interviewed the Brooklyn second baseman on base stealing. Baumgartner began on an intimate note. “Jackie Robinson reached down, picked up the stool, put it down in front of us and said, with a welcoming smile, ‘Have a seat.’” Background of Robinson’s recent electric play in Philadelphia, and a preview of the questions playing through Baumgartner’s mind, followed. Then, as “Robinson sat waiting patiently for us to begin,” the interview launched:

He grinned good-naturedly when we asked him if he had any ambition to equal the stolen base record of 96 in one season made by Cobb. He also smiled when we mentioned Jim Sheckard, who had pilfered 67 sacks when a member of the Dodgers in 1903, and Max Carey of the Pirates, who led the National League for ten years in stolen bases.

“I’m too old for that,” he said, and he patted his legs significantly. “There are only so many stolen bases in a man’s legs, just like so many pitches in an arm. Maybe if I had started,” and he let his voice fade off.

Maybe if he had been able to start four years earlier, he might have threatened records—but not now.37

Throughout the late 1940s, Baumgartner traced the development of a promising Phillies core: Granny Hamner, Andy Seminick, Del Ennis, Richie Ashburn, Willie Jones, Robin Roberts, and Curt Simmons. In July 1948, with the team failing to progress, Carpenter dismissed Chapman and promoted Eddie Sawyer from the farm system to take his place. The new manager, portrayed by Baumgartner as being equal parts calm and demanding, proved an ideal choice. In 1949 the youthful Phillies surfaced into the first division, with an 81-73 finish.

In 1950 the team finally rewarded their fans, including Baumgartner, who took to wearing a Phillies cap in the press box. The Whiz Kids built a commanding 7 1/2 game lead by mid-September, before frittering almost all of it away. In Brooklyn on October 1, Dick Sisler clinched the pennant with a tenth-inning three-run homer. Baumgartner conveyed the moment in the next day’s Inquirer:

Then Sisler strode to the plate. On four previous trips, Dick had fanned and pulled three straight singles through the infield to right. Newcombe got ahead of him this time with two consecutive strikes, then threw a ball outside. Sisler fouled the next toss back into the stands and the count was still 1-2.

On the next pitch, the southpaw-swinging Sisler swung with all he had. It was an outside fast ball, Dick’s favorite pitch. He didn’t pull the ball, he sliced it, and the pellet sailed toward left field. Cal Abrams circled toward the wall, going back as far as he could, and watched the ball fall into the stands some 350 feet from the plate.38

The Phillies hit only .203 in the World Series, and were swept by the Yankees. While sympathetic to Sawyer’s assessment that the Whiz Kids were in a batting slump, Baumgartner duly reported that Yankees pitchers had strategically fed the free-swinging Phillies a steady diet of rising fast balls.39 Still, optimism prevailed. With the exception of Simmons (military duty), the young squad remained intact. Six months later, Baumgartner predicted the Phillies would win the 1951 pennant by eight games.40

But the Philadelphia offense continued to sputter, no left-hander matched Simmons, and the team fell to a 73-81 mark in 1951. Baumgartner took considerable ribbing from his professional peers. The Phillies continued to drift early in the 1952 campaign, and Carpenter replaced Sawyer with Steve O’Neill. The team closed strong, and finished 9 1/2 games behind Brooklyn, in fourth place. But in 1953, the team could not build on such gains, and tied for third, 22 games behind the Dodgers.

Midway through the 1953 season, in an interview with Carpenter and O’Neill, the general manager greeted Baumgartner’s natural optimism with “a foreboding silence” before the skipper bluntly assessed the team’s shortcomings.41 But trades, front office moves, and another managerial change did not prevent the Phillies from sliding under .500 in 1954. That October, illustrating one element of the team’s failure to compete, Baumgartner reported that “the Phillies have made their first definite and determined steps to include top Negro players in their organization.”42

In December 1954, Baumgartner checked into the hospital, suffering from colitis, which proved to be colorectal cancer. A difficult surgery followed. Through much of the 1955 season he carried on, the journey to the press box increasingly arduous.43 On October 4, 1955, at Yankee Stadium, as the World Series concluded, press box loudspeakers informed his colleagues that he had passed away. Stan Baumgartner was survived by his father, wife Rita, and daughters Brenda, Bonnie, and Judi. He rests in Cheltenham, Pennsylvania’s Holy Sepulchre Cemetery.

Sources

The author is grateful to Brenda Baumgartner Kingham (Stan’s eldest daughter) and Tom Wasekanes (Stan’s nephew), for generously sharing their knowledge of Baumgartner’s life.

In addition to the sources noted in this biography, the author also accessed Baumgartner’s file from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and the following sites:

ancestry.com

chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/

fultonhistory.com/fulton.html

genealogybank.com

newspapers.com

Notes

While Bouton did not like the way the baseball business was run, he loved the game itself so much that he gave up a high-paying television career to return to the minors several years after his career had ended, and was still playing competitively when he was in his late 50s. A few years later his campaign to save a beloved old minor-league ballpark led him to help form the Vintage Base Ball Federation, bringing 19th century baseball rules, uniforms, and atmosphere to cities and town across the country.  Bouton’s detractors had called him a communist during his playing career, but in many ways he was actually a traditionalist, a man who fought on the side of baseball for five decades.

James Alan Bouton was born on March 8, 1939, in Newark, New Jersey. His father, George Hempstead Bouton, of French and English heritage, was attending night school at Columbia when Jim was born but later became a business executive. His mother, Trudy Vischer Bouton, was German and Dutch. Jim was the first of three sons, followed by Bob and Pete, and spent the first 15 years of his life in suburban New Jersey, in Rochelle Park and Ridgewood. He recalled spending much of his spare time trying to make money—delivering newspapers, collecting pop bottles and old newspapers, mowing lawns, and washing cars.[fn]Jim Bouton and Leonard Shecter (editor), I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally (William Morrow, 1971), 177-178.[/fn] The Bouton boys were New York Giants baseball fans and often went to the Polo Grounds to watch the team, seek out autographs, and try to retrieve baseballs during batting practice.

Bouton was not a big kid and not particularly athletic, but he possessed an extraordinary desire that would stick with him through his later baseball career. Sports did not come easily, but he worked harder than other people and found that he could compete. The challenge became greater when his father’s job took the family to Chicago Heights, Illinois, about 30 miles south of Chicago. His new high school, Bloom Township, was much larger, and he found he could make neither the football nor basketball team, and barely made the baseball team. In his sophomore year he was known as “Warmup” Bouton, because the coach would let him only warm up until the final game. He later had success both for the high-school team (pitching a no-hitter his senior season) and in American Legion ball. He threw a variety of pitches, including a knuckleball, but did not throw particularly hard.[fn]Bouton and Shecter, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, 179-186.[/fn]

He enrolled at Western Michigan University with the assurance that a good season for the freshman baseball team would earn him a scholarship for his sophomore year. He pitched well and got the scholarship, and then played in a Chicago amateur league during the summer of 1958. He pitched two great games in the league tournament, and suddenly professional scouts were coming around and asking him to work out. George Bouton wrote a letter to all 16 major-league teams telling them that his son was planning to sign a contract by Thanksgiving, advising them to get their bids in. The New York Yankees’ Art Stewart offered $30,000, and the Boutons signed in late summer.[fn]Jim Bouton, with Leonard Shecter (editor), Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues (World, 1970), 40-42.[/fn]

The 20-year-old Bouton split the 1959 season between two Class D clubs, the Auburn (New York) Yankees in the New York-Pennsylvania League, and Kearney (Nebraska) in the Nebraska State League. He did not pitch particularly well, a combined 3-8 with a 5.52 ERA in 22 games, but showed enough promise to get promoted to Greensboro, in the Class B Carolina League, for 1960. There, he finished 14-8 with a league-leading 2.74 ERA that season, and followed in 1961 with a 13-7 record and a 2.97 ERA for Amarillo in the Double-A Texas League. Both teams won their league’s pennants easily, and Bouton was one of the principal reasons.

Bouton went to spring training with the Yankees in 1962 with little expectation that he would make the team, but a string of good outings earned him a spot as the last man on the staff. Bouton had been given number 56 in spring training, a number indicative of someone not likely to make the team, but he wore this number for the rest of his career, as a reminder of how hard he’d had to work to make it. The Yankees that Bouton joined were a legendary bunch, led by Mickey Mantle, Whitey Ford, Yogi Berra, and Roger Maris, fresh off setting the single-season home run record the previous year.

