Bush League Boys: The Postwar Legends of Baseball in the American Southwest by Toby Smith (review)

Between the end of World War II and before television cemented its iron grip on America, minor-league baseball reveled in an Indian summer of popularity. It was perhaps the last era when local heroes genuinely claimed the hearts of children and others who retained youthful hearts. Albuquerque-based journalist Toby Smith has beautifully captured that fleeting time.

A modest amusement common to baby-boom children was collecting baseball cards. From the back of a 1950s bubble-gum card, the author, then a boy living in Connecticut, read an item of trivia on Joe Bauman of the 1954 Roswell Rockets. In that year, Bauman hit seventy-two home runs, far exceeding Babe Ruth’s legendary sixty homers in 1927, then the major-league record. Imagine: seventy-two home runs! New Mexico! Cactus and sagebrush! This mind-boggling bit of trivia so impressed young Toby Smith that it was the seed that sixty years on yielded Bush League Boys.

Smith begins with a chapter on Bauman and Bob Crues, who drove in a Paul Bunyan-like 254 runs (!) for the Amarillo Gold Sox in 1948. His colorful description of Bauman—“a naturally strong kid, with brick-thick fingers as long as snakes”—is typical of the vivid writing found throughout Bush League Boys. Smith shows us that it was not uncommon for a player to marry his bride on the field before a game: “’Do you take this left-fielder to be your lawfully wedded husband?’ Oh, to seal the bonds of holy matrimony on a scruffy grass-and-packed dirt playground before a thousand strangers wolfing red-dyed frankfurters and slugging down Dr Pepper” (153).

Smith employs his journalistic skill to tease out nuggets of rich detail through sleuthing of newspapers and libraries and personal interviews. In each chapter, he presents at least two oral histories, the extended monologues of players, fans, and other first-hand observers, reminiscent of another great historical baseball book, The Glory of Their Times, by Lawrence S. Ritter (1966). But Ritter’s book contains the voices of men who enjoyed significant big-league careers; the men portrayed in Smith’s tidy 192-page narrative are the real-life examples of fictional legends such as Roy Hobbs and Crash Davis, talented guys who spent most, if not all, of their careers playing under dim lights in towns like Roswell, Carlsbad, and Pampa. It is poignant to read Smith’s description of Bauman and Crues being buried in weed-infested unmarked graves (though this indignity has since been corrected).

Bush League Boys, while surely a baseball book, is also an insightful account of the post-World War II era, with topical chapters focusing on tornados and other extreme weather in New Mexico and West Texas, the fear of polio, and the experience of African American players, including the great Willie Stargell, coming to towns where many people had never seen a black person. A generous collection of evocative photos in Bush League Boys further brings the men and the times to life. The untold legions of readers who hold nostalgic feelings for baseball and the optimistic post-war era (whether they were alive in those days or not) will find Toby Smith’s Bush League Boys engaging and enlightening reading.