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We are thrilled to present this exclusive conversation with our first repeat guest on Cover the Bases! It is a privilege and an honor that Tim Wiles, Director of Research at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, provides what we’ll call an extra base hit. Tim has joined us in the past to discuss his beautiful treatment of Baseball’s Greatest Hit: The Story of Take Me Out to the Ball Game
.
In this episode we are honoring the fact that the month of April is designated as National Poetry Month. Tim is co-editor of a fine collection of baseball poems called Line Drives: 100 Contemporary Baseball Poems
along with Brooke Horvath.
The book is also graced with a forward by Elinor Nauen who perfectly sets the emotion of what can be found inside the covers. We begin our discussion quoting Elinor’s fondness for the short poem.
However, our exclusive topic on this episode is Baseball’s Sad Lexicon, the second most famous baseball poem this side of Casey At the Bat. Many will know it as, Tinker to Evers to Chance and it is celebrating it’s 100th anniversary, written in June or July in 191o.
The poem was written by Franklin Piece Adams (F.P.A.), who at the time was a columnist for the New York Evening Mail. He went on to pen a long running column called The Conning Tower and was a regular panelist on radio shows in the day.
As the story goes, F.P.A. was attempting to get out of the newsroom to catch a ballgame at the Polo Grounds one summer day, when his editor requested an additional 8 lines to fill space in the paper. His editor understood the lasting legacy of those 8 lines as soon as they were published.
Baseball’s Sad Lexicon revolves around the great rivalry of the day, which was the New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs. It is the Cubs’ splendid infield of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance which is immortalized as a forlorn Giants fan rues the double play that spoils his team’s chances.
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We are excited to present a conversation with Dan Fost on this edition of Cover the Bases. It turns out that Dan is a freelance writer with a common interest in the technology scene. He covers topics such as content delivery devices that corresponds with the direction that we see Baseballisms.com headed, so the pre-podcast recording conversation was very stimulating as well!
We have been communicating with Dan for many months in anticipation of the release of his first baseball book Giants Past & Present
which is part of a series published by MVP Books. The book finally arrived on his doorstep earlier this month and we are grateful that he could spend some time to discuss it.
Upon moving to San Francisco in 1989, Dan was struck by the storied aspects of the franchise and was immediately immersed in a World Series, and then four years later in one of the all-time great pennant races, when the Giants lost to the Dodgers on the last day of the season. The 1993 team won 103 games on the year but lost the NL West to the Braves by one game.
This beautiful coffee table book is set up in a Giants Past & Present format with each chapter examining and comparing the owners, the managers, key players for each position, even the details of the ballparks. All of this is surrounded by over 200 stunning photographs.
With a franchise as storied as the Giants, but with two very distinct eras as an east coast and west coast team, we were curious as to whether fans actually make any sort of distinction. Dan is encouraged that ownership under Peter Magowan really embraces the team’s heritage and includes all of the New York Giants players in all-time stats, and displays the team pennants at the ballpark. The fans in the area were slow to embrace all of the players who arrived in 1957 epitomized by the great quote Dan sent in an email:
“This is the damnedest town,” wrote Frank Conniff, covering a visit to San Francisco by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. “They cheer Khrushchev and boo Willie Mays.”
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Joe Cronin ascended from the sandlots of San Francisco through the ranks of star player, field manager, general manager and American League President to become one of the most influential people the game of baseball has ever seen. Historian and author Mark Armour has written the definitive biography of Cronin’s life in Joe Cronin: A Life in Baseball
.
Mark Armour has authored numerous books and articles on baseball, and is also the director of SABR’s Baseball Biography Project. We are extremely grateful for the opportunity to chat with him on the Cover the Bases podcast.
It was his efforts on the Baseball Biography Project that started Mark on the path to writing this book. Since Joe Cronin had been involved in the game at the highest levels since 1926 through his final days as AL President in 1973, his story was intermingled with most of the players that Mark was compiling in the project. After questioning a trusted colleague about why there had not been a complete biography of the man, Mark’s colleague said it was up to him to write it. His inspiration was set.
One of the first individuals in the game to recognize the skills that young Cronin possessed as a player, and also as a leader, was Clark Griffith owner of the Washington Senators. Griffith put complete faith in a 26 year old shortstop to lead his team as player-manager, which he did well, leading them to the World Series in 1933. This relationship to the Griffith family lasted a lifetime, including Cronin’s marriage to Griffith’s niece Mildred.
Expectations were high when Cronin arrived in Boston prior to the 1935 season to be the player-manager of owner Tom Yawkey‘s Red Sox, and the challenges of managing some of his new teammates who had already demonstrated Hall of Fame caliber success was difficult for the young man. He did however continue to demonstrate high caliber skills, earning him seven All-Star selections as a shortstop and was widely considered one of the game’s most popular players.
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We have a unique topic on this episode of Cover the Bases. Rather than the biographies, histories and memoirs that we usually speak about, instead we cover myths, legends and ghost tales with Dan Gordon. Dan is a Thomas J. Watson Fellow and has covered the game of baseball internationally, but discovered the folklore and story telling near his home on Cape Cod MA., leading him to seek out those same types of stories in baseball.
His first book is Haunted Baseball: Ghosts, Curses, Legends, and Eerie Events
published by Lyons Press. He has a followup book coming out in the summer of 2010 called Field of Screams. There is a web site to find information about his books at HauntedBaseball.com.
With his co-author and classmate from Union College, Mickey Bradley, Dan headed off to his first Spring Training with a few ideas and some access to players. With a bit of apprehension his first interview was Turk Wendell, one of the most superstitious and colorful characters in the game. Turk’s initial advice was to “go talk to the Yankees” which seemed to be a common response.
The book opens with the Yankees in their Spring Training facility called Huggins Stengel Field. The team trained there from the 1920′s up through the Sixties, and carries many stories from local residents and grounds crew. Dan always makes it a point to visit some of the old facilities around baseball since they have a great chance of catching a glimpse of nostalgia. It is said at Huggins Stengel that you can see Babe Ruth’s apparition and Casey Stengel sitting in the dugout, as well as noises of card games in the clubhouse.
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Seamheads.com Founder and Managing Editor, Mike Lynch is our guest on this episode of the Cover the Bases podcast. He is the author of two baseball books and writes regularly as his web site. We really appreciate the time that he took out of his night to talk some baseball with us.
His most recent book is It Ain’t So: A Might Have Been History of the White Sox in 1919 and Beyond
. It is published by McFarland, and was released in November of 2009.
Mike took a completely unique approach to writing about the Chicago White Sox team of 1919. After first pitching the concept to his publisher and getting some push back, he pitched another book which turned out to be Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson and the Feud That Nearly Destroyed the American League
. Once McFarland saw what Mike could accomplish, they let him revisit his concept for examining what might have happened if the Black Sox scandal had never taken place.
Out of the Park Baseball provided the computational muscle, while Mike allowed the players who were banned from baseball in 1920, to continue on in their careers. Mike chronicled the impact that this would have had on the American League races, as well as some World Series Championships. He played the 1919 World Series, completed the 1920 season, and then reset all of the American League teams each season to play a “might have been” version of the White Sox. This simulation and writing process took Mike about 10 years to complete.
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