Notes #392 Wintry Mix

                             NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN
                                           Observations from Outside the Lines
                                     By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@adelphia.net)
 

#392                                                                                                                       APRIL 17, 2007
                                                                  WINTRY MIX
 

            That’s a phrase from the weathermen, used when they aren’t sure whether it’s going to rain, sleet, snow, hail, or all of these choices on nature’s menu. What is a phrase like that doing as a headline in Notes, past the middle of April?  Exactly!
 

            Winter has ignored the advent of baseball, just as the schedulers of baseball ignored the calendar and the geography of many spring games. Once upon a time (take 1960), the ML schedules began in the second or third week of April, just to be safe.
 

            Oh well. Fewer games to follow, more time to read. In the happy phrase of the late Kurt Vonnegut: so it goes.
 

            This time around, I call the attention of Notes readers to two items that have been added to the Notes menu since last time. One is that Index to the B-Sox Material that has appeared here in Notes since September 2002 (#268 to present). I think 385 different items are listed, some short, some long, all searchable.
            The other item recently posted in an oldie, Notes #136, with the intriguing, Asinofian title One Woman Out. The woman is Marge Schott, and Marge came to mind last week when the persecution of Don Imus was in the news, for a remark he made which was not at all new for Imus. Signs of the times.
 

            The wintry mix in this issue is not all doom and gloom, however. It begins with a little history, a look at September 1919, the month before, and it really ties in with a couple items in Notes in recent months, related to the Origin of the Fix. Then a black & gold digression on the Pirates and their burst out of the gate this spring … a brief Remembering of Jackie, and his debut 60 years ago … a note on my 50th anniversary (as a fan of MLB), coming up this summer … a progress report on that League of Our Own here in Cooperstown’s shadows (AKA, Utica, NY) … a comment on the Imus case, even though it wasn’t baseball … the news about Burying the Black Sox receiving SABR’s Ritter Award … and finally, a too-lengthy review of a too-lengthy novel with the B-Sox scandal as its setting.
 

            Dreaming Baseball is a 50-year-old novel by the late James T. Farrell, of interest because of its author — who was there in Chicago in 1919, although only what we’d today call a teen-ager; and because of Eight Men Out, the book Farrell inspired Eliot Asinof to research and write in the early 1960s.
 

            This issue comes together on the other side of my having left my day job, to write, research and edit F/T. So it goes.
 

 

SEPTEMBER SONG, 1919  
 

            September 1919 was a giddy ride for Chicago’s White Sox fans. The Sox had been World Champs in 1917, defeating no less an opponent that October than the Giants of John McGraw. But 1918 was not a pretty sequel — the war (WW I) came along to strip baseball of many of its stars, the season was cut short, with the World Series barely being squeezed in after Labor Day. But in 1919, the war was over, the stars were back, and so were those dynastic Chicago White Sox. Return to normalcy, indeed.
 

            September started with the Sox on the road, a doubleheader in Detroit on 9/1, Labor Day, and then their 120th game on 9/2. The season had been trimmed to 140 games, the owners were not sure the fans would support baseball as they had before the war. They did, and then some.
 

            After a couple off days, the Sox hosted Cleveland on the 5, 6, & 7. Needless to say, all games were day games back then. The 7th was a Sunday, and not every city permitted Sunday baseball in 1919; the Sox would have the next two Sundays off.
 

            On September 9, they Sox traveled to Washington, and they played their last two games in the capitol on the 11th. On the 12th and 13th, they played the A’s in Philadelphia, taking Sunday off, and finishing out the series with a Monday game on the 15th. Whether Billy Maharg took in any of these games in unknown.
 

            On September 17, a Wednesday, the Sox played two in New York, and the next day, their last game there. It was here that the paths of the Sox crossed with that of Bill Burns, whose sales route took him in September 1919 to Cincinnati, Chicago, New York, Montreal and Philadelphia. Running into Eddie Cicotte at the Ansonia, probably on September 16 (an off day), Burns was told that if the Sox won the pennant — it was looking good, but not clinched yet — Cicotte would have “something good” for him. Before the Sox left NY for the first of three games in Boston on September 19, according to Burns, Cicotte told him that six Sox players were willing to make a deal.
 

