Review by New York Times Review
CHICAGO CUB fans, that numerous and inexplicable cohort, have a weird rallying cry: "Remember 1908!" Not one of them really does remember that season, the last time the Cubs won the World Series. That is all the more reason for them to join Cait Murphy on her jaunty walk through that tumultuous season. All other baseball fans should tag along. So should anyone interested in the rough texture of this bumptious nation in the early 20th century, when 25 cents - not a piddling amount for a low-skilled factory worker making $7 a week - would get you into a ballpark where whiskey, waffles and pigs' knuckles were served. "Crazy '08" is a walk on the wild side: Brooklyn fans on rooftops would hurl sharpened umbrella shafts at visiting players in the outfield. When only boxing and horse racing competed with baseball for the public's attention, baseball stirred tribal feelings. Baseball fans relish arguments about which was the greatest this or that - greatest game, team, left-handed right fielder, right-handed left fielder, whatever. Murphy will ignite a dandy rhubarb with her subtitle: "How a Cast of Cranks, Rogues, Boneheads, and Magnates Created the Greatest Year in Baseball History." The author, an assistant managing editor at Fortune magazine, makes a powerful case for those last six words. In 1908 - the year a play titled "The Melting Pot" put that phrase into the American lexicon - Americans were unmelted. When the best player in the game, Honus Wagner, came to bat, a band might break into "Wacht am Rhein." When John McGraw's Giants visited Springfield, Ill., which had recently experienced a hideous race riot - the N.A.A.C.P. was born partly in response to it - McGraw was given, as a souvenir, a piece of the rope used to lynch a black man. Murphy reports that McGraw said the rope would replace a rabbit's foot as the Giants' good-luck emblem. That year, construction began on the first fireproof (concrete and steel) ballpark, Shibe Park in Philadelphia. With its terra-cotta casts and copper-trimmed roof, it embodied the City Beautiful movement's belief that attractive buildings would uplift the downtrodden. Furthermore, 1908 gave the world the greatest piece of music since Mozart ("Take Me Out to the Ball Game," of course) and an audacious and successful bit of flapdoodle (the campaign to convince the gullible that Cooperstown was the birthplace, and Abner Doubleday the father, of baseball). Between the white lines, baseball in 1908 also included: * Two pennant races in which a total of six teams were in contention with two days left. * The finest (Murphy says so; she does like laying down the law) pitching duel in baseball history. Ed Walsh, whose record in 1908 would be 40-15 with a 1.42 E.R.A., struck out 15 - at that time a record for a nine-inning game - and allowed only one run, which was unearned. But he lost because Addie Joss used just 74 pitches to throw a perfect game. * What was perhaps the best season any National League player would have in the 20th century. The Pittsburgh Pirates' Honus Wagner led the league in almost everything - you can look it up. "There ain't much to being a ballplayer," he said, "if you're a ballplayer." * The only doubleheader in which one pitcher pitched every inning and threw two shutouts. * A steal of first base. (A runner on first stole second, hoping the runner on third would score on the throw to second. But the catcher did not throw. So on the next pitch the runner on second ran back to first. Then he stole second again.) When crucial games were being played, tens of thousands around the nation packed concert halls and blocked streets to watch large electric scoreboards relaying telegraph information of the games' progress, batter by batter. Murphy provides delightful samples of 1908 baseball writing for newspapers: "There was a sharp report as Tommy caught the pellet squarely on its proboscis and sent it screeching toward the distant middle." In 1908, Murphy writes, the average player's salary was $2,500 - three times as much as what Chicago paid a primary-school teacher with seven years' experience. In 1910, almost a quarter of major leaguers had some college education, compared with 5 percent of the population. But it was not until the late '80s that Pennsylvania, with its history of mills and mines, was surpassed by sunny California as the incubator of the most big-league players. For many men - the kind who poured whiskey on spike wounds - baseball a century ago was a way to avoid life sentences of hard labor, so they played with grim intensity. In 1907, a player was "beaned so badly that he was given last rites on the field." (He survived.) The umpire - often there was only one - was given three balls at the beginning of the game. If these did not suffice, the home team was required to supply balls. If the home team was ahead, those supplied were apt to be old and lifeless. Murphy gives this example of how, in a pennant race decided by a one-game margin, the Cubs stole a game because the umpire Cy Rigler, working alone, was calling balls and strikes standing behind the pitcher: "In the fifth inning, the Cubs attempt a double steal with men on first and third and two out; Rigler turns to call the runner out at second. The run scores if the runner on third, Johnny Kling, touches home before the out is