From 1986 to 1990, SABR published five volumes of the SABR Review of Books: A Forum of Baseball Literary Opinion. Edited by Paul Adomites, the groundbreaking publication attempted to “tap the two universal loves of SABR members: the love of reading baseball books and the love of a lively discussion.”

Reviews of contemporary (and historical) baseball books were combined with in-depth essays on a variety of subjects, such as women in baseball literature, baseball books for children, and a survey of early books on the Negro Leagues. The Review also included original interviews with the likes of author/pitcher Jim Brosnan, filmmaker John Sayles, and Roger Angell of The New Yorker. In Volume II (1987), dozens of SABR members selected their “Essential Baseball Library.”

In 2020, Phil Bergen’s essay on the baseball novels of John R. Tunis was selected for inclusion in the SABR 50 at 50 anthology book published by the University of Nebraska Press. Jules Tygiel’s article, “The Negro Leagues Revisited,” was included in The Negro Leagues Are Major Leagues, jointly published by SABR and Sports Reference in 2021.

All of the original essays from the SABR Review of Books can now be read online at SABR.org.

Click on a link below to download a PDF e-book edition of each issue:

• The SABR Review of Books, Volume I (1986)
• The SABR Review of Books, Volume II (1987)
• The SABR Review of Books, Volume III (1988)
• The SABR Review of Books, Volume IV (1989)
• The SABR Review of Books, Volume V (1990)

On October 15, 1988, with a runner on first, Kirk Gibson of the Los Angeles Dodgers jerked a slider from the Oakland A’s Dennis Eckersley into the stands for a 5-4 victory.

Newspaper reports noted that it was the first time a World Series game had been turned to victory from defeat by a final-at-bat home run.

Actually, it wasn’t. It had happened tens, dozens, maybe a hundred times before. It had happened in books, books which were implanted in the imagination of every American youngster.

Standing in the back yard, or down at the neighborhood park, it was always the bottom of the ninth. His team was always behind. It was his home run that would save it all.

A boy might never have seen that situation in real life but he had read about it. Frank Merriwell or Fred Fearnot or Joe Matson or Roy Tucker or Chip Hilton or one of the Blue Sox had banged out that desperation hit and he could do it, too.

He knew he could because he could recognize in those same stories many things which had happened before. Jackie Robinson had rattled many pitchers into balks before Roy Tucker did it. Sal Maglie had been released on Old Timers day before Speedy Mason. Don Drysdale had come along as a hot-tempered but talented rookie before Schoolboy Johnson. And those characters are from just one book. There are other fictional characters who echo Mike “King” Kelly or Frank Chance, Ralph Branca or Joe DiMaggio.

Baseball’s history has been so diverse, and has been recorded so well, that few heroics needed to be imagined. They were there, waiting to be polished.

What was polished changed as the game evolved. Early fictional characters played on town teams, told the pitcher where to throw the ball and thought the hit and run was the height of skill. With time, they played in domed stadiums, were taught to hit by computers and waited for the three-run homer.

The first novel which was almost completely about baseball was published in 1884. Noah Brooks Our Baseball Team and How It Won The Championship was a reflection of professional baseball in its formative decades.

Our Baseball Team was an Illinois town team formed from the swells and the mechanics by the city bigshots, formed to reflect well on the town and perhaps increase real estate values. Its best players were paid decent salaries by the standards of the time and its lesser players were paid nothing or next to it. The team traveled, played other teams around the state and reflected in many ways the career of the Midwestern boy to whom the book was dedicated, Albert Spalding.

By the first decade of the new century boys’ baseball books were filled with the “inside baseball” of John McGraw and the Giants. Team captains such as Frank Merriwell ran their charges like puppets, with elaborate signs. Professional managers tended to have Irish names mirroring McGraw, Connie Mack (Cornelius McGillicuddy), Jimmy Collins and the other famous managers of the era.

In the early 1920s one of baseball fiction’s most popular characters, Baseball Joe Matson, suddenly switched positions. In the teens, Joe had been a pitcher, the dominant position in the dead ball era. Suddenly, in 1922, just after Babe Ruth had shattered earlier records with consecutive 54-homer and 59-homer seasons, he became Baseball Joe, Home Run King.

In the ’50s, black players began to pop up in books, both about neighborhood games (Florence Hayes’ Skid) and the big leagues (Murrell Edmunds’ Behold, Thy Brother.) Little League and its equivalents also became the setting for many a book.

In recent decades, the reliever emerged. No longer merely a way to give a fading starter one last chance for glory, relief pitching produced prominent characters. Television gave authors another possibility, putting the hero in the booth to prolong his connection with the game.

Just as they drew their baseball from the game they watched, writers drew their characters from the players they watched. Sometimes, the debt was acknowledged, as it was to Frank Chance in Hugh Fullerton’s Jimmy Kirkland series. Sometimes, as in Johnny Madigan (Eddie Stanky) of Duane Decker’s Good Field, No Hit, it wasn’t. Spalding was merely the first of the characters borrowed from life.

George Brett, Charlie Finley, Reggie Jackson, Don Larsen, Connie Mack, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, and Eddie Waitkus have all shown up in some form.

If a writer didn’t want to borrow a player wholesale he could give him a bit part using his real name. Babe Ruth has a walk-on in Spitballs and Holy Water. Gene Autry has a ride-on in Johnny Got His Gun. Shoeless Joe Jackson got a book and a movie from the same bit of imagination.

Some authors took the idea of blending fiction and baseball history to a greater degree of exactness. Season’s Past by the pseudonymous Damon Rice uses several generations of a family to trace the history of New York City (mostly Brooklyn Dodger) baseball from Bob “Death to Flying Things” Ferguson to Jackie Robinson and Walter O’Malley. Two others, Donald Honig and Frank O’Rourke, built books around transparently disguised versions of the 1941-42 Dodgers and the 1949 Phillies. W.P. Kinsella imported the 1908 Chicago Cubs for The Iowa Baseball Confederacy.

It wasn’t only in the writing that baseball fiction reflected the game’s history. The illustrators which accompanied the stories are an alternative to photographs. Brooks’ book contains drawings of players without gloves and with benches that were exactly that, no roof to shade players from sun or fans.

Since Gilbert Patten’s Frank and Dick Merriwell books were reprinted several times from the 1890s to the 1930s, their cover art is a vital history of the period. The pitcher’s stage changes from a field-level slab with a path shaved directly to home plate to a raised mound with only a circle of dirt around it. Uniforms, caps, gloves, bats and stadiums evolved.

From the beginnings to 1910

But everything didn’t come together at once.

Although forms of baseball were played dating back to Colonial times, and some fragments tantalize us, there was nothing recognizable as baseball fiction until after the Civil War made baseball the national game.

In many ways, this was a reflection of the economics of book publishing in the United States. Fewer than 1,000 books were published in the country annually before 1890. Many of these were reprints of popular British authors, whose work American publishers could “borrow” freely because of the lack of a copyright treaty.

Most books were sold for about $2, a substantial sum when $1 a day was a laborer’s wage. They were the province of the wealthier classes, a group heavily influenced by English tastes.

In fact, the first substantial appearance of baseball came in a book that was an attempt to capitalize on the popularity of Tom Brown’s Schrool Days. Thomas Hughes’ schoolboy classic had been published in London in 1857. The book had been printed in America as well, and Boston’s Lee and Shepard Co. was looking for a way to tap the same market. They snapped up Charles’ Everetts’ Changing Base, a book of schoolboy adventures with a little more than two chapters devoted to the description of a baseball game. It appeared in 1868.

Between then and the turn of the century fewer than 10 original novels were published which contained any significant amount of baseball.

Yet, publishers were interested in baseball. In 1887, for example, teams from five publishers had formed a league which played regularly around New York City. The league included teams from Scribner’s (which had published Brooks’ Fairport Nine) and The Century Co. (which would publish its first full baseball novel, Leslie Quirk’s Freshman Dorn, Pitcher, in 1911.) Publisher’s Weekly, the bible of the industry since the 1870s, printed box scores of games between publishing house teams.

They also knew there was a market for baseball fiction. For outside the book market, a sizable number of baseball stories were being published.

They were appearing in what today we call story papers and dime novels. Story papers were generally the size of a newspaper and contained several serialized tales. Dime novels were about the size of a comic book and usually contained one or two stories, the main one about the length of a substantial short story. The dime novel story was generally complete in that issue (no heroes were left hanging with the bases loaded) but the characters and general plot lines continued from issue to weekly issue.

The series dime novel had been invented by the brothers Beadle, originally of Cooperstown, New York, in 1860. After the Civil War, the Beadles and their imitators began to publish large amounts of such fiction.

In contrast to the Anglocentric fiction of the rich, dime novels were overtly patriotic. The staples were the American West and heroic moments from American history.In the 1880s however, faced with a flagging market, dime novel publishers began to cast around for other topics. The major new genre was detective stories. The Beadles tried their share of these, but they also had other ideas.

Since its inception in 1860, the Beadles had published the annual Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player by Henry Chadwick, the inventor of the box score and one of the early codifiers and popularizers of baseball. For example, John McGraw recounted how he established his early baseball reputation in Truxton, New York by purchasing the new edition every year and being the first around to absorb the rule changes and think about their implications.

With this background it seemed natural for the Beadle to introduce some baseball tales into their dime novels, often in conjunction with detective stories. Their first baseball dime novel, in 1885, was Edward Wheeler’s High Hat Harry, the Baseball Detective. A couple of years later, they introduced the aptly named Dan Manly as Double Curve Dan, the Pitcher Detective, who made it clear baseball was merely a way to solve crimes and not a career for anyone serious, was the first baseball character to return in multiple dime novels.

At the same time, dime novel publishers were eyeing a younger audience. Dime novels (which usually cost a nickel) were one of the few forms of packaged entertainment a child could afford in the days before movies.

Baseball stories were a natural for this market. They were such a natural that publishers were inclined to fudge a bit in their advertising. Baseball covers became a favorite, even when there was little or no baseball action inside. Book publishers imported the Jack Harkaway boys adventure series from England and put a picture of Jack on the spine with a baseball bat, even though the Britisher played nothing of the kind. A.L. Burt, one of the large publishers of the day, put out a book called The Bordentown Story Teller in 1899. On the cover is a young man sliding into the plate while the catcher reaches for the throw. A crowd watches from a grandstand and the trees behind the outfield fence. Inside is a series of stories about Joseph Bonaparte, the brother of Napoleon, after he settled in the United States in the 1820s. Not a word of baseball.

Dime novel publishers also learned to jump on current events quickly. In 1890, John Montgomery Ward tried to break the owners’ economic stranglehold by creating the Players’ League, also known as the Brotherhood League. By late April, Street & Smith,which was replacing the Beadles at the top of the dime novel heap, was producing The Brotherhood Detective, or, Short-Stop Sam. In May, they had Brotherhood Buck, or, The Players League in the South.

The publishing world’s knowledge of baseball’s popularity received its greatest confirmation beginning April 18, 1896. On that date appeared Frank Merriwell’s School Days, the first issue of a new dime novel series, Tip Top Weekly, from Street & Smith. Frank’s creator was Gilbert Patten, a successful dime novel writer from Maine who’d played a lot of baseball as a boy and run a town team as a young man.

From the beginning Frank played baseball. Oh, he’d stray to football in the fall and a host of lesser sports during the dull winter months (which were often broken by a game of indoor baseball or a trip to some southern clime for a few winter innings.) But Frank’s acknowledged favorite was baseball. Baseball tales began with late winter practice, slid into the school team’s year and then stretched into some kind of summer league or barnstorming team. Frank’s foreign trips almost always took place during the winter. In all, some 712 of the eventual 245 Merriwell books (Frank spawned a brother, Dick, and later a son, Frank Jr.) contained baseball, far more than all other sports combined.

Frank was a publishing phenomenon, such a phenom that within a year, Street & Smith began to turn the Tip Top Weekly episodes into books. They would take three or four of the dime novels, do a little editing for continuity and put them out with paper covers. A couple of years later, they began putting out hardbound versions.

While no other venture was as successful as Patten’s Merriwell, there was no lack of imitators. Fred Fearnot was created by a Street & Smith rival in 1898. He survived into the 1920s and spent many of his summer months playing baseball. Others — Jack Lightfoot, Frank Manley, the Three Chums, Dick Daresome — popped up for a year or so and played baseball.

From 1910 to 1940

But the dime novel was actually on its last legs.

The first blow had hit in the 1890s with increased postal rates, for most dime novel sale were to subscribers. The publishers were also thrashing around for new genres, new plots and new characters.

The plots had long ago reached the point where even a 12-year-old boy could recognize a tinge of unreality. 13-year-olds regularly out-thought, out-played and out-fought adults. This came despite these adults trying every known poison, trap, deceit or disguise imaginable.

And then came the movies. Movies in the early 1910s were much like dime novels. They ran for fifteen action-packed minutes. Any they just happened to cost a nickel, too. They were such a natural that Gilbert Patten dug up his old dime novels and sold some to movie makers. (Eventually, in the 1930s, some Merriwell stories would be made into a movie serial).

Even the perennials like the Merriwell stories began to fade. The last original Merriwell dime novel appeared in 1915, and Patten had bailed out several years before that.

While the dime novel was fading, things were looking up for books. The first impetus was production methods. Cheaper paper and bindings, as well as new, highly-automated binding methods, had the potential to cut publishers’ costs.

Edward Stratemeyer was one of the first to perceive the potential of lower prices. Stratemeyer was a successful dime novel author and a friend and admirer of Horatio Alger, whose unfinished works he’d completed after Alger’s death.

Stratemeyer came up with two successful ideas.

The first, not entirely his own, was to price books at a dollar, or even at 25 cents. The increased volume would more than make up for the lower profit margin, he reasoned. He turned his pen to producing more of the historical adventure novels he was known for under a variety of pseudonyms. They sold well.

They sold so well they inspired Stratemeyer’s second idea, to turn writing into a highly organized, highly profitable enterprise — what a later writer was to call a fiction factory. Stratemeyer would think of a character and a basic plot outline. This would be turned over to a writer who would produce the book to Stratemeyer’s specifications. Stratemeyer would then find a company to publish the book.

In effect, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, as it was known, was a publisher. And thus he put great emphasis on two of a publisher’s standard practices of the time — series books and pseudonyms.

The series book was an extension of the most popular publishing ventures in the United States, the mass circulation magazine and the dime novel. Like both of these, the series book sought to interest a broad range of readers rather than a small, upper-class audience. And like the successful dime novels, it centered on a character with whom the public could identify. The identity and continuity bred sales.

However, it wasn’t a good business practice to attach these potential profits too closely to an author. What if he died, or won the lottery or decided to write the new The Scarlet Letter? Where would the series go? As if they needed another example, American publishers of the 1910s had Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Sherlock Holmes’ creator had decided he was a spiritualist and wanted to spend his fortune propagating those ideas. Harper & Bros. lost the flow of stories from one of the most profitable publishing ventures.

From publishers’ nightmares like these arose their penchant for pseudonyms. While they are widely thought of as protecting an author from the immediate consequences of publishing something controversial, in popular fiction they are more often a publisher’s device. The character belonged to the publisher and if it was successful, there was always another hack available.

Stratemeyer made great use of pseudonyms, either the Capt. Ralph Bonehill or Arthur M. Winfield he favored for himself, or the dozens he created for other series. In fact, Stratemeyer made great use of all the tricks of popular fiction. The Syndicate, run by his daughter and others, lasted long after his death in 1930, and still exists as part of Simon & Schuster.

His syndicate created the Bobbsey Twins, the Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, Tom Swift Jr. and a host of less successful series. The books were written over generations by multiple writers and the syndicate was so well organized and so secretive that even today the authorship of many of the books has not been established.

Most of the Stratemeyer syndicate books were not about baseball. Many of the early works were historical. But the next big category Stratemeyer moved into was a series featuring a hero or a group of chums having adventures at school, camp, etc., much like the contemporary Merriwell material. And, as with Merriwell, many of these books featured baseball plots or games.

In 1910, having watched the success of the Merriwell series, Stratemeyer created a new pseudonym, Lester Chadwick, specifically to handle baseball books. Stratemeyer was a baseball fan (a crank in the parlance of the time) and chose the name to echo that of Henry Chadwick. The Chadwick pseudonym first appeared on a couple of books about Tom Parsons, a hayseed who goes to college and makes good through baseball.

In 1912, Baseball Joe appeared under the Chadwick name. Joe Matson was an important new type for boys’ baseball fiction. He was the first series hero who was primarily a baseball player. Others had been all-around athletes, such as Jack Lightfoot, or all-around paragons, such as Frank Merriwell. Joe, of course, became a detective, boxer, financial whiz, etc. as the plots demanded, but he sustained none of these.

He was also the first professional baseball player in a series. Merriwell, the other dime novel heroes and the characters springing up in the series books of Ralph Henry Barbour, Albertus True Dudley and Zane Grey were amateurs, generally high school or college players. Professionals were faintly disreputable, and frequently beaten by Our Heroes’ amateur clubs. Many of the early Baseball Joe books seem to be reacting against this. Joe explains to his mother that he can help more people as a ballplayer than as a minister, that he can make lots of money, that he can win the respect of the right people.