Bouton pitched only once in April 1962, and got his first start in the Yankees 21st game, on May 6 against the Washington Senators at Yankee Stadium. On that day he allowed seven hits and seven walks, but held on for a complete-game 8-0 shutout. For the season, the 23-year-old Bouton pitched 36 times, including 16 starts, and finished 7-7 with a 3.99 ERA. The Yankees beat the Giants in the World Series, though Bouton did not pitch.

After serving a six-month hitch in the Army, Bouton broke through spectacularly in 1963, finishing 21-7 with a 2.53 ERA despite not joining the starting rotation until May 12. He ended up with 30 starts and 10 relief appearances. Bouton also pitched an inning in the All-Star Game, retiring Ken Boyer, Dick Groat, and Julian Javier in order. On September 13 his shutout over the Twins clinched the Yankees’ fourth straight pennant. He started the third game of the World Series in Los Angeles, but lost 1-0 to Don Drysdale, and the Yankees fell to the Dodgers in a four-game sweep.

Bouton had thrown a number of pitches in the minor leagues, including the knuckleball, but it was a conversation with Johnny Sain in 1961 that turned him into more of a traditional fastball-curveball pitcher. Bouton was a tremendous competitor throughout his career, famous for throwing so hard he often lost his cap after releasing the pitch. Asked about his competitiveness in 1965, he allowed, “I would smash into a second-baseman to break up a double play, or do anything I possibly could to win.”[fn]Max Nichols, “Harmon Killebrew and Jim Bouton: A Ballplayer’s Image,” Sport, July 1965, 31.[/fn] The sportswriter Maury Allen gave Bouton his enduring nickname of Bulldog.

By 1964 the Yankees had dominated baseball for 40 years, with a seemingly unending supply of new talent flowing into the system. Bouton was part of the latest wave of promising youngsters that included Joe Pepitone, Tom Tresh, Phil Linz, and Al Downing, portending many more World Series checks for Bouton. In the meantime, his life was progressing off the field. At Western Michigan he had met Bobbie Heister, whom he married in 1962. Their son Michael was born right after the 1963 World Series, and the family settled in suburban New Jersey not far from where Jim had lived as a boy. By the end of the decade they added Laurie and Kyong Jo, a boy they adopted from Korea who later took the name David.

Even before his stardom, Bouton drew quite a bit of attention in the baseball press. Partly this came about because Bouton liked to have fun, play practical jokes, and imitate characters like Crazy Guggenheim. Before his 1963 World Series start he got on the team bus with a phony newspaper he had had printed up, with a headline that blared, “Bouton Pitches Perfect Game; Fans 18 to Beat LA.” But what drew some of the reporters to him was something else—there was the sense that Bouton put baseball in perspective, and that there was more to him than just the day’s ballgame. After he lost the World Series game, he was emotional, but also recalled losing a big game in high school. “That game was as big to me then as the World Series. I cried after that one.”[fn]Leonard Shecter, “Jim Bouton—Everything in its Place”, Sport, March 1964, 71-73.[/fn]

There was a growing divide in the New York press at this time, between the old-school writers who believed their job was to present the players as heroes, and the new wave of journalists who were looking for a story, or some deeper understanding of what the players were thinking on and off the field. The Yankees players and management were used to being treated as royalty by the likes of Jimmy Cannon, and resented the young writers, whom Cannon derisively referred to as “chipmunks.” When Bouton joined the team he was warned to stay away from the press, but he soon found that he had a lot in common with the newer writers, men like Stan Isaacs, Vic Ziegel, and Steve Jacobson. For their part, the writers discovered that Bouton liked to paint, and to make jewelry, and to talk about more than just the day’s game. When asked his opinions about the Vietnam War, or about civil rights, Bouton would answer directly and honestly. Bouton was good copy, though becoming less popular with his teammates and management.

“After two or three years of playing with guys like Mantle and Maris,” Bouton later wrote, “I was no longer awed. I started to look at those guys as people and I didn’t like what I saw. They were fine as baseball heroes. As men they were not quite so successful. At the same time I guess I started to rub a lot of people the wrong way. Instead of being a funny rookie, I was a veteran wise guy. I reached the point where I would argue to support my opinion and that didn’t go down too well either.”[fn]Bouton and Shecter, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, 190.[/fn]

Before the 1964 season, Leonard Shecter, a writer for the New York Post and a friend of Bouton’s, wrote a glowing profile in Sport magazine. In summarizing Bouton’s hobbies and goofy personality, Shecter wrote, “All this is enough to have earned Bouton a reputation as a bit of an oddball. Of course he is not. He stands out because he is a decent young man in a game which does not recognize decency as valuable.” One can imagine what his teammates must have thought while reading the story. Shecter described Bouton as someone who, if things didn’t work out, would find another way to “make the world a better place.” But Bouton left no doubt where his heart lay. “Baseball is what I wanted,” he said.[fn]Shecter, “Jim Bouton—Everything in its Place.”[/fn]

Bouton also battled with the Yankees over his contract every year and, even worse, told the press the details of what he was asking for and what the Yankees were offering. Ralph Houk, who became the Yankees’ general manager after the 1963 season, asked Bouton why he was telling the writers what he was making. “If I don’t tell them, Ralph,” Bouton said, “maybe they’ll think I’m asking for ridiculous figures. I just want to let them know I’m being reasonable.”[fn]Bouton and Shecter, Ball Four, 7.[/fn] This angered Houk, but Bouton was proved right. When the writers discovered that the Yankees forced Bouton to accept just $18,500 for the 1964 season, most of them took the pitcher’s side.

In 1964 Bouton had another excellent year, finishing 18-13 with a 3.02 ERA, while leading the league with 37 starts. He started and won two World Series games, a 2-1 Game Three victory decided by a Mickey Mantle home run in the bottom of the ninth, and an 8-3 victory in Game Six. Over three World Series starts in his career, Bouton now had a 2-1 record with a 1.48 ERA. Despite Bouton’s victories, the Yankees lost to the St. Louis Cardinals four games to three, and the season would prove to be the end of the Yankees’ run of pennants, and the stardom of James Alan Bouton.

The pitcher showed up in 1965 with a sore bicep, but he and the Yankees decided he would just pitch through it. As it happened, his arm never really recovered. For the season he finished a dreadful 4-15 with a 4.82 ERA, while his team dropped all the way to sixth place, their first losing season since 1925. The next season was considerably better for Bouton, as his ERA dropped to 2.69, the best on the team among 100-inning pitchers, but the Yankees’ inept offense was the primary cause of Bouton’s 3-8 record and the team’s last-place finish. Now 27 years old and just two years removed from World Series stardom, his place was suddenly no longer secure on the major-league team.

Bouton made the Yankees in 1967 but a string of poor outings got him demoted to Syracuse, the Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate, in late May. He put up a 3.36 ERA in the minors, which earned him a 2-8 record in 15 starts. The demotion did help launch Bouton’s writing career, as he published an article for Sport on his life in the minor leagues. He spoke mainly of the difficult working conditions, but concluded, “The roughest part is having to admit I’m not good enough, and this is the biggest reason why I’ll be fighting to make it back to the big leagues.”[fn]Jim Bouton, “Returning to the Minors, Sport, April 1968, 30.[/fn] Bouton returned to the Yankees in August and pitched better, reducing his season ERA from 6.27 (at the time of his demotion) to 4.67 for the season.

He made the Yankees again in 1968, but after he posted a respectable 3.68 ERA in just 12 games, his contract was sold to the Seattle Pilots, a team that would not begin play until 1969. In the meantime he played the remainder of the 1968 season with the Triple-A Seattle Angels. Though he started poorly, late in the season he made the fateful decision to rely almost exclusively on his knuckleball and ran off a series of good starts. As the year ended he had hopes that he could make the Pilots’ staff the following spring. 

Making Bouton’s job a bit tougher was his continued willingness to speak up when he felt there was a worthy cause at stake. In early 1968 he signed a statement supporting an American boycott of the coming Mexico City Olympic Games if South Africa’s whites-only teams were allowed to participate in international competitions. The country had been barred by the Olympics beginning in 1964, but still took part in other events around the world. Bouton went to Mexico City to try to meet with representatives of the US Olympic Committee about the issue, but was rebuffed.  He wrote about the cause and his ordeal in an article for Sport the next winter.[fn]Jim Bouton, “A Mission in Mexico City,” Sport, August 1969.[/fn]

In the meantime he had begun taking notes on what was to become his historic book. In 1969 he spent most of the season with the new Seattle Pilots, with a brief demotion to Vancouver and a late-season trade to the Houston Astros. Overall he pitched in 80 games, almost all of them in relief, and finished the season in a National League pennant race. It was easily his best season since 1964, and at 30 years old he had reason for optimism that he had resurrected his career, albeit in a lesser nonstarring role for the Houston Astros.

