Wits, Flakes, and Clowns: The Colorful Characters of Baseball by Wayne Stewart (review)

In a clubhouse populated by over two dozen players and coaches whose ethnic makeup can be extremely diverse and whose personalities can vary from shy to outgoing, the need for an emotional outlet is an ever-present factor crucial to morale and team chemistry. When the amount of time a team spends together over the course of a baseball season is considered—seven months, and then some for playoff-bound teams—the need to relieve stress and boredom can take many forms, and those perpetrating antics and hijinks have become the subjects of Wayne Stewart's Wits, Flakes, and Clowns.

The author focuses on over 130 personalities, almost exclusively players with a sprinkling of managers added to his roster, and Stewart wistfully reaches for nostalgia in the early pages of the narrative. Because many of the characters that Stewart brings to the reader's attention were rooted in generations gone by, he impresses a longing for a return to an older brand of baseball and a simpler time when less meant more, when fans at the ballpark paid closer attention to the game itself rather than roam broad concourses in search of opportunities to socialize or wait in line for one of the unending varieties of food and drink options on offer (even at minor league venues).

Not emphasized, but certainly a contribution to the current gap between fans and their heroes, are astronomical player salaries: players have to be almost blindingly loyal to themselves simply because there is so much at stake financially in the modern game. Stewart advances that the colorful characters of the early and mid-twentieth century are largely now missing because the formality and professionalism of a current baseball career have largely shunted sophomoric behavior to the sidelines.

A brief dozen-page introduction and opening chapter set the stage for the narrative, but from that point on, the extreme length of the book's two primary chapters can seem stifling. The first of these deals with stunts and gags perpetrated by pitchers—and runs to just over seventy pages while the second, pertaining to position players, is over one hundred pages. The administering of a hotfoot, alteration of clothes hanging in a player's locker, prank telephone calls, and other shenanigans are standard fare, but the author's script grows tedious as more and more quips are added to the text. Not least among them are the one-liners attributed to relief pitcher Larry Andersen, but more likely from comedian George Carlin (56), and some metaphors come off as too stilted, such as Babe Herman's fielding ability being "as useless as popping placebos to cure terminal cancer," or Dick "Dr. Strangeglove" Stuart described as having "as much range as a flagpole sitter or a traffic pylon" (92, 124).

Because the entries for most players run for only two or three pages, the book's formatting takes on the characteristics of a media guide, and as such there is much value to Stewart's work as a reference. For younger readers less likely to be familiar with personalities of yesteryear, Wits, Flakes, and Clowns will help cultivate a sense of the richness of baseball's past and its humorous quirkiness. Stewart's extended profiles invite deeper inspection of these luminaries thanks to recent biographies of these Hall-of-Famers.

Stewart shares quotes obtained from his interviewees who offer interesting perspectives on why the book's subjects acted the way they did or infused their language with witty statements. For all the antics demonstrated on the mound by Detroit's Mark Fidrych, Stewart's tribute paid to the late pitcher by his widow and daughter, who groomed the area in front of the pitching rubber before throwing out a ceremonial first pitch at a Tigers game, may be the most poignant moment in the book.

Regarding the former Indian sensation of the early 1980s Joe Charboneau, Stewart observes that some of the...