Level Playing Fields: How the Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball (review)

Peter Morris’s latest book is truly groundbreaking. Level Playing Fields: How the Groundskeeping Murphy Brothers Shaped Baseball tells the largely untold story of two Irish immigrants, Tom and John Murphy, and how they revolutionized the national pastime. Until now, the Murphy brothers had a Zeliglike quality, popping up randomly in a number of biographies and histories. But no author had attempted to go beyond the brothers’ dirty fingernails. Morris, however, rescues them from the shadows in a well-researched and well-written book.

The Murphys changed baseball from the ground up during baseball’s formative years at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century. Without them, the game would certainly be a different one. The Murphys were instrumental in developing pitching mounds and permanent spring training sites. Without their irrigation techniques, countless ball games would never have been played. Tom Murphy used his talent for the good of his team. John Murphy used his talent for the good of the game.

Newspaper reports of the day acknowledged the Murphys for their work. One sportswriter called John Murphy “the best ground keeper in the country” (91). Such a comment, in today’s context, would appear to damn him with faint praise; after all, how many other groundskeepers can you name? Baseball fans take groundskeepers for granted, for the most part. A groundskeeper, however, can influence a game. Without the work of baseball’s “invisible men,” as Morris calls them, bunts become singles when the dirt around home plate is heavily watered, routine ground balls take wicked bounces on a parched infield, and base runners advance more easily when singles quit rolling in tall or wet outfield grass. Pitchers became either better or worse, depending on the lay of the mound.

As Morris chronicles, Tom Murphy adapted Baltimore’s Union Park to fit the style of the Baltimore Orioles, a team that resorted to every bit of chicanery to win. Few teams have ever had such a home-field advantage. Tom Murphy, for instance, made the soil hard in front of home plate so hitters could swing downward sharply, causing the ball to bounce high and allowing them to reach first safely before the infielder’s throw, inventing what would be called the “Baltimore Chop.”

The Murphys were part of the great wave of Irish immigrants who came to America in the mid-1900s to escape Ireland’s potato famine. For many of these immigrants, the American dream turned out to be pretty much the same as what they escaped. Many Irish found work landscaping parks, such as New York’s Central Park. The Murphys gravitated toward ballparks. The work was steady, though hardly stable. The temperamental Murphys saw themselves as masters of their domain. This frequently put them at odds with both man and nature.

Tom Murphy went to prison for nearly killing the brother of Philadelphia owner Connie Mack. John Murphy, too, quarreled incessantly with his employers, including Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss. John Murphy, however, was capable of great tenderness on the field. He created large flower beds at either end of the grandstands in Baltimore. Later, he transformed the Polo Grounds from a mud flat into the best-landscaped ballpark in the big leagues. “The Polo Grounds are the model baseball grounds of the country,” one sportswriter said, “and are so acknowledged by every player who has been fortunate enough to play on them. They are an artistic dream” (91).

Morris’s story is complicated because the Murphys moved often and sometimes seemed to disappear altogether. Because they were groundskeepers and not ballplayers, Morris cannot rely on the usual sources for information. However, Morris is a dogged researcher and succeeds in telling the story of the Murphys, though sometimes it appears like a jigsaw puzzle with a few pieces missing. Morris sometimes pads the book because there is so little known about the Murphys. This, though, is a minor criticism. Morris acknowledges the...