Charlie Gehringer: A Biography of the Hall of Fame Tigers Second Baseman (review)

Detroit Tigers great Charlie Gehringer was notorious for having nothing to say about himself. His contemporaries didn't have a great deal to say about him either. Yankee pitcher Lefty Gomez, the most voluble of Gehringer's opponents, summed it up: "Every time I turn around, the guy's on second base" (80). Gehringer didn't make any fuss; he just beat you at baseball.

John C. Skipper takes on the unpromising task of writing the life of Gehringer, and he brings it off creditably. With sparse oral tradition to go on, Skipper fleshes out the statistical skeleton of Gehringer's baseball career with what material he can find. Often, for pages at a time, little of this material is about Gehringer. Almost everyone that the second baseman encountered in the game was more intriguing than he was. Skipper exploits this fact to present anecdotes about Ty Cobb, Judge Kenesaw Landis, Dizzy Dean, Hank Greenberg, Mickey Cochrane, the "Cleveland Crybabies" of 1940, and Moe Berg. There is a good narrative of the well-known 1934 World Series against the Gashouse Gang. Skipper also tells the stories of the two lesser-known Series that Gehringer played in, Detroit's 1935 victory over the Cubs and their 1940 loss to Cincinnati.

Gehringer's nickname was "the Mechanical Man," but he was less the Terminator than Tik-tok of Oz. You can look it up: seven seasons with 200 or more hits, and twelve seasons with 100 or more runs scored. In eight different 154-game seasons, Gehringer played 150 games at second base.

Skipper's best achievements are succinct accounts of Gehringer's idiosyncrasies. A bachelor until the age of forty-six, Gehringer spent his playing years caring for his chronically ill mother. When he married Jo Stillen in 1949, he was as steady domestically as he had been on the diamond. Charlie and Jo went to mass every morning (except Saturdays) until his death forty-four years later.

Scandal trailed Gehringer only once. Long before he met Jo, his name was linked romantically to that of widowed Michigan socialite Lorraine MacDonald Dodge. Her automobile-heir husband Daniel Dodge had perished unconventionally (dynamite, drowning) during their honeymoon. Did Gehringer briefly become Lorraine's squire in 1939? Skipper doubts it, but hints fluttered in the gossip columns. In the long run, Gehringer shied away from a woman whose track record for keeping new husbands alive was spotty.

Gehringer's career after his playing days is of interest. Thirty-eight years old at the time of Pearl Harbor, he was not draftable. But he joined the Navy and spent the Second World War coaching baseball, just as some of his younger colleagues spent their war years playing for service teams. During his playing days, Gehringer became interested in novel automobile accessories, helping to market a patent upholstery button that became a Detroit fixture. After retirement from the Tigers, Gehringer went to work full-time with his partner Ray Forsyth, becoming a supplier of bits and pieces for the auto industry.

Only once was the Mechanical Man lured back to the game. In the mid-1950s, the Tigers made Gehringer their general manager. He later ruefully observed, "I didn't know who was and who wasn't" (161). He made some trades that didn't display much vision (George Kell plus extras for Walt Dropo and some other extras, for instance). Detroit landed in the cellar, and Gehringer retreated to the auto-furnishings industry.

Aside from faits divers like these, much of Skipper's life of Gehringer is a chronology of batting averages, pennant races, and box scores. It's a well-done chronology, in the manner of recent biographies like Thomas Bartel's life of Joe Medwick (Scarecrow, 2003) and Rob Kirkpatrick's book on Cecil Travis (McFarland, 2005). Such books tend to become less about their subjects than about their era of baseball history. Taken together, these biographies overlap a...