            In Boston on the 19th, then for a double-header on the 20th (Sunday, the 21st, was another off day), the Sox probably ran into Joseph “Sport” Sullivan. With just five games left in the season, the gambling world was getting in position for the biggest betting event of the Fall, if not the year.
 

            The Sox finished with five games at home, Sept 24-25 against St Louis, then the 26-28th against Detroit. With the pennant now in hand, the Sox lost those last three to the Tigers by scores of 10-7, 7-5, and 10-9. The Sox would finish 3.5 games ahead of Cleveland. Despite the Tiger sweep of the Sox at the end, Detroit would finish a half-game behind third-place New York — out of the money. Later, the Sox would be suspected of tossing those last three games to Detroit. Were they warming up for October?
 

JOY IN STEELVILLE  
 

            This time around, baseball’s openers were somewhat eclipsed by the opening days of my new, post-job world. (No need to detail my final days at what will likely be my last job, at least the last job I needed to do to support myself and my family. Suffice to say that I gave my agency four months to prepare for my departure, which also meant my staff had four months to plan and plot. I had a terrific send-off, the kind I think we all hope for.)
            However, the Pirates’ sweep in Houston to start the 2007 season definitely caught my attention. You see, it’s been a few years since the Pirates were over .500, having nose-dived from the opening bell the last couple springs, never to recover.
 

            Never mind that they lost three of their next four (at this writing), we’ll always have April 4 to look back upon, the day the Bucs sat atop the standings. It is sobering to think that the peak of the young season may already be past — but it’s possible. All the more reason to celebrate now, to bask in the
memory while it is still fresh.
 

            Spring itself seems to have come and gone, like that burst of Pirate wins. The return of snows, winds and cold temperatures reminded me of this old piece, in Notes #128:
 

HAPPY DAZE                                                                                                       [April 15, 1996]
 

            Since the spring of 1993, I have had to be content with small victories, in commenting on the fortunes of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Taking the season series from the Braves, or playing well the spoiler’s role, or, last year, taking any series — the Bucs never breathed the air over .500 all last summer.
 

            The Pirates won three straight division titles in 1990-92, losing the Playoffs and a few stars each time. I remained blindly optimistic, even after Barry Bonds struck gold in San Fran, and when the Pirates played well early in April 1993, peaking at five games over .500, it seemed like there were grounds for that optimism. Then they lost an extra-inning game to the Reds, one with a “there goes the season” flavor, and — well, there went the season.
            I don’t make predictions myself, but everyone and every publication who does, that I’ve seen, had the Pirates finishing a solid 5th in the NL Central, come next October. So when they started 1996 by winning two straight series, both on the road, I started wondering if this was a mirage, like 1993, or the real thing, like the three seasons before. Time will tell, but in the meantime, I have my hope intact….
 

            After thirty-some seasons of rooting, I have learned that victories in April can melt away quickly, like April snows. And they seem larger than life, like every at bat, which can mean a swing of a hundred points in a batting average. Illusions?
 

REMEMBERING JACKIE  
 

            For the last five or six years, I have been struck from time to time by the realization that a memory I was recalling, in story or imagination, was fifty or more years old. There is nothing especially significant about this, it is not a real achievement or feat of mental gymnastics, it just happens. But for human beings, the numbers 25, 50, 75, and 100 mean something, and we like to celebrate those milestones.
 

            This time around, baseball is celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut in MLB. He wasn’t the first black man to play at the game’s top level, but he was the first in a long time.
 

            Jackie played his first game for Brooklyn on April 15, 1947, three weeks before my first birthday. (I remember being stunned to learn that I once shared the planet with Babe Ruth, who departed the land of the living in 1948. I am similarly startled that baseball was not yet integrated when I arrived in May 1946. Babe Ruth always seemed mythic, prehistoric; “the color line,” as foreign as the Civil War. Yet both the Babe and the line and I were once contemporaneous. Amazing.)
 

            I have nothing new to say about Jackie Robinson on this anniversary. As I’ve aged, and observed race relations evolve in this country, my appreciation for Jackie has only grown stronger. I recently dropped off my wife at a pizza parlor, for a pick-up order, and while I was waiting, I saw a number of other customers come and go. Some were black, and I flashed back to my Cleveland days (1968-74) when black patrons entering an Italian restaurant in certain sections of that city, were risking their lives. And I had to admit that progress has been made. Miles to go, no doubt.
 

