Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu: John Updike on Ted Williams
by John Updike
The Library of America (2010)
$15.00 (hardcover). 64 pages 

It is hard not to begin this review with the phrase “This slender volume.” (In fact, I avoided doing so only by pulling the coy trick of beginning it the way I just did.) But this is, in fact, a very slender volume, and the few pages it comprises are only sparsely populated by text; it’s more an oversized postcard, really. Other than a very brief author’s preface and a short coda distilled from a few other of his fragmentary jottings on Ted Williams, the book contains only the text of Updike’s celebrated 1960 New Yorker essay (with the footnotes he added in 1965), recounting Ted Williams’s final game (played at Fenway, against the Orioles) and the splendidly improbable home run he hit in his last at-bat. In the case of this volume, however, the minimalist approach has worked beautifully. A compact and handsome fiftieth-anniversary tribute to what many regard as one of the best baseball essays ever written, it is at the same time a pleasant, slightly accidental commemoration of its author, who died only last year. 

Baseball has generated a richer, deeper, and more sustained literary tradition than any other sport. Only cricket has produced books of comparable literary quality, and the best of these—C. L. R. James’s masterpiece of social philosophy Beyond a Boundary, Hugh de Selincourt’s gossamer eclogue The Cricket Match—have been slightly eccentric rarities; there is no large continuous school of cricket writing, and the cricket essay has never become a recognized genre all to itself. The literature of baseball, however, is a crowded and distinguished field, and so it really is a considerable achievement for any single short piece of baseball writing to have acquired the sort of mythic luster that attaches to the Updike essay. It is especially impressive, perhaps, in that it is really the only piece of baseball writing Updike ever did. 

Of course, according to Updike he was not really writing about baseball at all but rather about Williams, his boyhood hero. Perhaps this is true; but, even so, some of the more famous passages capture the poetry of the game so exquisitely that they have to stir something in any lover of the game: “Baseball, with its graceful intermittences of action, its immense and tranquil field sparsely settled with poised men in white, its dispassionate mathematics, seems to me best suited to accommodate, and be ornamented by, a loner. It is an essentially lonely game.” And, even when reflecting specifically on Williams, Updike occasionally shows what looks like an aficionado’s eye for detail, as when he calls attention to the qualitatively peculiar trajectory of some of Williams’s low, squarely struck, continuously rising home runs. (My father has often regaled his sons with the golden legend of that trajectory—specifically a home run Williams hit in the old Oriole Park late in his career, a shot that took a foot-long splinter out of one of the wooden seats over the right-field wall, still apparently on the ascent when it did so.) 

I suppose the question one ought to ask—since the Library of America has gone to the trouble of producing a single-volume edition of what remains, at the end of the day, only a diverting “occasional” essay—is whether the piece really holds up well fifty years along. In a way—but only in a very impressive way— it does not. The truth is that it’s been set apart in a class of its own for so long that it no longer needs to be measured against other specimens of baseball writing to ensure its reputation; one measures it now against itself, and against the memory of it that one has from previous readings. Picking it up again this time around, I couldn’t help but notice that it has a somewhat slighter feel about it than I remembered it having. I thought I recalled it as being just a bit longer, more lyrical, more suspenseful in its build-up to that final plate appearance, more saturated with the light and colors of late September. But that in itself is a kind of tribute to the essay: It clearly has an evocative power, and generates a kind of emotional atmosphere, that lingers on and that far exceeds what’s immediately evident on the page. 

In the end, it really is the nonpareil baseball essay it’s reputed to be. Nothing about it seems dated. (Well, almost nothing: It is momentarily arresting to come across a merely anonymous mention of “the Orioles third baseman”—and, really, by late 1960 most serious followers of the game were well aware of who that was.) Only a few sentences seem overly mannered; for the most part, Updike had already, at only twentyeight years of age, achieved the sparkling ease of his mature style. And all the famous, oft-repeated phrases still ring out with a crystal tone: “the tissue-thin difference between a thing done well and a thing done ill”; or “that intensity of competence that crowds the throat with joy”; or “when a density of expectation hangs in the air and plucks an event out of the future”; or “immortality is nontransferable”; or, of course, “Gods do not answer letters.” 