Baseball Joe actually began as an amateur, playing as a 15-year-old for the Silver Stars of Riverside, his vaguely New England home town. In the next books, he moves to prep school and Yale. But by the fourth book, in 1914, he becomes a professional. By the next year, and the next book he’s in the majors. The series eventually ran to 15 books and continued until 1926.

Stratemeyer wasn’t the only writer making the transition from dime novels and amateur baseball players.

After Patten begged out of the Merriwell series, Street & Smith made him editor of a new weekly called Top Notch. The magazine featured stories of sports and adventure, many written by Patten using the Burt L. Standish pseudonym. He began writing serials for the magazine with baseball themes and characters.

The most popular of these characters was Lefty Locke, and in 1914 the same year Baseball Joe became a pro, the first five books of Patten’s Big League Series were published. Most of these featured Lefty, but not all, for Patten was breaking even more new ground with this series. They were all set in the same Big League (that’s how the books referred to it) and many characters repeat from book to book. But the characters also come and go. Lefty was the central character of the first four books, but in the fifth, Brick King, Backstop, he has a cameo at the end, congratulating rival Brick on his play.

Patten, a more skillful and interesting writer than most of his contemporaries, was creating a larger world, one which would give him more freedom to choose characters and plots. The Big League Series ran 16 books and ended in 1928, a run very parallel to Stratemeyer’s Baseball Joe. Yet, Patten was never driven to the length of plotting and draracterization of the later Baseball Joe books, which reached absurd lengths.

Joe would pledge to lead the league in all the major batting and pitching categories and then do so. He would extend the cliche of the “well thrown ball nailing the bad guy” to beaning a shark. In Baseball Joe, Pitching Wizard, he uncovers a plot by two Giant teammates to throw the pennant race. He chases them out of the league, but two rookies take their place, and being rookies, are making errors in the clutch. For the crucial game with the Cubs, Joe comes to the only possible conclusion. He must strike out every enemy batter. Needless to say, he does so. Presumably unable to top this, the Baseball Joe series died.

Baseball Joe and Lefty Locke were merely the two most prominent of the series characters that popped up over these decades.

The writers varied greatly in skill and audience. Some, such as Barbour, Dudley and William Heyliger, wrote mostly of prep schools. The books were published in nicely bound editions with color illustrations. They chronicled schoolboy hijinks and other sports as well as baseball. They were more expansive and aimed at a “nice” audience. Barbour worked his way through a large number of series, none of which ran more than 11 books, and none of which were completely baseball. In all Barbour published an astounding 135 boys’ series books between 1899 and 1943, while writing other works as well. Many consider him, especially in his early works, the most skillful writer of the period. Robert Cantwell maintains Barbour’s game descriptions were a major positive influence on sportswriters of the period.

Others, such as Harold Sherman and various pseudonyms from the Stratemeyer stable, were published in cheap editions, with few black and white sketches, paper the first cousin of newsprint and cardboard covers. Sherman’s Home Run Series was a series mostly because of its title. Characters didn’t carry over from book to book.

Sherman also wrote some of the purpler prose in a mauve era, the kind of prose that has made the era a snicker for modern readers. This is a speech from a chapter called “The Flame of Feeling Grows” in Fight ‘Em Big Three. Speaking with “simple directness,” the old coach tells the team, “if any of you think that the satisfying of personal grievance means more than victory for Milford, go ahead and betray your fellow team-mates who are grving their all for the finest old high school in the world.”

The other notable series of the period was attributed to professional baseball players Christy Mathewson and Everett “Deacon” Scott but actually written by John Wheeler. The books were linked by their alliterative titles — Pitcher Pollock and Catcher Craig — but by little else.

These series went a long way to establishing the characteristics of the baseball series and some of the themes that would stay with it. The characters were positive role models. The books aimed at a moral lesson (teamwork is important, gambling will hurt you). With writers like Barbour, and the greater freedom granted Patten outside the Frank Merriwell stories, the plots and characters improved and became more believable.

From 1940 to 1955 – Juveniles

World War II slowed the production of both babies and baseball fiction. From mid-1942 until 1946, only two baseball novels were published, both by John R. Tunis.

But, with the end of the war, the production of baseball fiction shot up in part to meet the reading habits of the baby explosion which celebrated the end of the war. There were an average of 17.5 baseball novels produced annually during the 1950s, in contrast to the 2.8 of the depression-wracked 1930s or the 4.8 of the booming 1920s.

The traditional series books returned with expanded vigor.

Clair Bee’s Chip Hilton and Wilfred McCormick’s Bronc Burnett and Rocky McCune recreated the series hero of old. Chip, Bronc and Rocky carried real-man nicknames and did real-man deeds even though Chip and Bronc were teenagers. They won state and national championships in the big three sports. They defeated bad guys, outwitted gamblers, endured bad umpires and generally ignored girls. (There was always one on the edge of the story just to let you know our hero’s, uh, heart was in the right place.) They mostly played baseball. Even Bee, who before he created Chip was nationally famous as a basketball coach, wrote more baseball stories for Chip than either basketball or football.

Drane Decker’s Blue Sox stories were a distinct echo of Gilbert Patten’s Big League Series which featured the Blue Stockings. Decker’s books each follow a player who establishes himself in the Blue Sox lineup, with characters in the later books in the 13-volume series replacing those who had been the heroes of the first books.

But new themes were appearing too.

The most obvious was Little League, which was expanding across the nation in the 1950s. Curtis Bishop and Cary Jackson built series or groups of similar books in Little League settings. Many of the books, especially those from Jackson, included instructional sections to help young players.

Race also was popping up as a topic in the years after Jackie Robinson. The first was Skid by Florence Hayes in 1948. Others soon followed, and some of the series book writers took up the theme — Bishop in Little League Heroes and Archibald in Outfield Orphan.

The pivotal figure in this period was Tunis. He had begun publishing sports books in the 1930s with stories of Harvard snobbery and track. He wrote them for all ages, but his publisher marketed them as juveniles. Just before World War II, he turned to baseball.

Before Tunis, the values taught in baseball novels were socially very conservative. The themes constantly taught the young readers that the individual had to conform to the group. Individuals could be criminals or cheats, mean or jealous, but society as a whole was fine. The books showed these aberrant, individual evils overcome and society rendered whole again.

Tunis’s books rendered a much more liberal view of society. Some evils were broad. Keystone Kids, published during World War II, was a story of two brothers who’d fought their way to the big leagues from poverty. It was also a book about anti-Semitism, a social evil which had never served as a theme before. In fact, many turn-of-the-century books were filled with anti-Semitic remarks and slurs against other ethnic and racial groups, too.

Tunis’s theme gained power from his characters, who had many more dimensions than other writers. Most characters in boys’ novels reeked of a nobility unfound in the readers’ daily lives. The sneaks and the baddies were easily identifiable. Their “shifty” eyes or some such things would reveal them to the alert reader long before their cowardice or manipulations caused trouble for the hero. Tunis’s characters were grayer, and thus their struggles over their own selfishness (Highpockets) or insensitivity (Young Razzle) carried more weight.

Tunis even had the temerity to challenge that most sacred icon of juvenile baseball heroes — the former player who is now the main character’s coach. In Buddy and the Old Pro, Buddy’s admiration for his hero turns to disgust when the Stankyish old pro begins to teach him how to cheat.

From 1965 to 1990 – Updated Juveniles

Tunis’s work was just one signal of a broader societal change, a greater concern with the rights of the individual than of the society as a whole.

Books about baseball, a team sport, reacted slowly. Even in race, an issue where baseball had been something of a pioneer, the fictional reaction was slow. Black characters began to appear in books — Matt Christopher’s No Arm in Left Field, George Shea’s Big Bad Ernie — but so did a host of groups previously far from the mainstream.

Linnea Due’s High and Outside looked at alcoholism. Marilyn Levinson’s And Don’t Bring Jeremy was about learning disabilities. Barbara Aiello’s It’s Your Turn at Bat featured a kid with cerebral palsy. In addition to the other themes in these books, each one found society (the baseball team) must come to an understanding of the main character’s problem, rather than the character adapting to the group.

To be sure, authors such as Christopher and Bill Knott continued to turn out more traditional books. But even these authors broke non-traditional ground with Knott’s story of a boy who must cope with sitting on the bench while his sister plays or Christopher’s story of a boy struggling while his parents’ divorce.

The new trend of the post-baby boom years clearly was the role of women, or girls. They were not the non-competitive softball players of earlier books, but rivals. One, R.R. Knudson’s Zan Hagen, was even a superwoman of the Frank Merriwell/Chip Hilton ilk, beating all comers at all sports. They also appeared as Little League coaches.

Most of these books came down on the side that girls could and should play with boys. But one, David Klass’ A Different Season, while accepting the validity of all the feminist arguments, has the main character adamant that there are some things — the high school baseball team, a funky local driving range — that really should be just for boys.

In some ways, these arguments are echoed in a new genre of baseball fiction, one specifically aimed at girls, the juvenile romance. Here, girls are most often cheerleaders or ball girls or some other decorative role. Even when they do become players, as in Elaine Harper’s Short Stop for Romance they do so to attract the attention of a boy and quit when they get it. He’s supposed to be the sweaty sports hero. She’s really more into ballet.

Another development of the period was the growth in the number of books designed to be read to children of pre-school age. Before 1970, for example, there were only 14 juvenile books of 50 pages or less published. Since then, there have been 71.

While these books were proliferating, the traditional series had all but disappeared with Bee, McCormick and Decker in the 1950s. The most prolific writers of the period, notably Christopher, didn’t do any series. Throughout the 1970s, no series carried longer than the four books of Clem Philbrook’s Ollie’s Team.

Very recently, however, the baseball series book appears to be making at least a modest comeback. In 1989 and 1990, Random House’s Ballantine Books began publishing paperbound series which echoed many of the traits of the dime novels. They used a recognizable set of characters, were programmed to come out over the course of the baseball season and focused heavily on the game. The 1989 series, The Rookies by Mark Freeman, followed three boys from high school to the World Series in three years. I have not seen the 1990 series, The Angel Park All-Stars by Dean Hughes, but the publisher’s catalogue indicates it will be about Little League boys.

Adult Baseball Novels

While baseball books aimed at teenagers and smaller fry have had a long history, the adult baseball novel didn’t really flower until the 1950s.

There had been earlier attempts. Some early pot-boilers were aimed at adults. Heywood Broun wrote a rather interesting novel in the 1920s. And several murder mysteries were published.

The only pre-World War II baseball fiction which was judged to have any literary merit were the Jack Keefe and Danny Warner stories of Ring Lardner. Lardner thought they were simply dialect stories best treated as amusement, but luminaries such as Virginia Woolf found them interesting. Lardner never pursued the characters and the literary establishment made it clear they felt baseball and serious literature were incompatible.

This began to change with the publication of Bernard Malamud’s The Natural in 1952 and Mark Harris’s The Southpaw in 1953. Both were recognized as literary novels despite their baseball content. But Harris has recalled that at the time he had to do a lot of talking to convince critics that his was a serious book. Harris said he argued this so long that it took him years to acknowledge publicly his debt to the baseball novels he had read as a boy.

That’s interesting, because in The Southpaw, Harris has Henry Wiggen admit to having read Heyliger, Sherman, Tunis and Lardner, “although Lardner did not seem to me to amount to much, half his stories containing women in them and the other half less about baseball then what was going on in the hotels and trains. He never seems to care how the game came out. He wouldn’t tell you much about the stars but only about bums and punks and second-raters that never had the stuff to begin with. Heyliger and Sherman and some of the others give you a good baseball story that you couldn’t lay it down.” Henry describes his great delight at a series with strong echoes of Baseball Joe.

While Malamud and Harris were storming the literary gates, the publishing firms of A.S. Barnes was making an effort to create a body of adult baseball fiction in more popular form. In a decade from 1948 to 1957, they published a series of novels by Frank O’Rourke, Jack Weeks, Arnold Hano and Ed Fitzgerald which took a more adult view of baseball. It wasn’t sugar-coated. People lost more than a game at times. Players had trouble (but rarely actual sex) with women.

It was Malamud and Harris, however, who opened the baseball novel to serious litterateurs. Novelists began to use baseball to explore established themes and questions in a new way.

From alienation (Robert Coovey’s The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop.) to fantastic realism (W.P. Kinsella’s Shoeless Joe), the themes and styles which dominated American literary writing in the last few decades have appeared in baseball novels.

As the publishing market changed and expanded in the decades following World War tr, all the styles and genres threw off baseball novels.

There were the 1950s screwball comedies begging to be movies — H. Allen Smith’s Rhubarb, Bud Nye’s Stay Loose, Paul Molloy’s A Pennant for The Kremlin. Later, the genre followed the imitators of Dan Jenkins’s football book, Semi-Tough, adding much more explicit sex.

There were the new types. Romances blossomed, from Lucy Kennedy’s The Sunlit Field in the 1950s to a host of paperback romances, such as Sheila Paulos’s Wild Roses, in the 1980s. Curiously, only the more explicit lines in the romance field used baseball themes. Science fiction produced a couple of baseball books, as did horror novels.

Older genres produced baseball books, too. The detective novel blossomed. one of Robert Parker’s early Spenser novels had a baseball setting. Richard Rosen turned out stylish mysteries with a former player as detective. Spy novels, from the grim Cold War seriousness of Robert Wade’s Knave of Eagles to the spoofs of Ross H. Spencer used baseball.

The first woman in baseball became a popular theme, ranging from the trashy A Grand Slam by Ray Puechner to Barbara Gregorich’s She’s on First. Some in this genre were in sharp contrast to the romances, which for all the statements about independence had some finding their fulfillment in their relationships with men. Books such as Michael Bowen’s Can’t Miss and Gregorich’s attempted to take a serious look at the issue and to have the main character be primarily a baseball player rather than a seeker of love.

Graham Greene once noted that literary figures are perfectly happy to acknowledge their debt to writers such as Joseph Conrad, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Henry James. But they are, he said, less likely to recognize H. Rider Haggard, the turn-of-the-century writer of fantastic adventures who inspired Greene’s own imagination as a boy. Yet, it is writers like Haggard, he said, who bring us to a love of reading when we are young.

The baseball juvenile nurtured many of us in two ways. It created a sense of enjoyment in reading, a joy which we could take to reading of all kinds. It also created a sense of the game, its strategies, its characters, its traditions, the way baseball situations were always the same yet always just a bit different.

The novel may have always brought the winning run to the plate in the bottom of the ninth. But the man at the plate was never quite the same. Maybe he was weak from having escaped gamblers, like Frank Merriwell. Maybe he was tormented by past failures, like Pete Gibbs of the Blue Sox. Maybe he was a man so crippled he had to hit a homer because he couldn’t run, like Kirk Gibson.

In his wonderfully compact and brilliant Take Time For Paradise, the late Bart Giamatti says, “If baseball is a narrative, an epic of exile and return, a vast, communal poem about separation, loss and the hope for reunion — if baseball is a romantic Epic — it is finally told by the audience.” The 1980s saw a change in baseball writing as dramatic as the lively ball Babe Ruth and others found themselves hitting in 1920. We have finished a decade marked by baseball books written for and by adults, and I don’t mean sportswriters, many of whom, like many athletes, think like adolescents. Much good writing about the game is now done by the audience.

Two of the most whimsical, delightful baseball novels of the 1980s, The Curious Case of Sidd J. Finch and Shoeless Joe share enchanting as well as technically interesting qualities. Each book recounts a magical fantasy, a story that the reader knows could not actually happen, in a fashion that allows the reader to believe that the events are happening for the duration of the book. Both also enhance the credibility of the narration by the use of real people as characters. In Sidd Finch, George Plimpton embellishes his 1985 April Fool’s Day Sports Illustrated “scoop” about the Mets’ pitching discovery. Finch is a young Englishman with a 763 mile-per-hour fast ball and pinpoint control who learned to chant mantras in a Tibetan monastery. Plimpton chronicles Sidd Finch’s brief major league career (2-0, 17 2/3 IP, 0 H, 0 ER, 0 BB, 53 K) as observed by Robert Temple. Temple is a writer who finds out about Sidd by accident, rents him a room, and eventually becomes his friend.

James Patrick Brosnan was a baseball pioneer. A tall righthanded pitcher of average ability, he spent most of his career pitching for the Cubs, Cardinals, and Reds. Known as the “Professor” because of his habit of smoking a pipe while he read, the bespectacled Brosnan made his mark as the first baseball player to write honestly about the game from the inside. His first book, The Long Season, is considered a classic because it was the first book to relate what it was really like to play in the big leagues. Brosnan related his experiences in an insightful yet humorous journal format. He uses this same format in his second book, Pennant Race, which deals with his stint with the 1961 National League champion Cincinnati Reds. Both works have served as the inspiration for countless player journals starting with Ball Four. To date none of Brosnan’s imitators have brought the same sensitivity and literary skill to their work. It is also worth noting that Brosnan never enlisted the aid of a ghostwriter, which places him nearly alone among ballplayers whose names appear on bookjackets. I recently spoke with Brosnan via telephone from his home in suburban Chicago.

From what he says in his autobiography, A Measure of Independence, John R. Tunis had no particular interest in baseball. He does remember fondly attending baseball games in Boston at the age of ten or eleven, but the impulse to write about the sport came from his editor. In Florida getting material for his first baseball book, Tunis is accompanied by his brother Roberts, whom he describes as “a great fan and a student of the game, about which he knew far more than I did.” Nevertheless, Tunis eventually wrote nine books with a baseball setting, eight of them based on the Brooklyn Dodgers he chose to watch that spring in Florida “because the squad at the time was full of lively and interesting characters.”