            This seems like a good place to weigh in on the Don Imus flap, but I doubt I can add anything new to that discussion here. To fans of Imus — and I’m one of them — no explanation is necessary. He takes a worse beating on his own show than any he deals out daily to the rest of the world, regardless of race, creed or color — or politics, or economic status. To those who are not fans, his remarks lack context, and no short explanation is possible. And probably no long one, either. Too bad.
 

            So let me simply salute Jackie one more time, and recommend a one-man performer, Greg Kenney. Greg is a Pittsburgher who does a hell of a terrific show, he becomes Jackie Robinson and dazzles his audience with a trip thru Jackie’s famous life. Greg also does Josh Gibson, Roberto Clemente, and Willie Stargell, and you can look him up at the Hall of Fame’s web site, under HOF Ambassadors. I caught his act at the Clinton HS annual fund-raiser for ALS, organized by a quiet local hero, HS principal and SABR chapter chair Richard Hunt. Dick also had a hand in organizing an annual Jackie Robinson game, played between two local colleges for many years now. MLB just played its first.
 

 

 

SPEAKING OF 50ths  
 

            I think I’ve noted here before that my birthdays have never bothered me. Not turning 30, 40, 50, or (last year) 60. Especially since having bypass surgery 15 years ago, each year has felt like an accomplishment.
 

            One of the treats of getting past 55 is having those memories that are half a century old. Sometimes, my reaction has been fifty years?! Where has the time gone?  And sometimes — well, sometimes those anniversaries just slide right on by, unnoticed and uncelebrated.
 

            But this summer, I really need to celebrate one memory from the summer of 1957. And that would be my “baptism” into baseball fandom, at the tender age of ten. Oh, I played baseball before then, I grew up catching balls and swinging bats. But I didn’t pay much attention to major league baseball, and the Pittsburgh Pirates, until 1957. Here is how I recalled it in Dear Patrick, a memoir I started writing in 1989:
 

                                                                        * * * * *
 

     My first “real” baseball memory?  Well, I don’t remember Bobby Thomson’s home run. That shot may have been heard ’round the world, but I only caught the echoes.  I do vaguely recall Brooklyn winning the Series in 1955 — a Johnny Podres headline sticks in my mind.  But I’d have to say my earliest awareness of an actual event, came a little later.
 

     In 1956, a Pirate named Dale Long did something that no one else had ever done before.  He hit home runs in eight straight games — a feat equaled only once since [thru 1989], thirty years later, by my son’s onetime hero Don Mattingly!  After Number Seven (which broke the old record), Long became an instant celebrity and received America’s highest tribute: a guest appearance on the Sunday night Ed Sullivan show. Probably more Pittsburghers watched Ed that night than when Elvis Presley guested, a year or so before. Number Eight came Monday. 
 

     I was ten, and ready to start serious fandom.  Was Dale Long the new Kiner, who would lead the Bucs out of the cellar?  When you’re ten, there’s no limit to your hopes. And it was May,  when no team was yet so far behind that a pennant was un-hope-able.
 

     Long’s accomplishment was the sort of event that got the attention not just of baseball fans, but of those countless people on the fringes. Those who become fans in October for the Series. It jumped off the sports pages, onto the front page; it was mentioned first on the TV and radio news, not fifteen minutes later.
 

     But the dreams of May faded in the heat of the summer, and although Long slugged twenty-seven round-trippers, the Bucs never came close to the flag.  They wound up in seventh place, and the only consolation was that that broke a streak of four straight eighth-place finishes! 
 

     Oh yes — the World Series that fall was highlighted by Yankee Don Larsen’s El Perfecto against the Brooklyn Dodgers.  It’s still the only Series perfect game ever.  I remember Dale Long’s terrific ten days in May, but not that October masterpiece. That was the last time that a World Series got past me without leaving some lasting impression.
 

     I remember more clearly a game in 1957, that I consider my “baptism” into being a genuine fan.  I was at home listening to my radio, as Bob Prince, “the Voice of the Pirates,” was broadcasting.  The Pirate manager, Bobby Bragan, got into a grand rhubarb with one of the umpires, and was tossed out.  Before leaving, he offered the whole crew of umps a drink from his cup of orange juice. (It was a parting gesture in a couple of ways — two days later, Bragan was fired, and an Irishman coach, Danny Murtaugh, was named manager.) 
 

