Reviewing The League of Outsider Baseball

Gary Cieradkowski's The League of Outsider Baseball: An Illustrated History of Baseball's Forgotten Heroes is a collection of vignettes and vintage style illustrations that wanders through the depths of baseball to find some of the less known fascinating stories arising from our American pastime.  Baseball, like much of history, has narratives that can be hyper-local or transient in their importance.  These stories may be well known at the time, but generally fade away and become long forgotten.  For instance, I imagine many of you respond with a blank face when the phrase "Mystique and Aura" is mentioned.

Outsider Baseball tries to collect those peculiar twists on history in a way that is much warmer and largely lacking a thesis as a similar book we reviewed last year, the Devil Snake Curve.  In that work, baseball was used to illustrate the darker side of the game and how, coincidentally or not, it reflected American society.  In this work, the stated goal is to find those interesting and peculiar diamond-in-the-rough kind of stories that are tinged with colorful nostalgia.  Outsider Baseball fills one with the sense of the great wonder and bootstrap style American tales.

Of course, the focus is squarely placed on the narratives and less so on fine tuning the true reality of the sport.  Baltimore fans would find the story about Steve Dalkowski as quite familiar.  For the unknowing, Dalkowski is a storied figure in baseball for his absurd fastball and his absurd lack of control.  Accolades of his velocity were preached by such illuninaries as Pat Gillick, a former teammate, and Ted Williams, a Spring Training opponent.  After throwing a good hundred warm up pitches or so, the Orioles supposedly used a wind tunnel to measure his velocity with that tunnel set up at home plate.  It measured his fastball in the mid-90s, which means, using today's radar guns, a velocity out of the hand around 110.  An Aroldis Chapman without control.  Eventually, injury and alcohol destroyed his career and severely impaired the rest of his life.

There is an amazing story there and elements have been visited for movies like Bull Durham and The Rookie.  However, some of the stories are impossible.  In the book, it mentions Dalko's fastball as sinking and then rising due to the effect of his velocity.  This is not true.  Basically, it comes down to the Magnus effect.  The velocity in conjunction with the seams on a four seam fastball work together to provide an upward force.  This force does not cause the ball to rise, but for it to sink less rapidly.  An individual who is highly experienced in observing the trajectory of a baseball might confuse the less rapid descent as the ball lifting upward when it clearly is not.

The book though is able to outpace little missteps like this because stories are not exactly about reality, but of a misty remembered reality contributing to an emotional truth that fleshes out the kernels of fact.  The core of the short stories and nearly all of the trappings are amazingly well-researched and accurate.  It makes a great companion for an avid baseball fan who needs to find something to mention for the moments of needed small talk between innings or during a pitching change.

The League of Outsider Baseball
by Gary Cieradkowski
240 pages, Touchstone

Reviewing the Devil Snake's Curve

Josh Ostergaard's The Devil's Snake Curve is constructed of short vignettes ranging from svelte paragraphs to short essays of a couple pages in length with sources in case anyone wishes to delve deeper.  This work is a dark commemoration of America's pastime.  One that tries to tie in the author's own concepts of personal disappointment or failure with America's through the shared fascination with baseball.  The book connects many of those vignettes to show interconnectedness on unimagined levels.  For instance, three separate vignettes connect construction company and Yankees owner Del Webb as he constructs internment camps for Japanese (many have been part of diplomat baseball groups) to Webb's 1955 New York Yankee tour of Japan (including a passage on the atomic bombs) to the closing of Yankee stadium and it being attended by Babe Ruth's grand daughter who now resides in an Arizona retirement community built by Webb's company on the design he perfected from the internment camps.

Ostergaard haphazardly follows these threads of this pastime with the quilt of America.  At no time are you fully aware of where he is or what he is going to do other than a loose adherence to a logical chronology.  To those who are unfamiliar with the history of this country or how baseball has sat front and a little to the right of center, this is a fascinating book.  To others, it may be frustrating to resolve that baseball has always been part of the muck as most things are to some degree.  As you can imagine, these short wanderings can be wonderful challenges to your perspective, but partaking in too many can leave you with a literary hangover.  My suggestion would be to read a few and let those few stories linger for the rest of the day.

To some who frequent this site, it may be irritating that so little of this work considers the history of the Baltimore Orioles (or maybe we should be thankful).  The only inclusion of our storied franchise is a connection to 9/11 that Ostergaard includes in a very brief paragraph titled "Intentional Walk".  It mentions that a few days before 9/11, the extended Bin Laden family chartered a private plane and left America.  The previous group who chartered the plane was the Baltimore Orioles who were in the midst of a dreary season perked up by Cal Ripken Jr.'s farewell tour.  There is no commentary attached to that occurrence.  There is no artistic embellishment imagining any association between the two other than both groups chartered the same plane.  At times, he playfully tugs at the American Weave and toyingly suggests unlikely connections, but nothing here.

The Devil's Snake Curve reads, to me, like a more sophisticated version of meandering history that my friends and I engaged in back during my undergraduate.  We would try to tie connected events into a greater mechanistic hypothesis of how the world has worked.  One of the more common elements to riff on was religion, which is perhaps something all good Methodist teenagers do when opened up to college outside of your elder's view.  As young minds were trying to sound worldly and cocksure that riff on religion tried to offer a proof that religion is the bane of all existence. 

It is both an easy argument to make as well as one that is wrought with great error.  First off, it is easy because religion has been so intertwined with the existence of our species and likely before we ever were a species distinct from our ancestors.  You name an awful thing happening (i.e., expulsions, massacres, century long wars) and, well, religion is not too far away from it.  However, the ever presence of religion can make many a young mind falsely conclude that religion is the mechanism by which bad things happen.  Basically, societies do bad things because societies do bad things.  The trappings of that society may give the flavor of the unseemliness, but it is not the cause.

Like religion, baseball has been very much involved in the working of America.  Baseball has been on the front lines of the Monroe Doctrine.  Baseball has been taken with our country as we send our soliders and diplomats to foreign lands.  Baseball has been ever present as our own country makes sense of how we treat women and non-whites.  It has benefited from government corruption from the 1860s until now.  It has been pulled into musicals, movies, comics, and Sunday sermons.  With that level of presence in our society, those with a very liberal treatment of mathematics just might be encouraged to suggest that:

Baseball = America

I would not, but maybe you would.  Either way, The Devil's Snake Curve is an interesting foray into that equation.

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The Devil's Snake Curve by Josh Ostergaard
Coffee House Press
256 pages