recorded. Rigler has no way of knowing when or even if Kling crosses the plate in time. He simply flips a mental coin and admits the run - and the Cubs beat the Cardinals 4-3. Even the Chicago press admits that Kling was several steps short." Between the Cubs, who were then a dynasty (no other team has ever won 530 games in five years, as the Cubs did from 1906 to 1910), and the New York Giants, this was, as Murphy says, an "era of really bad feelings." On Sept. 23, with the Giants leading the Cubs by half a game, the Giants' regular first baseman woke up with lumbago, so Fred Merkle, 19, got his first start of the season. After the tumultuous ninth inning, he would forever be known as Bonehead Merkle. Murphy's reconstruction of the jaw-dropping confusion that effectively sent the Cubs to the World Series is lucid and hilarious, and justifies her assertion - baseball fans do love such judgments - that the game involved "perhaps the single most courageous act" ever by an umpire. He ruled that on an infield covered with fans and several balls more or less in play, Merkle never touched second. All baseball fans know something about this game; few know the astonishing details Murphy supplies, including a brazen attempt to bribe the umpires before the game was replayed, because the Merkle game had been declared a tie. Murphy's book is rich in trivia - not that anything associated with baseball is really trivial. Did you know, for example, that when the Yankees were still the Highlanders (they played at the highest point in Manhattan) they adopted their interlocking NY lettering "based on the Tiffany design for the Police Department's Medal of Honor"? Readers of "Crazy '08" can almost smell the whiskey and taste the pigs' knuckles. This rollicking tour of that season will entertain readers interested in social history, will fascinate students of baseball and will cause today's Cub fans to experience an unaccustomed feeling - pride - as their team enters the 2007 season, the 99th season of its rebuilding effort. Twenty-five cents would get you into a ballpark where whiskey, waffles and pigs' knuckles were served. George F. Will is a syndicated columnist.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review
Fans knew they were seeing the end of a marvelous season when they watched the Cubs claim the National League pennant by defeating the New York Giants on October 8, 1908. But with the advantage of historical perspective, Murphy recognizes that the '08 fans actually witnessed baseball's decisive turn toward modernity. In a tale peopled with colorful characters--including the regal Christy Mathewson and the boozy Hal Chase--Murphy unfolds the formative events of this frenetic year. Readers will relish the infamous Merkle game --a game apparently won by the Giants, but later declared a tie because of a base-running blunder. Almost as riveting is the season-ending replay of the controversial tie, a replay that so aroused fans that some snuck into the game through the sewers, and many stayed to assault the victorious visitors. A writer of exceptional verve when recounting the heroics of the diamond, Murphy evinces a shrewd intelligence when scanning the cultural forces remaking the world beyond the ballpark. She unravels the malign dynamics behind Ty Cobb's violence against blacks, and she limns the parallels between early-twentieth-century anxieties about immigrant anarchists and twenty-first-century fears of foreign terrorists. A book that will long claim the attention of serious sports enthusiasts. --Bryce Christensen Copyright 2007 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
It's been almost a century since the loopy shenanigans of 1908 that produced what Fortune magazine editor Cait Murphy calls "the year that baseball comes of age," but the resultant drama has hardly faded with time. Although baseball books tend to sag with nostalgia, Murphy's wisecracking yarn digs right into the era's brawling, vivid ugliness with little regard for such niceties, and is all the better for it. Her book is so rife with corruption, greed, stupidity and downright weirdness that it makes today's sport of sanctimony and clean behavior look positively sleepy in comparison. This isn't surprising, given that 1908 was not just the last year that the shockingly victorious Chicago Cubs made it to the World Series, but also the year when a game would be called a tie through sheer Rashomon-like confusion and when a game day riot would take the lives of two people. The titanic matches between the rival Cubs and New York Giants are thrilling enough, but what really makes Murphy's book an addictive pleasure is the joy the author takes in the colorful asides where she fills in the chaotic blanks of an America discovering not just the joy of its national pastime but its very character. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
With adroitness and flair, Murphy (Fortune magazine) revisits this fantastic season in baseball history, which has been certainly studied and celebrated before but never with her skill. This was a year with such driving forces as Ty Cobb, Honus Wagner, Napoleon Lajoie, Christy Mathewson, and an aging Cy Young. And it was the last time the Cubs won the series. Murphy mixes irreverence, insight, and erudition to produce this treat. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
