Urban Shocker: Silent Hero of Baseball’s Golden Age by Steve Steinberg (review)

Steve Steinberg’s biography of Urban Shocker, a largely forgotten player whose thirteen-year, 187 major league wins pitching career began in the dead ball era, flourished in the early 1920s, and climaxed with a major contribution to one of baseball’s greatest teams, the 1927 Yankees, was nearly twenty years in the making. Steve first encountered his subject when he discovered a Shocker baseball card in 1998 while nurturing his 10-year-old son’s interest in the game. Despite producing a lengthy “creative work” about Shocker in 2002, he determined that “the story wasn’t ready. Neither was I” (xii). But after completing two noted books on the 1920s Yankees with co-author Lyle Spatz— 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York (2010), and The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership that Transformed the New York Yankees (2015)— Steinberg finally returned to Shocker, producing a compelling portrait of a “complex man [who] was mercurial and moody” and who “played the game with a swagger, an arrogance born of excellence.” According to Steinberg, Shocker “did not have humility in his makeup, and his temper was often roiling just beneath the surface. His indomitable spirit was matched by his physical strength. He was a workhorse” (241). Others variously described Shocker as “cunning” (164), “talented yet petulant” (44), a “temperamental spitballist” (144), and a “tough customer” (149).

Steinberg’s interest in the man born Urbain Jacques Shockcor was not based solely on his pitching excellence. Shocker, who died on September 9, 1928, less than a year after the Yankees won their second World Series, suffered during the final years of his life from a heart condition that caused “shortness of breath, dizziness, fainting spells, even his inability to sleep while lying down” (238). His condition was largely kept secret from his teammates and the public with batboy Eddie Bennett, who roomed with Shocker on road trips and suffered from a back deformity, shielding Shocker’s ailment from others. Shocker died from a combination of pneumonia and an enlarged “athletic heart,” most likely the result of mitral valve prolapse. At the time Steinberg resumed work on Shocker in 2009, he was diagnosed with his own heart disease. The similarity of their maladies heightened the connection between author and subject.

Steinberg’s excellent biography is the result of meticulous research evident from 58 pages of extensive notes that accompany the text. He relied heavily upon newspapers to place the reader directly in the spirit of the first three decades of the twentieth century. Sixteen chapters begin with quotations from Grantland Rice, and Steinberg often uses the words of the great sports writers of the era, such as Bob Broeg, Heywood Broun, Warren Brown, Arthur Daley, Dan Daniel, Hugh Fullerton, Frank Graham, F. C. Lane, Tom Meany, Westbrook Pegler, W. A. Phelan, Francis Richter, Damon Runyon, and Irving Sanborn to describe Shocker, his teammates and opponents, and the rough nature of a game marked by gambling and fixed games, the outlawing of the spitball, and the tragic death of Indians star Ray Chapman after a beaning by Carl Mays, “one of Shocker’s least favorite players” (103).

Steinberg is a master storyteller, weaving together tales that reveal much about Shocker and the personalities surrounding him. For instance, Steinberg highlights the pitcher’s battles with Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. The rivalry with Cobb turned into fisticuffs on April 19, 1923, when incessant banter between the two strong-willed players led to an altercation (“Cobb swung first and missed; Shocker then landed a solid blow to the chin” [119]). But not every encounter went Shocker’s way. As Steinberg notes, Cobb’s five career home runs placed Urban at the top of Ty’s personal victim list (89). After his trade to the Browns, Shocker welcomed the opportunity to challenge Ruth even though many pitchers either walked the Yankees slugger or pitched around him. Ruth, for his...