“In the vast range of baseball novels boys’ books written by men like John Tunis to adult novels written by men like Bernard Malamud, women for the most part have been either complaisant wives or stupid bimbos — or perhaps sexual threats. Rarely…does a woman appear as someone intelligent or valuable.” — Eric Solomon (1985).

Lindy Sunshine is the hottest big-league prospect in a dozen seasons — a crack shortstop with great range and shotgun arm, a clutch .300 hitter, a firebrand sparkplug who almost singlehandedly lifts the doormat Chicago Eagles back into the thick of a pennant race. But Lindy is also dogged by endless controversy and embroiled in riotous conflict. Sunshine’s teammates threaten revolt if the much ballyhooed rookie remains in the lineup, and fans jeer Sunshine’s every appearance on the field. Opposing baserunners slide at second base with spikes high and blood in the eye, while opposing moundsmen brush the rookie back at each at-bat with high hard ones calculated to dispatch Lindy directly to the disabled list.

Not since the fabled Jackie Robinson, in fact, has any rookie been greeted with such universal animosity and treated to such relentless indignities. Like Robinson, Lindy Sunshine carries a deeply personal and utterly inescapable burden onto the big-league diamond — one destined to spur deeper hatred and kindle greater bigotry than even the ebony skin and African features that were Robinson’s legacy in his rookie Dodger season of 1947. Ms. Lindy Sunshine, star rookie shortstop for the Chicago Eagles, is, after all, a woman — the first female player to make it into the Bigs. And as the game’s first female star, Sunshine provides — for teammate, fan, and reader alike — the ultimate assault upon that last pure male bastion which masquerades as America’s national pastime. Yet Lindy Sunshine is also driven — with an inward fire that matches even Robinson’s — to succeed alone on her considerable merits as a ballplayer. In the process of winning ballgames she aims to push aside, perhaps forever, that last great hypocrisy tainting America’s most democratic of all institutions — professional baseball.

This is the ingenious plot and convoluted circumstance underpinning the narrative structure of Barbara Gregorich’s intriguing first novel, a rookie work which sparkles throughout with realistic diamond action and engages the baseball reader with its dramatic tension and finely drawn cast of big-league characters. Gregorich surprises her predominantly male readership with one of the most accomplished fictional celebrations to date of our hyper-literary national pastime. “She’s on First” it turns out, is a novel which merits attention as much for its successful baseball ambience as for its unconventional subject matter. As intriguing fictional theme, after all, the notion of a pioneer woman big-leaguer is not at all unique to previous baseball literature. Five novels, at least, have been drawn to this theme during previous seasons, and Gregorich’s novel ironically appears here head-to-head in 1987 against Michael Bowen’s “Can’t Miss,” a much less accomplished treatment seizing upon the same unconventional plot, yet falling as flat as the Chicago Cubs in late August.

Where Gregorich’s fictional ballplayers are generally believable if sometimes overdrawn, and her contemporary adaptations of Branch Rickey’s noble experiment add poignant significance to her plot, Bowen’s characters are cardboard, his diamond actions highly contrived, his dialogue almost always juvenile. But what really distinguishes these two novels with such similar plot lines is that one takes its revisionist-feminist theme as the prophetic stuff of baseball myth and lore, while the other simply reinforces the reigning stereotype of an ill-equipped feminine intruder upon baseball’s male sanctity. Lindy Sunshine is a baseball pioneer cut in the mold of real-life rebels Jackie Robinson, Pete Gray, this season’s Jim Abbott; Bowen’s Chris Tilden is little more than a grown-up Sensible Kate, uncomfortable in spikes and ballcap, the stuff of juvenile Horatio Alger fiction stuffed uncomfortably into the mere trappings of serious adult fiction.

Women have had little visible impact upon professional baseball across the century, though they have not been entirely absent from the game either. In the world of baseball fiction, women characters have played a much more visible, albeit predictable, role. The treatment of women in baseball novels — from juvenile fictions in the mold of John Tunis to sophisticated adult novels from Malamud to Kinsella — has fallen repeatedly into three distinct categories.

The first and most frequently encountered is the notion of women as creatures totally foreign to baseball’s world, as to the larger world of competitive sports in general. This is the tradition established at the outset with juvenile sports novels: the woman is either protective mother, virtuous girlfriend, or silly pigtailed classmate — in all cases a bothersome distraction from the noble game itself. The second role assigned women throughout sports fiction is that of cardboard symbol for insidious forces of good and evil. This is the familiar Hollywood motif of the lucky player finding virtuous woman companion and enjoying immediate diamond success; by contrast, the foolhardy players are seduced by dark ladies and suffer prolonged batting slumps as an inevitable consequence. The prototype here is Malamud’s Roy Hobbs, yet the theme is spun out with endless variation in nearly every literary and cinematic rendition of the timeworn baseball plot, from “Damn Yankees” to “Bull Durham.”

Finally, there is the more daring theme of the first woman ballplayer, the female Jackie Robinson breaking the last great barrier to true baseball equality. This theme has itself received two contrasting treatments — as minor plot element and comic escapade, or as the stuff of serious baseball mythology. This article first surveys historical perspectives on women’s general treatment in historical baseball and throughout baseball fiction. We then look more closely at the fictional potential of stories involving the first woman major leaguer, a theme which has led to some of baseball’s lamest writing — with Rothweiler and Bowen — as well as to some of its most gripping diamond action — in the spritely treatment of Barbara Gregorich.

While Gregorich and Bowen are first to devote an entire novel to serious fictional treatment of the female rookie’s diamond debut, other novelists have exploited this idea as either minor subplot or excuse for titillating sexual escapade. The waters are first tested with the least meritorious effort in this vain, Ray Peuchner’s “Grand Slam” (1973), a less than mildly amusing sports novel about a gorgeous tough-talking second baseperson on an obscure minor league club. Swinging sex all too quickly pads out the sparse narrative action for Peuchner, and dramatic boredom descends rapidly into intellectual banality. Paul Rothweiler’s shabbily constructed and even more poorly received 1976 novel, “The Sensuous Southpaw,” continues the small sub-genre of women’s baseball fiction with an equally uneven and frivolous tale about Jeri “Red” Walker, knuckleballing ace of the minor league Portland Beavers. The team nickname itself should be sufficient to alert readers to Rothweiler’s lust for the cheap literary joke. David Ritz in his more inventive work, “The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn” (1981), features a fastballing Jewish female Sandy Koufax as improbable ace of his fictional Dodgers, just as improbably resurrected in Brooklyn of the 1980s. Donald Hays’ slapstick Dixie Association Arkansas Reds boast a female infielder in their oddball lineup as do the fictional Portland Mavericks (same team yet more tasteful nickname than Rothweiler’s novel) of Merritt Clifton’s counter-culture novelette “A Baseball Classic” (1978). If this plot device of woman major leaguer or minor leaguer is still somewhat surprising to the casual reader of sports fiction, it is not at all unfamiliar to the true devotees of more obscure baseball novels.

That women should play baseball, and play it competently, is of course not in itself an altogether absurd notion, unfamiliar as that notion might be to spectatorship at large. Women’s baseball — real hardball — has, after all, existed sporadically outside the pages of novels and the flickering images of film. Yet from 1943 to 1954 the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League operated successfully in a half-dozen cities spread through the midwest, often drawing standing room crowds (perhaps as many as 10,000) for much of its 120-game schedule. Formed at the urging of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and financially underwritten by several major league owners — principally P.K. Wrigley of the Cubs — the AAGPBL would boast as many as ten teams at the height of its popularity and pay a respectable average salary of $75 weekly. AAGPBL ballplayers drew fans as much for their diamond wizardry as for the prurient male desire of seeing tuniclike uniforms and feminine legs loose upon the basepaths. The AAGPBL baseballs were real, the distances of the diamond were big-league measure, the pitching was overhand, and the base hits were solid as they come.

Other women over the years have managed to crack the world of male professional and semi-professional baseball, although for brief and often little-noticed careers. Today’s fading memories of these brief glorious moments for women in pro baseball are now kept alive by recent unveiling of the permanent Women’s Baseball Exhibit, erected in conjunction with this season’s Golden Anniversary of baseball’s sacred shrine in Cooperstown. And renewed interest in the subject has led to both a major television documentary (“A League of Their Own”, 1986) treating AAGPBL baseball history, as well as a book-length feminist chronicle of women’s role in the national pastime (Zipter, “Diamonds Are A Dyke’s Best Friend,” 1989).

Yet old prejudice dies hard, and baseball (like most team sports of wide spectator appeal) remains the most exclusive among male-dominated venues. Football and basketball at least have sideline cheerleaders, as blatantly sexist as their symbolic role may be. There is no sanctioned on-field position for women in baseball, and this sport alone maintains a written stricture against women signing professional contracts with men’s teams, a clause adopted by organized baseball on June 21, 1952 and remaining in full force to this day. By definition, sports which admit women participants are by that fact alone dismissed as constituting minor sports.

Lindy Sunshine’s fictional treatment at the hands of teammates and fans of the Chicago Eagles is therefore as inevitable within the frame of Gregorich’s novel as it would be on the diamonds of real-life baseball. For generations of ballplayers (usually athletes of rural southern roots) a black man in the national game was almost unthinkable; yet once integration had been forced upon professional sport in the wake of the second great war, however, it suddenly seemed as though it had somehow been there for all time.

For women to intrude upon this all-male realm of sport is quite another matter altogether; the sexual barriers run deepest of all. Anthropologist Mario Bick astutely observes that “sports conversations often effectively exclude women, and sporting events remain one of the few bastions of aggressive male manifestations of superiority, as reflected in the stereotypical behavior of males in explaining sports events to their women companions.” Women in baseball, from the first, have been as antithetical to the national game itself as, say, betting scandals or time clocks. Females found little enough welcome even within their normal ballpark domain — the grandstand — until well into the game’s fifth or sixth decade. The reigning attitude of baseball’s male world – from Abner Doubleday to Bart Giamatti — has always seemingly been that of the unknown 1911 author of the Reach Official American League Guide. It was this author who apparently first suggested (in print) that the idea of women actually playing baseball was, after all, “positively repugnant”.

From the outset women have been treated at least as unkindly in baseball fiction as they have by the big-league game itself. Critic Michael Oriard lays bare the issue by capsulizing the familiar role of female characters throughout baseball novels — throughout sports novels in general — as that of either complaisant wife, inspirational yet little-seen mother, admiring girlfriend who inspires the hero with her moral uprightness, or (in later adult fiction) unwelcomed yet irresistible sexual threat. This troublesome ideal of dominant masculinity and seductive contaminating femininity in the sports world is launched with the earliest of juvenile sports fiction. The schoolboy hero of such novels always has an unimportant and largely absent mother, or perhaps an adoring and encouraging girlfriend as reward for virtuous athletic prowess. But such relationships are never erotic and female characters are as often entirely absent from the scene.

The stereotype of masculine exclusivity in sport is not only reflected in boys’ juveniles but thoroughly reinforced as well by subsequent sports fiction of all types. Qualities which lead to success in the sporting arena are those which define our national masculine ideal: strength, agility, speed, mental toughness and unbridled aggressiveness. These are the skills by which the American frontier was won; and as Oriard stresses, the modern-day absence of action-packed frontier living necessitates the athletic field as a last refuge for preserving and validating our illusions of this ingrained masculine ideal.

The exclusive nature of the male athlete, as portrayed in American sports fiction, has long dictated the necessary roles assigned women in such works of fiction. The linking of American 2Oth-century sport with American 19th-century frontier life assures that male/female stereotypes will pervade the diamonds, gridirons and indoor arenas of fictional sporting contests. Such fictions supply the storehouse for American myths of modernday folk-hero survival. As symbolic hunters, warriors, and protectors of women and children, our athletes perform ritualized tribal defense by meeting and conquering their athletic opponents and thus protecting hometown rooters from the dreaded enemy team. But while men tenaciously protect the narrow masculine character of their sports, a central theme of sports fiction remains the always irreconcilable incompatibility between women and the game itself. Men must eschew the softness of females and femininity to score victory on the athletic field; women serve to encourage (as lovers, fans, symbolic cheerleaders) male aggressiveness, or to weaken (as dark temptress or silly bystander) the inherent nobility of such male contests. When female characters in the sports novel do not act out the predictable roles of “terrible, emasculating mother,” (as Memo in Malamud’s “The Natural”), or practical arbiter of worldly affairs (as Holly Wiggen in Mark Harris’ Henry Wiggen trilogy), they are likely reduced to “silly girls” swooning at masculine athletic prowess or cheapening “the game” with their inability to understand its simplest rules or most obvious rationales (as with Judith Winthrop, in her first trip to the local ballpark in Heywood Broun’s 1923 baseball novel, “The Sun Field”). One of the most insightful of Oriard’s observations about the inherent male-female dichotomy of American frontier life is the notion that “the American counterpart to the Victorian ethic made women the arbiters of culture and morality and men the entrepreneurs in industry and commerce.”

Women writing about baseball have done little themselves to reverse the stereotypical images of woman in the game. Most often, it is the woman baseball novelist or baseball beat writer who, with her own work, is the strongest reinforcer of such stereotypes. Women authors of juvenile sports fiction consistently maintained the formulae expected of such boy’s pulp novels. Furthermore, they reinforced the dominant notion of the closed male domain by writing under male pseudonyms (Beth Bradford Gilchrist = John Prescott Earl; Elsie Wright = Jack Wright; Constance H. Irwin = C.H. Frick) or hiding behind sexless initials (B.J. Chute, M.G. Bonner, H.D. Francis). Disaffected baseball wives Bobbie Bouton, Nancy Marshall, and Danielle Torrez have produced silly and carping exposes which only reinforce our perception of women as hopeless uninitiates, outsiders incapable of grasping the true beauties of a man’s game. Charline Gibson, in writing “A Wife’s Guide to Baseball” (with ghost author Michael Rich) assumes that women as a class hold not even the slightest modicum of appreciation for the national pastime.

Even baseball’s two brightest women commentators unintentionally reinforce the limiting role of “women as outside reporters”. Kathryn Parker (“We Won Today: My Season with the Mets”) and Alison Gordon (“Foul Ball! Five Years in the American League”) cast themselves unknowingly as “the intrusive female scribe,” more interested in the awkwardness of her unwelcomed position in the locker room than in the on-field game she is covering. Parker devotes the heart of her 1977 book to chapters on a baseball wife’s perceptions of the game, the plight of female “ballboys”, and the predictably negative comments of selected Mets’ players about the possibility of future female major leaguers. Gordon as well underscores the common theme: that the most difficult obstacle she had to overcome was her appearance as a woman sportswriter in the locker room.

Gordon and Parker are indisputably skilled baseball writers who often capture the subtleties of diamond myth and poetry; Alison Gordon’s chapter on the mythic surroundings of big-league ballparks is a minor diamond classic. But journalistic insight is all-too-often muted by the notion that — as self-conscious female reporters — their reportership is their only sanctioned role in an otherwise hostile baseball world. It is primarily the notion that they can only appreciate baseball as clubhouse reporters, women reporters at that, that in the end detracts from both Gordon’s and Parker’s otherwise astute accounts of the game.

One of the few serious adult baseball novels of the pre-1950s also unexpectedly focuses on the role of women in baseball and intentionally probes the silliness of women who try to grasp the male world of competitive team sport. Heywood Broun’s “The Sun Field” (1923) provides archetypical illustration of this reigning image of woman as naive observer of the mysterious world of baseball and as dangerous temptress of the dedicated men who play the game. Yankee slugger Tiny Tyler — a Babe Ruth prototype already a few seasons past his fading prime — is enticed into an ill-fated amorous encounter with an equally prototypical female baseball groupie — romantic and intellectually chic Judith Winthrop. In her initial visit to a big-league park, Judith is first repelled by the vicarious nature of fan enthusiasm, the silliness of savage male competition, and the general inaneness she perceives in the contest itself. But when her attention is directed to Tiny Tyler, she sees suddenly only the highly romanticized “titanic efforts” of the slugger’s play. Tyler takes tremendous whiffs when he strikes out rather than those little pokes which provide less romantic players (like Ty Cobb) with cherished base hits. When Judith falls in love with Tyler and he returns her advances, her ultimate influence upon the swooning slugger is that of convincing him to strike those romantic poses of Greek sculpture she so admires in his outfield play. Tyler’s resulting preoccupation (like any slumping ballplayer, he begins to think too much) predictably wreaks havoc upon his baseball play. This is, of course, one of the earliest yet most sophisticated versions of a familiar baseball theme — unfortunate players who earn the love of a good woman perform well upon the field; those seduced by a dark temptress are visited by the most terrible of slumps. Broun’s novel lacks the mythic qualities which elevate Malamud’s treatment of this theme; yet “The Sun Field” is indeed important in historical perspective. It offers one of the starkest renditions of a standby of the American sports novel — the useless woman as silly spectator and evil temptress, encroaching with disastrous consequence upon the idyllic male baseball world.