And, perhaps most importantly, the high points do not tower over the rest of the essay. It’s a model of elegant writing throughout. Even the brief précis of Williams’s career with which Updike sets the scene is graceful; only the most interesting and salient statistics are cited, and always in order to cast light on the strangely remote character of the man who amassed them. Then the narrative proper begins, and proceeds at just the right pace; the story almost seems to tell itself. Of course, in a sense it did tell itself. How Updike would have finished the tale if Williams had weakly flied out in the eighth is hard to imagine. He might not have written about the game at all; or he might have dwelled longer on its soft autumnal sadness, and tried to write it with even greater poignancy. Whatever the case, it would have lacked that last, faintly magical moment that draws the whole story—not only the story of that day, but the story of Williams’s entire career—to its achingly symbolic dénouement. 

In long retrospect, it seems to me that Updike and Williams were oddly suited to one another, and it’s something of a fortunate accident that their careers briefly converged in one unexpectedly exquisite magazine article. This may seem like a less than gracious observation, but I mean it as very high praise indeed: Soberly and honestly considered, each man was a brilliant specialist—by which I mean, each was supremely skilled in one vital facet of his craft, and merely better than ordinary at all its other aspects. Williams was a pure hitter of almost uncanny ability, of course, with that fluid, oddly dipping and rising yet perfectly timed swing of his: a dead pull hitter in the live-ball era who ripped heroically at everything inside and yet who could still post averages with which Ty Cobb or Rogers Hornsby would have been quite contented come the fall. It almost defies belief, frankly. And yet, at everything else in the game he was unexceptional. On the bases or in the field, he discharged his duties well enough, and he kept himself in good athletic trim throughout his playing days; but it was only with the bat that he stood apart from other players. 

Similarly Updike was, at his best, an altogether magnificent prose stylist. There are many, many passages in his collected works that rival or surpass the best work of just about any other English-language writer of the twentieth century; there are whole paragraphs and chapters of almost delirious beauty. And yet he never really wrote a great book. Even the very best of his novels (such as The Centaur) and the most accomplished of his short stories (such as the early Maples stories) always somehow seemed to add up to less than the sum of their glittering sentences and ingenious metaphors. They were good novels and good stories, diverting and clever, and sometimes astonishingly good in many of their individual parts; but they were never masterpieces. 

That, though, is not a criticism. The careers of both Williams and Updike serve as excellent reminders that, in most walks of life, only a very few of us are capable of doing anything as near to perfection as humanly possible. For anyone, though, who does have the ability, concentrating on that one extraordinary skill or gift, even at the price of doing everything else (at most) only a little better than average, is the surest way to achieve genuine greatness. And, having achieved it, such a person should certainly be regarded not only with admiration, but also with a little awe. 

DAVID B. HART is the author of five books, including “Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies” (Yale, 2009), and of the article “A Perfect Game: The Metaphysical Meaning of Baseball” in First Things (August/September 2010).

The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood
by Jane Leavy
Harper (2010)
$27.99 (hardcover); $12.99 (e-book). 480 pages

Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball
by Bill Madden
Harper (2010)
$26.99 (hardcover); $12.99 (e-book). 480 pages

Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero
by Tom Clavin and Danny Peary
Touchstone (2010)
$26.99 (hardcover); $12.99 (e-book). 422 pages 

The Yankee Years
by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci
Anchor (2010)
$16.95 (paperback); $9.89 (e-book). 528 pages

Author’s note: The New York Yankees suffered several major losses in 2010, the least of which was their ouster in the American League Championship series by the Texas Rangers. George Steinbrenner, the team’s tempestuous owner who brought them back into relevance after several years out of the limelight, passed away, as did Bob Sheppard, their longtime golden-throated public-address announcer. Shortly before he died, Steinbrenner joined a group of Yankee legends who had written or were the subject of recent books, including Joe Torre, Roger Maris, and, most recently, Mickey Mantle.