     This incident must have intrigued me at the time. I could see in my imagination those grown men, arguing like kids, louder and longer than I’d ever have been allowed to. Then the ejection — the assertion of authority. But instead of the expected obedient departure, comes a clownish parting shot, as the fans and announcers go wild. Was this a great sport or what?
 

     My son’s cartoon hero Bart Simpson would have loved it!
 

     Murtaugh, in his locker-room inaugural address, promised that the Pirates would play .500 ball. They were in last place as usual at the time, so the idea of actually winning as often as losing seemed far-fetched, pie-in-the-sky, and preposterous. Not knowing better, I believed him, heart and soul.
 

                                                                        * * * * *
 

            Fifty years later, here I am again, rooting for the Pirates to climb out of the darkness into the bright light of .500 ball.
 

            But in the meantime, a lot has happened. The second-place finish in 1958, as satisfying in many ways as the pennant in 1960, although nothing can top Mazeroski’s game-seven-ending HR in the 1960 Series. Nothing. The pennants in 1971 and 1979 were thrilling, don’t get me wrong. But I was 14 in 1960, and that was no doubt a factor. Life was only starting to get complicated.
 

            I’ve have to look up the date when the time gets closer, but I invite all those who remember Bobby Bragan’s grand exit, to hoist with me a glass or orange juice, and toast. Bragan told the umps it was carrot juice — good for the eyes. In fact, it turned out to be good for the Pirates, and for this fan. Fifty years?! Where has the time gone?
 

 

A LEAGUE OF OUR OWN: PROGRESS REPORT  
 

            Utica, NY, has not had professional baseball since 2001, and has been without intelligent team marketing for many years before that. After a five-year drought — not a record — pro ball will return to Utica this summer, if all goes well, and it looks like it is on track.
 

            There will literally be a league of our own — all the games will be played at the same field, Murnane, where Donovan Stadium is perched at the corner of Sunset and Burrstone Roads. (That is within walking distance of my first Utica home, when the newlywed Carneys spent part of the summer of 1977 watching Jesse Barfield and company bring baseball back to Utica — after a 27-season gap. I now live less than a mile and a half away, still a walk.)
 

            This will be, I think, a grand experiment. For two months, July and August, fans will be treated to two games a day, one in the afternoon and one in the evening, with Monday off. The day game will be free, the PM game $5, but just $3 for seniors and kids like me. I’m already looking forward to the long walks on sunny days, for the exercise, for lunch, for getting together with friends, and oh yes, for a little pro baseball.
 

            Roger Kahn made the Utica Blue Sox famous with his book about the 1993 season, Good Enough to Dream (its highlight was, of course, my toddler daughter tossing out the first ball of that championship season). For 2007, the “NY State League” is rounding up the usual suspects prospects, kids who are good enough to dream about dreaming. Undrafted free agents, or players who were signed but played fewer than fifty pro games. If the minor leagues feature terrific baseball, played by kids hungry to move on up — and they do — then our league will feature even better ball, by kids hungry for a contract, giving them permission to dream.
            The brochure on the NYSL is promising — in fact, it is downright Veeckian, with something going every day. There will be places for groups to gather and a BBQ tent that they can book; a play area for kids, and a way to celebrate birthdays and anniversaries; Utica is a pizza city, and on Wednesdays, fans can have all they can eat for $10, and come back Wednesdays for $1 a slice. Thursdays, families will get hot dogs, soda and a program with their $4 admission ticket.
 

            Baseball in Utica has a 120+ year tradition, and I can’t help but think that the 2007 version will look a lot like the 1880s, when team owners had their fingers crossed much of the season, hoping for fair weather and good turnouts. If this model works, I would expect other cities to give it a shot.
 

            Best of all, fans will not be distracted by big salaries, or big egos. These kids will be playing their best, to win and to earn the attention of pro scouts. We’ll probably lose our best players, but that’s OK. That’s Entertainment! (See Notes #167)
 

 

A FURTHER REFLECTION ON THE CASE OF DON IMUS  
 

            Had his comment not been about athletes, there may not have been sufficient pressure on his employers and advertisers to dump him. But his verbal blunder wound up atop the headlines everywhere, the news networks and the sports networks, all the talk shows. Imus was radio and TV, so the shotgun was double-barrelled. And because networks were involved, other networks smelled the blood in the water and it turned sharkfest.
 

