A Biographical Dictionary of the Baseball Hall of Fame (review)

The most important aspect of any reference book is accuracy. Of course, other things like readability, construction, and interesting tidbits help to enrich such a piece; however, works of this nature typically are not read for pleasure but more for individual pieces of information. It was quite disturbing then, at least for this reviewer, to find some glaring mistakes at the very beginning of A Biographical Dictionary of the Baseball Hall of Fame and to agonize over others that kept cropping up. Part of the problem comes in the bibliographic exclusions. Certainly a book on the Baseball Hall of Fame should include standard works on this subject matter, but author John Skipper leaves out those that deal with its origin. This is a glaring omission since the organization's beginnings are shrouded in controversy and rest on the myth of Abner Doubleday. It seems rather ironic that Ken Smith's classic work on the Hall (Baseball's Hall of Fame), which was constantly updated and survived numerous editions, is not mentioned while the author includes Smith as a member of the writer's wing. Moreover, the reader is left with an introduction that cries out for revision and sows a seed of doubt in the reader's mind from the very beginning about the accuracy of the rest of the book.

Unfortunately, these problems continue. For example, in the section on Leo Durocher, Dodger fans will be thrilled to discover that their team finished first in the 1942 pennant race. Who knows, they may have even won the World Series that year, making Johnny Podres nothing more than an afterthought. While J. Roy Stockton (also cited in the bibliography as Roy J. Stockton) did indeed write on the Cardinal teams of the 1940s, he first gained national attention in the previous decade with his pieces on the Gas House Gang for the Saturday Evening Post. Bob Broeg has written fourteen books, not nine as stated in his bio. Harry Caray's home run call started with "it might be," not "it may be." Alexander Cartwright wasn't traveling "around the country"; he was heading for the California gold rush en route to his final destination-Hawaii. Cooperstown was not Abner Doubleday's hometown . . . and on it goes. Okay, so I'm getting picky, but again accuracy should be the hallmark for a book of this nature, and better editing could have cured this problem.

Sometimes it's not what the author included but what he left out that's troubling. Certainly Adrian "Cap" Anson was one of the greatest ballplayers of the late nineteenth century, but he also helped to usher in Jim Crow, which excluded black players for more than a half century. How could one mention that Ernie Harwell began his career with the Dodgers in 1948 without including the fact that they acquired him from the Atlanta Crackers for a Minor League catcher? Certainly Jaime Jarrin belongs in the Hall, but does he deserve more lines than Vin Scully and Jim Murry, who get only four sentences? The dearth of information on writers and broadcasters brings up another bibliographic problem. Neither Curt Smith's Voices of the Game nor editor Richard Orodenker's Twentieth-Century American Sportswriters was used as a source, and both would have enhanced these sections immensely. Skipper, who previously wrote a book on umpires, does a better job with the arbitrators of the game.

To his credit, Skipper includes all categories of Hall of Fame members-players, umpires, writers, managers, coaches, executives, broadcasters, and Negro Leaguers. He lists them in alphabetical order rather than by wing of inclusion. In some ways, this may annoy those who only want to look up one branch of the Hall, but by doing it this way, the author adds a more egalitarian flavor to the book. After all, subtract any group and the game isn't the national pastime it came to be throughout most of the twentieth...