New Mexico Baseball: Miners, Outlaws, Indians and Isotopes: 1880 to the Present (review)

While baseball fervor is not usually associated with the state of New Mexico, Virginia-based writer L. M. Sutter makes an eloquent case for the national pastime in the Land of Enchantment. Basing her observations upon an extensive reading of territorial and state newspapers, as well as interviews with New Mexicans, Sutter presents a convincing argument which may seem strange to filmmaker Ken Burns as well as Red Sox-Yankee fans who display an Eastern-centric perception of the game.

Writing in a clear narrative fashion, Sutter demonstrates a strong grasp of New Mexican history and culture. For example, Sutter notes that at the 1911 territorial fair in Albuquerque, with New Mexico on the eve of statehood, baseball contests at the fairgrounds included Native Americans, African Americans, Hispanics, and Anglos, during a time when much of the country was ablaze with racial and ethnic conflicts. Of New Mexico in 1911, Sutter writes, "But this was a place that, by the eve of statehood, had already learned to tout its tri-cultural history. For three centuries, the different peoples had been forced to learn-and periodically have to relearn the same lesson-that New Mexico's strength lies in her diversity" (51). And Sutter tends to emphasize this diversity by concentrating upon more indigenous baseball culture in the state, rather than the connection between Major League Baseball and farm clubs such as the Albuquerque Dukes or Isotopes. In this approach, she is following the example established by Dorothy Seymour Mills and Harold Seymour in The People's Game (1990).

The major exception to this rule is Sutter's examination of the Class C West Texas-New Mexico League during the 1940s and 1950s. Considerable attention is devoted to the actions of Grover Seitz, who established a notorious reputation for baiting umpires while managing franchises in Pampa, Texas, and Clovis, New Mexico. With relatively small ballparks and high altitudes, which allowed for the ball to carry well, the West Texas-New Mexico League was noted for its hitting. In 1954, Joe Bauman, playing for the Roswell Rockets, established a new professional baseball home run mark with 72 four-base hits. In a moving portrait, Sutter tells the story of Bauman through the eyes of his friends and widow, whom she interviewed at the family home in Roswell.

The bulk of Sutter's history, however, deals with amateur and semiprofessional baseball in New Mexico. Similar to many Western territories and states, baseball flourished in the mining camps of New Mexico. The Copper League, which featured franchises in both Arizona and New Mexico, was employed by company bosses as a tactic to distract their workers from union activities. Hiring athletes who were sometimes asked to do little work underground, franchises in the Copper League attracted outlaw players such as Buck Weaver and Chick Gandil, who were banned from Organized Baseball following the infamous 1919 Black Sox scandal. Sutter also chronicles the exploits of the Madrid Miners, Tererro Tigers, and the Jackpile Miners from Laguna Pueblo in the Central New Mexico League from the 1930s into the 1950s.

In addition to mining camps, Sutter observes that New Mexico enjoyed a baseball tradition associated with military installations, from the Buffalo Soldiers of the nineteenth-century frontier to the Flying Kellys from Albuquerque's Kirtland Air Force Base during World War II. The importance of New Mexico to contemporary amateur baseball is told in the story of Farmington, located in the Four Corners area of the state, which in 1963 became home to the Connie Mack World Series for boys ages sixteen to eighteen. Sutter also notes the significance of baseball to the New Mexico state penitentiary outside of Santa Fe, an institution probably best known for the brutality which characterized a 1980 inmate uprising.

However, the most poignant chapters of Sutter's book deal with baseball among the state's Hispanic and Native American populations. Based upon numerous family interviews...