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347 PAGES

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By Gary Kaufman

April 3, 2000 |  In the middle of the century, Red Smith was to sportswriters what Joe DiMaggio was to center fielders. As New York Times columnist Ira Berkow writes in the foreword to "Red Smith on Baseball," Newsweek put the columnist for the New York Herald Tribune (and, later, the Times) on its cover in 1959 with the headline "Star of the Press Box," and he was often referred to as the Shakespeare of that smoky structure.

Berkow also tells us (and there's no reason not to believe Berkow, himself a typist of the first order) that baseball was Smith's favorite sport: hence this collection of columns, subtitled "The Game's Greatest Writer on the Game's Greatest Years" -- both arguable points.

It's tempting to just fill this review with quotations from Smith's writing by way of illustrating what the Pulitzer Prize folks called his "erudition, literary quality, vitality and freshness of viewpoint" when they laid the overdue laurels on him in 1976. I found myself marking particularly lively passages with a pencil. From 1941, the date of the first column, through the early '50s, my copy is a mess of No. 2 lead. After that, the pages are considerably cleaner: In those years Smith lost some of his edge and settled in as just a very good sportswriter, if one who reminisced a bit too much about the old days and relied a little too heavily on sarcasm.

Also Today If you fold it, they will come Minor league baseball is bittersweet. The players are praying for a ticket out, and it's even worse when the team is looking to move, too By Steve Burgess

"Now it is done," reads the famous lead of his Oct. 4, 1951, column on Bobby Thomson's "Shot Heard Round the World," the home run that won a three-game playoff and capped the greatest comeback in baseball history, when the New York Giants, who'd been hopelessly out of it in mid-August, rallied to overtake their arch-rivals, the Brooklyn Dodgers. "Now the story ends. And there is no way to tell it. The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention. Only the utterly impossible, the inexpressibly fantastic, can ever be plausible again."

A week later, the Giants had lost the World Series to the New York Yankees, who were taking their third of what would be five straight world championships. (Smith wrote that rooting for them was like pulling for U.S. Steel.) "Magic and sorcery and incantation and spells had taken the Giants to the championship of the National League and put them into the World Series ... But you don't beat the Yankees with a witch's broomstick. Not the Yankees, when there's hard money to be won."

Ah, what the hell. I have a couple of beefs, but first:

Smith on Dodger Cookie Lavagetto's game-winning pinch double in the 1947 World Series: "After 136 pitches, Floyd Bevens, of the Yankees, had the only no-hit ball game ever played in a World Series. But he threw 137 and lost, 3 to 2."

On Stan Musial: "He is the best left fielder the Cardinals have, the best center fielder they have, the best first baseman they have. He is, in short, the best ball club in St. Louis and one of the best in the world."

On DiMaggio: "Sometimes a fellow gets a little tired of writing about DiMaggio; a fellow thinks, 'there must be some other ball player in the world worth mentioning.' But there isn't really, not worth mentioning in the same breath with Joe DiMaggio."

Remembering Jackie Robinson on his death in 1973, Smith wrote that the picture that stuck in his mind was a game-saving diving catch Robinson made on the last day of that fateful '51 season: "The unconquerable doing the impossible."

He liked to go into an ironic formal tone when writing about the scruffy tobacco-chewers who populated the game, so a Phillies second baseman is "Mr. Babe Alexander, of Philadelphia," and Yogi Berra and Casey Stengel are usually Lawrence Peter Berra and Charles Dillon Stengel. Uniforms are "flannel rompers," the game is "rounders," players are "wage slaves" or "employees" or, if they're well paid, "capitalists."

But it wasn't just the wordplay that made Smith special. He was a keen observer, too. As early as the 1940s, for example, he was predicting that if the players could ever organize themselves into an effective union, they would take over the game from the shortsighted, ineffectual owners -- a development that came to pass three decades later.

So here's the beefs: This book will probably be read only by baseball fans (which is a shame, because anyone interested in good newspaper writing will find plenty to snack on), so the lack of explanatory notes isn't a huge oversight. Still, they would have helped explain some of Smith's offhand references to baseball events and people that a casual fan in, say, 1948, would have recognized at once, but that are head-scratchers today.

Much worse, the book's cover is, to paraphrase Smith paraphrasing Babe Ruth, an adjectival bonehead play, an indelicacy mistake. It's a lovely picture, taken from the upper deck, of a ballgame being played on a sunny afternoon -- at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles. Here's Smith in 1957: "The departure of the Giants and Dodgers from New York is an unrelieved calamity, a grievous loss to the city and to baseball, a shattering blow to the prestige of the National League, an indictment of the men operating the clubs and the men governing the city." It was, he wrote, "the boldest step backward since the league was born in 1876."

They couldn't have found a nice color picture of Ebbets Field or Yankee Stadium in the '50s? Whoever chose that photo was having, as Red Smith might say, a bad day with the old medulla oblongata.
salon.com | April 3, 2000

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