Baseball fans — generally a fair lot — will likely accept Pam Postema’s female encroachment upon baseball — in her role as big-league umpire — since here we encounter an image of woman (as moral arbiter) consistent with at least one facet of Michael Oriard’s description of familiar roles assigned female characters in the closed world of sports fiction and sports culture. The woman umpire, however, is still something of a female intrusion upon the male baseball world, and as such it will not sit altogether easy with multitudes of fans and legions of the game’s professional players. Women “players” are even more deeply threatening, of course, and two most egregious assaults on the male baseball world — albeit in the somewhat harmless guise of fiction — are those launched by Gregorich and Bowen in 1987. Gregorich’s is the most dramatic affront to sexually exclusive baseball, partly because it is actually written by a woman, partly because it is a markedly better baseball novel. Gregorich’s Lindy Sunshine is, after all, as far from the rigid cultural stereotypes of woman (as nurturing homebodies and seductive outsiders) as she is from Michael Bowen’s flaccid and one dimensional Chris Tilden of the Denver Marshalls. Here is a real flesh-and-blood ballplayer, one straight out of the best tradition of Mark Harris’ Henry Wiggen and his colorful Mammoth teammates. As one critic has aptly phrased it, having scrapped her way into the literary baseball lineup, Lindy Sunshine could be around for awhile. And sooner or later she will perhaps indeed look prophetic as well.

Gregorich’s novel is indeed more threatening to baseball traditionalists than superficially similar forerunners which satirize the notion of woman big-league ballplayer, or “baseball novels” by women which focus on recreational softball play (e.g., Cooney, Vogan), or on the woman’s lot as baseball spectator, well removed from the male arena of the locker room and field of play (e.g., Tennenbaum, Willard).

For such tradition-bound baseball readers, Rothweiler, Peuchner, Ritz and Hays might also seem a good deal less objectionable in their consistently cavalier treatments of the first-woman-ballplayer theme. In these earlier works baseball is always pure fantasy, and the treatment is relentlessly humorous if not downright slapstick. The story element of “woman in baseball” is either subplot or lark with all four earlier novels. Then too, all four (like Bowen’s “Can’t Miss”) can be easily dismissed as not very good baseball novels, fictions offering little more than exploitation of America’s pastime for cheap second-rate flights of imaginative fantasy. Rothweiler’s female ballplayer, for one, is drawn as the stuff of male sex fantasies, as his title underscores, and Jeri “Red” Walker’s own constant sexual daydreams assure from cover to cover that “The Sensuous Southpaw” is always more potboiler than mythic episode. A single passage alone captures the pejorative feminine stereotypes of Rothweiler’s exploitative novel:

The crowd stood and stomped and cheered. Then I was walking to the mound and the p.a. announced me: “NOW PITCHING: NUMBER 44, JERI ‘RED’ WALKER!” Dusty handed me a brand-new National League ball and mumbled something about the bases being loaded and I should be careful. I threw in a couple of warmups — right down the pipes — and the crowd began chanting my name. Then I was facing one of the most awesome guys I’d ever seen, seven feet tall, with a bat that must’ve been cut from a telephone pole. He swung it like it was a Styrofoam toy … I went into a full windup, gritted my teeth, and threw him a curve, low and outside. His big face broke into a grin as his bat came round. My heart sank as the ball made contact with the bat and took off like a rocket toward left field. I was crying … Suddenly a horse raced across the outfield, headed straight for the mound. It was white — pure white — and riding it was a huge handsome guy with windblown hair. Before I could do anything, he’d swept me up behind him, and we were galloping straight up over the stadium.

Ritz writes a much better baseball novel than Rothweiler, one which plays effectively on the shared culture of deep-rooted baseball nostalgia for neighborhood teams of our past — in this case the mythical Brooklyn Dodgers of the Jackie Robinson era — rather than on shallow adolescent fantasies of sexual exploitation. Yet Ritz reserves the female big-leaguer element of his novel as minor plot device; Ruth Smelkinson (as Jewish as the Sandy Koufax she emulates) provides one of the more improbable elements surrounding a Dodger team which is here miraculously resurrected in Brooklyn three decades after O’Malley’s infamous flight to California. Smelkinson adds an intriguing romantic element, being predictably coupled with one of the novel’s two day-dreaming protagonists who have together somehow pulled off one of baseball’s ultimate wish-fulfillment fantasies. Yet ballplaying Ruth Smelkinson is clearly the lesser of two important female characters in this novel; sportswriter Oran Ellis, in her more appropriate and sanctioned female role as detached baseball observer and scribe, is indisputably the more memorable female character of Ritz’ fine baseball fantasy.

Hays, in turn, also buries his attention-catching female infielder — here of the fictional Double-A Arkansas Reds — under a windfall of bizarre and thinly drawn literary stereotypes: two Cuban refugees on loan from Fidel Castro, a folk-singing starting pitcher, a broken-down alcoholic relief pitcher with the familiar “unhittable knuckler,” an ex-con slugging first baseman doubling as the story’s narrator, and a one-armed former big-leaguer turned university professor, who doubles as the team’s socialist manager. More than one critical commentator has noted that Hays’ lineup in “The Dixie Association” seems remarkably like “literary APBA cards, playing on a rigged game board.” Hays’ first woman big-leaguer, Susan Pankhurst — “tall and long-legged and blond-headed, with eyes the color of the Colorado sky; Hitler would’ve made her his poster girl” — hardly escapes the cartoon-character treatment which substitutes for serious characterization throughout “The Dixie Association.”

Against this established minor tradition of cameo female appearances in baseball fiction, Gregorich and Bowen’s novels are the more remarkable for coming directly to grips with serious treatment of the women-in-baseball theme. Both “She’s on First” and “Can’t Miss” are somewhat uneven as first novels; both (as is the wont of the typical baseball novel) sacrifice depth for fluent action; both are often all-too-predictable in on-field baseball event as well as unfolding plot-line. Bowen’s novel has far less to recommend it, however. In the phrase of reviewer Harry, Reed, this book is indeed a baseball anomaly — “a boring book about a natural hitter”. The largest fault with Bowen’s slow-moving novel is perhaps the degree to which it leaves all the crucial actions open-ended: Cindy Briggs, enigmatic publicity director, and her unresolved relationship with the team’s star left-handed pitcher; Chris Tilden’s ambiguous love-affair with a lifeless older sportswriter; Tilden’s post-rookie baseball career; the fate of the novel’s best-developed character, utility infielder Mace Dickson, caught at the tail-end of an undistinguished career — all are left unresolved with novel’s close. In the end, Bowen’s novel is dismissed as second rate in its baseball scenes and largely unenticing in its treatment of female efforts at cracking baseball’s rigid sexual barrier. It differs from Rothweiler’s and Hays’ lightweight treatments of this engaging theme only in the degree to which his female ballplayer is consistent focus for the novel’s central actions.

While novels featuring the first women big-league player — from Rothweiler to Gregorich — conspire to bury familiar stereotypes of woman as intruder in the national game, these novels themselves are not without their own special cache of carefully hewn literary stereotypes. Alongside ingrained notions of baseball women as seductive temptress (Lola sent by the devil to lure Joe Hardy from more noble diamond pursuits) and stupid bimbo (Judith Winthrop’s view of baseball as “sillier than patriotism” and of an outfielder as a Greek sculpture) which comprise the familiar treatment of women in more traditional baseball fiction, even novels daring the first woman big-leaguer are notable for their own set of rigid diamond stereotypes. For Gregorich, Bowen and Rothweiler the first distaff big-leaguer must be a daughter of an ex-major leaguer; all such novels seize in one fashion or another (and with varying degrees of literary success) on explicit parallels to Jackie Robinson and the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers. The sexuality of our female ballplayer is always seemingly a prevalent issue and in the three novels focusing explicitly on the first woman big-leaguer our heroine must struggle to remain sexually pure (never seemingly an issue for male jocks of standard adult baseball fiction).

A related matter is a second, more curious paradox: that love affairs for our woman major leaguer are regularly plotted to involve a dashing male sportswriter (Gregorich and Bowen) or enticing big-league manager (Rothweiler and Ritz), but never another available ballplayer. It is a final curiosity that three such novels set the locale of the female rookie’s baseball debut in minor league settings (Hays, Rothweiler and Clifton, with the latter two obviously recalling the colorful Triple-A Portland Beavers of the 1970s), while the three major league novels (Gregorich, Bowen, Ritz) select non-existent big-league teams — the Chicago Eagles, Denver Marshalls, and resurrected 1981 Brooklyn Dodgers. Each of these last two plot devices seem calculated io assure safe distancing from baseball reality as setting for such seemingly outrageous baseball circumstance.

In the genre of female rookie baseball fiction, Gregorich provides both the best baseball writing and the most palatable rebuttal to the male-dominated baseball novel of American sports tradition. Parodying the standard baseball plot Gregorich finds her feminine ballplayer involved romantically with a male sportswriter covering the Eagles, and Sunshine’s slowly evolving affair with Neal Vanderlin has none of the exploitative trappings of the expected lust-ridden scenes between sexy feminine ballplayer and locker room jockeys. Here, in fact, Gregorich neatly reverses the time-worn paradigm by exchanging the expected sexual roles of participant and observer. Lindy Sunshine is the ballplayer, the insider intimate with nuts and bolts of the game; Neal is the sportswriter, always held one step away from baseball’s inner-circle by his outsider’s status, barred by his profession from the game’s select fraternal order of players. This neat reversal of male sportswriter (outside observer) and female player (inside the game’s protective circle) is ultimately the maior achievement of Barbara Gregorich’s unusual novel.

With “She’s on First,” the fast-moving plot appears both natural and yet delightfully original throughout, in the finest tradition of our most readable baseball fiction. Lindy Sunshine is (unknown to herself) the illegitimate child of two professional baseball superstars, former Chicago Eagle slugger (and now club owner) Al Mowerinski, and the late Amanda Quitman, star infielder for the AAGPBL Hammond Chicks in the late 1940s. Living with adoptive parents, Sunshine exploits the advantages of heredity and environment (she’s unusually tall and long-armed, even as a child) and progresses rapidly toward baseball stardom, performing as a stellar shortstop and breaking the male hold on baseball all the way from Little League through the Collegiate World Series. From the day that Al Mowerinski first coerces former teammate and current Eagle scout T.M. Curry into seeing Lindy perform on a backroad Pennsylvania Little League diamond, Curry senses that something strange lurks behind Mowerinski’s apparent fascination with this talented female ballplayer; but Curry wants no part of being associated with bringing a woman into the game and balks repeatedly when later sent to scout and sign the female college star. Mowerinski gambles on signing Sunshine straight off the college campus and a subsequent scene in the owner’s Chicago office poignantly echoes the famous first meeting between Rickey and Robinson which is today the familiar stuff of baseball’s noblest legend.

From here the plot unfolds rapidly and predictably: Sunshine progresses quickly through the minors, despite hatred and taunting from teammates and fans alike; Sunshine is brought to Chicago to save the floundering Eagles with her talented arm and bat and her expected celebrity status; Sunshine develops a romantic attachment with intellectual sportswriter Neal Vanderlin, after shunning the crude advances of self-serving teammates; Eagle players are divided on the issue of a female intruder in the locker room and eventually threaten boycott if Sunshine stays; Lindy rudely discovers that Mowerinski is her actual father and leaves the team in dismay, now feeling her ascent to the majors resulted from something other than her obvious baseball talents; finally, through the gentle efforts of Vanderlin, Sunshine is brought to her senses and returns to Chicago to play out the season and accomplish her mission of breaking baseball’s male stranglehold. The action is fast-paced and except for the unforgettable fact that Sunshine is female, this novel is from first to last the basic outline of all those many gripping stories about baseball rookies. Drawn in the finest tradition of John Tunis or Mark Harris — or hundreds of sportswriters each new spring season — this “prospect make good against overwhelming odds” plotline is the baseball version of that too-familiar coming-of-age fiction which still constitutes one of the staple trademarks of western literature.

Among women’s baseball and softball novels — especially among the baseball books authored by women — Barbara Gregorich’s novel is the undisputed all-star selection. Only Nancy Willard comes close to Gregorich’s true fan’s appreciation for the game, or to her talents for capturing baseball’s inherent narrative potential; yet Willard’s “Things Invisible To See” is a novel cast more in baseball’s mythical-surrealistic tradition. And in this sense, especially, Willard is again reminiscent of the familiar baseball tradition of women reporters who poeticize and romanticize the game, ultimately at the expense of dramatic big-league action.

Gregorich’s baseball scenes, by contrast, are the stuff of real baseball. Her treatment of the game is, in fact, unique from three distinct perspectives. Here is a woman, we sense, who intimately knows and loves the hardball game. No embarrassing technical errors here (except one instance on page 103-104 almost too slight to mention, where four batters come to the plate in what is described as a one-two-three inning); no embarrassing female transmogrifications of ballplayers into fuzzy Greek statues or ephemeral literary symbols. Also, the baseball descriptions are true-to-life and almost always enthralling; few male authors and virtually no female writers have actually matched them. Numerous descriptions of Sunshine’s mental adventures at the plate approximate the best baseball fiction writing:

Behind her she heard the soft shuffling sound of the catcher’s feet, sensed him settle into place and lift his glove. She watched the pitcher intently. It’ll be a strike. Coming right at me. I’m waiting for a fastball, low and on the outside corner. That’s my pitch. Here it comes. Focusing on the release point, she saw the white blur appear above the pitcher’s shoulder, coming out of his hand. Almost here, it’s a fastball, hit it! She hammered it through to left. The ball fell into the hole for a single, advancing Ulysses to second. (107)

Perhaps only the loving views from the Shea Stadium grandstand offered by Sylvia Tennenbaum in “Rachel, The Rabbi’s Wife,” come close to Gregorich for appreciation of the details and poetry of the game. As with all the best chronicles of baseball’s on-field play, Gregorich repeatedly sacrifices depth of portrait for demands of fluid action, a decision calculated to appeal to most casual readers and fans of hardball fiction. Finally, with Gregorich all the previous stereotypes of the woman’s dimwitted regard for baseball are rudely dispatched. By transforming the love interest of her star female player into a male sportswriter — himself an outsider to the game — Gregorich provides a single brilliant final irony underscoring her fictional treatment of baseball’s sexual barriers. This final irony is, in fact, the heart of her achievement. While Michael Bowen seizes upon the identical set of fitting circumstances, his own narrative account of Chris Tilden’s affair with Nathan Morris is as flat and uninspired as everything else in “Can’t Miss.” Morris is not even a central figure in the latter novel, whose only two fully drawn portraits — broken-down utility man Mace Dickson and hard-as-nails female publicity director Cindy Briggs — are much closer to familiar stereotypes of baseball fiction than they are to the liberated characters of Gregorich’s fictional baseball world.

Gregorich’s novel may also be one of baseball’s most prophetic literary fantasies. Julie Croteau’s history-making appearance in Division III NCAA baseball this spring — seen against the backdrop of Gregorich’s entertaining novel — may strike something of a portentous note for the patrons of the national game. In today’s world of greedy sports owners, lusting after surefire gate attractions and clamoring for celebrity superstars — a world of pure hype and insubstantial image at the expense of substance and lasting quality — Al Mowerinski seems an altogether plausible Steinbrenner or Veeck or Finley. All it would take, perhaps, is a petite shortstop who can hit and throw like Sunshine, a Tony Fernandez with hidden pigtails and rifle arm. For those who find this notion farfetched, recall only that baseball’s rich and often bizare history has always been far more often the stuff of fantasy and myth — Ruth calling his shot, Eddie Waitkus lying wounded in a Chicago hotel room, Pete Gray and Jim Abbott in big-league uniform. Baseball fiction itself has never been as bound to real-world events as has baseball history to flights of unlimited fancy. And Barbara Gregorich’s bright novel is not, after all, the first to prefigure baseball history in the flesh. There was J. Henry Waugh’s illusionary world of baseball board games; Bernard Malamud’s 38-year-old rookie phenom Roy Hobbs; Donald Hays’ one-armed Lefty Marks; John Hough’s despondent gay umpire. Baseball fiction, as much as baseball history, time and again has provided both mirror and crystal ball for life itself.

Good afternoon, students. I am Professor Hailey, and this is Industrial Organization 162, “Baseball as a Business Enterprise” — which is better known around campus, I understand, as “Bats, Balls, and the Bottom Line.”

In 1914 a New York court ruled that major league baseball was not subject to the antitrust laws because “baseball is amusement, a sport, a game … not a commodity or an article of merchandise.” In other words, the court held that baseball was a sport, not a business.

Baseball is certainly a sport, but it is also a business. That is obvious in today’s world of million-dollar player salaries and billion-dollar television contracts. But it was also true long before 1914. Baseball clubs began charging admission and paying their players in the 1860s. The American Association, or “Beer-Ball League” was organized in 1881 in response to the National League’s decision to ban ballpark liquor sales and Sunday games; four of the association’s founding fathers were brewery owners, who got into baseball in order to sell more beer. In 1899, New York Giants owner Andrew Freedman urged his fellow owners to follow the example of robber barons like Rockefeller and Frick and organize a “Baseball Trust” powerful enough to drive rival leagues out of existence.

A major-league baseball team is a relatively small business. In 1985, the average baseball team had fewer than 300 full-time employees and total revenues of $25.6 million (up from $8.4 million in 1977). About 60% of that money came from the fans who attended games in person; most of the rest came from the sale of broadcast rights.

