Ball, Bat and Bitumen: A History of Coalfield Baseball in the Appalachian South (review)

L. M. Sutter’s book is the story of baseball in the coalfields of southern Appalachia—specifically the area where Kentucky, Virginia, and West Virginia meet—during the first half of the twentieth century. Men with grime on their faces emerged from their dangerous work in the mines to play baseball. They played on teams in amateur, semipro, and professional leagues. Based on twenty regional newspapers and sixty interviews with former players, their relatives, and spectators, Sutter concludes that the quality of play in coalfield baseball was high, the teams often hired ringers to improve their chances of winning, and women were the most ardent fans.

Sutter brings a genuine passion to his subject. His affection for coalminers and the baseball they played jumps off every page of his book. Another strength is the more than forty photographs that enrich the text. The author covers the entire spectrum of coalfield baseball, with chapters on promoters, players, teams, leagues, towns, the African American experience, and fans, among other topics. For example, Sutter devotes a chapter to the indefatigable Virgil Q. Wacks, who began his career as a local journalist, became the leading promoter of baseball in the region, and culminated his career as president of the Class D Mountain States League. Sutter tells the story of Norton, Virginia, during the 1952 season when a group of twenty headstrong women took control of the town’s team in the Mountain States League; they handled all responsibilities except playing on the field. The book includes a chapter on the Raleigh Clippers, a powerful black team. Sutter features the 1951 Bombers of Hazard, Kentucky, in another chapter. Behind future major-league pitcher Johnny Podres, this team won the Mountain States League championship with an astounding record of 93–33. The 1951 Bombers rate as one of the best one hundred teams in minor-league history. Another chapter details the trials and tribulations that Vince Pankovits endured as player-manager of the 1953 Knoxville Smokies in the Mountain States League. Among other embarrassments, the team had to forfeit a game because of a lack of baseballs. Pankovits and the team were embroiled in journalistic, political, and racial quarrels that spilled onto the diamond. Nevertheless, the team won the post-season championship behind the stellar play of African American hurler Jim Tugerson. These and other fascinating people and stories are among the many vignettes the reader discovers in Sutter’s work.

It is the desultory nature of the topics covered that constitutes the fundamental flaw of this book. Sutter’s work is a disjointed and disconnected collection of short and superficial descriptive narratives that might stand alone as journal articles. But the book lacks sustained critical analysis and a central unifying thesis. Early in the book, Sutter asserts that paternalistic mine owners used baseball as an anti-union tool. A fierce rivalry on the baseball diamond could prevent cooperation among players and their fans on labor issues. Much later in the book, Sutter devotes an entire chapter to labor strife in two Kentucky towns, but he fails to establish baseball as an anti-union weapon of mine owners. This potentially important theme is never developed anywhere in the book.

Other potential themes that Sutter could have developed are baseball integration as an agent of social change, and the impact of television on the leisure habits of the region. He first mentions them in one sentence in the chapter on Virgil Q. Wacks: “It [The Mountain States League] successfully integrated in 1951 after a couple of stalled attempts the year before and tried to fend off the corroding effects of televised major league games” (39). But Sutter provides no additional discussion or analysis of these themes at this point. In fact, he never again discusses the impact of television on baseball in the area. He simply parrots the standard interpretation that the new medium devastated minor-league baseball. Sutter does not...