Customer Reviews

Baseball Extra: A Newspaper History of the Glorious Game from Its Beginnings to the Present

From the baselines to the headlines, September 14, 2003

I've looked at all the headlines in this book and skimmed some of the stories, but I still haven't read an appreciable portion of the book as a whole.

The detail is so great, and the print on the older newspapers is so small that one really would have to have the luxury of time to read the whole thing.

Essentially, the book is a collection of baseball-theme newspaper headlines from 1857 to 1999. One can appreciate just how far back in time this book takes him when he sees a 1918 Boston Post headline that reads, *Red Sox Are Again World's Champions.*

The RED SOX? Baseball's world champions? AGAIN??????

Now THAT'S ancient history.

But this just isn't a baseball book, and those who can tolerate the baseball but whose historical interests lie elsewhere will take interest in the other slices of Americana that often lie side-by-side with the baseball stories.

The Red Sox story above is actually overshadowed by a headline about 13,000,000 additional draft registrants being called up, even as victory over the Kaiser is within reach.

Right next to the Milwaukee Daily News headline from October 14, 1908 declaring *Cubs Again Champions of the World* (another example of ancient history) is a political cartoon lampooning President Teddy Roosevelt.

The 1921 acquittal of the Chicago *Black Sox* players of conspiring to throw the 1919 World Series accompanies another story about the death of singer Enrico Caruso.

A 1948 headline in the Washington Afro American announcing forty-something Satchel Paige's belated call-up to the major leagues also includes an editorial criticizing Harry Truman's civil rights policies and announcing the assassination of a Haitian editor of a pro-government newspaper.

*Going away?* the ad in the lower left-hand corner asks. *Be sure that the Afro goes with you.*

Ads for tobacco (*Rabbitt Maranville says, *Blackstone is the best smoke on the big league circuit*), chewing gum (*it's good and it's good for you,* the Wrigley's Spearmint Gum ad advises), and health-enhancing elixirs also predominate.

A 1951 story in the Kansas City Star about the boyish Mickey Mantle's standing as heir apparent to the great DiMaggio also proudly announces Satin School Jackets (regularly selling for $7.95) on sale for $4.98. 1951 model Dodges are available at Midwest Motors for only $1666.17.

Moon Mullins and other retro comic strip characters also dot these pages. *Whadd'ya mean he's beginning to get to you?* an irate boxing manager demands of his fighter in the middle of an empty arena. *He's been and gone!* Now THAT'S another animated boxing manager who also isn't going to be saying *we* anytime soon.

There's even a measure of eeriness about some of these headlines. Everyone knows that Joe DiMaggio's famous 56 game hitting strike took place in the pre-war environment that was the 1941 baseball season, so it's startling to see a number of San Francisco Chronicle headlines tracking his hitting streak - that are dated in 1933.

The answer, of course, is that years before DiMaggio electrified the nation with his 56-game streak, he was raising eyebrows on the West Coast with a 61-game streak for the Pacific Coast League's San Francisco Seals. Incredibly, the Chronicle repeatedly gets his name wrong, spelling it as *De Maggio*. The man was born on Fisherman's Wharf, after all. He was a San Francisco native son.

And in another Twilight Zonish moment from 1920, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle proclaims that *Hank Gherrig* (whose bases-loaded homerun won the game for his local high-school) is the Babe Ruth of high school baseball.

The subject, of course, is Lou Gehrig who would set the all-time record for grand slam homeruns (it still stands today) and who would later join Babe Ruth in the Yankees lineup to make up what might still be the greatest homerun-hitting tandem of all time.

Yes, if you've got this collection with you, you have tremendous incentive to find a desert island to be stranded on.

Of course, the stories from the more recent years can be passed over. And retro-baseball also contains some sobering food for thought: 50 years from now; 80-100 years from now; will baseball fans from the future pour over headlines about Darryl Strawberry, Frank Thomas, Alex Rodriguez, Garry Sheffield, and Will Clark - and modernist madness outside the world of baseball - with the same misty glow?

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