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| Book Review: Bottom of the Ninth |
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| Fantasy Baseball Blog | |||
| Saturday, 30 May 2009 10:06 | |||
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Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball from Itself by Michael Shapiro 320 pgs. Times Books. $25 In the opening of his book Bottom of the Ninth, Michael Shapiro diagnoses professional baseball with "self-destructive myopia." Whatever the crisis it faces (and in its long history it has faced many: segregation, gambling, collusion and performance-enhancing drugs), baseball "behaves like a man with a toothache who believes that if he ignores the pain it will somehow go away." Time and again the owners who run the game have resisted until resistance is impossible all attempts at reform or the mitigation of their monopoly power. The crisis in Shapiro's book is expansion--the attempt at the end of the 1950s by eager prospective owners to expand baseball from the 16 teams in the American and National Leagues to new franchises in places like Texas, Atlanta, Minnesota, and New York, which had been a one-team city since the departure of t  he Dodgers and Giants in 1957. These prospective owners, corralled by William Shea and led publicly by the larger-than-life Branch Rickey, first sought to expand within the National and American Leagues. But years of delay, indifference, and thinly (if at all) veiled hostility from the established owners convinced the upstarts there could be only one other viable option: the creation of an independent, equal organization--the Continental League. It is the story of this effort--behind closed doors, at press conferences, in Congressional committee hearings--that forms the bulk of Shapiro's book, and it is told with exhaustive, expansive detail. Though nominally tethered to a strict chronology from the Fall of 1958 to the end of the 1960 World Series, Shapiro's tale roams freely through baseball's history, whether to refresh the reader on Rickey's previous accomplishments in Pittsburgh, the circumstances of Walter O'Malley's push to relocate the Dodgers, or the creation of the American League itself. The result is a thorough, if sometimes mildly disorienting (what year are we in again?) explanation of how baseball, as it is owned and managed, came to the close of the 1950s entangled in a war over who in the country would have the privilege of watching the game (not just what cities could host a franchise, but who could watch a dwindling number of freely broadcast games and who could afford the luxury of exclusive "pay TV" broadcasts) and who could reap the immensely profitable benefits of owning that game. As the Continental League fought for recognition, Casey Stengel was embroiled in his own battles, both for his professional survival as manager of the Yankees, and for the glory of another World Series championship. Though Stengel's managerial journey toward October 1960 is sometimes overshadowed by Shapiro's deft and detailed chronicle of the Continental Leaguers, Stengel and the Yankees take center stage for an engrossing inning-to-inning recount of that year's seven-game Pittsburgh-New York saga. Shapiro makes the 1960 World Series the climax of his book, and for good reason. Not only did it coincide with the close of Rickey's tenure with the Continental League and Stengel's with the Yankees, it also (with the benefit of hindsight) signaled the passing of baseball as America's national pastime in anything but the nostalgic sense of the term. As Shapiro notes, a 1960 Gallup poll asked Americans to rank their favorite sports; 34 percent chose baseball as their top sport, and 21 percent football. The next time Gallup conducted the poll in 1972, baseball had fallen to 24 percent, and football had risen to 32. Shapiro digs into the history of these numbers, and builds the case that another sports organization, created newly independent at the same time as the Continental League was organizing, achieved far greater success than any baseball league, new or old, would ever match. That league was the American Football League, and in between his interweaved tales of baseball's postwar climax, Shapiro persuades that the AFL captured audiences with innovations--among them freely and nationally televised games, and an "anyone can win" atmosphere of competitive parity--equally available to baseball's owners, who spurned them. Shapiro lays much of the blame for baseball's decline on its owners, and on their greed. Or on the short-sightedness of their greed--the greed may not be unique or unexpected, but its all-too-frequent obtuseness and corruption is. Chief to his case is what Shapiro clearly sees as a missed opportunity in 1960 to reform the national game, and his lively tale of the three-year buildup to that opportunity can transport the reader to think that perhaps baseball could truly have been saved, if greed had not come so modified. Trackback(0)
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Tags: Branch Rickey Casey Stengel 1960 World Series William Shea Pittsburgh Pirates New York Yankees Continental League
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