More importantly for his place in history, Bouton took notes and spoke into a tape recorder almost every day all season and sent the tapes to Shecter, who worked with him to turn the material into a book. After a few rejections, World published Ball Four—My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues, in the spring of 1970.

Other than a few roommates, few people knew that Bouton was working on a book. The first excerpts were published by Look magazine in May 1970 and caused a firestorm within the game. Former and current teammates, other players and baseball writers around the major leagues, and baseball management were outraged at Bouton’s stories of ballplayers’ drug use and sexual hijinks. Bouton was hauled before Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who publicly admonished the pitcher. Bouton later credited Kuhn for helping book sales. 

On the bright side, once the book was released on June 21 it received mainly glowing reviews from the respected book critics and journalists, who looked past the titillating passages to see the struggles and joys Bouton endured while trying to hang on in the big leagues with an expansion team. (For a more detailed look at the book and its response, read the accompanying article.)

Although Bouton began the 1970 season in the Astros’ rotation, he did not pitch well at the start of the season or after. By the time the book came out, his ERA was over 6.00, and the anger over the book likely did not help. In late July Bouton (4-6, 5.40) was demoted to Oklahoma City, where he was bombed in two straight starts. After the second outing, Bouton decided to retire from baseball, beaten down by his poor pitching and the continued fallout from Ball Four. In the coming decades, Bouton retained some friendships with his former teammates, but the baseball establishment, especially the New York Yankees for whom he had starred, continued to shun him.

Bouton’s first post-baseball career was on television, working as a sportscaster in New York City. His penchant for doing things his own way continued in his new profession, as he focused less on the high-profile professional teams and more on girls high-school basketball teams or weightlifting clubs. His reportage also led him to participate in roller derby matches and rodeo events, to bring his audience closer to the action. Bouton’s broadcasts were popular with the public, though the local professional teams were unhappy that he had no interest in simply promoting their businesses as television had been doing for years. In 1971 he put out a second book, I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally, about the reaction to Ball Four, his retirement from the game, and his early days as a sports reporter.

In 1973 Bouton landed a part in his one and only movie, playing the bad guy Terry Lennox in Robert Altman’s cult classic The Long Goodbye, which also starred Elliott Gould. In 1976 CBS aired five episodes of a television version of Ball Four. Bouton was one of the creators and primary writers for the show and played the main character. The critics blasted the show and the audience stayed away, leading to its quick cancellation.

Meanwhile Bouton continued to play baseball in various adult leagues in suburban New Jersey, still loving the competition and the game. In 1975 he spent a few weeks with the Single-A Portland (Oregon) Mavericks (Northwest League), pitching five games and putting up a 4-1 record and a 2.20 ERA. Two years later he decided to put his lucrative television career on hold and get back to baseball full time. He began the year with Knoxville, the White Sox’ Double-A affiliate in the Southern League, for whom he went 0-6 before drawing his release. From there he traveled to Durango to pitch in the Mexican League, where he finished 2-5. Finally he landed back with the Portland Mavericks, and again found success, with a 5-1 record. Still, it was the lowest level in the minor leagues and Bouton was now 38 years old.

He persevered. He met Ted Turner, the young maverick owner of the Atlanta Braves, who promised him another shot. After Bouton pitched well in the spring, and then beat the Braves in an exhibition game in May, Turner gave him a job with Atlanta’s Southern League affiliate in Savannah, where he found his knuckleball again. In 21 games, all starts, Bouton finished 11-9 with a 2.82 ERA, and Savannah won the league title. Miraculously he was called up to the Braves in September, more than eight years after his retirement.

The 1978 Braves were a bad team going nowhere, but Bouton was facing big-league hitters again, including the Dodgers, Giants, and Reds, who were fighting for the division title. He started five games, and pitched well in three of them. He beat the Giants 4-1 on September 14, his first major-league victory in eight years. After a 2-1 loss to the Reds, their manager Sparky Anderson allowed, “We didn’t even hit the ball hard off of him, and got two runs we shouldn’t have gotten.”[fn]Jim Bouton, Ball Four Plus Ball Five, 1981.[/fn] Bouton finished 1-3 with a 4.91 ERA in his three weeks back at the top. After the season he retired again, saying that he had achieved his goal and had nothing left to prove to himself.

Bouton’s life off the field was changing dramatically as well. His marriage with Bobbie, whom readers had come to know so well in his books, became rocky after his first retirement and ended in the late 1970s. Their three children remained close with both parents. He soon met and married Paula Kurman, an academic and writer, and the two blended their families (Paula had two teenage children of her own) and their professional lives.

Bouton remained in the public eye, speaking on college campuses all over the country about his big-league career and famous book. He and Rob Nelson, a teammate in the late 1970s with the Portland Mavericks, developed a product called Big League Chew, shredded bubble gum designed to look like chewing tobacco, a popular vice among ballplayers. They sold the idea to Wrigley, and 30 years later the gum was still selling well. Bouton invented and sold a few other ideas, including personalized baseball cards for fans. 

He continued to write occasional stories for newspapers and magazines, and updated his best-selling book in 1981, 1990, and again in 2000. In 1994 he teamed up with Eliot Asinof on Strike Zone, a novel about baseball that received positive reviews.

Bouton suffered a tragedy in 1997 when his beloved daughter Laurie was killed in an automobile accident. The devastated Bouton retreated into depression, an ordeal he describes fully in an epilogue to the 2000 edition of Ball Four.[fn]Jim Bouton, with Leonard Shecter (editor), Ball Four: My Life and Hard Times Throwing the Knuckleball in the Big Leagues, revised (Bulldog Publishing, 2000).[/fn] A year later his oldest son, Michael, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times, telling of his father’s suffering and asking that the Yankees forgive Bouton for his book, and invite him the next month to Old Timers Day, an annual event that had long shunned him. The Yankees did invite Bouton, leading to an emotional reunion with his fans, his old ballpark, and many of his teammates. He faced just one batter, but to the delight of the crowd got his cap to fall off on his first pitch.

In 2003 Bouton got involved in a fight to save baseball in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a town whose beloved Wahconah Park, an old WPA-era ballpark, had been deemed inadequate by baseball’s minor leagues. The politicians in Pittsfield backed the construction of a taxpayer-funded stadium, built on (Bouton helped discover) polluted land owned by General Electric, who were eager to sell the land to the city. Bouton’s campaign helped saved Wahconah and defeat the proposed ballpark, but the city did lose minor-league baseball until 2010, when a team from the independent Canadian-American League moved into Wahconah. Bouton told the frustrating tale of his ordeal in the 2003 book Foul Ball (Bulldog Publishing), which he substantially updated in 2005 (Lyons Press).

Bouton never fades too far from the public eye. Anytime there is an anniversary for Ball Four, or some organization comes out with a list of great sports books (Ball Four always near the top), Bouton is called on to speak about it again, and he tells many of the same stories. Among many honors, his book was named one of the Books of the Century by the New York Public Library, the only sports book on their list. The critics have largely melted away, and the baseball writers of today not only read his book as a child, but might have become journalists because of his book. The unfair labor conditions Bouton wrote about are relics of the past, and he played no small role in turning the public in favor of the players in the 1970s.

In 2010 Bouton and his wife, Paula, were still living in their home in the Berkshires, where Bouton kept occupied by building stone walls. In September 2010 he attended a 40th-anniversary celebration of his classic book in Burbank, California, leading to another round of national media interviews. Among other things, the world learned that Bouton was working on writing a theatrical musical version of Ball Four. The famous last sentence of Bouton’s book (“You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time”) relates to how an aging journeyman pitcher loved the game and could not give it up. Forty years on, baseball fans showed no signs of setting aside their appreciation for his master work.

Postscript

Bouton died at the age of 80 on July 10, 2019, at home with his wife, Paula Kurman, after battling a brain disease linked to dementia for several years.