By 1990, average annual team revenues will jump to $40 million, primarily because major league baseball recently sold national broadcast rights for the 1990-93 seasons to CBS and ESPN for almost $1.5 billion, or $14.4 million per team per year; the current national television contracts are worth only about $7.5 million annually to each team. Beginning in 1990, the average team will take in more money from selling television and radio rights than from ticket sales and concessions.

Player salaries account for over half of the average baseball team’s costs. The average salary in 1975 was about $44,000; last year, the average salary was almost ten times that amount. In 1989, over 100 major-league players will make $1 million or more; at least 21 players will earn $2 million or more.

So much for revenues and expenses: what about profits? In 1984 the 25 major-league teams suffered a net book loss of well over $50 million and fewer than a half-dozen teams made money; commissioner Peter Ueberroth claimed that baseball was “headed for bankruptcy.” But after examining the teams’ financial statements, Professor Roger Noll of Stanford University concluded in a report prepared for the Major League Baseball Players Association that the sport was generally in good financial condition, with only a few franchises in serious trouble. Ueberroth did not agree with that conclusion in 1984, but he does now; just before giving way to A. Bartlett Giamatti earlier this year, Ueberroth said that the ratio of money-losing and money-making teams that had existed when he became commissioner had been reversed.

An accountant who works in the front office of one team once said, “Anyone who quotes profits of a baseball club is missing the point. Under generally accepted accounting principles, I could turn a $4 million profit into a $2 million loss and I could get every national accounting firm to agree with me.”

We will briefly discuss how the alchemy of corporate tax accounting can turn profits into losses a bit later. Suffice it to say now that the prices paid for major-league teams continue to escalate. Of course, people who buy baseball teams are rarely motivated entirely by economic considerations, and some of them would be willing to pay plenty for a team even if it consistently lost money – but the current sellers’ market in baseball franchises indicates that sport is in good economic health. As Professor Noll has observed, “Smart business executives do not pay $50 to $100 million for the opportunity to lose further millions in a perpetually losing venture.”

Now let’s talk about the books on the course reading list. This course will concentrate on current events, not history. The required texts are the most up-to-date sources available on the particular subjects we will be covering – labor-management relations, radio and television contracts, and so on.

The first book on our reading list, “Baseball Economics and Public Policy,” by Jesse Markham and Paul Teplitz, was commissioned by major-league baseball in 1977 in anticipation of a Congressional inquiry into certain aspects of professional sports leagues. Markham and Teplitz conclude that conventional anti-trust analysis should not be applied to major-league baseball clubs because “baseball is essentially a cooperative rather than a competitive enterprise.”

Most businessmen operate independently of their competitors. General Motors does not consult with Ford when setting prices or deciding how many units of a certain model it will produce; the antitrust laws prohibit such cooperation between competitors. But you can’t play baseball with only one team, and you can’t have a league without agreeing when and where to play and what the rules of the game are.

Baseball’s owners have gotten together on much more than the schedule and the rulebook, however. They have agreed to a number of competitive restrictions that they justify as necessary to maintain competitive balance, which is in their (and the fans’) long-term interest. GM would like nothing better than to capture all of Ford’s customers and run it out of the automobile business. But the Yankees will do better over the long term if they lose to the Red Sox some of the time rather than always beat them. Studies have shown that game attendance is positively correlated with uncertainty over the game’s outcome and the closeness of the pennant race. If the Yankees always beat the Red Sox, attendance at Yankees-Red Sox games in New York as well as Boston suffers.

The reverse-order-of-finish draft of high school and college players that the owners agreed to after the 1964 season is one mechanism that promotes competitive balance. Limits on the maximum number of players on a team’s roster and the policy of sharing national broadcast revenues equally are also designed to equalize team strength.

But baseball is not strictly egalitarian. For example, baseball teams do not share local broadcasting revenues. Beginning in 1991, the Madison Square Garden Network will pay the Yankees almost $42 million annually for local television rights; teams in smaller markets like Milwaukee and Cincinnati get a fraction of that amount for their local broadcast rights. The home team also keeps the lion’s share (about 80%) of ticket and concession revenues, which vary greatly from team to team. The bottom line is that the most successful baseball franchises take in about four times as much money in a season as the poorest teams. Teams in smaller metropolitan areas are almost always at a financial disadvantage to teams like the Dodgers, Mets, and Yankees, and that financial inequality should lead to competitive imbalance in the long run.

The relationship between a team’s revenues and its on-the-field success is not as strong as one might expect because the owners of baseball teams do not necessarily seek to maximize profits. As New York Times sportswriter Leonard Koppett put it in a 1973 article, “Profit … is not the owner’s primary motive. Any man with the resources to acquire a major league team can find ways to make better dollar-for-dollar investments. His payoff is in terms of social prestige. … A man who runs a $100-million-a-year business is usually anonymous to the general public; a man who owns even a piece of a ball club that grosses $5 million a year is a celebrity.”

For some owners, a major-league baseball team may be primarily a hobby or food for the ego instead of a business. But let’s not overestimate the enjoyment that team owners derive from losing money. Virtually all team owners have interests in bigger businesses; when you look at the combined results of an owner’s business operations you may find that the allegedly money-losing team is really a money-maker for its owner. The next assigned reading, Roger Noll’s “The Economics of Sports Leagues,” which is chapter 77 of a legal reference work titled “Law of Professional and Amateur Sports,”” explains how that happens.

Once upon a time, baseball teams were family-owned, mom-and-pop businesses. But the Macks, the Griffiths, the Wrigleys, and most of the other old-time baseball families have long since sold their teams. Today most team owners have diversified business interests; teams like the Braves and Cardinals are relatively small parts of large corporate empires. To evaluate the profitability of such teams, you must know something about the operations of their corporate cousins.

Ted Turner owns the Atlanta Braves. He also owns WTBS, a TV “superstation” that sells broadcasts of Braves games to cable TV systems across the country. In 1984, WTBS paid the Braves $1 million for their television rights, which was quite a bit less than most teams were paid for local TV rights that year. The Braves’ 1984 financial statement, therefore, understated the team’s true profitability; by the same token, WTBS’s operating results are overstated because they were able to buy valuable programming from their corporate cousin at a bargain price. Turner may have had some reason for having his baseball team subsidize his TV station; perhaps he was thinking about selling WTBS and wanted to make it look as profitable as possible. On the other hand, the $1 million number may have been plucked out of thin air – since Turner owns both businesses, deciding whether to charge WTBS $1 million or $10 million for the Braves’ broadcast rights may have been of no more significance to him than deciding whether to put his change in his left or his right pants pocket.

Noll also explains how professional sports teams lower their tax liability significantly by amortizing player contracts. The tax laws allow the purchaser of an existing pro team to allocate roughly 50% of the purchase price to the value of the team’s contracts with its current players, and to amortize that 50% over a five-year period. In other words, if you buy a team for $50 million, you can assign a value of $25 million to the player contracts and deduct one-fifth of that amount, or $5 million, in each of the next five years. If the team’s operating profits are $5 million, it pays no income taxes; if it loses money, the owner can use the excess tax deduction to shelter income from other sources.

Amortizing or depreciating assets is standard accounting practice. Let’s say that you’re in the cropdusting business, and that the average life expectancy of a cropdusting plane is ten years. Your plane loses ten percent of its value each year, and it is logical to allow a tax deduction of that amount annually. But the baseball business is not like the cropdusting business. A cropduster’s most valuable asset is his airplane. A baseball owner’s most valuable asset is his membership in the major-league fraternity — his franchise — which entitles him to a share of the money from baseball’s national TV contract, an exclusive right to operate a team in a particular city, and many other benefits. A player’s contract may be an asset to the owner, but it may also be a costly liability.

Noll believes that most of the value of a major-league franchise is created by the owners’ self-imposed limits on competition for players, which keep player salaries well below what they would be in an unrestricted market. Just imagine how much money Jose Canseco (or Dwight Gooden) could have demanded after his rookie season if he had been a free agent. Because players are not eligible for arbitration until they have three full years of major league service, a player like Canseco has little choice but to take what his team offers him after his first and second seasons in the majors. Noll dismisses as a “myth” the argument that restrictions on free agency preserve competitive balance. Such limits may restrict the ability of players to choose to move from poorer teams to richer teams, but they do not prevent the owners of the poorer teams from selling their players to the richer teams. Former commissioner Bowie Kuhn established a $400,000 ceiling on straight cash deals to prevent the more well-heeled owners from simply buying up all the good players, but such a restriction does not solve the problem entirely. Trading a player with a million-dollar contract for a couple of rookies making the minimum wage is almost the same thing as selling that player – a business can boost profits by increasing revenues or by cutting expenses.

Noll discusses the economics of all four major professional sports — baseball, football, basketball, and hockey — and identifies a number of important differences among those sports. As previously noted, the most successful baseball teams have revenues several times greater than their less fortunate rivals; the same is true in basketball and hockey. But all NFL teams take in roughly the same amount of money. Winning football teams and teams in big cities don’t make much more money than perennial also-rans or teams in small markets. That’s because pro football teams share all television money equally and split ticket revenues 60-40.

By the way, don’t expect much demand for used copies of “The Economics of Sports Leagues” or “Baseball Economics and Public Policy” from students who take this course next year. It is almost certain that I will drop them from the course reading list in favor of Professor Gerald Scully’s “The Business of Major League Baseball” which will be published in September 1989 by the University of Chicago Press. Professor Scully has been kind enough to let me take a peek at the manuscript of this ambitious and provocative book, which discusses all the significant economic issues we will discuss in this class: restrictions on competition for players, broadcast rights and revenues, tax accounting, expansion and franchise relocation, and so on. But Scully does more than simply describe baseball as a business enterprise: he also attempts to demonstrate how on-the-field performance is affected by baseball’s economic structure. For example, Scully examines the effects of revenue sharing (or the lack thereof) and the amateur free agent draft on relative team strength. He also analyzes racial discrimination in baseball and relates the won-lost records of baseball managers to their salaries. Scully’s conclusions are certain to generate considerable controversy.

The next book on the reading list is “Hardball: The Education of a Baseball Commissioner,” by Bowie Kuhn, who served as Commissioner of Baseball from 1969 to 1984. A lot happened during Kuhn’s tenure. The owners prevailed when Curt Flood took baseball’s century-old reserve system to court, but their victory was rendered almost meaningless a few years later when arbitrator Peter Seitz granted free agency to Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally; the relationship between the owners and the players’ association then festered until 1981, when the worst strike in American sports history wiped out almost one-third of the baseball season. A number of franchises came and went: Kansas City, Montreal, San Diego, and Seattle got expansion teams in 1969; the Seattle franchise quickly went bankrupt, so it was transferred to Milwaukee just in time for Opening Day 1970; after the next season the American League approved the move of the Washington Senators to Dallas-Fort Worth; and in 1975, the American League voted to expand to Toronto and Seattle. Since then, no expansion teams have been admitted, and no existing teams have moved to different cities. In the hope of increasing its television audience and revenues, baseball decided to play the All-Star Game and most World Series games at night rather than in the daytime, and sold ABC the rights for “Monday Night Baseball”; cable TV “superstations,” which threatened to take a bite out of the teams’ local broadcasting revenues and home attendance, reared their ugly head. “Hardball” covers all these developments in considerable detail.

The mere existence of the Commissioner of Baseball is evidence that baseball is a peculiar business enterprise. In theory, the commissioner has almost unlimited authority: baseball’s constitution, the Major League Agreement, gives him authority to investigate “any act, transaction or practice, charged, alleged or suspected to be detrimental to the best interests of the national game of baseball,” and to determine what “preventive, remedial or punitive action is appropriate … and to take such action either against Major Leagues, Major League Clubs or individuals.” As author Daniel Okrent has put it, “The more responsible owners, miscreants in spite of themselves, want to give the commissioner a whip with which to discipline themselves.” When Charlie Finley decided in 1976 to follow the honorable and ancient baseball tradition of selling off his star players to the highest bidder, he had no trouble finding bidders — Boston, Cincinnati, and the Yankees were more than willing to spend millions for the likes of Vida Blue, Rollie Fingers, and Joe Rudi. No doubt the other owners breathed a sigh of relief when Kuhn quashed the sales and helped protect them from their brethren.

The first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, was hired to restore the integrity of the sport — and, equally important, to restore the public’s faith in its integrity — after the “Black Sox” scandal came to light in 1920. In more recent times, the commissioner also has been expected to be baseball’s CEO. Peter Ueberroth, for example, will be remembered as the man who negotiated baseball’s new record-breaking television contracts. Kuhn was also a relatively savvy businessman. When he was elected commissioner, baseball was losing market share; pro football was increasingly popular, especially with younger fans. Traditionalists excoriated Kuhn for moving World Series games into prime time, but he was convinced that baseball “had to use national television as a means of rejuvenating baseball’s popularity”; according to Kuhn, it made no sense to broadcast baseball’s greatest event “when most of North America was working or going to school.”

But Kuhn was better known for his Landis-like determination to search out and punish impropriety and the appearance of impropriety. In 1974, Kuhn suspended George Steinbrenner for two years after he pleaded guilty to making an illegal contribution to President Nixon’s re-election campaign and was fined $15,000; had Steinbrenner been sentenced to jail, Kuhn says he would have banned him from baseball for life. A couple of years later, Kuhn suspended Ted Turner for a year and took away the Braves’ first pick in the 1977 amateur draft when Turner tampered with Giants outfielder and soon-to-be free agent Gary Matthews by announcing at a World Series cocktail party that he would spend whatever it took to sign Matthews. “C’mon, Principal,” Turner told Kuhn, “you can’t take me seriously when I’ve had a few drinks.” But Kuhn was not someone to excuse an infraction on such grounds. “A good deal of baseball business, wisely or unwisely, is carried on by people who have been drinking. If we had two sets of rules, the result would be a shambles,” he primly testified when Turner went to court in an unsuccessful attempt to overturn the suspension.

It is ironic that Kuhn was usually perceived as an owners’ commissioner; he was never afraid to punish transgressing owners like Steinbrenner and Turner. But Kuhn made more enemies among the owners by supporting limits on TV superstations and greater revenue sharing among major-league teams. Turner and Chicago’s Tribune Company who owned the Cubs and superstation WGN were unhappy with Kuhn’s efforts to limit the number of games that superstations could sell to cable systems in other teams’ local markets. And Nelson Doubleday, one of baseball’s fattest fat cats, called revenue sharing “socialism.” The owner of the Mets, whose local television rights were enormously valuable — particularly when New York City superstation WOR began to sell Mets games to cable systems across the country — told Kuhn that since “he had bought the Mets for what he considered a big price, he did not see why he should share the benefits of New York with others.” The rules are different now, but in Kuhn’s day, a commissioner had to win approval from at least three-fourths of the clubs in each league to be elected; 18 of 26 owners wanted to re-elect Kuhn to a third term as commissioner, but only 7 of the 12 National League teams supported him.

Kuhn was first and foremost a lawyer, with a lawyer’s respect for precedent and procedural niceties. His decision to ban Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle from working for major-league teams after they accepted employment at Atlantic City casinos is perhaps the best example of Kuhn’s lawyerly punctiliousness. Kuhn defended that decision as consistent with a long line of precedents dating back to “Black Sox” times; only a few years earlier, Kuhn had told former Yankee owner Del Webb that he could not buy the White Sox unless he first sold off his Las Vegas casino operations. Not surprisingly, Kuhn was roasted by the press; Peter Ueberroth quickly reversed Kuhn’s decision when he became commissioner. Kuhn credits his successor with a “superior sense of public relations,” which is an understatement.

The worst blemish on Kuhn’s record was his failure to head off (or, at least, more quickly end) the 1981 strike, when the owners and players squared off on the issue of what compensation was owed by a team that signed a free agent. The owners felt that a team losing a free agent should receive a major-leaguer in return — in their view, that was both fair and necessary to maintain competitive balance. But the players were not about to agree to anything that would discourage the Steinbrenners and Turners of the world from throwing their millions at free agents. Kuhn “hated the strike and had prayed that it would not happen” — he had a “more-than-fifty-year history as a fan,” and he appreciated just how much baseball was loved by millions of others — but he felt powerless to bring it to an end. Listen: “I was still haunted by the Landis myth. I did not have the power to direct the activities of a federally protected labor union. Had it been otherwise, there would have been no strike. No sensible person would have permitted the Players Association to strike over the [free agent] compensation issue.”

Kuhn’s explanation is a bit curious. He had never hesitated to fine an owner who was guilty of tampering or suspend a player who was arrested for drug possession, even though his decisions were sometimes reversed by judges or arbitrators. Kuhn probably was legally impotent to stop the strike by fiat — it is extremely doubtful that he simply could have shouted “Play ball!” and made it stick. Perhaps a bolder, more imaginative, or more shameless man would have been able to frighten, trick, or embarrass the players and owners into bringing the strike to an end.