If she’s not careful, Jane Leavy will earn a reputation as the Boswell of the battered ballplayer. In 2002 she published Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, the definitive biography (to this point) of the role model for Jewish boomers everywhere. In 2010, it’s The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle and the End of America’s Childhood, the much anticipated story of another hero laid low by injury. 

Whereas Koufax’s arthritic left arm dramatically shortened an amazing career at age 30, the question about Mantle is how much better he might have been had he not exacerbated his numerous injuries with his profligate ways. How many more home runs could he have powered over the outfield walls were it not for the booze and the broads? Surely he would have retired with the .300 batting average he decided was the true mark of a truly great player. Even the book jacket illustrates Mantle’s degeneration: The photo of a smiling rookie with unlimited potential is accompanied by that of a broken-down veteran, almost literally on his last legs. 

“The end of America’s childhood” came not with Mantle’s death in 1995 but with his retirement almost thirty years earlier (which I suppose is a kind of death). The Yankees—indeed Boomer America itself— seemed to fall from innocence with the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Since then, the reverence that would have precluded books such as Jim Bouton’s Ball Four and Jose Canseco’s Juiced, which take the heroic figure off the pedestal and put him under the microscope, have become the norm, and the heretofore standard reverential tome has flown out the window. It was no longer enough to write about hard work and gumption; now every subject had to overcome some traumatic obstacle, whether it was substance or sexual abuse (or, as it turns out in Mantle’s case, both). 

Leavy, an award-winning former sports and feature writer for the Washington Post, admits to being an unabashed Mantle fan since childhood—and the journalist’s objectivism be damned. In that, she shares his fans’ adoration and disappointment. But in demonstrating her impressive investigative skills, Leavy goes perhaps a bit overboard as she deconstructs a few of Mantle’s tape-measure home runs and provides testimonials for his considerable athletic skills. It is admirable in scope, as she discusses bat velocity, angles, and meteorological conditions with the scientific community, but does it really matter if the ball went 430 feet or 450 or 480? In the Cold War era, when for the American psyche to be the best at everything was so important, this display of power was comforting. 

The author interviewed hundreds of people in the course of her research, all to turn out this most in-depth look at the Commerce Comet yet published. But the reader might wonder about the accuracy of her collective memory, as about those questionable tape-measure home runs, or even wonder about the possibility of downright fabrication for the sake of building up the impression of her personal connection to the Mick. 

Leavy alternates between some of the biggest events in Mantle’s career (for better or worse) and her fateful interview in April 1983, when he was reduced to working as a glad-hander for an Atlantic City casino. Her rose-colored glasses were shattered. Who kidnapped her beloved Mick and replaced him with this boorish drunk with the foul mouth and roaming hands? Still, Leavy managed to retain her composure and professionalism to get the story done . . . which served as the impetus for this book. 

There is little joy in The Last Boy. Mantle’s accomplishments were diminished in his own eyes then and in those of many baseball fans later on when they learned the extent of his boozing and womanizing. That his “live for today” attitude stemmed from his belief that he would die young or from the sexual abuse he suffered as a child (a subject that, despite all the play it got in the media, isn’t discussed until the end of the book) makes that outcome all the sadder. The description of his last days, when liver problems and cancer ravaged his once powerful body, defies the ability of even the most sangfroid reader not to get misty-eyed. 

Just a few generations back, many professional clubs were family-run operations that were in business for the long haul. Now there is just one (at least in baseball), and the end of an era is in sight, according to Bill Madden, the award-winning sports columnist and author of Steinbrenner: The Last Lion of Baseball. 

There were many adjectives used to describe George Michael Steinbrenner III, principal owner and chair of the New York Yankees, and most were not complimentary. Since he took over the team in the early 1970s, there has been no shortage of fodder for the local press, including Madden, who has followed the game for the New York Daily News. “Der Boss” (one of Steinbrenner’s many nicknames) was famous for his fiery temper; before Joe Torre, the Bronx Bombers went through twenty managerial changes between 1973 and 1995, including several repeat performances, most notably by the late Billy Martin. And that doesn’t even take into account front-office personnel. He would order his underlings to handle a task or acquire a certain player, often disregarding the objections of those far more knowledgeable in such matters, and then explode when things didn’t work out his way. He would fire, then rehire, at the drop of a pin, often excusing the hasty behavior with “I didn’t really mean it” or “I’ll let it go, this time.” 