• Related link: Listen to highlights from Jim Bouton: A Life in Baseball panel at the 2017 SABR convention in New York City
  

Bob Broeg (rhymes with “egg”) was a titan of sports writing and knowledge in St. Louis for six decades. He was a local boy through and through, growing up in south city, attending the University of Missouri, and working in St. Louis (aside from a very brief time early in his career in Boston), from 1946 until his death. He held his dream job, St. Louis Cardinals beat writer, at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, before being promoted to sports editor, and then to assistant to the publisher. Even into his so-called retirement, he continued to write a Sunday column and also special columns whenever the mood struck or events warranted. He hosted a KMOX radio show with friend and rival columnist Bob Burnes, where he opined about sports for years. He lent his name to the St. Louis SABR chapter and regularly attended the Bob Broeg Chapter monthly meetings. He was an author of many books, including one on his favorite team, the Gas House Gang. Most importantly, he was highly respected by so many in the St. Louis area, both the people he covered and his many readers and listeners.

Robert William Patrick Broeg was born on March 18, 1918, to Robert Michel Broeg, a bakery deliveryman, and Alice (Wiley) Broeg. He tells the story in his inimitable style, “So in the afternoon in the kitchen at Virginia and Pulaski in South St. Louis, Madame Mal Practice used her forceps like ice tongs, grabbing me fore and aft, rather than left and right. One tong scarred my left eye, permanently blurring my vision. No corneal transplants back then. The other tong dug into the back of my cranium. So, yeah, I had a hole in my head from day one.”1 His father got another doctor to come by to mend the baby’s wounds. In 1923, little brother Frederick Charles Broeg joined the clan.

Even with a bad left eye, Broeg had an early inclination toward reading and writing. His parents bought all four St. Louis papers every day (grand total — eight cents). He read them all but his favorite paper was the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, at least that is what he insisted after being a Post-Dispatch employee for five decades. He particularly liked the sports pages, baseball and boxing being his main interests, just as they were the major sporting interests in the country at the time. He also devoured the ‘Baseball Joe’ series of books about fictional baseball titan Joe Matson. He received the first in the series at age nine from his uncle while recuperating in the hospital from appendicitis. After that, he asked for, and received, additional books in the series for birthdays and Christmases.2

May 30, 1927, was a special day for nine-year-old Broeg. His uncle Will was tasked with bringing him to the ballpark for a Memorial Day doubleheader. Sitting in the right field bleachers, his most vivid memories of the Cardinal sweep were the sights and sounds of the ball hitting the bat and the smells of popcorn and peanuts. He also remembered Billy Southworth, future St. Louis pennant-winning manager, patrolling right field. It would be the first of many games for Broeg.3

Even though Broeg didn’t remember him from his first game, his favorite player growing up was “The Fordham Flash” Frankie Frisch. He tried to imitate his hitting and fielding style, including learning to switch hit. He was right-handed, so hitting right with a bad left eye probably was good incentive to bat from the left side. In later years, Broeg was lucky enough to become friends with Frisch, including penning a book titled, “The Pilot Light and the Gas House Gang,” featuring Frisch prominently.

Broeg attended Mt. Pleasant grade school. The historic building is still in existence today, no longer a school, but an apartment building. During the summers he attended dime admission movies three days a week, and played baseball, basketball, and soccer whenever he could. His protective parents forbade him from playing football after they found out he had practiced with the school team. His father wasn’t wild about him playing soccer either, but Broeg played organized soccer for three years before dad said no more. He was modest about his playing ability, writing in his autobiography, “Over the years I got to play with some pretty good baseball and basketball teams, if only because I was smart enough to organize more talented guys to play on teams I managed. Naturally, I reserved a starter’s role for myself.”4 As a teenager, he attended an open Cardinals workout at Sportsman’s Park, not because he thought he could play professional baseball but because he wanted to meet Frankie Frisch. Instead, the Cardinals’ Cuban coach Mike Gonzalez ran the workout. After the tryout, Gonzalez assessed Broeg in his heavily accented English, “You fiel’ hokay, boy, but you throw like old womang!”5

After he realized he would never be a professional baseball player, becoming a sportswriter was Broeg’s focus. His fourth grade teacher saw his interest in reading and writing and arranged a meeting with Post-Dispatch baseball writer J. Roy Stockton, Broeg’s favorite columnist. He was impressed by both Stockton and the Post-Dispatch operations.

Broeg’s favorite season from his childhood was 1930. His beloved Cardinals won 22 of their final 26 games to take the pennant. He loved the big offense era and delighted in Jim Bottomley and Frankie Frisch’s exploits, along with the bench players on the team. He also remembered attending the last game of the year, after the Cardinals clinched, witnessing the major league debut of Cardinal legend Dizzy Dean, who pitched a three-hit, 3-1 complete game victory over the Pirates. A week later he attended his first World Series game, witnessing Jimmie Foxx bury the Cardinals with a home run in the ninth inning off a Burleigh Grimes slow curve. Broeg remembered and told stories like this for the rest of his life.

Broeg went to high school at Cleveland High, which is now known as Cleveland Junior Naval Academy. The historic building he attended school in sits silently in his old neighborhood, waiting for redevelopment. He was president of his senior class and the baseball team manager, finagling his way onto the baseball team and playing a few times in his senior year, garnering a few base hits and a game-ending catch.

During the summers, Broeg and his friends played baseball every day of the week (except Sunday) on the Cleveland High field. Typically they’d work odd jobs in the morning to earn enough money to buy used baseballs from the Cardinals and the Browns, sold at the princely rate of three scuffed balls for a buck. On Saturdays, some young adults would join in and they’d play triple headers. Sundays were reserved for league games while wearing real uniforms at other locations in the city.

In high school Broeg was developing his comma-rich, descriptive writing style, writing regularly for the school newspaper and penning the baseball team season summary in the 1936 yearbook. One paragraph reads: “Spectators almost witnessed a rarity of rarities in the season finale — a no-hit, no-run game; but, alas, and alack, Bob Gerst, Beaumont’s star chucker, failed on only three occasions to keep Cleveland hitless. John Lamping, Bob Broeg, and Norv Bleitz were able to secure one base knocks off the Beaumont north-paw who pitched a nifty ball game, while his team mates were raising riot with the offerings of the South Siders’ pitchers.”6 During his junior year, he wrote a story about Branch Rickey, which included an opportunity to interview the great man. Rickey was impressed by the story and promised Broeg a job with the Cardinals the summer of 1936 before he went off to college.

Broeg’s father, who started working for a living after dropping out of grade school, did not insist that his sons work. His reasoning was that once they started working they’d never stop so they should enjoy their childhood. Broeg didn’t start working regularly until after he graduated high school in December 1935. He helped the Post-Dispatch prep sports editor cover high school events. After those temporary assignments went well, he started covering Public High School League triple header baseball games on Saturdays. He’d cover the games, then go down to the Post-Dispatch and file the stories. That work netted him $7.50 a week. He also wrote a column for a South St. Louis free delivery weekly newspaper, getting 10 cents a column inch. Broeg never struggled coming up with enough words to fill a full column and take home two dollars.

In April 1936, he showed up at the Cardinals’ offices and met traveling secretary Clarence Lloyd. Lloyd didn’t know what to do with Broeg, but eventually made him a ticket taker. The best part of this job for Broeg was that when the fifth inning ended, the ticket takers were freed up to watch the rest of the game. And sometimes, particularly during weekday games, not all ticket takers were needed, so Broeg could watch the whole game free. After high school closed for the summer, he filled his evenings by working as the official scorer and public address announcer at the St. Louis Softball Park. He took home one dollar a night for two evening games.

Broeg started attending the University of Missouri Journalism School in the fall of 1936. He joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, largely because, by washing dishes after meals, his monthly house bill was halved to $27.50; tuition for the semester was $30. Broeg’s total spending allowance, based on what his parents could afford, was $35 a month, so he was just barely able to squeeze by, often subsisting on care packages from mom.

While at Missouri, Broeg worked for the student newspaper (of course). Foreshadowing his own newspaper career, he wrote a weekly column. He also got a job in the university public relations department. This helped cement his lifelong love of Ole’ Mizzou and the football program. The legendary football coach, Don Faurot, for whom the Missouri football field in now named, started coaching Missouri one year before Broeg enrolled and pulled the football program out of the doldrums. Broeg met J. Roy Stockton again when the newspaperman came to town to cover a Washington University-Missouri football game. He remembered Broeg from their earlier meeting and told him to send some examples of his writing. From that point forward, Broeg lobbied Stockton for a job with the Post-Dispatch.

