Book Review: Crazy ‘08
As you may have heard — from any one of a hundred stories about it in various media outlets — this year marks the 100th anniversary of the Cubs’ last World Series title.
While that may be the most memorable thing we now recall about the 1908 baseball season, there is much more of interest than the last Chicago championship. Among them are the best pennant race — in both leagues — that we’ve seen in the majors, one of the greatest individual seasons of all time, arguably the biggest baserunning gaffe on record, and the top pitcher’s duel of the modern era.
Many, many books have been written about aspects of the 1908 season, but Cait Murphy’s “Crazy ‘08
Murphy has a sense of humor in her prose that helps the characters personalities leap out of the dusty domain of history and into vivid reality. This isn’t a dry retelling of a series of historical events — it’s a lively journey through one of the most entertaining seasons on record.
John McGraw, Nap Lajoie, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance and numerous others are the characters in this wild season, set against the backdrop of a changing game filled with talented naturals, unsavory gamblers, country rubes and unlikely heroes.
Murphy’s real accomplishment in the book is her fantastic ability to bring us to the 1908 season, as though it happened just a short time ago. She intersperses the chapters with “time outs”, or glimpses into what was going on in the outside world that year. Diverse topics touched on by Murphy include Tammany Hall in New York, the invented mythology of the genesis of the game, an infamous “murder farm” near Chicago and the fall of radical anarchism in America only to be replaced by radical communism.
Here’s a quote from the book which I feel helps to illustrate Murphy’s writing style and the way she covers the events of 1908. From page 182, in Chapter 9, “The Merkle Game”:
In the trajectory of a life, there is often a single year in which childhood flees. The knees of boys unknobble and voices deepen; girls lose their baby fat and discover high heels. Countries, too, can experience a year that beckons a new maturity — Poland joining the European Union in 2003, say, or Japan hosting the Olympics in 1964. Sometimes the transition to a new age can be plotted even more precisely. Television became a force in Britain on the afternoon of June 3, 1953, when the country tuned in to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Modern medicine began on October 16, 1846, when Boston physicians performed the first surgery with anesthetic.
Baseball’s year is 1908; the place is the Polo Grounds; the day is September 23; and the event is the most controversial game in baseball history. In the late afternoon of that crisp autumn Wednesday, as the sunlight fades into the gloaming of dusk, a teenage rookie starting his first major-league game makes a mistake, and turns an interesting season into something much more. Riots and mayhem follow the contest, as well as affidavits, front-page headlines, and at least one death. The game itself would not be decided, officially, for two weeks. Forevermore known as “the Merkle game,” it is the hinge on which the season turns — and 1908 is the season in which baseball itself makes the turn into the modern era.
If that doesn’t make you want to read the book, I don’t know what will. I have the feeling that Murphy, who makes her living as an assistant managing editor for Fortune magazine, could have a long and noted career in baseball writing, if the notion struck her.
I now greatly regret having missed her speak at the SABR convention last year in St. Louis. It was a toss-up for me between her presentation and another, and I can see now that I made the wrong decision. I’ll be looking for future works from Murphy, whose biography amusingly states that “she doesn’t throw like a girl.” Well, she doesn’t write like a little girl, either — she’s extremely polished, entertaining, knowledgeable and almost poetic in her prose.
I’ll leave you with one more quote from “Crazy ‘08″, and I urge you to pick up a copy
A typical game in 1908 used perhaps six to ten balls (compared to eighty-plus now) because fouls hit into the stands are supposed to be returned to play.
Fans didn’t always comply, of course, but the law is on management’s side. During batting practice in Brooklyn in April 1908, Giants manager John McGraw sends police into the stands to intimidate people into returning fouls. Christy Mathewson even tattles on one fan, which isn’t very nice, and the poor fellow is arrested. It is not until 1923 that an eleven-year-old establishes the principle of salvage. Young Reuben Berman was jailed overnight for the crime of refusing to return a ball at Philadelphia’s Baker Bowl. In the kind of decision that reaffirms one’s faith in the American judicial system, a judge ruled that “a boy who gets a baseball in the bleachers to take home as a souvenir is acting on the natural impulse of all boys and is not guilty of larceny.” After that, foul balls were fair game.