Smoky Joe Wood: The Biography of a Baseball Legend by Gerald C. Wood (review)

Famous baseball player Mark McGwire, in an interview, talked about fan participation by stating, "I think it puts baseball back on the map as a sport. It's America's pastime and just look at everyone coming out to the ballpark. It has been an exciting year" (Baseball Almanac, "Mark McGwire Quotes," http://www.baseball-almanac.com/quotes/quomcgw.shtml). Since 1869, Americans have enjoyed attending baseball games in person, and, since the last century, by watching the sport at home on their televisions. The game has evolved to include thirty major league teams, split between the American League and the National League. Each team plays 162 games per season in order to have a chance at participating in the World Series, the ultimate honor for any team.

When baseball originated as a major sport in the United States, players worked full-time jobs in the off-season because baseball was not considered a profession. Today many professional baseball players are celebrities and some are compensated for their athletic skill with multiyear contracts that pay millions of dollars per season. Fans flock to their favorite stadiums for the spectacle of the sport, hoping to witness a game- or season-changing moment. Gerald C. Wood, a distinguished professor emeritus of English at Carson-Newman University, decided to write about one baseball player who, even with an impressive early-twentieth-century career, is not currently in the Baseball Hall of Fame—namely, Howard "Smoky Joe" Wood.

Smoky Joe became one of only a few players to begin his baseball career as a pitcher and finish his career in the outfield. (Some other notable players who have made that switch in their career are former St. Louis Cardinals player Rick Ankiel and current Arizona Diamondback David Peralta.) Wood started his career with the Boston Red Sox and amassed a total of 117 wins over a seven-year period. In 1912, Wood posted a 34-5 record before injuring his arm. Soon after, Smoky Joe joined the Cleveland Indians as an outfielder and had a career-best .366 batting average. He then took his impressive skill sets and became Yale University's baseball coach for close to twenty years. In 1985, A. Bartlett Giamatti, the former president of Yale University, bestowed an honorary doctorate on Smoky Joe Wood.

Gerald Wood spent over a decade researching and writing this extensive biography, ensuring that any reader would have an accurate portrait of this baseball legend. His effort created a vivid picture of Smokey Joe's accomplishments while also celebrating the person behind the statistics. Wood mentions in an interview that the inspiration for the biography came from seeing "Ken Burn's documentary and [being] embarrassed [he] hadn't heard of the hero of the 1912 season who had [his] last name" (xiii). As a devoted baseball fan, I, too, was surprised to learn about this legendary baseball player. To conduct the research for the biography, Gerald Wood used archival materials that Smoky Joe's family provided, with some of the material being available at the Baseball Hall of Fame, including video archives (located at Cleveland Public Library and Yale University Sports Archive) containing interviews with Smokey Joe and highlight videos of some of the baseball games. Wood (the author) also peppers his biography with anecdotes and other details of Smoky Joe's life and career, like moments from his childhood and his postbaseball career, and even accounts that discuss Smoky Joe's involvement in the 1919 betting scandal. All of these gems help to bring the reader closer to the real person behind the celebrity.

The two chapters on Smoky Joe's 1912 season and his participation in the World Series form one of the most interesting and enlightening sections of the book. Smoky Joe won three games in the 1912 World Series in addition to the deciding eighth game where he pitched two scoreless innings (because one of the games was declared...