Summer work in 1937 was as a ticket taker for the Cardinals again. But in the depression in 1938, Broeg could only manage some umpiring in local leagues. He took a college course and was still able to continue with Missouri in the fall. In the summer of 1939, The Sporting News called. They offered him a job at $12.50 a week which he gratefully accepted. But when the Cardinals’ publicity department offered him $20, he took that job on the condition that the Cardinals clear it with The Sporting News. They didn’t, and editor J.G. Taylor Spink was not happy. Broeg wrote him an apology; Spink wrote him a brief reply, “My dear Bob: As you get older, you’ll realize you’ve got to consider the feelings of others.”7 It was the right decision for young Broeg. Not only did he make more money, he also worked with another new employee, and a person he would end up covering in the future, a young man named Bing Devine, future general manager of the Cardinals.

When Broeg got back to the University of Missouri, he accepted a job with the Associated Press in the Columbia office. He was able to work for them and finish his degree. He also met Dorothy Carr, his future wife. After his Christmas, 1940 graduation, he inquired, but the Post-Dispatch had no position for him. So he continued working for the Associated Press in the Jefferson City office on a temporary assignment on the state capital press team. His main job was to send stories out via the punch machine. He also got some experience editing reports sent to small newspapers. After several months, the AP put his name on a list of ‘unassigned’ employees. The office in Boston picked him up. He said goodbye to his girlfriend and family and moved to the East in late summer of 1941.

Broeg was assigned as the ‘night side rewrite man’ in the Boston AP office. His shift from 5 PM to 2 AM left him days available to go to ball games. Boston, like St. Louis, had baseball teams in both leagues, so he had plenty of opportunities to go to games. The Boston Braves were run by Bob Quinn, who had headed the St. Louis Browns back in the 1920s and were managed by Kansas City native Casey Stengel, so Broeg had some common foundations to make connections. But he definitely wanted to get into more sports writing and return to St. Louis and kept writing to J. Roy Stockton. The AP promised him a move to Wichita but it didn’t materialize. Finally, his mentor wrote back and told him while the Post-Dispatch didn’t need anyone, the rival St. Louis Star-Times had a need in their sports department. Broeg contacted sports editor Sid Keener and got the job along with more money, a princely $42.50 per week.

Broeg’s time in Boston wasn’t long, only about 18 months, but he was a witness to some amazing individual achievements. He saw Ted Williams hit .406, Lefty Grove win his 300th game, Paul Waner achieve 3,000 hits, and pitcher Jim Tobin hit four consecutive home runs, a pinch-hit home run followed by three home runs the following day while pitching. He remembered these events fondly and these experiences added to his baseball-encyclopedic mind.

Broeg happily moved back to St. Louis in the summer of 1942. He was making more money, working in the sports department of a newspaper in his hometown, covering his Cardinals, and able to live at home and enjoy mom’s home cooking. His main job was as a copy reader, making sure the baseball game play-by-play accounts were correct. His Cardinals were great in 1942, winning 43 of their final 53 games and ending with 106 wins, two more than the rival Dodgers — plus a World Series win over the Yankees.

Uncle Sam drafted Broeg in 1941 but, due to his bad eye, ruled him 4F. After the war began, he tried to enlist in the Marines but they were reluctant due to his eyesight. He signed a waiver but they told him to go home. Late in 1942, he got the call from the recruiter informing him that they would accept his enlistment. He shipped out to San Diego for boot camp the third Tuesday in December and returned to St. Louis in February, 1943. The Marines assigned him as a recruiting sergeant for St. Louis, instead of an overseas deployment, due to his bad eye. The return home worked out perfectly, allowing him to wed Dorothy Carr on June 19, 1943. The Marines found out about his writing and journalism experience and transferred him to Washington, DC. They wanted to put out a magazine on par with the Navy’s and enlisted the writer to help. Luckily for the young couple, a contact also got Dorothy a position in the capital so they were able to stay together. He led the effort on the magazine but also found time to research and write the first of his many books, Don’t Bring That Up! Skeletons in the Sports Closet, which wasn’t published until April, 1946.

In another lucky break (Broeg considered his life a long series of lucky events) Leatherneck Magazine wanted a Marine to cover the 1944 World Series between the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns. They checked their roster and found four card-carrying members of the Baseball Writers Association of America. Three of them were deployed overseas but Broeg was right there in Washington, DC. So he was sent to St. Louis to cover the Series. He remembered that Series fondly — especially because the Cardinals won — while speaking on the banquet circuit and in St. Louis Chapter SABR meetings.8

In 1945 the Marines were finished with Broeg. He made a good impression on pretty much everyone he met or worked for because he had several job offers to choose from. But it was really no contest. The Post-Dispatch offered him $75 per week to work in the sports department. This was young Broeg’s dream fulfilled. He would write sports for the Post-Dispatch for the rest of his life.

He had many different sports assignments, including both his beloved Cardinals and Missouri Tigers football. In 1949, he noticed Cardinals traveling secretary Leo Ward wearing a bow tie. He thought it held up better to the rigors of travel and looked so much better, so he asked Ward to show him how to tie it. From that moment forward, he always wore a bow tie, which became his signature. He also stayed more than busy writing. While working for the paper he also freelanced for The Sporting News and other magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post.

The managing editor of the paper, Ben Reese, knew Broeg was a great writer for the paper. In 1950, he insisted Broeg be made beat writer for the Cardinals, but longtime writer and Broeg’s boss, J. Roy Stockton, held the position and didn’t want to give it up. So Broeg was assigned to the Browns instead. The Browns were a terrible team, run by entertaining owner Bill Veeck. In 1951, Broeg had a part to play in the Eddie Gaedel affair. The evening before the event, he was drinking with owner Veeck. He didn’t tell Broeg what was going to happen but he did tell him to make sure there would be a Post-Dispatch photographer at the second game of the doubleheader the next day. Typically, by August the Browns were comfortably out of the pennant race and photographers might only cover the first few innings of the first game and then leave. Broeg told the photographer to stay, which led to the classic photo of Gaedel batting in the second game of the doubleheader. It also left Broeg with a story he would tell when prompted, including his brief interview of the tiny pinch hitter in the press box.

By 1952, Broeg was the lead on the St. Louis Cardinals’ beat, the job he always wanted. But, as usual in any business, great performance leads to promotion. In 1958 J. Roy Stockton retired and Broeg was made sports editor. But he didn’t give up writing. He was a writing editor. In fact, managing editor Raymond Crowley told Broeg, somewhat derisively, that he was “90 percent writer and 10 percent editor.”9 Broeg loved the editor position because he could pick and choose his travel assignments, going to cover all the events he really wanted to see. He also completely shaped the sports department, hiring all the writers from 1958 to 1977.

In 1958, Broeg was elected President of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. One of his duties was to attend the banquet circuit of writers’ dinners around the country. He was embarrassed that St. Louis didn’t have a dinner and the writers hardly ever met. So he resolved to start an annual dinner in St. Louis and organized the first event. Guests at that dinner included Stan Musial, Frank Frisch, Rogers Hornsby, and George Sisler. If that wasn’t enough, the NBA All-Star Game was in St. Louis that year, so Broeg scheduled the dinner to allow the NBA players to attend, which helped drive even more ticket sales. The dinner is still held annually, still has a premier lineup of guests, is highly anticipated, and has raised a huge amount of money for scholarships. He considered it one of his proudest legacies.10

Broeg continued following the Cardinals, writing about the team and his favorite player as an adult: Stan Musial. While he didn’t exactly coin Musial’s nickname, he did popularize it in writing. He heard Brooklyn fans murmuring when Musial came up to bat but couldn’t understand what they were saying. Traveling secretary Leo Ward told him they were saying, ‘Here comes that man.’ And so he wrote about it, noting that Stan was “The Man.” He also wrote five columns a week while editing the sports section of the paper. In 1964 he co-wrote Stan Musial, the Man’s Own Story, the iconic autobiography of the great player.

The pressures of being an editor affected Broeg’s health. He quit his three-pack-a-day cigarette habit in 1954 but the stresses of the job impacted him. He also had a temper. He was a fit 6-foot, 195-pounder with strong convictions and not shy about defending them. When in college, he had a near fight with Leo Durocher while working publicity for the Cardinals (stopped before blows landed by a Dodger trainer). His AP supervisor in Boston was a difficult personality and they nearly tangled one evening after some drinking. He punched a drunk who made him drop his evening snack of cookies on the floor of a hotel elevator in the 1950s, and almost slugged Howard Cosell at a boxing promotion. As sports editor, he tried to make sure that when his anger surfaced, he kept it general, not wanting to focus it on one of his employees. There are stories of thrown office equipment, but none of people being bullied or belittled. The stress, along with late night sessions with sports figures, helped lead to an ulcer. Eventually his doctor told him to stop drinking to let the ulcer heal.