Yankees fans and haters were well aware of Steinbrenner’s mercurial nature. His apologists point to his success while his detractors note the distractions and bad feelings among the team’s personnel. Forget the infamous quote from Reggie Jackson about his being “the straw that stirs the drink,” that sobriquet should go to Steinbrenner. In fact, one has to wonder: Does such drama like this occur on other clubs (Frank and Jamie McCourt’s messy divorce notwithstanding), or did we hear more about Steinbrenner’s antics because his team played in the media capital of the world? 

Did his megalomania come from some deep-rooted desire to both win the approval of his father—a strict, hardworking, successful businessman—and yet prove himself to be his own man? Hard to say, although Madden certainly pushes the reader in that direction, albeit without the psychological profiling. Citing one example after another, he chronicles the Yankees’ chief as a bully and a liar, who could be incalculably mean while at the same time setting up a foundation to make sure that children of deceased New York City police and firefighters were able to go to college. Madden includes the praise as well as the lash, but the former was far-between or generally underreported throughout the years; for all his penchant for being the center of attention, Steinbrenner didn’t court the press to promote his good deeds. 

A recipient of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s annual Spink Award for outstanding career accomplishments as a writer, Madden strives to be even-handed. His role for the New York papers put him in a position to write a first-hand account, but he uses that relationship with a light hand, relying on his skills as a journalist rather than employing his personal observations. While dutifully covering Steinbrenner’s rightful banishment from the game in the 1970s because of his illegal campaign contributions to Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, Madden goes to great lengths to show that his subject was unfairly treated by Commissioner Fay Vincent, who kicked him out of the game in 1990 for giving $40,000 to Howard Spira, a two-bit hustler, for his role in digging up dirt on Yankees outfielder Dave Winfield, with whom Steinbrenner was feuding over financial matters. Baseball, it seems, is not a law unto itself, and even Steinbrenner had rights of due process. 

Sadly, the last few years were not kind to the Yankees’ leader. Ill health rendered him a shell of his former, larger-than-life persona. Madden reports this with a mix of professional objectivity and personal sadness. After all, the two had had a working relationship and had even been fairly close at one point. 

Are there elements in the book that might offend the Steinbrenner family? Perhaps. But as Madden relates in the introduction, he undertook the project at their suggestion. And judging by all accounts, he seems to have done a fair and balanced job. 

It’s fitting that books on both of the M&M Boys were published in 2010. While not carrying the same level of notoriety as The Last Boy—given the pecking order of the players involved—Tom Clavin and Danny Peary’s Roger Maris: Baseball’s Reluctant Hero is a similarly insightful and welcome profile that looks into the soul of another troubled Yankee great. 

Peary has noted in interviews that Maris—who like his buddy Mantle was a small-town boy thrust into the spotlight—was perhaps the least-prepared person to deal with the success and pressure that came when he challenged Babe Ruth’s single-season home-run record of 60 in 1961. 

It was Maris’s misfortune, and obviously not of his own doing, to come along in an era when the schedule had expanded from 154 games to 162, thereby giving “haters” (including baseball commissioner and former Ruth confidant Ford Frick) an opportunity to denigrate the Yankee slugger’s accomplishments. Add to that a new generation of iconoclastic journalists who refused to kowtow to athletes as their predecessors did, and you have a confluence of events that turned the loving family man into a taciturn, short-tempered, and uncooperative subject, as he was besieged daily by reporters looking for a fresh story or an original quote. 

Peary and Clavin maintain that his employers were derelict in not helping him deal with the media crush. (These days, all the questions would be addressed in pregame and postgame press conferences.) Add to that the team’s mishandling of a hand injury Maris suffered and you have a sad situation that was only barely alleviated by his trade in 1967 to the St. Louis Cardinals, a team he helped lead to two National League pennants and a World Series even while on the downside of his career. 