Kuhn believed he could not order the players to end their strike, and he would not order the owners to settle if that meant giving up on compensation for free agents. The commissioner felt strongly that free agency without compensation was wrong. “[Why] should I influence the owners to do what in my judgment was not best for baseball?” he asks. Even more important to Kuhn than the compensation issue was what he saw as the battle between owners and players for control of baseball. Kuhn had his problems with individual owners, but he had a particular dislike for Marvin Miller, the executive director of the Players Association. To Kuhn, Miller’s refusal to bargain on compensation for free agents was proof that he was “[h]ung up on outdated trade union dogma about never giving anything back and on his own ego gratification.” Kuhn was also frustrated because the players always presented a solidly united front at the bargaining table, while the owners were a house divided, saying:

It was Miller’s calculation that the owners would not long stand together against a strike, that their unity was paper-thin. It seemed to me that unless the clubs took a stand at some point, the Players Association would forever have its way. … Given free rein, the Players Association would look only to the financial welfare of the players … [with] no concern for the fans or the ticket prices. … Not so transient as the players, most of the club executives, for all their frailties, had a deep sense of dedication to the game and to the public.

In Kuhn’s eyes, Miller “was not a fan, showed no concern for the fans, and had little sense of responsibility to the public or the game.”

Kuhn sincerely believed that unrestricted free agency would destroy competitive balance and harm the fans. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, Kuhn’s fears seem to have been exaggerated. But the significance of the 1975 Messersmith-McNally arbitration decision, which freed the players from the shackles of the reserve system, can hardly be exaggerated.

In “Beyond the Sixth Game,” baseball journalist Peter Gammons tells the tale of the decline and fall of the mighty Fisk-Lynn-Rice-Yastrzemski Red Sox of the mid-1970s, whose front-office executives were unable to cope with the radical changes in the player-management relationship that followed arbitrator Peter Seitz’s celebrated Messersmith-McNally decision. Before Seitz ruled that the standard reserve clause in player contracts did not bind a major leaguer to his team for as long as the team wanted him, players were at a tremendous disadvantage in salary negotiations because the owners did not compete with one another for talent — a player could play for the organization that had drafted or traded for him, or he could go into another line of work. But after the Seitz decision, as Gammons puts it, the players had a “powerful gun” to point at the owners: free agency.

“Beyond the Sixth Game” is first of all a book about the game of baseball, not the business of baseball. But no serious discussion of recent baseball history is complete unless it examines the effects of free agency, salary arbitration, and the other fallout from the Seitz decision. Beginning in 1976, according to Gammons, life in baseball’s front office got a lot tougher.

The reserve system had guaranteed management equality, which in turn had fostered a club of good old boys protected by the rules of the game. The new system made every judgment and decision important: big-money signings had to be well conceived, scouting and development became increasingly vital and the ability to judge and find talent without trying to spend with George Steinbrenner became what separated Baltimore and Los Angeles from the rest of the teams.

“Free agency,” said Dodgers vice president Al Campanis, “forced everyone to be more competitive and make tougher decisions.”

The Red Sox front office wasn’t equal to the challenge. Longtime owner Tom Yawkey died seven months after the Messersmith decision and just three days before the players and owners agreed to a new collective bargaining agreement, which provided for free agency after six years of major-league service. Yawkey had been a free-spender, but new owners Haywood Sullivan and Buddy Leroux (quickly nicknamed “Dumwood and Shoddy”) decided it was time to trim the fat in the front office. Sullivan, who had been a reasonably competent director of player personnel, became general manager and chief contract negotiator; in addition, he sat on several important owners’ committees. The former bullpen catcher didn’t have the negotiating experience to deal with player agents like Jerry Kapstein, and he didn’t have enough time during the season to work the telephones and put together deals to fill the holes in the Red Sox lineup.

Sullivan met his Waterloo in the 1980-81 off-season. In 1976, the Red Sox had signed stars Rick Burleson, Carlton Fisk, and Fred Lynn to five-year contracts; Burleson was dealt to the Angels after the 1980 season. The fifth year of those contracts was an option year; the contracts provided that the teams had until March 11, 1981, to exercise their option for the 1981 season. But the Basic Agreement required teams to tender contracts to players by December 20. Sullivan did not want to mail contracts by December 20 because Fisk and Lynn might have had the right go to salary arbitration if he did; his lawyers told him it would be safe to wait until March 11. After hearing that the Angels had sent Burleson a contract on December 17, Sullivan changed his mind and put Fisk and Lynn’s contracts in the mail on December 22, two days too late. Sullivan took the rap for the fiasco that cost the Red Sox two of their best players — some people still believe he just forgot to mail the contracts on time — but he was really the victim of questionable legal advice.

There’s a considerable amount of good legal advice in “Law of Professional and Amateur Sports,” a legal treatise edited by Gary Uberstine. Chapter 4 of that treatise, “Collective Bargaining in Professional Sports,” by Boston College law professor Robert Berry, first describes collective bargaining generally, then briefly discusses the most salient feature of the basic labor-management agreements in baseball, football, basketball, and hockey. Chapter 5, “Negotiating for the Professional Baseball Player,” by sports lawyer Jeffrey Moorad — he represents Will Clark and Cory Snyder, among others — moves from collective bargaining to the individual player contract. Moorad covers what is at issue in contract negotiations for three different kinds of clients: (1) amateurs selected in the annual free agent draft, who are negotiating their initial professional contracts; (2) minor-league players; and (3) major-league players. He also describes the mechanics of arbitration and free agency. Although the Berry and Moorad chapters were written for lawyers, they are not particularly technical — after reading “Hardball” and “Beyond the Sixth Game,” you should have no trouble understanding this material.

The next book on our reading list is “Sports for Sale: Television, Money, and the Fans,” by David Klatell and Norman Marcus of Boston University’s Institute in Broadcast Sports. William Wrigley used to give away the broadcasting rights to Cubs games, hoping that people who watched the Cubs play on TV or listened to them on radio might decide to come out to Wrigley Field and buy a ticket. Today, baseball’s broadcasting rights are worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year; in a few years, team owners will make more money from television than from selling tickets. “Sports for Sale” covers the past, present, and future of sports and television — and the future is spelled C-A-B-L-E.

If you like to watch baseball on TV and you don’t already have cable, you’d better get it soon. Beginning in 1990, ESPN will televise 175 regular-season games; regional cable programmers and cable superstations will show hundreds more. All you’ll get for free is 12 regular-season games on CBS, and maybe a few more on a local station. Of course, the All-Star Game, playoffs, and World Series won’t cost you anything, but don’t expect that to last forever. Pay-for-view technology, which enables your cable system to charge you by the program rather than by the month, has come a long way in the last few years. Unless the politicians step in, free televised baseball may be extinct by the year 2000. “Sports for Sale’s” examination of the history and economics of cable television — which Klatell and Marcus term “the goose that can lay golden eggs” — is particularly illuminating. The chapter on the legal and regulatory aspects of sports broadcasting is also quite good. Feel free to skip the discussion of sports anthology shows (like “Wide World of Sports”) and the Olympics.

The next required reading is “The Dodgers Move West,” by Neil Sullivan, which is an account of the most controversial franchise move in the history of professional sports. Howard Cosell has called Walter O’Malley’s decision to leave Brooklyn a “moral and ethical disgrace” because the Dodgers were not in economic distress. It is true that the Dodgers made more money from 1952 to 1955 than any other major-league team, including the Yankees. But O’Malley had reason to worry about how long the good times would last. In 1955, the Dodgers drew barely a million fans to Ebbets Field, which was cramped and dilapidated; that same season, the Braves, who had left Boston for the greener pasture of Milwaukee in 1953, drew over two million fans. O’Malley was concerned that the Braves would be able to hire better scouts, pay bigger bonuses to young prospects, and operate more farm teams than his Dodgers.

To keep up with the Braves, O’Malley needed a new stadium with plenty of parking. He did not expect the taxpayers to pick up the tab for the stadium — in fact, he preferred to finance the stadium privately. O’Malley knew it would be impossible to assemble enough land to build a stadium on unless the city was willing to use its powers of eminent domain to help him. When New York City officials responded less than enthusiastically to O’Malley’s pleas for assistance — they hired consultants to evaluate various proposed sites for a new stadium, and hemmed and hawed about whether they had the legal authority to do what O’Malley wanted — he started talking to people in Los Angeles. O’Malley eventually gave up on getting a new stadium in Brooklyn and decided to move to the west coast, where the Dodgers have been a smashing success both as a baseball team and as a business.

That’s all very interesting, but it did happen 30-odd years ago, and I said earlier that this course was about current events, not history. But if you want to discuss franchise relocation at all, you have to go back quite a few years — the last major-league team to switch cities was the Senators, who left Washington after the 1971 season. And I have a feeling that the next team that tries to move to a new city will face many of the same problems the Dodgers faced. For example, not everyone in Southern California welcomed the Dodgers with open arms. Disgruntled citizens forced a referendum on the sale of the Chavez Ravine land to the team; other unhappy taxpayers went to court to challenge the deal. O’Malley eventually prevailed, but all the legal and political maneuvering — which Sullivan’s book describes in exhaustive, and sometimes exhausting detail — delayed the construction of Dodger Stadium by several years. Keep in mind that O’Malley paid for that stadium himself; the complaining would have been much louder if it had been publicly financed.

Was Walter O’Malley justified in moving the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles? If O’Malley had been in any other business than baseball, almost no one — probably not even Howard Cosell — would have questioned his right to pull up stakes and move anywhere he wanted. But many would argue that a baseball owner should not be allowed to move unless his team consistently loses money due to below-average fan support. It seems doubtful that the other owners would vote to approve a move today unless the team was a chronic money-loser for that reason.

There always seem to be more cities that want major-league baseball (or football, or basketball) than there are teams available. I will not attempt to explain why that is — this is a business course, not a course in abnormal psychology or interest group politics. Viewed strictly as a matter of dollars and cents, local governments almost always lose money on professional sports.

The politicians usually argue that a big-league franchise makes a significant contribution to the city’s economy, but such claims are usually overblown. Most of the people who spend money at a baseball game are local residents; they would have spent that money at other local businesses (restaurants, movie theatres, bowling alleys, or whatever) if the city did not have a major-league team. “Beyond the Sixth Game” tells the story of how the new player-management balance of power affected one major-league team. The next book on the reading list, “Ballpark Figures: The Blue Jays and the Business of Baseball,” by Toronto newspaperman Larry Millson, offers a broader view of the business operations of a baseball team.

As its title promises, “Ballpark Figures” gives you all the numbers — Millson covers everything from player salaries to marketing expenses to the Blue Jays’ electric bill. What’s the cost of a seven-day road trip to New York and Boston? About $75,000. How much meal money does a Class A player get? Eleven dollars a day. (Double A players get twelve.) How much does each one-cent drop in the value of the Canadian dollar cost the Jays? About $285,000 per year. (Most of the dollars the team collects are Canadian dollars, but most of its bills — including player salaries — must be paid in U.S. dollars. The Blue Jays bought $15.3 million U.S. in 1987.)

But “Ballpark Figures” is about more than numbers. Millson has covered the Blue Jays for the Toronto Globe and Mail since 1980, and he knows the organization inside and out. His book introduces you to dozens of members of the Blue Jay organization — everyone from the team’s board of directors to its front-office personnel to its players, managers, coaches, and scouts — and explains what they do and why. “Ballpark Figures” takes you to spring training, to the Dominican Republic with Latin American superscout Epy Guerrero to Medicine Hat, Alberta, where the Jays have a rookie league team, and to West Palm Beach for a hearing on pitcher Dennis Lamp’s grievance. (Lamp’s contract provided for a guaranteed 1987 salary of $500,000 if he pitched in a certain number of games in 1986; he claimed that the Blue Jays stopped using him late in the ’85 season to keep him from getting the required number of appearances, but the arbitrator ruled against him.)

The American League granted expansion franchises to Toronto and Seattle in 1976. A decade later, the Blue Jays had established themselves as one of baseball’s most successful teams, both on and off the field. From 1983 to 1985, only the Tigers, Mets, and Yankees won more games than the Blue Jays, and only five more wins would have given Toronto the best four-year record in the major leagues; by contrast, Seattle won fewer games than anyone during those four seasons. Even though they have had to play their games in Exhibition Stadium, a converted football stadium that Millson calls “a sorry imitation of a baseball park” the Blue Jays’ home attendance figures have been remarkable. In 1983-86, only the Dodgers, Angels, and Cardinals sold more tickets; the hapless Mariners attracted only 40% as many fans as the Jays.

What is the secret of Toronto’s success? According to Millson, “the Blue Jays stuck to sound business principle” right from the start. Peter Bavasi, the team’s first general manager, told Millson that the Blue Jays were run like any other business.

From day one, it was expected that we would operate this franchise as a business. We produced annual operating plans, budgets, cash-flow forecasts, business plans, marketing plans, strategy plans, short-term, long-term, medium-term plans. It disciplined us.

But the Blue Jays’ owners — Labatt Breweries owns 45% of the team, Montreal businessman R. Howard Webster holds another 45%, and the remaining 10% belongs to the Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce — never lost sight of the fact that a baseball team is in the business of winning baseball games. The board of directors never votes on whether the general manager should sign a free agent, or whom the manager should start at second base.

“The team hired experts and gave them room to operate,” according to Millson. “The business people interfered as little as possible with the baseball people.”

Unlike many teams, Toronto is a patient organization with a long-term outlook; the Jays want to win now, but not if it means throwing away any chance to win in the future. The Blue Jays don’t pinch pennies when it comes to scouting and player development — the minor-league teams get more than the usual amount of money and attention. The man in charge of the Jays’ Medicine Hat rookie league team also administers minor-league affiliates of Houston, Kansas City, and Seattle; he told Millson that Toronto was “about ten country miles” ahead of the other organizations.

They do absolutely everything first class in the minor leagues. Toronto took its entire minor-league system — the coaches, the general managers, owners — up to Toronto for the playoffs in 1985. We’re also with Kansas City and they didn’t even send me an order form for tickets. Toronto not only sent me an order form, they sent us a plane ticket and said come on down. And every year, they bring in the general managers and the owners of every one of their minor-league clubs, their expenses paid, to Toronto. Nobody else we deal with is even close.

Toronto pays attention to details: because they sign more Latin American players than most other teams, the Jays’ lower-level minor-league teams usually have a Spanish-speaking manager or coach, which eases the culture shock that an 18-year-old Dominican would otherwise suffer when he found himself in Medicine Hat or Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

The Blue Jays’ organization is characterized by continuity and loyalty. Like the Dodgers, the Blue Jays prefer to hire managers, coaches, and scouts who have played in the Toronto organization because they know the Blue Jays’ way of doing things. Rapid turnover is a fact of life in many front offices, but many key Blue Jay employees have been with the organization since 1976 — including their executive vice-president for baseball, Pat Gillick, and executive vice-president for business, Paul Beeston. Even the equipment manager and visitors’ clubhouse attendant are original Blue Jays employees.

Toronto’s employees are loyal because they are treated well. The front-office clerical employees get a free trip to the All-Star Game each summer. The team usually promotes from within the organization: the administrator of player personnel once worked on the ground crew and in the ticket department, while the team’s original trainer is now in charge of Toronto’s spring-training facilities and Class A minor-league team in Dunedin, Florida.

Unfortunately, “Ballpark Figures” does not have an index. About the only other thing wrong with this book is that it was never published in the United States, so you won’t find it at the campus bookstore. There are a couple of copies on reserve in the library but you’ll have to contact the publisher (McClelland & Stewart, 25 Hollinger Road, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, M4B 3G2) if you want to buy one of your own.

Your final reading assignment is “A Baseball Winter: The Off-Season Life of the Summer Game,” which is a day-by-day account of what the front-office personnel of five major-league organizations — the Angels, Braves, Indians, Mets, and Phillies — did between the 1984 World Series and Opening Day 1985. Like fledgling stockbrokers and insurance agents making endless “cold calls” in hopes of finding a few people who want to buy mutual funds or universal-life policies, front-office employees of baseball teams spend most of the off-season talking on the telephone. They talk to player agents, who all seem to want multi-year guaranteed contracts for their clients (not to mention no-trade clauses and incentive bonuses); to the scouts who are monitoring the progress of the organization’s prize prospects in the winter leagues; to the doctors who operated on their catcher’s knee or their star reliever’s elbow — but most of all, they talk to one another about possible trades, the availability of better jobs in other organizations, and a multitude of other topics.

“A Baseball Winter” was written by five veteran sportswriters, each of whom had covered one of the five teams for many years. “A Baseball Winter” does not probe as deeply as “Ballpark Figures,” but by looking at five very different organizations, it tells you quite a bit about why some teams are successful businesses and others are failures. The 1984-85 Cleveland Indians provide a particularly stark contrast to the Blue Jays. For one thing, the Indians did not have financially strong, stable ownership. The estate of Steve O’Neill owned about 60% of the Indians; 54 limited partners held the rest. O’Neill had become the ninth man to own the Indians since World War II when he bought the team in 1977; he put it on the block less than four years later, not long before his death. At one point, Donald Trump tried to buy the team and move it to the New Jersey Meadowlands, but the O’Neill estate held out for a purchaser who would promise to keep the Indians in Cleveland. David LeFevre, a Cleveland native and diehard Indians fan, agreed to buy the team for $41 million in June 1984, but three of the club’s minority partners — together, the three owned less than 17% of the Indians — went to court in an attempt to get a bigger piece of the pie. That November, when an attempt to get an expedited ruling in that case failed, LeFevre was forced to call off the deal.