            And I found myself thinking back to 1994, when the sharks were circling Marge Schott. I had tried, in those early days of Notes, to avoid baseball owners as much as possible — George Steinbrenner was taking ‘way too much attention away from baseball. But first Marge pouted about the change in the Opening Day tradition (Sunday evening O-Day was introduced), and I agreed with her. Then she commented that she was raised “to believe that men who wear earrings are fruity.” She was just being honest, and the media punished her for it.
 

            But Marge weathered the storm, and the Selig Strike of ’94-95 came along and put all the owners in the doghouse. But once the sharks taste blood, it’s hard to get them to back off, and in 1996 they circled Marge again, with a vengeance, and took her down. My account, in Notes #136, ONE WOMAN OUT, had the title “The Margian Chronicles” and I regard it as some on my best editorializing/reporting. It’s now in the Notes Archive, with #140, a sequel of sorts.
 

            Something in me reacts whenever I sense a piling-on campaign to silence people. Hypocrisy was something that stirred up the prophets of the Bible (including Jesus), folks who have given the Judaeo-Christian tradition, anyway, its moral compass. What is hypocrisy? Pretending to be what one is not — as in, The stations pretended to be offended by Imus’ remarks. Hypocrisy is pretending to believe what one does not — as in, The stations pretended to believe that insulting language that goes too far should be removed from the airwaves. If they really believed that, there would be a lot more music and silence on our TVs and radios. Hypocrisy is the false assumption of an appearance of virtue or religion — as in, Those condemning Imus appeared to be righteous, forgetting the part about “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”  Forgetting words we all learned before kindergarten, words of survival: “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” 
 

            I do not believe in free speech without limits, but I wish we could have free speech without hypocrisy. Without piling on. The trouble is, Don Imus has a rap sheet. He has been an equal-opportunity offender, taking on the hypocrisy of the left and the right. What was the final straw?  His outrage over the Walter Reed Hospital conditions?  His crusades about autism and SIDS? His wife’s ranting about the greening of America’s hospitals? His tireless work to help kids with cancer?  His lampooning of just about everybody, most of all himself?  Resurrection on deck?
 

 

THE GLORY OF THEIR TIMES  
 

            I never knew Lawrence S. Ritter well enough to call him Larry, but I know people who did. Like most baseball fans, I knew him mainly from his book, The Glory of Their Times. Scanning the internet for lists of the best baseball books of 2006, you will find many fans nominate Glory — it’s one of the best books any year.
            And that’s because it is timeless storytelling by old ballplayers — “oral history,” if you prefer. It’s available on book tape, so today’s fans can actually sit at the knees of Fred Snodgrass and hear him talk about Victory Faust; or Sam Crawford, who shared the Detroit outfield for years with Ty Cobb; or Chief Myers, Davy Jones, Lefty O’Doul, and more. In Roger Angell’s words, the book is “almost perfect.”  Some of the stories have been debunked, proving something we all knew anyway, that fading memories sometimes get things wrong, but the stories still enthrall and entertain.
 

            SABR’s Deadball Era Committee annually gives the Ritter Award to the book from the previous year that best reflects Ritter’s dedication to bringing that bygone era back to life, through research and writing. I was not at all sure Burying the Black Sox qualified. Yes, the ballplayers in the B-Sox story were all Deadballers, and, I might add, very much like any or all of the ballplayers of that day. But the events spill over into the 1920s: Ruthian, Lively Ball time. And the subject is about the opposite of Glory: The Ugliness of Their Time.
 

            Nevertheless, Burying was one of eleven books read and rated by a panel of ten judges, none of them relatives of mine, and I recently learned that it was selected for the 2007 Ritter Award.
 

            I wrote about Awards just a few issues back, in #390. There, I noted how meaningful an award from SABR would be. And how fitting, because without SABR, there simply is no Burying the Black Sox. The award must be shared with everyone listed in my Acknowledgements, and probably more.
 

PAPERBACK WRITER  
 

            One of my regrets in my life so far, is that Romancing the Horsehide: Baseball Poems on Players & the Game (McFarland, 1993) never made it to paperback. As a plain- and hard-cover book, it sold pretty well thru a couple editions, but I always thought it would do better in paper, selling at half that price of $18.95.
 