In The Yankee Years, former manager Joe Torre teams up with Sports Illustrated’s senior baseball writer Tom Verducci for a unique and somewhat baffling presentation. 

Although Torre gets star billing, the reader will get the impression that Verducci is telling the story, since the narrative is written in the third person. 

Torre was an All-Star and a Most Valuable Player during his 18-year career. He also managed the New York Mets, Atlanta Braves, and St. Louis Cardinals before taking over the Yankee reins. His considerable lack of success in those previous go-arounds made him a curious candidate in the eyes of the press and the fans. 

For the most part, this is a standard baseball tale of hard work, success, and frustration. The last element is especially salient when you consider that Torre’s employer, George Steinbrenner, was one of the most hands-on (or meddlesome, depending on your point of view) owners in the history of the game, going through managers like a cold-sufferer going through boxes of tissues.

But Torre gave the club a stability it hadn’t known since Casey Stengel led the Yankees to a constant stream of pennants and world championships from 1949 through 1960. From the very beginning, he took control over a mix of veterans and rookies and molded them into a team, as trite as that might sound: The Yankees ran off a string of three consecutive World Series titles and four in five years. 

Ultimately, The Yankee Years is a sad tale on the natural order of things in the sports world. Athletes grow older, their skills diminish, and they are replaced by others who may be better or worse, with different drives and agendas. That was part of Torre’s downfall. In his first few seasons he was surrounded by the likes of Paul O’Neill, Bernie Williams, Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, and others who meshed so well together, working for that common goal. But the ones who followed seemed less interested in Yankee tradition and more in individual performances. Some—David Wells, Kyle Farnsworth, Carl Pavano, and Kevin Brown, to name a few—were a constant source of disappointment. The Yankees kept winning, but for Torre the spark and joy were missing. 

Working for Steinbrenner and his front-office minions presented its own set of difficulties, constant scrutiny and job insecurity being two of them. Despite thirteen consecutive postseason appearances, someone was always looking over Torre’s shoulder, quick to criticize if some bit of strategy backfired or if things weren’t running smoothly. After an initial euphoria, the tone of the book becomes more forlorn with every chapter. Baseball fans know the inevitable outcome— Torre was not retained following the 2007 season and was named manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers (which he led to the postseason in his first season)— but Verducci hammers the point home anyway: “It was,” he writes, “the 1,294th win with the Yankees for Torre, including postseason play, over 12 seasons. It would be the last.” And: “He showered, dressed and left his office and the clubhouse believing this would be the final time he would do so as manager of the New York Yankees. He did not look back.” It is fitting that the book jacket features a picture of Torre walking away from the camera. 

There was a great gnashing of teeth in the run-up to the publication of The Yankee Years, with promises of dirt to be dished and secrets to be revealed, but Torre’s autobiography/memoir can be summed up with a title from Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing. Like the trailer of a two-star movie, the media— many members of which admitted to not having read the book in its entirety when they made their comments—cherry-picked parts for maximum bang. In particular, they focused on Torre’s remarks about Alex Rodriguez, whom he characterized as high-maintenance, more concerned with how he looked and performed than with his contributions to the team’s success. They failed to mention that Torre also praised Rodriguez: “Nobody has ever worked harder in my memory than this guy,” he wrote. 

Torre also expressed disappointment in his deteriorating relationship with Brian Cashman, the Yankees’ general manager, whom he accused of not supporting him when the chips were down. 

Taken as a whole, The Yankee Years is a standard bit of baseball memoir, no worse and perhaps better than others that have been published in recent years. Too bad it couldn’t have had a happier ending.

RON KAPLAN, editor of SABR’s Bibliography Committee newsletter, blogs about baseball literature and other media at ronkaplansbaseballbookshelf.com.

Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman
by G. Michael Green and Roger D. Launius
Walker and Company (2010)
$27 (hardcover); $14.85 (e-book). 368 pages 

With its wealth of first-hand interviews and archival resources, Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman provides insights from those who dealt with Charlie Finley. In fact, this book arguably is more about the reflections of his players, staff, media, and family than about the icon himself. The in-depth investigation by the authors, their sweat and sacrifice, is the key to making this book a success—as in Finley’s own formula of S + S = S. 

Much of the book’s focus is on Finley’s need for control and how it led him to alienate others. Examples are multiplied throughout. He insisted on having the ultimate authority and the ability to override the decisions of general manager Frank Lane and field manager Joe Gordon. There were his late-night phone calls to his cousin Carl and others who worked in the front office. To Reggie Jackson and Mike Andrews he presented prewritten statements for them to sign. No doubt, Finley had issues with control, and like many MLB owners, apparently (this may be nearly a requirement for battling one’s way into the exclusive club), he demonstrated behavioral evidence of high levels of narcissism—there were his feelings of self-importance, his pronounced angry reactions to criticism, his unreasonable expectations of favorable treatment, his extreme lack of concern for others. 

I took a look back at some research I completed with colleagues several years ago. Consistent with one of the central premises of Green and Launius, our study of approximately one hundred team presidents and owners found that Finley had the lowest ranking on measures of providing individualized support, defined as behaving in a manner that demonstrates both respect for members of the organization and concern about their personal feelings and needs.[fn]See, for example, Steve Weingarden, Christian J. Resick, and Daniel S. Whitman, “Why Is That Executive a Hall of Famer? Have You Seen His Leadership Stats?” Outside the Lines 12, no. 2 (2006): 1–4. Finley ranked lower than such famously self-centered owners as Marge Schott, Jerry Reinsdorf, and George Steinbrenner. He was rated at 1.42 on a 7-point scale, making him the only executive in the study to receive a rating under 2.0 for providing individualized support. The average rating was 4.86. Finley’s graciousness, examples of which are highlighted in the book, was overshadowed by the rage and disrespect he demonstrated to the same individuals over time.[/fn] 

One wonders, given other details the authors provide, if the character of Finley’s involvement in baseball would have been different had he entered the fray at a more mature time in his life. His insurance office and the American League office were in the same building when, all of 36 years old, he first tried to buy the A’s. The ensuing negative experience taught him some lessons about the ownership clique. It may also have activated and amplified his narcissist tendencies. He was 42, still perhaps with opportunity for personal leadership growth (age tends to be a factor but is not the only determinant for leadership growth), when he finally succeeded in his bid to purchase the A’s and was thrust into the spotlight. My suspicion is that the authors would argue that Finley’s personality would have been susceptible to the same leadership derailers regardless of his maturity at the time of purchase, but they offer such extensive detail that readers can choose their own customized paths of inquiry. 

The book moves quickly and the authors write well. The stories and quotes are rich and enjoyable. Joe Rudi reflects on an emotional-whirlwind phone call from Finley about Rudi’s 1974 contract; Martin Finley recounts a picture taken of his mother, Shirley Finley, at Charlie’s funeral. And there is Hank Peters summing up Finley’s qualifications to lead the front office: “Charlie Finley didn’t know beans about baseball.”[fn]Marvin Miller suggests something perhaps in contradiction to Peters, calling Finley “the finest judge of baseball talent I ever saw at the head of a team. See Miller, A Whole Different Ball Game: The Inside Story of the Baseball Revolution (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004). Peters’s quote stood out to me, as it made the emotional connection, especially when combined with player reminisces of their dealings with Finley. If you have ever suffered a boss who not only lacks the necessary technical knowledge, skills, and abilities for his position—something that to some degree he can correct over time—but also lacks the ability to lead, insists on overinvolvement, and is prone to be cruel when protecting his own hollow status, your stomach can only turn when reading what it must have been like for the individuals who worked in the A’s organization during Finley’s tenure. This fact, the infliction of unnecessary suffering on others on a daily basis for an extended period of time and the lack of sensitivity toward others, made it difficult for me to feel any affection for Finley or much pity for him in his suffering.[/fn] 

