Roger Maris : baseball's reluctant hero /

MOST baseball writing is not exactly about baseball. Jim Bouton's classic tell-all, "Ball Four," spends more time on the players' high jinks than the players' play. As the grammar in its title hints, HUB FANS BID KID ADIEU (Library of America, $15), John Updike's imperishable farewell to Ted Williams (an essay now available in book form), concentrates not on the "Kid," but on the fans. While few books delve deeper into baseball's intricacies than "Moneybali," the advanced statistics Michael Lewis writes about are merely the particulars of his case study; his book is about "the art of winning an unfair game" - any unfair game. What four new books talk about when they talk about baseball also isn't always baseball itself. An excellent and rigorous history of baseball cards concludes with a manifesto calling on makers to restore the business "to what it once was" - the author needs cards to be a living link to his childhood rather than the utilitarian objects that he elsewhere shows them to be, A history of interracial barnstorming drowns you in baseball minutiae while asking you to look finally at baseball's effects on society. Roger Maris's biographers urge us to see the Yankee slugger as an Everyman rather than a professional ballplayer with a couple of genuinely heroic seasons. And a superb study of the fastball reveals the pitch to be an alchemical formula for resurrecting the dead and redeeming the game itself. But, sometimes, a bat is just a bat. Dave Jamieson's "Mint Condition" is a comprehensive romp through a quirky subject's history. Because Jamieson, who has written for The Washington Post and The New Republic, clearly did ample reporting, his yearning for the years when there were only a few baseball cards per player feels less frivolous than when, say, members of his parents' generation fondly recollect the days when a Buick looked like nothing but a Buick. He details early tobacco cards, stuffed into packs to keep the cigarettes from crushing; kitschy nonbaseball series like Mars Attacks; and the rest of the history. But the real fun comes in the mini-profiles that propel the narrative; especially memorable is Jamieson's sketch of the gadfly who purposefully doctors cards in order to reveal how poorly the ultra-powerful grading agencies do their jobs. The book really heats up when Upper Deck is started in 1989. The first card company explicitly to appeal to serious collectors, it kicked off a ferocious competition among producers, spawning an absurd number of brands and gimmicks and series that turned most noncollectors off - especially the kids. (Jamieson, as well as this reviewer, could do little but give up the hobby.) This shortsightedness helped turn the business into the emphysema patient it is now. "The problem with the industry today isn't what baseball cards have always been," Jamieson argues, "it's what baseball cards have become." But might not the mid-'90s card decline be linked to, say, the mid-'90s rise of the Internet? (For one thing, there is now an easier way to find a player's stats.) Jamieson forgets that things are never what they used to be. When Jefferson Burdick, the dean of card collecting, lamented that "there are too many baseball cards being issued," it was 1959, and a Topps looked like nothing but a Topps. Writing from a Pacific island during World War II, a Washington Senators player advised his bosses that if Major League Baseball ever opened its doors to blacks, they ought to sign a talented seaman he had just played with. The Cleveland Indians owner Bill Veeck got to him first, and Larry Doby integrated the American League in 1947. With this story and many - too many - others, Timothy M. Gay's "Satch, Dizzy and Rapid Robert" convincingly shows that, as with the rest of society (like the Navy), baseball integration was a more gradual process than we are usually taught. The first recorded interracial baligame took place in 1869; Babe Ruth participated in integrated games for extra cash; and in the 1930s and '40s, after the seasons ended, interracial barnstorming games were held at Yankee Stadium, Wrigley Field and dozens of smaller venues across the country. The book's recountings of these endless autumns are, well, endless, though the inimitable black pitcher Satchel Paige is usually available to resuscitate the flagging narrative. Gay, the author of "Tris Speaker," wants us to see these games as seminal showmanship - Paige and Dizzy Dean were "America's first black-and-white buddy act" - which somewhat undercuts his argument that they dramatically reformed the sport. Gay more successfully shows that the white impresarios behind all this were as penny-wise as they were liberal-minded. At the book's close, the Brooklyn Dodgers general manager Branch Rickey makes one of the canniest signings of ail time: the second baseman Jackie Robinson went on to win Rookie of the Year and, later, Most Valuable Player honors. Among other achievements. IN the acknowledgments of "Roger Maris," Tom Clavin and Danny Peary thank Maris - who broke Babe Ruth's single-season home run record by slamming 61 in 1961 - for giving them "the most thrilling baseball season of our youths." Oh, that explains it. That explains the proprietary tone in which Maris is always "Roger"; the bewildering amount of uninteresting family background and childhood narrative; the glossing over of Maris's paltry batting average and addiction to streaks and slumps. Clavin and Peary's need to cast Maris as a normal guy who was, in one sportswriter's words, "ordinary in size - or less," implies that Maris's feats within the game are not sufficient for us to dwell upon: as always with baseball, there is an extra lesson, and Maris's is that we, too, can be gods. Clavin, a sports and business journalist, and Peary, a sports and pop culture historian, are better at evoking baseball in 1960, when new Yankees dissatisfied with small contracts were told to sit tight and await their World Series checks. While Maris's home run record is perceived in the poststeroid era as having been chiseled into indestructible granite, Clavin and Peary usefully remind us that, because of the fact that 1961 was the majors' first 162-game season, Maris's status as home run king was actually hotly disputed, and was not officially considered totally legitimate until the startlingly late date of 1991. There is always an asterisk, until there isn't one. "The mighty fastball could certainly ring up a lot of batters," Tim Wendel observes, "but sooner or later the ride always seemed to get too bumpy.'for everyone involved." In the wonderful "High Heat," Wendel leverages that tension - the fastball as both blessing and bane - to mine a stunning amount of drama from the small cadre of pitchers throughout history who happened to be able to hurl a baseball really, really fast. Ostensibly, Wendel, a founding editor of USA Today Baseball Weekly, is trying to determine who is fastest, and in the end he puts Nolan Ryan at the top (gentlemen, start your debating engines). But this conceit is, thankfully, only a conceit, a pretext to revel in the details. And in the mystery that surrounds this simplest of pitches: despite methods varying from Bob Feller's strenuous, towering kick to Walter (the Big Train) Johnson's relaxed sidearm, why have all the fastest pitchers reached right around 100 miles an hour? Meanwhile, Wendel's writing is also all fastballs. Sensitive and scrupulous, he never forgets that for every Ryan and Sandy Koufax, lucky to have their unearned gifts, there are flameouts like Steve Dalkowski - a tragic fireballer who couldn't control his otherworldly heat and never made it out of the minors. Readers won't forget Dalkowski when the superhyped Washington Nationals rookie Stephen Strasburg establishes himself as the fastest pitcher in the District of Columbia since the Big Train took the mound more than 100 years ago. AFTER reading Wendel, you instinctively connect Johnson to Strasburg. "High Heat" is "a séance with the game's past," an almost literary fantasy in which all the great pitchers throw side by side on the same diamond. While baseball has long been something well suited to breaking bread with the dead ("Field of Dreams" is notably not about soccer), Wendel's purpose is particularly urgent: he wants to recover the game's sense of continuity, which baseball fans long treasured before "steroids knocked the whole rig into the ditch." He has chosen the right subject for this project: steroids may have improved the fastball pitcher's longevity (see Clemens, Roger), but they failed to enhance his speed. So at least Wendel's flight of fancy is rooted in the mechanics of the game itself. Yes, the game itself. It's nice that baseball cards serve as a route back to our childhoods; that casual exhibitions paved the way for real social change (this is especially nice); that a slugging superhuman passed for an ordinary human, making his inspiration more credible. But baseball itself is pretty great, too. In 1960, the game was at the pinnacle of its popularity and prestige, and Updike could get away with putting the fans at the center of a September afternoon. But I wonder if baseball can afford the same indulgence today. And anyway, what lingers most from Updike's essay is not what the fans do, but what Williams does. And what do you think he does? He hits a home run to dead center in his final at-bat at Fenway. Let the game have the last word, and it rarely lets you down. Marc Tracy is a staff writer at Tablet magazine.

Maris remains an enigmatic figure notwithstanding the attention he received in large part for his 1961 home run season. Prolific writers Clavin and Peary reveal a complex and private individual, making plain not only his underappreciated talent in all aspects of the game but his humanity and love for family and friends. There is no greater praise than being a "gamer," and Maris was that and much more. This book's ultimate contribution may be its indictment of irresponsible reporters and image makers who failed to accord a hero his due. Without question an entertaining book for ball fans, but general readers of biography may also enjoy understanding the life of one who achieved greatness despite adversity. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.