Broeg was an old-school reporter. He was critical at times, but players respected him because he knew his stuff and told the truth. However, he didn’t report items that would impact the players’ privacy, such as late-night escapades. He would also act to keep them out of trouble. Cardinal broadcaster Harry Caray was routinely very hard on Ken Boyer, magnifying every mistake the captain made over the radio. One day the players received word that Caray was coming down to the clubhouse. Boyer planned to confront him, but Broeg hurried to the door to get to Caray before Boyer. With one punch, Broeg laid out Caray. After walloping the broadcaster he turned to Boyer and steered him back to his locker with the advice that Boyer shouldn’t get physically involved with the media.11 In later years, when the Post-Dispatch ran a positive story on Caray when he was broadcasting White Sox games, Broeg was angry about the paper idolizing that broadcaster.12

There was no question that Broeg was the boss when he was the sports editor. He was very encouraging to his employees and very protective of his guys when someone from outside gave them problems. He was proud of his many years in the position, the people he hired and mentored, and the way he shaped the sports department.13

Broeg was a giant among the nation’s sportswriters, especially for someone reporting from a city not named New York. In a ‘farewell’ column in 1987, Post-Dispatch reporter Kevin Horrigan wrote of Broeg:

“During the 25 years from the end of the big war to 1970, Bob Broeg was one of the giants of this business. His baseball coverage and his sports columns reflected the tenor of his times, and indeed, helped set the tenor of sports coverage in America. He wrote more, and better, than all but a few sportswriters in America. He helped make the Cardinals the unofficial civic religion of St. Louis. He defined the Missouri Tigers in their glory years.”14

On November 1, 1975, after a year-long bout with lung cancer, Broeg’s beloved wife Dorothy died. The couple was childless. On July 23, 1977, he married Lynette Anton Emmenegger. With that marriage, he finally left his city apartment and moved into her house in the St. Louis suburb of Frontenac.

KMOX radio, the flagship radio station for Cardinal baseball, tapped Bob Broeg and St. Louis Globe Democrat sports writer Bob Burnes to host a regular radio show. There was nothing Broeg loved more than an attentive audience for his sports stories and he did the show for years, bringing his voice to St. Louis sports fans. His radio style was very genuine and filled with informative asides, just like his print columns. He also spent some time on television in the 1960s, hosting a studio show aired before Cardinal games.

Broeg was closely involved with the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was named to the Board of Directors in 1972, serving for 28 years. He also served on the Veterans’ Committee for many years. He took those responsibilities, along with the responsibility of Hall of Fame voting, very seriously. He always thought it was a shame that Ted Simmons, who he felt was a deserving candidate, was only on the ballot one year, so he always voted for ten players, not to get everyone in the Hall but to keep deserving guys on the ballot.

In 1977, Broeg was “promoted” to Assistant to the Publisher. This took him officially out of the sports department. He only wrote one column per week (instead of his normal five) and no longer was tasked with editing the sports page, but he noted he would never retire. In fact, since his newspaper obligations were lessened, his book writing picked up. He wrote or contributed to at least twenty books, most of which were published after this date. In 1978 he had a minor stroke but fully recovered. In recognition of his amazing career, he received the J.G. Taylor Spink writers’ award from the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1979.

Broeg could wield profanity like a fencer would use his blade. Although he spent many years around baseball locker rooms and in male-only newsrooms and press boxes, he claimed he inherited the use of the profane from his Aunt Millie during his youth.15 He would tell wonderful stories peppered with salty language at mostly male gatherings such as the 123 Club and the St. Louis SABR Chapter meetings. But when a woman was present, his stories would change subtly. For example, instead of a throw coming to the infielder ‘cock high’ it might come in ‘waist high.’16 And if he did let an expletive slip when a woman was present, he’d always quickly apologize with an ‘excuse me dear.’17

As Broeg aged, he may have slowed down but his mind remained sharp as ever. He continued covering sports and speaking on the banquet circuit. In 1984, the St. Louis Chapter of SABR approached Bob Burnes to name the chapter after him. He politely declined. So the chapter then asked Broeg, who quickly agreed. This was the most fortunate turn of events in St. Louis SABR chapter history. He became an avid attendee at the monthly meetings, delivering his stories and sports insight month after month. He also provided assistance getting player guests at the St. Louis SABR conventions in 1979 and 1992.

Broeg’s eccentricities charmed people. Besides the signature bow tie, he was a voracious consumer of saltine crackers. He would complain about his stomach ‘boiling’ and the crackers and iced tea (which became his substitute for beer when his doctor told him to stop drinking) helped ease it. Fellow Spink Award winner and colleague Rick Hummel remembers on cold days, particularly at Missouri Tigers football games, Broeg would wear his winter boots but also put his feet in cardboard boxes to stay warm.18

Broeg’s awards are many, but he listed the ones he was most proud of in his autobiography. “I’ve received the University of Missouri Journalism School’s medal award and had the blushing pleasure of having the Society for American Baseball Research, of which I am a proud member, designate the local SABR branch as the Bob Broeg St. Louis chapter. Also, the Post-Dispatch is kind enough to designate their scholar-athlete honorees as winning the Bob Broeg Top Ten Award. And at Cooperstown, I received the national BBWAA’s award in the Hall of Fame writers’ wing.”19

Broeg was approachable and accommodating. When Charles Alexander was writing his book on Rogers Hornsby, he set up an interview with Broeg. When the time came, Broeg was in the hospital but still agreed to do the interview.20 He was always happy to talk to anyone about sports at any time and was never condescending to anyone.

During the last two years of Broeg’s life, he suffered from strokes that affected his vision and made it more difficult for him to get around. However, various people helped drive him to events and made sure he could still attend all the important events. True to form, he never retired, and with his last column published in the Post-Dispatch on June 20, 2004, reminisced about talking sports with President Ronald Reagan in 1986 at a White House luncheon. He died from infirmities on October 28, 2005, survived by Lynette and stepchildren Greg and Lisa, along with his brother Fred and his nieces and nephews. His Catholic mass and burial service, heavily attended by so many of his colleagues and the people he covered, including Stan Musial, was on November 3, 2005. He is interred in the Sunset Memorial Park and Mausoleum in Affton, Missouri.

There were many tributes to the man by the people that he covered. Here is a small sampling:

• “His laughter ran from the tip of his toes through his entire body.” — Joe Garagiola
• “When I think about Broeg, I smile, because he was very honest and knew his stuff and would stand up for his writing.” — Tim McCarver
• “Of all the people, Bob Broeg and Gene Autry loved baseball more than anyone else.” — Whitey Herzog
• “The distinguishing thing about him was his quality of eternal boyishness.” — Bob Costas
• “He traveled with us for 25 years, and he was a great personal friend, and a great writer.” — Stan Musial21
• “You know what I’d like more than a couple of hours talking baseball with Bob Broeg? A couple of days!” — Ted Williams
• “Bob Broeg is the finest, fairest journalist I ever met.” — Don Faurot
• “Broeg has the memory of a 2000-year-old man. The sports stories are great. His life story is even better.” — Jack Buck22

To Broeg words meant things and the meanings were important. His obituary noted, “…[his] writing style was once described as so thickly layered with anecdotes and names and finite details that at times it’s like trying to take notes from someone reciting personal experiences on the scale of ‘War and Peace.’”23 The reason he used such descriptive language was because he was trying to describe exactly what he meant and tell a good story along the way. Even his epitaph needed extra description. He long noted it should be: “He was fair, as in just, not as in mediocre.”

Acknowledgments

This biography was reviewed by Joe DeSantis and Norman Macht, and fact-checked by Warren Corbett.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also accessed Ancestry.com, and Newspapers.com. Additionally, the author posthumously thanks Bob Broeg himself for all those memories made at SABR Bob Broeg Chapter monthly meetings.

