Wicked Curve: The Life and Troubled Times of Grover Cleveland Alexander (review)

The photo on the cover of John Skipper's absorbing new biography of Grover Cleveland Alexander is worth at least a thousand words. Taken late in the career of the future Hall-of-Fame pitcher, he is pictured on the floor of a dugout with his back resting against a wall. Clasping his right hand firmly with his left, the look of dour contemplation on Alexander's face strongly suggests his ongoing battle against demons inside. The story of the Nebraska farm boy who had unprecedented control on the mound but little control off of it is one of baseball's most tragic tales, and Skipper has done an admirable job in researching and writing it.

Born in 1887 in Elba, Nebraska, a farming town that took its name from the elbow created by the Union Pacific railroad tracks, Grover Cleveland Alexander was one of thirteen children, twelve boys, five of whom died in infancy. Skipper informs us that he could find no particular reason for Alexander's presidential given names except that perhaps his parents ran out of alternatives. As a youth, Grover, or Dode as he was nicknamed, quickly earned a reputation for his prodigious ability to shuck corn and to throw a baseball. By his midteens, Alexander's powerful arm became widely known in the surrounding towns of west-central Nebraska, but he wasn't signed to a professional contract until 1909 when he won 15 games for a team in Galesburg, Illinois. His season was cut short when he was hit on the head by a second baseman's throw while trying to break up a double play. He suffered from double vision for some time thereafter but recovered enough to win 29 games in 1910 for a team in Syracuse, New York. However, he was not signed for the next season, probably because he was already drinking heavily. Skipper does not say so definitively, but it seems that his weakness for what sportswriters of the time lightly called "John Barleycorn" was also a factor in Alexander's not being offered a pro contract until his early twenties.

Regardless of his off-field problems, a talent like Alexander's did not go unnoticed for long. He was signed by the Philadelphia Phillies in 1911, and he enjoyed what Skipper boldly states was "the greatest rookie season of all time" (29). Surely the numbers are impressive: a 28-13 record in 367 innings with an ERA of 2.57 and nearly a 2:1 strikeout-walk ratio of 227:129. For the next eighteen years, Alexander—probably the greatest control pitcher of all time—never walked more than seventy-six men. From 1915 through 1917, Alexander put together three unprecedented seasons in which he won more than 30 games each year with ERAs below 2 runs per game. In 1915 he won the only game that the Phillies would win in a World Series until 1980. In 1916 his 33 wins included an amazing 16 shutouts.

Phillies team ownership, however, was in disarray. Horace Fogel initially signed Alexander, but because of his close connection to professional gambling—Skipper informs us that he actually wanted to change the name of the team to the Live Wires—he was forced to sell the team to local investor William Locke. When Locke died suddenly, his partner, William F. Baker (a former New York City police commissioner), took over the team but was not interested in paying top dollar for his stars. Alexander held out before the 1917 season, taking a job in a traveling circus to make ends meet. Skipper notes perceptively, "The fact that Alexander would even consider being a sideshow for a circus for huge money [$1,000 a week for thirty-five weeks] was an indication of how much his life was worth to others and of his own self-worth" (64). Alexander eventually did sign with the Phillies in 1917 and won another 30 games...