Edd Roush: A Biography of the Cincinnati Reds Star (review)

Edd J. Roush is a name that may be unfamiliar to all but the most hardcore baseball fans, including fans of the Cincinnati Reds. But, during the late 1910s and the early 1920s Edd Roush was one of the most feared batsmen in the National League, known by every baseball fan in America. He came to the major leagues during the deadball era, participated in the 1919 Black Sox World Series, and finished his career a decade after Babe Ruth changed the game of baseball forever.

Mitchell Conrad Stinson, a sportswriter hailing from Evansville, Indiana, first learned about Roush as a fourteen-year-old boy in 1978 while on a family vacation. He and his family stopped by the octogenarian's house in Oakland City, Indiana, unannounced, and were granted an interview with the Hall of Famer. Two years later, Stinson and Roush met again and Stinson again tape-recorded the interview. Several years later, he embarked on writing this book and used those tape-recorded interviews with the now deceased Roush as the starting point for his research.

Stinson has made use of his own interviews and interviews with others who knew Roush, as well as newspaper records, court records, secondary sources, and primary sources such as the Roush file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York. The result is an entertaining and readable, yet meticulously researched, biography of one of the great players of his era, but a man very few people could identify today.

Roush was born in 1893, in Oakland City, Indiana, not far from Evansville. He and his twin brother, Fred, spent most of their lives in Oakland City, or its environs, except when they were employed playing baseball. Edd (yes, his parents named him Edd with two Ds, not Edward) became the better player and spent an apprenticeship in the low minors before climbing the ranks to the major leagues when he made his debut with the Chicago White Sox in 1913. Unfortunately for the White Sox, Roush did not make a big enough impression for them to keep him, so he returned to the minor leagues before joining the Indianapolis Hoosiers, a Federal League team, in 1914. He spent the 1915 season with the Newark team (the Indianapolis franchise had been transferred prior to the 1915 season), where he began making a name for himself. John McGraw's New York Giants acquired Roush when the Federal League failed, and while McGraw considered himself a sharp judge of talent, he and Roush clashed over Roush's 48-ounce bat, and McGraw shipped him off to Cincinnati.

With the downtrodden Reds, Roush flourished and became one of the most feared hitters in the National League, winning batting championships in 1917 and 1919. In 1919, the Reds finally made it to the World Series, only to have it later revealed that several Chicago White Sox players had conspired with gamblers to throw the series. Roush (and Stinson) remained adamant that even had the White Sox been playing on the up and up, the Reds still would have won the series due to their superior pitching staff.

The years that followed were not as successful for Roush. The game had changed, but he had a difficult time changing with it. Babe Ruth had changed the hitting part of the game from a scientific approach of well-placed hits and smart base-running to a game of power baseball and hitting home runs. Roush also suffered from injuries as he aged, and his well-known penchant for holding out each spring may have contributed to his maladies. Roush never reached double figures in home runs, but he sported a career .323 batting average when he retired in 1931, after spending 1928 and 1929 with John McGraw's New York Giants and then sitting out the 1930 season. By then, Roush was thirty-eight years old and his legs just did not...