Final Thoughts on Chicago Sports

Book Review: Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty, and the Say Hey Kid

I like reading sports books, as you may well remember from this post a few weeks ago.  One thing I realized when compiling that list is how baseball-centric my reading choices are (at least when it comes to sports books).  I enjoy football as much as anybody, but I bet I've read five baseball books for every football book I've read.  Why does baseball seem to be winning the literature war?  I don't have a definitive answer, but I bet there are a number of factors:

• The reverence for the past.  Nobody really cares about about football or basketball from the first half of the 1900s at all, probably because those games have changed so much in the last fifty years.  With baseball, the game that Babe Ruth played still looks an awful lot like the game you see today.  
• The casual pace of the game.  There's no constant ticking clock, and a game has time to get into a rhythm just like a great dramatic movie.  Three up, three down.  Bases loaded, nobody out.  Game-ending strikeouts.  Walk-offs.
• The length of the season.  You can cram a lot of stories into a 162 game season.
• The stats.  Every single pitch is tracked and the outcome of every single play will be captured in the box score forever.

Football may be America's New Pastime, but baseball is still in its blood.

With that in mind, I got a copy of a new book by John Rosengren last week titled "Hammerin' Hank, George Almighty, and the Say Hey Kid: The Year that Changed Baseball Forever."  It's about the 1973 season and how it was a pivotal season in baseball history.  I was skeptical that the season really "changed the game forever," because, as previously noted, the game in 1972 still looks an awful lot like the game today.  I was even more skeptical after I read the introduction where the author more or less stated that this was THE YEAR for him.  What I mean by THE YEAR is that it's basically the year that the author fell in love with the game.  For me, that year was 1987. 

I'd been basically watching Cubs baseball with my Dad since birth, but I didn't really pay attention until 1984.  I started to memorize the lineups and really started to comprehend the nuances of the game.  Over the next few years, I discovered my favorite player (Ryno), started collecting baseball cards, started looking at box scores in the newspaper daily, and generally became a well-informed fan.  But in 1987 the arrival of Andre Dawson and his 49 homers took my fandom to a whole new level.  What can I say? I dug the long ball.  And I started to love the game. 

So anyways, 1973 was pretty much THE YEAR for the author, so I was leery of his decision to chronicle that particular season.  Then I dug into the book.  Turns out Rosengren is probably right; an awful lot of big things happened that year:

• Hank Aaron closed in on Babe Ruth's career home run record.  The intense media pressure, not to mention all of the hate mail he received, was a lot for Hank to endure.  Not only was Hank receiving death threats, but so were his parents and his kids.  Can you imagine?  He ended the season just one home run short of Ruth.
• The legendary Willie Mays played his last season with the Mets, and he was a shell of his former self.
• Reggie Jackson won the MVP award and his first postseason MVP award (with the A's) on his way to becoming Mr. October.  Jackson was a new breed of superstar.  His hubris (which was not unlike your typical T.O. of today) was a stark contrast to the stoic, classy Mays (and Aaron for that matter).  They squared off in the World Series in a "changing of the guard" of sorts.
• George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees, bringing league-high payrolls and a new era of meddling ownership to baseball.  Not only was he just getting his feet wet in the Major League ranks, but he also was convicted of campaign contribution laws and obstruction in '73.  Yes, King George was a convicted felon.
• Baseball was still recovering from it's first strike (in 1972), suffered its first lockout, and was two years away from the official start of free agency. 
• The DH was introduced.  This is a change that affected how the game was played on the field greatly.  A lot of people still think the leagues should decide and conform to a single rule.  DH for both leagues or DH for neither.  I like it the way it is. It adds flavor. 
• Nolan Ryan threw a pair of no-hitters on his way to a single-season record 383 strikeouts. 
• Yogi Berra uttered his famous phrase, "It ain't over till it's over" about his Mets team that made a miracle run down the stretch to win a tight pennant race.  Actually, he literally said "It's never over until it's over" but the media tweaked it and ran with it.  I guess Yogi was right when he said "I never said half the things I said."
• Mustaches!  Charlie Finley, the crazy/cheapskate jerk of an owner and master of self-promotion, gave his (A's) players a bonus if they would grow a mustache, violating the unwritten rule of no facial hair in the big leagues.  Seriously, there were virtually no mustaches in baseball until 1973.

What I'm going to take away from this book is the stories.  That's what I like about most baseball books, really. It's a chance to sit down and enjoy a piece of the game's rich history.  Going through this book, I felt like I lived through the entire season, even though it was two years before I was born.  You don't really get that from looking at old box scores and baseball-reference.com.  Now I fully understand what it was like to watch Reggie Jackson at the peak of his powers, why people hang their head when talking about the final seasons of Willie Mays, and how George Steinbrenner built his ivory tower.  It's a good read and worth your time.