Not only did the Indians need an owner, they needed someone to replace retiring president Gabe Paul. Perhaps the only thing worse than having no one in charge is having too many people in charge: Peter Bavasi, who replaced Paul, hired two former general managers, Danny O’Brien and Joe Klein, and made Paul’s general manager, Phil Seghi, the director of major-league personnel. Not surprisingly, the lines of authority in the Indians’ front office became rather tangled.

What are some of the other lessons you can learn from “A Baseball Winter”? For one thing, you’ll learn why major-league teams hate to go to arbitration: because the players almost never lose. The clubs “won” seven of the 13 cases that went to arbitration in the winter of 1985 — or did they? The seven players who lost got average pay raises of 40%; about 85% of the time, the salary offers that clubs submitted to arbitration were higher than their final pre-arbitration offers to the players. Here are the latest numbers on arbitration, courtesy of the New York Times. This winter, 135 players filed for salary arbitration; only twelve players failed to settle their cases. The seven players who won in arbitration ended up with a collective 120% pay increase; the five who lost will still make 16% more money than they earned last year. The players who settled prior to arbitration will make an average of almost $552,000 in 1989, up 71% from their 1988 average salary of about $388,000. The right to go to arbitration was particularly valuable to young players like Jose Canseco who were eligible for arbitration for the first time: the 50 arbitration rookies ended up with a 137% raise.

I see that our time is up for today. If you read all these books, you will have a solid understanding of baseball as a business enterprise — and you will have no trouble passing my final exam.

Editor’s Note: Why are Cub books different? Because Cub fans are different. No team in baseball has such a long-term tradition of efficient losing as the Cubs. So Cub fans don’t write books full of poetry about Babe Ruth (or about losing Babe Ruth). Chicago fans are jealous of their suffering. The result is a reverse snobbery, underlined by their secret they have something we don’t have. Chicago folk talk about how hard it is to be a Cub fan and fans from other cities can kind of understand. They tell you how lovely Wrigley is, and that’s easy to grasp if you can see. But what they’re really saying is how much fun it is to duck out of work and spend the afternoon being a kid again. (Hide your briefcase in the mailroom.) With only a handful of night games, the only place in the country where grownups with high-paying jobs still play hookey to see baseball is in Chicago. It makes a difference.

Reading books about the Chicago Cubs in 1989 is a bittersweet experience. After only four seasons, the 1984 Eastern Division Championship season is glimpsed through a golden haze of nostalgia.

Next year was a very brief year.

Cubs fans are nothing if not resilient, however. We are strong. We have character. Above all, Cubs fans are creative! Cub writers have created a literature with a form and style for every taste – from the dullest compilation of statistics to the most free-form of prose, all the way, in fact, to cartoons.

It was instructive to read “The Chicago Cubs” by Warren Brown. Published in 1946, it proves that things never change. Points he made then could have been made in 1956, 1966, 1976 or 1986. Following are some “Brownies,” with their modern-day commentary.

“In the modern (1900-1945) era of the Cubs, nothing they have accomplished has caused as much commotion as their player deals. It would seem from some comments, that whenever they went into the market, they were played for suckers by everyone with whom they dealt…”

And that was written before Brock for Broglio! That one trade haunts everyone’s memory and a paragraph or two about it appears in virtually every column written about current deals, most recently Palmeiro to Texas. Is this another one? is the constant fear.

Most of the books written since the trade state their opinion as well. Gifford (“The Neighborhood of Baseball”) seems to take the Brock trade as a personal affront. Year after year, he enjoys flagellating himself with the man’s stab.

Back to Brown. “Gallagher refrained from issuing any statements, though in their fine frenzy the critics, or some of them, were now polling the National and American Leagues to show the number of former Cubs who were performing with varying degrees of success.”

Forty-three years later, this is still being done. What Chicago sportswriter can resist comparing Eckersley’s and Smith’s save totals for 1988 to that of the entire Cub bullpen? One newspaper highlights the “Ex-Chicago Player of the Week” although the “honors” are shared by ex-White Sox.

In the last several years, it’s become a fall tradition to pick league and World Series winners based on the “Ex-Cubs Factor”: the more former Cubbies on a team, the greater the odds against its survival.

“Another source of criticism of the Cubs has been their managerial changes.”

Ahh, yes. From the everlasting hope that Charlie Grimm would once again work his magic and bring another pennant to Chicago, to the College of Coaches (more about them later), to the hiring of Gene Michael, “who stuck out like a sore thumb,” the managerial parade has provided much column fodder.

“In concluding this interlude it might be well to take up another favorite criticism of the Cubs, that of front-office interference with the manager.”

Phil Wrigley traded players he didn’t like. Dallas Green threatened to take over as field manager. Things haven’t changed much here, either.

Speaking of managers, why is everybody so critical of the Cubs’ College of Coaches? It was merely an intra-organizational version of baseball’s revolving management plan, under which a man is fired by one club and hired by another shortly thereafter. Or, in the case of the Yankees, Martin and Piniella took turns sitting in the dugout. Sounds a lot like the college to me.

The books reviewed here fell into two categories: those written by professional sportswriters and those written by men outside Organized Baseba1l. It is my opinion that “OB” includes those assigned to cover the game. Players, executives, sportscasters, writers all share the same attitudes, prejudices and cliches.

With the exception of Wheeler (“Bleachers”), possibly because it’s a subjective look at Cub fans, one definite difference between the professional sportswriters and the fans is their pretentious use of words. Brown’s men never merely “try,” they “essay.” Men don’t go home; they “return to their domicile.” Enright, as noted in the review of Chicago Cubs, falls into the same pattern, although not nearly so often. In “The Golden Era Cubs,” and “The New Era Cubs,” Gold uses puns, cloying alliteration and strange descriptions: i.e., “pounding the pines.”

Are the pros trying to prove they’re worth their pay? Or that each can afford a thesaurus?

Two common themes in the literature infuriated me. One was the widely-held image of a Cub fan as a bleacherite. The bleachers hold less than ten percent of Wrigley’s crowd. Are we to believe there are only 3,000 Cub fans? That’s ridiculous. Let’s end this myth right now and replace it with the truth: True Cub fans sit in the upper deck!

Another erroneous belief is that Cub fans are exclusively male. Look around! In every Wrigley Field crowd, at least half the people there are women! I’ve got news for you — we aren’t dragged there by our significant others. Lots of us bring our SOs.

“Bleachers” is the only book that takes women fans seriously. Jack Brickhouse, in his foreword to “The Cub Fan’s Guide To Life,” writes of a Cub fan holding hands (in the bleachers!) with his Cub fan girlfriend. Doesn’t that give her equal status?

Gold and Ahrens take note of women only as they swoon over cute Cub players. Schwab seems to hate all women, including his wife. Most of the other writers don’t notice the existence of women at all.

Then there’s Brown:

“Wrigley not only invited ’em out, he practically insisted on it. Since there has never been anyone concerned with the presentation of major league baseball wiser to the ways of promotional advertising than the Wrigleys, not even a sale of nylons in early 1945 was as productive of mass turnouts of women as were those Ladies Days at Wrigley Field.”

Growing up, I remember listening to Brickhouse say things: “It’s going to be noisy here today. It’s Ladies’ Day.”

Women’s lot as baseball fans: be ignored or be patronized.

With the exception of Langford’s “The Game is Never Over,” the objective books about the Cubs are mostly forgettable, to be used mainly as reference. For enjoyable reading give me a subjective book any time. They can be read again and again and savored. The writing comes from the heart and reaches another fan’s heart.

The further a writer gets from pure chronological accounting, the better the writing and the longer-lived. Left-brained readers will, of course, disagree, but my point is easily proven.

Take, for instance, the famed double play combination of Tinker to Evers to Chance. Sometime between 1905 and 1909, Franklin P. Adams, a writer with the New York Evening Mail, penned these lines:

These are the saddest of possible words
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Trio of bear cubs and fleeter than birds
Tinker to Evers to Chance.
Thoughtlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble
Making a Giant hit into a double
Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble
Tinker to Evers to Chance.

In “Chicago Cubs,” Enright records the trio’s totals: “In four years, at the height of their prowess, Tinker, Evers and Chance made the 6-4-3 and 4-6-3 double play only 56 times!” But the poem lives on, proving that the way something really happened means little, compared to the way it’s perceived.

Brown, in one of his more readable sentences, agrees. “Don’t let anyone tell you the poet’s pen isn’t mightier than the official scorer’s pencil.”

Finally, one cartoon from “How Many Next Years Do You Get in Baseball?” sums up Cub fandom perfectly: The Perfesser is at the box office buying tickets: “one child … and one childish.” Cub fans never grow up.

These reviews are arranged from objective books about the Chicago Cubs to the more subjective. In each category they are listed chronologically by publishing date.

“The Chicago Cubs,” by Warren Brown (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1946) begins with a heartbreaking dedication: “To P.K. Wrigley and the world’s championship yet to come.” It then goes on to include some of the most heartrending prose ever to be set in type.

Brown was a sportswriter for more than 50 years. He knows his facts, and tells the inside stories, but a reader wades through to pages to find yet another example of his opaque wordiness.

“And thereby he moved himself into the Wrigley empire to become, before his death, one of the most imporiant front-office men in that part of it known as the Chicago Cubs.”

“He had come to the Reds as a coach and certainly had no idea of trying to recapture his lost youth and again essay a daily stint as a catcher when the World Series began.”

“Veeck’s utter frankness in his discussions of baseball business and his availability for interviewers made his office a happy hunting ground for item seekers in the years that followed Bill Veeck’s death and up to the installation of James T. Gallagher as general manager.”

It is especially interesting to read a book from 40 years back and note that it contains only eight pages of statistics. (Maybe the Forties were the Good Old Days?)

“Baseball’s Great Teams: Chicago Cubs,” by Jim Enright, (Collier Books, New York, 1975) is another of the books written by a sportswriter. As such he’s prone to the same occupational disease – pretentious and cute language. Mixed in with solid, workmanlike prose, we find things like, “…for the Cubs’ most memorable home run was struck when sunlight had all but abandoned the Wrigley Field solarium.”

“Chicago Cubs” is heavily illustrated, both with Cubs and their opponents referred to in the accompanying text. This is wonderful, but since the book is only 192 pages long, it forces Enright to cover his material “once over lightly.”

As history, “Chicago Cubs” only whets a reader’s appetite for more.

Jim Langford’s “The Game Is Never Over: An Appreciative History of the Chicago Cubs” (Icarus Press, South Bend, Indiana, 1982) has a chapter on “Beautiful Wrigley Field.”

“The fashions change, but the fans remain. Come to the field on a day when the Cubs are losing and, with two outs in the ninth, look around. There they sit. Complaining, but alert. Frustrated, but attentive. Dejected, yet happy. For Cub fans know, together, sitting there in that wonderful green field, the game is never over. Never.”

Yeah! That’s us, all right!

Langford relates Cub history from 1875 to 1949 in Chapter Three. Thereafter, he covers the team by decade, including the Opening Day lineup for each year from 1950 through 1981. He includes statistics and an index of Cub players from 1948.

Naturally, in writing about more than a century of baseball only a season’s high points can be included. Working within this constraint, Langford still manages to convey some of the excitement of each year’s race. That’s quite an accomplishment.

“Day by Day in Chicago Cubs History,” by Art Ahrens and Eddie Gold, is a “Gold mine” (Eddie’s been a Chicago Sun-Times reporter for 39 years) of Cubs information. As the name implies, it goes through the calendar and lists happenings for each day of the year.

In addition to the chronological listings, there are page after page of the inevitable statistics. Ahrens’ and Gold’s numbers don’t always match those in other books; they have .240 as Randy Hundley’s lifetime BA, while the Baseball Encyclopedia lists it as .236. That’s one of the few stats I know.)

“Day by Day” has a lot of old photos as well. If you’re into statistics and/or trivia, it’s a good reference book.

“Cub Fan Mania: A Pictorial Portrait of Baseball’s Most Dedicated and Vocal Fans,” is by Bob Ibach and Ned Colletti (Leisure Press, New York, 1983). Both Ibach and Colletti were employees of the Cubs, though the former left after the 1988 season.

This is a slim little book (only 96 pages), containing some trivia, though mercifully free of statistics. These people are capable, corporate writers. No one will ever quote them. Their words do not stir the blood.

The best part of “Cub Fan Mania” is the photographs: fans, vendors, scoreboard, grandstand, bleachers, seats, streets. Anyone who’s been at Wrigley has witnessed many of these scenes. The vendor on page 58 – I saw him!

In “You Gotta Have Heart: Dallas Green’s Rebuilding of the Cubs,” (Diamond Communications, South Bend, Indiana, 1985) Ned Colletti does the impossible: he makes the 1984 Cubs championship season a dull read.

He does have the ability to write on command. Dallas Green (the world’s tallest two-year-old) no doubt told Colletti to write a book praising Green’s superior executive ability in putting together the 1984 Eastern Division champions.

Shortly after this book reached print, however, the Cubs lost their entire starting rotation to injuries, the skids were greased for their fourth-place finish, and the “Dallas Green for President’ signs disappeared from the bleacher fences. Talk about being on the wrong bookshelves at the wrong time.

On the other hand, had the Cubs done well in 1985, more innocent people might have wasted $15.95 on “You Gotta Have Heart.”

“The Golden Era Cubs — 1876-1940” and “The New Era Cubs — 1941-1985” by Eddie Gold and Art Ahrens are based on the same format: “Pictures, biographies, statistics, and the anecdotes that go with them.” They provide valuable reference allowing a reader to learn more about Cub players (although not all of them) than the dry columns of numbers in “Day by Day.

One of the book’s irritations is that the writers sometimes get too cute with language. Example:

“Steven Michael Stone was a player of many facets – all turned on.” Picture him a poet, a ping pong prodigy, a pitcher, and a proud possessor of the national pastime’s Cy Young Award. In addition, the chunky, curly-coiffured Clevelander was a collegian at Kent State, a chess connoisseur, and a creative chef.”

By page 186 of the second volume (page 366 of a total 454), the guys were getting giddy.

Bob Logan was, at the time of writing “a 24-year veteran sportswriter for the Chicago Tribune.” “So You Think You’re a Die-Hard Cub Fan” (Contemporary Books, Inc., Chicago, 1985) is written in the typical matter-of-fact style found on any sports page in the country. Even its format is similar to a newspaper, mixing text with photos, sidebars and short items; at times, this mix is slightly confusing.

A quick once-over of Cub history, it concentrates most heavily on the last several decades. Logan ends each chapter with a few trivia questions.

“So You Think..” refers to Chapter 2: “Cub Superfans – The Tenth Man.” He writes about us true fans and (gasp) the others.

“After decades of obscurity, the team created a national craze in 1984 and thousands flocked to join the Die-Hard Fan Club. The real die-hards, those who had been rooting for the Cubs since childhood glimpses of them at Wrigley Field, viewed the trendy newcomers with attitudes ranging from amused tolerance to ill-concealed scorn.”

On the cover, Logan notes that his book is “not for the faint-hearted.” That’s probably due to the opening page of Chapter 7, “The (Sometimes) Friendly Confines,” in which he bluntly states:

“The Cubs won’t be the same without Wrigley Field. Baseball won’t be the same. Neither will Chicago. Now the question is not if, but when, the North Side museum of so many happy memories and unhappy endings will vanish. It’s apparent that the Cubs will have to leave the cozy, ivy-covered cottage they’ve lived in since 1915.”

He predicts “a new stadium for the Cubs and Bears — with the White Sox frozen out – seemed to be in the cards, perhaps as early as the 1992 Chicago World’s Fair.” I hope he didn’t bet money on it. Wrigley Field still stands, while the new stadium (and the Fair) are history. By the way – Logan’s left town, too.

“Here Come the ’86 Cubs” by Fred Mitchell (Bonus Books, Chicago, 1986) could well have been a larger version of the 1985 Cubs Media Guide, with more photos and expanded text.

Written during spring training Mitchell merely introduces the Cub starters and hopefuls, quoting them about their goals for the year, and adding the opinions of the management. Everybody said the same thing: we’re going to do better than 1985.

If an expert is one who knows more and more about less and less, Jim Langford is, indeed, an expert on the Chicago Cubs.

In “Runs, Hits & Errors: A Treasury of Cub History and Humor,” (Diamond Communications, Inc., South Bend, Indiana, 1987) he again takes us all the way back to 1875 and continues to the end of the 1987 season.

Calling himself a “compiler,” he’s raided every clipping file and library shelf in Chicago, Indiana and beyond. He’s included whole chapters from Charlie Grimm’s “Grimm’s Baseball Tales.” He quotes, in their entirety, newspaper columns from as far back as 1880.

With its subtitle, “A Treasury of Cub History and Humor,” I picked up the book with great anticipation. Of history, there’s more than enough. Of humor … it must have been very subtle.

“Runs, Hits & Errors” is far from being the worst book about the Cubs, but Langford should stick to writing his own words rather than quoting others (at least at such length.)

If your idea of fun is to throw Cub questions at your friends, “The Cub Fan’s Quiz Book” by David Marran (Diamond Communications, South Bend, Indiana, 1985) is the book for you. It has questions to which every Cub fan knows the answer, i.e., “Wvhat was Ernie Banks’ number?” Plus things like, “After the final out in The Clincher, the Cubs charged the field in celebration. When Cub manager Jim Frey ran onto the field, where did he put his cap?” Now, that’s trivia!