Notes

1 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), 1

2 Ibid, 33

3 Ibid, 34

4 Ibid, 54

5 Ibid, 54

6 1936 Cleveland High School Yearbook, 125

7 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), 105

8 Bob Broeg, author’s recollections during SABR chapter meetings, ~2000

9 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), 280

10 Jerry Vickory, Phone Conversation w/Author, March 8, 2019

11 Ibid

12 Rick Hummel, Phone Conversation w/Author, April 3, 2019

13 Ibid

14 Kevan Horrigan, “Bow Ties, Commas, Redbirds, and Tigers,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 1D

15 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), 13

16 Jerry Vickory, Phone Conversation w/Author, March 8, 2019

17 Barbara Sheinbein, Email to Author, February 13, 2019

18 Rick Hummel, Phone Conversation w/Author, April 3, 2019

19 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), 375

20 Steve Gietschier, Phone Conversation w/Author, February 27, 2019

21 John M. McGuire, “Hall of Fame Sportswriter Bob Broeg Dies,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 29, 2005, B5

22 Bob Broeg, Memories of a Hall of Fame Sportswriter, (Champaign, Illinois: Sagamore Publishing, 1995), Dust Jacket

23 John M. McGuire, “Hall of Fame Sportswriter Bob Broeg Dies,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 29, 2005, B5

James Patrick Brosnan began life in Cincinnati, Ohio, on October 24, 1929, one of five children born to John and Rose Brosnan. John worked for the Cincinnati Milling Company as a lathe operator, while Rose was a piano teacher and a nurse. The couple was responsible for instilling very different interests in the family. “My mother exposed the children to music,” Brosnan later recalled. “My father was completely baseball minded. When I was six or seven, I’d go to the library every week to pick out books for my mother to read to me. My father would throw sports books at me and say, ‘Don’t read that junk—read this.’”1

Brosnan’s intelligence and thirst for knowledge was evident early. Musically, he started off playing the trombone, but switched to the piano and learned to play complicated classical pieces. He skipped first grade, and later took seven years of Latin. “I had eclectic tastes,” he recalled. “I particularly enjoyed reading Joseph Altschuler, a children’s historian who wrote several novels about American Indians… My ambitions as a kid were to write a book or be a doctor, something like that, and way off in the distance, maybe be a major league baseball player.”2

Membership in the Knothole Gang in Cincinnati allowed him to watch many Reds games at Crosley Field, and he played a lot of baseball. Brosnan was a tall (6’1”), skinny kid in high school, too thin for football but strong enough to pitch. He played just one year of high school baseball, but played for the Bentley Post American Legion team that made the national finals in 1946. Well aided by teammates Don Zimmer and Jim Frey, Brosnan chipped in with two shutouts in the regional and sectional finals, one a two-hitter and the other a three-hitter. There were plenty of big league scouts at the tourney, and in November 1946 Brosnan signed with Tony Lucadello and the Chicago Cubs for $2,500. The 17-year-old had finished high school the previous June.

In 1947 Brosnan traveled to Shelby, North Carolina, where the Cubs minor league teams were training. Jack Sheehan, who ran the Cubs farm system, was impressed but wary. “The guy had good poise, real good stuff for a youngster and good speed. He had an exceptional curve ball for a boy that age. He was impetuous though; he wanted to learn everything he could right away. He was a fellow who wasn’t easy to get acquainted with.”3 The 17-year-old began his career with Elizabethton TN of the Class D Appalachian League, and finished 17-8 with a 3.04 ERA. A great start.

His next season was filled with poor pitching and a general lack of decorum. After one drubbing while pitching for Fayetteville NC, Brosnan left the mound and the clubhouse, packed his bags, and returned home to Cincinnati. He eventually rejoined the team, but things did not improve; he finished 7-13 on the season, split between two clubs.

Cubs general manager Jim Gallagher related the young hurler’s story to Arthur Meyerhoff, a team stockholder and the head of a Chicago ad agency. Meyerhoff asked to meet Brosnan, and the two became friends. Meyerhoff recommended he seek counseling, which Brosnan did for two years. “Analysis, my marriage, and knowing Meyerhoff were the most important steps in my social readjustment,” recalled Brosnan. “Meyerhoff took a very fatherly interest in me.” Meyerhoff remembered, “He was surly and antagonistic, but he was a brilliant guy. He was so sensitive.”4

Brosnan was not out of the woods yet. After a decent year for single-A Macon in 1949 (9-11, 3.77), he took another step backward in 1950. He played for four different teams, finishing 7-10 with a ghastly 6.21 ERA. Morrie Arnovich, his manager in Decatur, filed the following report to the Cubs: “Reported unhappy, still lone wolf. Started off not reporting on time and leaving park after being taken out of game, but doing little more. … The last time he pitched he walked to the plate in batting practice without a cap and, when not at the plate, sat on the bench reading a magazine. Was told about these things.”5 After the season, he spent two years in the U.S. Army.

He dreaded the army, but it turned out much better than he had feared. Brosnan did not die in Korea, as he had expected, instead spending his entire hitch at Fort Meade in Maryland, winning 50 games for the post team. Even better, he met Anne Stewart Pitcher, a Virginian who worked on the post. “I was very much interested in music,” recalled Anne Stewart. “All the people I knew there weren’t. Some pretended to be, but they weren’t really. The night I met Jim he talked about Bartok and Virgil Thomson’s tone poem, and I said to myself, ‘Here’s another one who’s pretending that he likes music.’ When I saw my roommate later I said to her, ‘That was a very interesting man. I wonder if he really likes music.’”6

While at Fort Meade Brosnan regularly took a bus to Washington to see the National Symphony Orchestra perform. Anne Stewart began driving him to the concerts: “The only reason we got together, we both like music and I had a car.” Six months after meeting, on June 23, 1952, the two were married. Soon there were three children: Jamie, Tim, and Kimberlee. They settled in the Chicago area, buying a house in suburban Morton Grove.

Brosnan’s first year back in Organized Baseball the next year was less than triumphant, as he finished 4-17 for Triple-A Springfield, in the International League. He had taken an aptitude test in the army and had learned he was most suited to be a writer or an accountant. Seeing his baseball career going nowhere and needing to make some money to support a growing family, he enrolled in an accounting course at Benjamin Franklin College in Washington DC.  To his surprise, he was invited to spring training with the Cubs in 1954, and, even more surprisingly, he made the team. “I wasn’t ready,” recalled Brosnan. “I couldn’t pitch in the big leagues; I didn’t know how. And they soon found out.”7 The 24-year-old pitched 18 games with a 9.45 ERA before he was sent down to Beaumont in the Texas League.

With Beaumont he began throwing the slider, which would become his best pitch. He finished 7-1 in Texas, and won 17 games the next season for Los Angeles in the Pacific Coast League. He still had no close friends. At home he had a wife and a new baby, and on the road he went to art museums or sat in his room reading Stendhal and Dostoevsky. “If I went to a foreign movie, I went by myself.”8

One day in Oakland he lost a tough game in extra innings, and was distraught enough that he went out drinking with his brother, who was living in San Francisco. The two were soon quite drunk, and ran into some of Jim’s teammates, who had never seen him in such a state. Naturally, they bought him more drinks, and had to help him into the taxi to get to the airport. There, they ran into more teammates who insisted they should get in on the fun. When Brosnan got off the plane in Los Angeles, Anne Stewart saw her husband’s condition and walked away. But the binge made him a full member of the team.

He stuck with the Cubs again in 1956, and this time he was ready. The tall, skinny high school kid was now 6’4” and 210 pounds, with blond hair and blue eyes behind his horn-rimmed glasses. Working as a starter and out of the bullpen, Brosnan finished 5-9 with a 3.79 ERA for a poor Chicago team. The next season, in a similar role, he put up a 5-5 record and led the club with a 3.38 ERA in 99 innings.

Years later, Brosnan asked Don Osborn, who had been his manager at two minor league stops, why he had stuck with him for so long despite years of disappointment. Osborn told him the Cubs knew he had a great arm, but were less sure of his head and his heart. “He was right,” Brosnan admitted. “I wasn’t driven to be a professional baseball player. By 1958 I began to hate to lose at pitching; I hated it even when somebody got a hit off me. The competitive urge finally came to me, but when it came I was already in the big leagues.”9

Still, Brosnan’s intellect and eccentricities stood out in the world of baseball. He read constantly, carrying a small library of books with him on the road, watched foreign movies, smoked a pipe, and used a baffling vocabulary. One time on the mound, he imperiously yelled at a confused batter, “Ils ne passeront pas!” 10 (The phrase, whose English translation is “They shall not pass,” had earned fame as the rallying cry for the French at the Battle of Verdun in the first World War.) A few years later Frank Robinson gave him his enduring, though not surprising, nickname: “Professor.”

Brosnan was the Cubs’ Opening Day starter in 1958, pitching six shutout innings in a victory over the Cardinals. He pitched well early in the season, putting up a 3.14 ERA in eight starts, before being traded to St. Louis on May 20 for infielder Alvin Dark. Brosnan returned to a swingman role with the Cardinals, but had a fine season overall—11-8 with a 3.35 ERA, the seventh lowest figure in the league.

