The Cincinnati Reds, and: The Cleveland Indians (review)

What can a reviewer say about two team histories, one published in 1948 and the other in 1949? Reading Lee Allen's The Cincinnati Reds and Franklin Lewis's The Cleveland Indians, I get the sense that the game was somehow more vivid, that the grass was greener, the skies were bluer, the heroes purer, the characters of the game funnier. Each book has scenes that are so archetypically baseball, so soaked in the lore of the game, that they read like something from Bernard Malamud's The Natural or Mark Harris's Bang the Drum Slowly. For instance, take the luncheon of the Cleveland brass in a suite at the Terminal Tower in the spring of 1936. Team president Alva Bradley went around the table asking questions, assessing the upcoming season. Eventually he got around to C. C. "Cy" Slapnicka, his new assistant.

"Slap, tell them about that young pitcher you signed."

Slap cleared his throat and began, "Gentleman, I found the greatest young pitcher I ever saw. I suppose this sounds like old stuff to you, but I want to tell you to believe me. This boy that I found out in Iowa will be the greatest pitcher the world has ever known."

Slap's modest bravado rings a bit of Roy Hobbs in The Natural when he announces that he plans to be the best that ever was. There is something so pure about it. A general manager who still had farm dirt under his fingernails discovers a right-handed farm boy from Iowa who throws the ball faster than the eye can follow it. The boy is a phenomenon who averaged nineteen strikeouts a game in summer ball, a boy with all the promise of America. Of course, Slapnicka's boy was Bob Feller, and arguably he was as good as any pitcher ever.

But Lewis's story is only partially true. He left out the fact that the Cleveland organization violated baseball's rules for signing pre-college amateurs and tried to cover up its action through a complex bookkeeping scheme. Lewis's version is fun to read, but for today's readers it seems not so much naive as it does intentionally sanitized.

To some degree this is because Lewis was part of the organization. A sportswriter for the Cleveland Press in the 1940s and 1950s, he was as necessary to the team as batboys and equipment managers. He traveled with the team, ate with the players and coaches, and probably knew where all the skeletons were hidden. In his columns he praised and criticized the actions on the field and in the boardroom, but he never tried to damage the image of baseball as the great American pastime. He was a sportswriter by vocation but a fan by choice. He often asked why his team wasn't better and repeatedly offered opinions on how to improve the Indians, but he never questioned the foundations of professional sports or the culture of baseball.

Lee Allen viewed baseball from the same perspective as Lewis. A native of Cincinnati, he served for a time as the director of publicity for the Reds, wrote about baseball for a series of newspapers, and eventually became the historian for the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Known as "Baseball's Walking Encyclopedia," Allen loved the sport, working tirelessly to preserve its statistics and stories. As much as anyone else, he was responsible for the Macmillan Baseball Encyclopedia, the magisterial final word for millions of bar bets. When he wrote The Cincinnati Reds, no one knew the story better, and few could tell it as well. From the Red Stockings 1869 tour through the struggling early period and tainted 1919 World Series victory to the World War II decline...