“The Cubbies: Quotations on the Chicago Cubs” (Atheneum, New York, 1987) by Bob Chieger is nothing more than a collection of quotes by and/or about the Cubs. Some are funny, some are irritating. If one reads (or has read) almost anything about the Cubs, two-thirds or more of them are familiar.

When Dorothy Parker said, “This is not a book to be cast aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force,” she may have been talking about “Stuck on the Cubs,” by Rick Schwab (Sassafras Press, Inc., Evanston, Illinois, 1977).

Heralded as “A story told by a fan for the fans,” “Stuck” is full of self-righteousness, self-aggrandizement and self-adoration. Does Schwab really think anyone cares that he “moved to a suburb of Chicago near an expressway system that will whisk me downtown, catapult me to work, or eject me onto the Indiana dunes”? The cover blurb that states this is “an outrageously funny book” is false billing, too.

He says a few things one can agree with. “Baseball is the greatest game in the world.” “I have seen thousands of players come and go. None of them has affected my life and given me the vicarious thrills as has Ernie Banks.” “Cub fans’ pet peeves – 1. Front Runner Fans.”

Schwab spews his vitriol in all directions. He rails against: Chicago sportswriters, Cub catchers (all of them!), Harry Caray (even before he announced Cub games), gamblers in the bleachers, the three managers who came after Leo Durocher, Leo Durocher, the College of Coaches (nobody liked them!), Jack Brickhouse, commercials, Astroturf, Bowie Kuhn, stupid trades, Sunday drivers, Chicago police, Puerto Ricans, Wrigley Field usherettes, ushers, his 1965 Dodge Dart, his wife before she learned about baseball (“to Diane, a special is a seven-piece iced tea set for $3.99”), his wife now that she knows more about baseball than he does (“better barefoot and pregnant”), woman athletes, Women’s Lib, public restrooms, and people who watch Cub games from neighborhood rooftops. That’s only a partial list.

“The Neighborhood of Baseball: A Personal History of the Chicago Cubs,” by Barry Gifford (E.P. Dutton, New York, 1981) is half a good book The first few chapters are absolutely delightful. Gifford writes about the era that I remember best – the Cubs of the ’50s and early ’60s. These were my guys! Hank Sauer! Dee Fondy! Dale Long! Ernie Banks! So what if the Cubs always finished in the second division those years?

This is prose that can be quoted. It is my favorite writing about the Cubs. My family patiently sat through my reading portions of “The Neighborhood of Baseball” aloud. They know me.

Gifford saw his first game at Wrigley when he was five: “As for me, I had no choice, I was hooked. At five years old I could hardly go anywhere on my own, and I’d been exposed to the Chicago Cubs.” The exact same things could have been written about thousands of Cub fans, several generations worth. Including me. Throughout, Gifford complains about the Cubs starting strong and fading as the season winds down. Ironically, “The Neighborhood of Baseball” does the same thing. The first chapters explode in the reader’s mind. Then Gifford leaves town and after that, the book just disappears.

When you hit Chapter 34, stop reading. Whereas the former half of the book had been written with love and personal remembrance, the latter half was reconstructed from research. He has no personal involvement with any of it, and it was obviously added to pad the manuscript out to book length – always a poor excuse for writing.

Gifford’s lack of feeling for his subject is typified by his 1980 visit to Wrigley Field – he waited for the Cubs to send press credentials! – proof that he was doing it for money, not love.

“The Cub Fan’s Guide to Life: The Ultimate Self-Help Book,” another by Jim Langford (Diamond Communications, South Bend,Indiana, 1988) is a parody of self-help books. The reader begins by testing her Cub Fan Quotient. Having scored 91, I’m “already a great person!” It’s “impossible to score 100 on the test just to remind you that nobody’s perfect, as every Cub fan knows.

This is a hilarious little book (90 pages), in which Langford proves, again and again, how well he understands Cub fans. “Psychiatrists tell us that two essential ingredients in mental health and personal happiness are self-esteem and the virtue of hope. Cub fans have the patent on hope. If it didn’t exist, we would have invented it.” He knows his history, too (of course, he wrote a book on it!)

Langford, a one-fan industry (Diamond Communications offers Cub calendars and other items, as well as books by other writers, most notably Curt Smith) can be believed when he says: “There is no such thing as an ex-Cub fan!”

“Bleachers: A Summer in Wrigley Field” (Contemporary Books, Inc., Chicago, 1988) has a book-jacket bio of author Lonnie Wheeler that immediately made me dislike both writer and book. He lives in Cincinnati!

Cub fans writing about the Cubs! Yes! Chicago sportswriters writing about the Cubs? Natch. A Cincinnati sportswriter writing about the Cubs? No way! I hope he burned and peeled all summer long!

In his introduction, however, Wheeler makes one good point:

“Perhaps it had to be done by somebody to whom the bleachers were not a familiar fact of life, but a fetching image.” That’s true enough. No Cub fan would write it. Bleacher denizens aren’t trusted with pencils and those who sit in the grandstand wouldn’t waste time writing about the obnoxious, beer-soaked loudmouths who sit in the cheap seats.

He, himself, acknowledges this bleacher fact of life. “We tried to hash out why the bleachers were the unique contemporary cultural phenomenon that they were. We tried out a lot of theories and decided the best one was beer.”

He would, further, have us believe that: The only true Cub fans sit in the bleachers. The only knowledgeable Cub fans sit in the bleachers. The only friendly Cub fans sit in the bleachers. The bleachers are full when the grandstand is virtually empty. The only Cub fans who appreciate green grass sit in the bleachers. The best view is from the bleachers. Any one of those statements is hard to believe. All of them put together really strain the seams of credulity.

“How Many Next Years Do You Get in Baseball? Shoe Goes to Wrigley Field” (Bonus Books, Inc., Chicago, 1988) by Jeff MacNeely, features Cub fans like P. Martin Shoemaker, Perfesser Cosmo Fishhawk and his nephew Skyler, characters from the highly successful, widely syndicated comic strip Shoe.

MacNeely knows well the bittersweetness of being a Cub fan. The Perfesser: “A good Cubs fan accepts defeat and disappointment in the belief that tomorrow will be a better day. Do you know what that’s called, Skyler?” “Self-delusion.” “Optimism is the word I was looking for.”

Alas, the Perfesser is always sneaking off to the ballpark “to soak up some rays!” The present ownership is doing its best to see that line relegated to history.

“How Many Next Years …?” is an absolutely wonderful book. No matter how many times I read it, it still makes me laugh. Nor is it possible to look at one strip and put it down. Like peanuts, popcorn or Cracker Jack, one leads to another, then to another. Finally I gave up, and starting at the beginning, read it all the way through.

What more could anyone ask of any book?

With his 1988 film adaptation of Eliot Asinof’s Eight Men Out, novelist-filmmaker John Sayles has crafted the most authentic baseball film released to date. His respect for Asinof’s work, and for the look, language, and rhythm of dead ball era baseball is evidence in every frame of the film. Unlike any other baseball movie, “Eight Men Out” is nearly devoid of saccharine sentimentality, distracting extra-curricular nonsense or embarrassing errors in its depiction of baseball and its surroundings.

I met with John Sayles on the morning following the Boston premiere of “Eight Men Out” to discuss the movie, the Black Sox scandal, and baseball in general. An avowed Pirate fan, Sayles answered my questions for nearly an hour over breakfast in the genteel confines of the cafe of the Ritz Carlton Hotel.

Q. Describe your fascination with the book “Eight Men Out.” Did the screenplay emerge from your being a baseball fan or from being a fan of the story ?

A. I think the initial interest was hearing the story and wondering how eight men could throw the World Series. I had read a couple of other books that alluded to the scandal but didn’t have many details. In 1976 I discovered E1iot’s book, read it, and felt that it described the scandal in great detail. I found that my feelings toward the story changed after reading this book; it wasn’t simply that these were bad guys and this was how they did it; it was why they did it. And they’re not all necessarily bad. It was a very complex human situation. I also felt, and this happens when you read certain books, that this would be a great movie story. There were lots of great characters and a page-turning plot. At this point in my career I was turning from writing fiction to writing screenplays, and had just finished “Union Dues” and parts of “Pride of the Bimbos.” Interestingly the literary agency I got to sell “Union Dues” had a deal with an agency on the west coast who called them to represent my books as screen properties. I didn’t really write them for the screen but told them I did want to become a screenwriter. In turn they asked me to send them something I had written at which point I got off the phone and decided maybe I would adapt “Eight Men Out.” I think I was under the mistaken impression that maybe because I was a novelist my entry into films would be adapting books. I was wrong. They don’t really care if you’re a novelist out there in Hollywood. They think novelists are people who write books that they buy, and then overcharge them to write bad screenplays, and then grouse about the movie once its released. In Hollywood you almost have to whisper that you’ve written novels.

So I adapted “Eight Men Out” and sent it out. It so happens that the head of the agency had been Asinof’s agent back in 1963 and was familiar with the material. He said I had done a fine job but to forget about doing the picture; the rights were in litigation.

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

Q. How involved was Eliot with you in writing the screenplay?

A. I didn’t meet Eliot or talk to him until he came to the set while we were shooting and he played a part. I felt that with the screenplay the job was to take that book and somehow make a two-hour movie of it. I was definitely interested in telling the story of “Eight Men Out.” So I didn’t think Eliot would be too bent out of shape by it. I’m sure he had his trepidations because he had been through court and a lot of other troubles. And people had always wanted to romanticize the story, make it more of a vehicle for one or two stars where Eliot always wanted the story he had told to come out. I think he ended up being pretty happy with the screenplay because it tried to tell the story as he had depicted it. I’m sure, like everyone, he asked, “How is this going to work as a movie?” because the screenplay is very dense and complex. This is a movie that, until you see it with the music, crowd sound, and rhythm you really don’t know if it’s going to work or not. There’s a lot of moviemaking to it.

Q. What part did you think the 1920 White Sox team would play in your film adaptation of the story? After all, the team was better than the 1919 champs, yet played the season under a shroud of controversy.

A. If we had done a mini-series I could’ve covered that part of the story. It would’ve taken at least six hours. With only two hours to work with dramatically, I couldn’t take a side trip into the 1920 season. For one thing I would’ve had to introduce a couple of new characters. For one, Red Faber, a pitcher who had hurt his arm in 1919 and would’ve probably torpedoed the fix because the gamblers would have realized that bagging two of four starting pitchers wouldn’t fix a nine-game series (though it could alter an individual game or two), but not the whole series. It seems that during 1920 the gamblers were still into Cicotte and Williams, or they were into the gamblers, and games were thrown. It’s very unclear as to whether they were getting a lot of money or just a few bucks and a lot of threats. Eliot told me that a lot of the guys he talked to were still afraid of the gamblers, even though the gamblers were long in the grave. The idea was simply that you just didn’t mess with these people.

Q. What did you talk about with Edd Roush when he came to the set?

A. Well, some of the players were there, we were shooting the train interior scenes in Kentucky across the river from Cincinnati, and they mostly asked him questions about playing baseball in those days. “What was the ball like? Who was the toughest pitcher?” He was a crusty old guy, full of “Oh, these guys today can’t play.” He told of catching balls that were flat on one side because the dead ball really was dead and he never tried to hit home runs because his only hope was a couple of inside the park jobs per season … balls bouncing through the fence or whatnot. He played extremely shallow center field and had to stay on his toes to avoid giving up any such homers himself. If you had a good day in his era, you knew you’d end up on your ass the next. It was a much tougher game. Regarding the Black Sox he contended that he heard guys arguing in the hotel room next door and went to his manager who asked if he had been approached by gamblers. Roush hadn’t but Hod Eller apparently had been approached in an elevator and told the gambler to get the hell away from him or he’d punch him out. Roush’s contention was that the Sox only threw the first game. When I asked him why Lefty Williams got tossed out of baseball if they only threw the first game, he said, “Aw, I don’t know, maybe he was in on the meetings.” So he was still holding onto the notion that the Reds would’ve won anyway and the Sox only threw one game on purpose. He was on the way to the airport and didn’t have much time to talk with us, but a bunch of the guys who were playing ballplayers got a chance to meet and talk with him which was nice.

Q. What feelings do you have about the contention, held by some, that Joe Jackson belongs in the Hall of Fame?

A. Well, that is really up to the Hall of Fame to define themselves about what they’re about. If they’re about character, he was actually considered a very good guy when he went back home to Brandon Mills [in South Carolina], but he made a big mistake that had to do with baseball. If the Hall is just about stats then he’s in, but if the Hall is about character as related to baseball then you have to realize that he did sell out games and confessed to the act and therefore shouldn’t be selected. If he were enshrined there should be so many asterisks around his name that his plaque wouldn’t be included in the same room with the others.

Q. Have you ever contacted any of the relatives of the players?

A. Not really, although the granddaughter of Swede Risberg was an extra when we filmed a racing scene down in Kentucky. But she really didn’t know about it. She indicated that her father never talked about it. I also ran into a guy who had Swede Risberg’s son, the woman’s father, as a gym coach and he once asked him if Swede was his father. The coach, who was also a pretty hard guy, just clammed up. We did get a nice letter from a woman whose husband had just suffered a stroke and was one of the batboys for the Sox. The letter said that he didn’t know about the fix but that the players were screaming at each other on the field which wasn’t usual for that club. Even though many of the players disliked each other their normal behavior was to keep their ill feelings to themselves and ignore one another. She also mentioned that he didn’t attend a major league game for over thirty years following the scandal because he felt he was sold out by his buddies.

Q. Isn’t it true that Ring Lardner left the baseball beat in 1919 for much the same reasons?

A. Well, he had already kind of left before 1919 because in many ways he had outgrown baseball. He wasn’t a sports reporter anymore; he was writing short stories and musicals. He just returned to cover the Series and maybe an occasional boxing match. I think what soured him on baseball even more than the scandal was the rabbit ball. He didn’t think it was baseball.

Q. What, if anything, would you have done differently if you’d had more money or time to spend on the film?

A. Actually the only thing that I would change would be to make the coverage of baseball more three dimensional. Certainly if we had unlimited money and I felt like it was worth spending we could have paid extras enough that they wouldn’t have stayed away and therefore we could have shot beautiful vistas of full grandstands from the outfield in. We only had enough money to pay extras twenty dollars per day and we never got more than one thousand people in a day. Usually we had around two hundred people. That limits your shots towards the stands. Then we couldn’t take down all the light standards in Bush Stadium in Indianapolis; we could only take down the center ones. So we had to keep moving this stupid smokestack around to look like a factory in the background. If you really paid attention and stopped the movie on a video freeze frame, you could see that the stack was always moving around, in both ballparks. When we shot from the dugout there’s always a coach blocking another light standard we couldn’t take down. To top it off, the Pan Am Games used the park and a field across the street so that even more light standards were erected that we couldn’t touch. If we’d had the money we could’ve removed all the lights and had far more leeway in shooting towards the outfield. We couldn’t move the camera that much, so we had to be very, very careful. Otherwise we would reveal empty seats and modern lights. It all turned out fine because we had time to consider each shot, but would have preferred to use wider lenses instead of long lenses. I wanted to avoid the telephoto look you get in modern baseball. There are no shots from center field, with the pitcher stacked up against the catcher. That was just too modern for me.

Q. How closely did you and your staff work with historians and the people at the Hall of Fame ?

A. We had a researcher and I had been doing a bunch of research on the era since doing “Matewan.” We were already experts on subjects such as train interiors and things like that. Our researcher was in daily contact with the archivists at the Hall of Fame. They were able to send us information about the look of the uniforms if they didn’t already have a 1919 version. They sent us a rule book, programs, newspapers, and the names and numbers of collectors from across the country who had access to loads of great items. We ended up borrowing a score of gloves, bats, shoes, chest protectors and the like in order to shoot the film. We even hired a shoemaker especially to make spikes for the players. Much of the equipment used in the film was original stuff from 50, 50, 70 years ago. Needless to say, it was tough to keep everyone equipped all the time. We used a lot of safety pins and tape! Because of our research we also changed the script regarding topics such as mass communication. For example, the scene where the boys are using a crystal set depicts the kids picking a crude Morse code account of the games.

Q. In the final scene of “Eight Men Out” you show Joe Jackson playing in Hoboken; did he actually play there ?

A. I imagine he did play in Hoboken in a Jersey semipro league. In Eliot’s book he played for Bogota, New Jersey, which isn’t far from Hoboken. If we had put Bogota on his jersey, seeing the short scene in which this occurs, I was afraid that people would’ve thought that he was playing in South America. I didn’t want people to think … “Oh the poor guy … why isn’t he speaking Spanish?” or “Where are the palm trees?” Hoboken, better than anyplace else, puts his feet squarely in New Jersey.

Q. What are some of your other favorite baseball stories ? If you were ever to do another baseball film which story would you select?

A. I think somebody should take another crack at the Jim Thorpe story. He certainly found the beginning and end of his athletic career in baseball.

I think Christy Mathewson would also be another great subject. There was a book which got sort of esoteric about Mathewson called “The Celebrant” which includes some interesting material. The dynamics of his relationship with John McGraw are especially interesting. Of course McGraw knew about the 1919 fix. This reminds me of an anecdote about [Charles] Comiskey who was asked by a journalist after the second game of the Series if he had seen anything, to which the Old Roman replied “What do you mean by anything?” I don’t doubt that he had bets down on the Series too!