            So I was delighted to hear that Burying the Black Sox will be available in paperback, at about half the price of the hard-cover edition ($26.95), in late April 2007. It’s the same book, no new material, and (I think) no corrections of the few errata. But this is still good news, I’m sure more people will buy the paperback. Here’s hoping this is a steppingstone on the path to the film version! 
 

 

THE ROOTS OF EIGHT MEN OUT  
 

            In 1960, Eliot Asinof was a CBS-TV employee, and perhaps because he was also a former ballplayer, he was assigned to write a screenplay about a subject that had been off-limits for forty years, the Black Sox scandal. You can read all about this in Bleeding Between the Lines (1979). He was only on the B-Sox trail a few weeks when CBS pulled the plug; what little research Asinof had completed became the basis for an episode of The Witness, which aired in January 1961, with Shoeless Joe as the Witness. And you can read all about that in Burying the Black Sox.
 

            Asinof’s brief time on the trail hooked him on the subject, and he gives no small part of the credit to a guide he met early on, James T. Farrell, know for his Studs Lonigan trilogy. Asinof almost didn’t write Eight Men Out because he heard that Farrell had completed a “Black Sox” novel. When their paths finally crossed, Farrell had set aside his project, but supplied Asinof with a wealth of memories, notes, and the motivation to dig into the events of October 1919 and their aftermath. He urged Asinof to track down the living B-Sox players, and find out why they did it. If he succeeded, he’d be writing history.
 

            Thanks to a trio of writers/editors, we can now read Farrell’s own version of things, in Dreaming Baseball, just out from the Kent State University Press, whom I thank for a review copy. Ron Briley, Margaret Davidson and James Barbour have carved this book out of Farrell’s manuscripts, one 900 pages and another 615. Dreaming is a slim (by comparison) 308 pages, but it could easily be trimmed to half of that number. Reading it while looking for the roots of Eight Men Out, the reader wants more of that story, and less about the fictional Mickey Donovan, who tells it, in the course of telling his own story.
 

            Dreaming Baseball is clearly fiction, but based on the “facts” of the Black Sox scandal, the version that has gone down in history, the version Eight Men Out cemented into place. Eliot Asinof, who told me when I invited him to provide a blurb for the jacket of Burying the Black Sox, “I don’t do blurbs,” made an exception for this fifty-years old Farrell novel, contributing a three-page foreword. Asinof rightly notes that the heart of this novel is the dream of the fictional Donovan to make it in baseball, and to hold onto his dream and his integrity, while the team he has joined — the 1919 White Sox — and baseball itself  — lose theirs.
 

            It’s not a flawless novel, but most of the errata are minor. Fred McMullin is McMullen throughout the book, Garry Herrmann is Gerry. Kid Gleason is called The Little Skipper so often that it becomes annoying, and the transition from Rowland to Gleason is not explained well. Farrell has Tris Speaker shaking hands with Chick Gandil before the tainted 1919 Series, noting that Spoke might not have done this “if he had known,” but in fact Tris himself had done something shady with Ty Cobb at the end of the 1919 season, something Farrell notes later — altho he has Gandil making the waves in 1926, instead of Swede Risberg. Jackson’s bat is Black Betty instead of Betsy. Lefty Williams and Joe Jackson are from North Carolina, instead of Missouri and South Carolina, respectively. The Sox lose the last three games of 1920 to the Browns, instead of two. But again, these are minor errors.
 

            Farrell does a better job than Asinof, I think, in conveying the murkiness of what actually happened. Asinof hovers godlike above the events, describing his version of what he think happened. Farrell puts the reader behind the eyes of Mickey Donovan, on the team but distanced from things, probably about as much as Farrell himself was, as a young White Sox fan in 1919. We catch glimpses of Bill Burns and Billy Maharg, sealing the deal with Cicotte and Gandil in New York and Cincinnati, before the Series, but no invented dialogue convicts them or convinces us. We are told the odds were 5-1 Sox before Game One, something Asinof passes on as history, but which I’ve been unable to confirm anywhere. The Sox were favored, but I don’t believe the odds were ever that lop-sided, nor should they have been, given the Reds’ edge in pitching depth.
 

