.721: A History of the 1954 Cleveland Indians by Gary Webster (review)

What are the all-time-greatest major-league baseball nines? This is a question that has long-intrigued the sport’s diehard fanatics. Could it be one of several New York Yankees clubs: the 1927 “Murderers Row” lineup, for example, or the 1998 team, which finished the regular season at 114–48 and the playoffs at 125–50? The answer might be a resounding “yes” to one of these (if you are a New Yorker) or a belligerent “no” (if you are a Yankee hater). But objectively speaking, what is the very best team?

In .721: A History of the 1954 Cleveland Indians, Gary Webster cites several often-overlooked nominees: the 1906 Chicago Cubs, who completed the season with 116 victories and a .763 winning percentage; the 2001 Seattle Mariners, who also won 116 regular season games; and the 109-game-winning 1969 Baltimore Orioles. In the end, however, he discounts them because they were World Series also-rans—and he acknowledges that such also was the case with the 1954 Cleveland Indians. Still, Webster observes that the Tribe’s “remarkable accomplishments [that season] deserve to be more than a mere afterthought … or worse, something that Cleveland’s baseball fans have been trying ever since to forget” (174).

Stat-oriented fans may know that the 1954 Tribe won 111 regular-season games. They may be familiar with the team’s formidable starting pitchers (Bob Lemon, Early Wynn, and Mike Garcia) and five future Hall of Famers (Lemon, Wynn, Bob Feller, Larry Doby, and Hal Newhouser), and they may know that second sacker Bobby Avila was the al batting champ, that flychaser Doby led the league in home runs and rbi, and that Garcia won the era crown. Yet those stats fans also acknowledge that the Indians not only lost the Fall Classic but were swept by the New York Giants and that Willie Mays’s legendary back-to-home plate catch robbed Vic Wertz in Game One. So beyond citing names and numbers and beyond his view of the team’s place in baseball history, what does Webster tell us about the Indians that we don’t already know?

For one thing, he offers an astute analysis of the team’s inner workings. He sums this up in his preface, where he notes, “A study of the statistics indicates the Indians were a classic example of a team that was greater than the sum of its parts” (2), and he goes on to chronicle what essentially is a season in the life of a ball club. Webster spotlights the contributions of and conflicts between Al Lopez, the Tribe skipper, and the man who brought him to Cleveland, general manager Hank Greenberg. He discusses why the pre-1954 Tribe could not best the Yankees, who were the al pennant winners for five straight seasons (194953), and charts Greenberg’s efforts to improve the team for the ’54 campaign as well as the Yankees’ preseason strategizing and deal making. He details everything from salary squabbles and spring training minutia (a highlight of which is the long-running preseason rivalry between the Indians and Giants, who both trained in Arizona and had been facing off against each other since 1934) to the various in-season and postseason highlights and lowlights.

Wherever possible, Webster employs first-person accounts (most notably the day-by-day reportage of local sportswriters and columnists), and he writes with diary-like detail. (Indeed, the book easily might be retitled Diary of a Season.) For example, sore-armed ex-Detroit Tigers ace Hal Newhouser had been released by the team midway through the 1953 season. Webster cites Greenberg’s decision to invite his old teammate to spring training and, “while he wasn’t able to crack the Tribe’s starting rotation, he gave the club a much-needed effective southpaw reliever” (32). He discusses the ins and outs of Yankees general manager George Weiss’s decision to part with hurler Vic Raschi, who...