Eyes on the Sporting Scene, 1870-1930: Will and June Rankin, New York’s Sportswriting Brothers by Pamela A. Bakker (review)

Today’s most prominent sportswriters exist in a multiplatform world. They record podcasts, tweet between appearances on ESPN or sports radio, cultivate Facebook followings, and update their online newspaper or magazine pieces while—one assumes—chasing down leads for their next story. Rather than report the news, they often strive to become news themselves, seeking a bit of the celebrity limelight that illuminates the athletes whom they cover.

Pamela A. Bakker’s Eyes on the Sporting Scene attempts to recapture a quieter era, when excellent writing and deep knowledge separated the giants of the sports page from the hacks. Brothers Will and June Rankin, sons of a Pennsylvania newspaperman who shared his love of reading and writing with his boys, were two of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era’s best-known sportswriters. Working through a bewildering array of outlets, including the New York Clipper, the National Police Gazette, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, and the New York Herald, they monitored the transformation of American sports, especially baseball, from a series of local contests into a modern urban spectacle.

Will and June’s love affair with baseball began when they took up semi-professional baseball immediately after the Civil War. From there it was a short leap into writing about the game, first for local journals then for the big New York sheets that were just beginning to develop the modern sports section. The brothers, who worked separately, shared a gift for capturing a moment in words, and their own playing experience gave them credibility among professional players. They soon became respected arbiters of the game, serving as official scorers for a series of franchises and acting as the court of last resort in disputes about baseball history. Will especially embraced this role, amassing an enormous baseball library and helping to popularize the use of basic statistics to measure performance across baseball eras.

As the author Bakker reveals, the Rankin brothers witnessed and participated in many of the upheavals that shaped modern baseball. Their careers spanned from the National Association of Baseball Players of the 1860s and 1870s, through the Players’ League (1890), and well beyond the 1903 American-National League merger. Along the way they befriended such legends as Albert G. Spalding and Henry Chadwick. June branched out in the 1890s, covering the legendary Sullivan-Corbett championship fight for the Associated Press and later throwing himself into the burgeoning golf scene. Will stuck to baseball, penning several books about the sport and covering it for the New York Clipper and several other papers until his death in 1913. June carried on for another seventeen years, writing for such publications as the New York World and sneaking out for a round of golf whenever he could.

Eyes on the Sporting Scene is clearly a labor of love. Bakker is June Rankin’s great-granddaughter, and this book represents her effort to honor the once-renowned brothers. Unfortunately, her work is riddled with shortcomings. The book is poorly structured, bouncing almost randomly between the brothers, who appear to have had little contact with each other despite sharing a profession and a city. Will and June disappear for lengthy stretches as the book meanders into unnecessary digressions—a long history of a newspaper, the names of everyone who occupied the Harpers Ferry armory with John Brown, listing the entire roster of a baseball team. These tangents make a short book feel padded.

Bakker conscientiously consulted available materials, employing census and property records, conducting interviews with the Rankins’ descendants, and adopting a raft of contemporary newspaper articles to tell her story. She leans on respected secondary sources such as David Q. Voigt’s American Baseball (1992) for background material. For all this, Eyes on the Sporting Scene provides only the barest sense of who Will and June Rankin were and of...