            There’s no $10,000 bonus promised to Cicotte — so that is likely a detail added by Asinof. I was impressed all over again, however, to realize that Cicotte won his 29 games in 1919 in a 140-game season. And Jackson does not ask to be benched before Game One in Dreaming, another detail I was looking for. In fact, Farrell seems uninterested in Shoeless Joe — Buck Weaver is his favorite, and we learn more about Buck than anyone else, mainly because Farrell himself got to meet and know Buck after the scandal broke. Buck’s death is the event that sends Mickey Donovan into his past, to tell this story today (that is, in the 1950s).
            Because some readers will take Dreaming Baseball as history, as they took Eight Men Out, some things really should be corrected. Fullerton wrote after the Series that seven players would not return in 1920, not eight. That is easy to look up, and Farrell bases much of his book on newspaper accounts that will be familiar to those who have researched the Series and the 1921 trial. Farrell’s hero Donovan notes that all the players do return, except for Gandil, but he might have added that most of them received raises, too. To be fair to Joe Jackson, Farrell should have noted that he was never placed at the planning meetings, in New York or Cincinnati, as Dreaming has it.
 

            Farrell seems to answer the question he passed along to Asinof, Why did they do it?, with the answer that I think is correct: it looked like easy money. Comiskey was tight, but not a Scrooge with whom they wanted to get even. The odds of getting caught must have seemed much greater than 5-1; maybe 50-1, or even 200-1. The punishment of a lifetime ban was unthinkable. It was very ordinary greed, and the project seemed low-risk.
 

            I suspect that Dreaming Baseball was not edited down more, out of respect for Farrell. Which is why I recommend the book, and at the same time, recommend skimming parts of it. (By the way, I recommend the same to readers of Burying the Black Sox; I am fully aware that few readers care about Hugh Fullerton’s columns in the wake of the Fix, or the play-by-play of the cover-up coming undone. Or the footnotes.)
 

            I was a bit disappointed that Farrell shed no new light on the cover-up. His hero Donovan is dimly aware that the Sox knew about the Fix all along, and perhaps as readers travel through the story, that is the most interesting thread. What was it like for the Sox in 1920, given the suspicions and the accusations?  In a sense, Farrell is telling us how the cover-up almost worked. No one wanted to talk about it, everyone wanted to bury the rumors and move on. To probe was to risk injuring not just the dynastic White Sox, who were fun to play for partly because of the promise of extra money at the end of each summer; but baseball itself was at risk. Loose lips could sink the ship of baseball, taking down a whole industry.
 

            So readers move on through the year between the Fix and the scandal breaking in late September 1920, inside the mind of Mickey Donovan.  His dreams of becoming a major league star are growing, while dark clouds are gathering. Donovan, and all of the Sox, have guilty knowledge, but it is uncertain knowledge. Those not in on the Fix also carry doubt, and hope, and these prevent that knowledge based on rumor and hearsay and imagination from spurring action. Indeed, at the end, each player must have worried, What will I say if the grand jury calls me? 
 

            Buck Weaver fans will especially enjoy Dreaming Baseball. No one is more tortured and conflicted about the Sox’ situation that the likeable third baseman. Buck just wants to play ball, to win another pennant. He’d kill to play for McGraw’s Giants, partly to get away from the looming disaster. Farrell at times exempts Buck from the blackness that stains the other Sox, and at other times lumps the eight together, as the press ultimately did.
 

            In the end, Dreaming Baseball, like Eight Men Out, rests on a simplified version of things, the version of the day’s newspapers. The statements of Cicotte and Jackson to the grand jury suggesting that they both played the 1919 Series to win, are invisible. They confessed. “Eight men out” — all you need to know. And in the 1950s, that would have been acceptable. And that is something the reader needs to keep in mind, Dreaming does not contain even the research Asinof included in 1963’s 8MO, let alone what we have learned since. Nor should it.
 

            What must it have been like, to be on the White Sox team in 1919, and in 1920?  That’s a great question, and Farrell does a fine job answering it. Dreaming has echoes of Farrell’s 1957 My Baseball Diary, and it might be a good idea to pick up that memoir at the same time you check out Dreaming, for more on Buck, and for Farrell’s eyewitness account of “It ain’t so, Joe.”