Around this time he began his writing career. He had become friendly with a writer for Sports Illustrated, who suggested that Brosnan should write about baseball. Brosnan had been keeping a diary off and on for years, but did not feel he’d done anything interesting yet. After his trade to the Cardinals, he sent Sports Illustrated an excerpt from his diary, and it ran in the July 21, 1958, issue. Brosnan’s intellect and writing ability were a revelation at a time when readers had been served vanilla depictions of their baseball heroes performing glorious deeds on the fields of battle. Brosnan drew himself and his teammates as complicated humans struggling to make their way.

After his sudden change of employers, he wrote of the charade of the player-management relationship. “[General manager John] Holland’s words,” Brosnan wrote, “‘I don’t know whether this is good news or bad news’… and ‘We appreciate all you’ve done for the organization,’ while probably well intentioned, were spoken like a poor actor at first rehearsal. The self-hypnosis about the Grand Nature of the Good American Game tends to delude the managers of baseball.” More practically, he had to tell his wife he was no longer playing for the team near their home. “My wife cried via long distance from Chicago… for ten minutes. I did, too … a little. Why me?”11

His article received positive reviews, and he soon had an agreement with Harper & Brothers Publishers to write a book in the same diary format, covering the upcoming 1959 season. Brosnan began keeping notes whenever something interested him. These events were just as likely to happen in the bullpen, or airport, or hotel, as they were during a ballgame. The Cardinals gave the story a dramatic twist when they traded him in June to the Cincinnati Reds for pitcher Hal Jeffcoat. Thus his journal could again directly address his feelings about the life of an itinerant ballplayer. For the season Brosnan finished 9-6 with a 3.79 ERA, and spent the summer tapping away on his typewriter.

An excerpt from The Long Season, about his positive relationship with Reds’ manager Fred Hutchinson, was published in Sports Illustrated in the spring of 1960, and the book was released in hardcover in July. It received wonderful reviews in the press, including in Time (“a deft wry account of his struggles as a pitcher last year”), the New York Times (“a fascinating and embittered view of what our capitalistic national game has to offer to the average ballplayer”), and the Los Angeles Times (“a rich and always interesting account of the great game as seen through the eyes of an articulate ballplayer”).12 The great sportswriter Red Smith called it “a cocky book, caustic and candid and, in a way, courageous, for Brosnan calls him like he sees them, doesn’t hesitate to name names, and employs ridicule like a stiletto.”13 Jimmy Cannon, another famed sportswriter, simply called it “the greatest baseball book ever written.”14

Brosnan broke new ground by letting the reader experience the day-to-day existence of the major league player. Many of these days were fun, and many were boring (though Brosnan’s humor keeps the reader interested). The young men took a liking to young women (though Brosnan did not go into detail) and to alcohol. In the very first paragraph of the book, Brosnan writes, “I had called home to see if there were enough olives for the martini hour.”15 Some baseball people were less than amused (Joe Garagiola called Brosnan “a kookie beatnik”), most particularly because he painted a less than flattering portrait of baseball management. His treatment of Solly Hemus, his manager with the Cardinals, was harsh. “You think Brosnan’s writing is funny,” said Hemus, “wait until you see him pitch.”16

Brosnan was at his best when writing of the difficulties faced by players, particularly when they are traded without warning, as he was. “Oh, God, Meat, not that,” his wife cried. “I’ll never be able to drive from Chicago to Cincinnati.” And: “Jeffcoat! Couldn’t they get more than that? Oh, honey, they just wanted to get rid of you.” Brosnan himself had changed in the previous year. “I sat back on the couch, half-breathing as I waited for indignation to flush good red blood to my head. Nothing happened. I took a deep breath, then exhaled slowly. It’s true. The second time you’re sold you don’t feel a thing.”17 

Despite the criticism Brosnan endured for revealing too much about the lives of players, he believed that later books, such as Jim Bouton’s Ball Four, did go too far in their language and revelations of sexual behavior. But Brosnan felt that baseball had been done a disservice when earlier writers had whitewashed it. “The life we led had not been truly represented in print,” he recalled. “Even the good writers had held off from writing the truth in order to preserve their relationship with the ballclubs.”18 As Brosnan did not discuss the personal lives of individual players, he was not ostracized even by the teammates who criticized the book.

Through it all, he continued to pitch well. In 1960 he appeared in 57 games, and finished 7-2 with a career-low 2.36 ERA and 12 saves that were fourth most in the National League. “Broz had the stuff and control,” said manager Hutchinson, “and became more confident as he went along.”19 His most rewarding season came in 1961, when, for the first and only time, he pitched in a pennant race. Brosnan was a key member of the staff (10-4, 3.04, 16 saves), as Cincinnati prevailed to win a surprising pennant, their first in 21 years. Brosnan pitched three times in the World Series, twice in scoreless outings but getting hit hard in Game 4. The heavily favored New York Yankees took the series in five games.

Two weeks later, Brosnan’s story about the World Series—wryly titled “Embarrassing, Wasn’t It?”—appeared in Sports Illustrated. “There are three monuments in center field,” he wrote of his first look at Yankee Stadium, “and plenty of room for more future self-exaltation if such is necessary to prove the greater glory of the Yankees.” But Brosnan had wanted to win, and wrote honestly about his team’s failure to do so.20

The following spring Harper published Brosnan’s second book, Pennant Race, a journal of the 1961 season. The book abruptly ends with the regular season, likely because Sports Illustrated had already run the World Series material. Praise again was the order of the day, and Brosnan always believed that his writing improved in his second effort. “To get to [Cincinnati’s] Crosley Field,” he wrote, “I usually take a bus through the old crumbling streets of the Bottoms. Negroes stand on the corners watching their homes fall down. The insecurity of being in the second division of the National League leaves me. For 25 cents, the daily bus ride gives me enough humility to get me through any baseball game, or season.”21

By this time Brosnan had become a prolific freelance baseball writer, his work appearing in The Atlantic, Esquire, Look, Life, Sports Illustrated, Sport and Saturday Evening Post, among others. He wrote in the first person, but about general topics such as spring training, the spitball, or Little League parents. He wrote mainly in the off-season, although the stories were often published during the season. This last would prove to be a problem.

The Reds won 98 games in 1962, not enough to keep up with either the Giants or Dodgers. The 32-year-old Brosnan had another fine year in the bullpen (4-4 with 13 saves). Nonetheless, very early the next season he was traded to the Chicago White Sox, because, according to Brosnan, the Reds wanted to shed his $30,000 salary, which was one of the highest on the team.

When Brosnan arrived in Chicago, general manager Ed Short greeted him by telling him he would not be able to write or publish anything during the baseball season. Brosnan reluctantly went along, at least for a while. The White Sox already had Hoyt Wilhelm and Eddie Fisher in the bullpen, but Brosnan got plenty of important work. He recorded saves in his first four outings, and finished with a deceptive 3-8 record, a 2.84 ERA and 14 saves. The White Sox finished a strong second to the Yankees, and their excellent bullpen was one of the primary reasons.

After the 1963 season Brosnan received a contract calling for a pay cut and a continued ban on writing. The pitcher-author balked, reasoning that, at the very least, he needed to write to make up for the lesser salary. Moreover, he had already sold two stories that would be coming out in the early part of the season. The White Sox released him before spring training, and no other major league team was interested in the services of one of the best relief pitchers in the game. The Sporting News and Sports Illustrated rallied to his side, but his playing career was over at the age of 34. “Quitting didn’t bother me,” Brosnan later remembered. “I was a writer, I was going to be a writer.”22

While continuing to write regular baseball articles, Brosnan also worked for an ad agency, as he had during the off-seasons for many years, and in broadcasting. He published several baseball books for young readers (titles like Great Baseball Pitchers and The Ted Simmons Story). In the early 1970s he began writing baseball articles for Boys’ Life, which he continued to do for 20 years. By 2011 he had been fully retired for many years, still happily married to Anne Stewart and still living in the house in Morton Grove they had bought 55 years earlier.

Brosnan often referred to himself as an “average major league player,” a depiction that is inaccurate. His was a good pitcher for many years, and one of the best relievers in the game in the early 1960s. But his legacy will remain his writing, especially his two classic books. He paved the way for many future memoirs, but only Brosnan wrote his books without help. His stature as the best writer ever to emerge from the baseball playing ranks is still safe after fifty years. “My kids will resent me saying this,” he later said, “but when Long Season came out I felt as proud as a father.”23

Brosnan died on June 28, 2014.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Warren Corbett for his editorial assistance.

Notes