That said, I did nonetheless feel anger over the treatment—the misguided and Machiavellian processes and hard-to-fathom decisions he suffered through— that Finley suffered at the hands of other owners and Bowie Kuhn. It is interesting to note that Green and Launius indirectly (and at certain points more directly) do a nice job fleshing out, perhaps, the baseball establishment’s real problems with Charlie Finley. Ford Frick’s autobiography does not mention Finley even once and barely mentions the Kansas City Athletics.[fn]Ford C. Frick, Games, Asterisks, and People: Memoirs of a Lucky Fan (New York: Crown, 1973). In turn, the authors of Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman mention Frick only a couple of times and don’t mention short-termer Spike Eckert at all. It wasn’t until Finley moved the A’s to Oakland and the team started winning that the vicious and uneven treatment of Finley picked up steam, led by Commissioner Kuhn, who was serving in a role in which, theoretically, he should have protected and affirmed Finley’s equal standing with the other owners. It’s difficult to find a hero in an assassin’s guild. Even though I knew how many of the stories were going to end, I found myself needing someone to root for and, in many instances, landing on Marvin Miller, a side character in this particular book.[/fn]

One concern I did have is that the book may not have been consistently critical enough of the media treatment Finley received. The criticism leveled by reporter Ernie Mehl was less than objective and almost swaggering, and the potential conflict of interest in his coverage was given something of a pass, while Red Smith received only a glancing light knock when he failed to include the World Series in his coverage, although Shirley Povich, by contrast, received strong pushback for his unsupported personal attacks on Finley. 

A related concern is the occasional overstatement. For example, I wasn’t convinced by the logic and evidence for the claim that Finley’s three-ball-walk rule, which he proposed as a measure to increase offense, was similar to “the decision made by owners in the 1990s to turn a blind eye to the players’ bulking up through steroid use.” Foremost, the statement wasn’t incorporated naturally into the text and I was unclear, in multiple ways, as to the true similarity of the threeball-walk rule and steroid usage—pitchers were just as likely to use steroids as were power hitters, suggesting that increased offense was not a goal pursued by owners when they addressed steroid usage, and I am unaware of public statements by owners that they would turn a blind eye to steroids to increase offense. Another example is the claim that, “Kansas Citians simply wanted stability and harmony in their Major League Baseball team.” That could be true, but I wasn’t fully convinced, by the evidence, that for Kansas Citians a winning team wasn’t actually a priority. 

The book is written in chronological order but does jump around within any given year. So the sequence of events can sometimes be difficult for the reader to juggle, leading to a stoppage and review of the previous page or two to determine what event happened first. For example, in a discussion of the A’s, a Beatles concert, and the Kansas City market for baseball, I became a little bit lost between 1963, 1964, and 1965. Fully understanding the need to complete a portion of a story or theme before moving on to the next item, I considered this a minor issue, but I would recommend that important events be included on a timeline as part of an appendix, to help ground readers as to what was happening when. 

From my perspective, there are four key takeaways from this book: 

• Charlie Finley had unusual demands for control. 
• Charlie Finley mistreated others—most others. 
• Charlie Finley was mistreated by most members of the owners’ clique, the commissioner, and some unprofessional members of the media (aka anyone who clung onto the owners’ clique). 
• This book has new details on most of the fantastic Charlie Finley stories told over the years. 

For the fourth point, alone, Charlie Finley: The Outrageous Story of Baseball’s Super Showman is a worthwhile read. Compared to other books on Charlie Finley or other MLB owners, this one fares well, making a contribution through original interviews and a nice table-turning focus on the reactions that others had to Finley’s behavior and on the interpretation of how that behavior reflects Finley’s personality. 

One last note of importance is the authors’ acknowledgment of SABR conferences and several SABR members as being important in their writing of this book. It’s good to know that SABR is fostering research for its members and through its members, events, and publications. 

STEVE WEINGARDEN is an organizational psychologist. He has researched MLB team owners and presidents for nearly a decade. He currently cochairs SABR’s Business of Baseball Committee.