New Book Tells Jackie Robinson’s Life Story

Some results of the 1994 baseball strike:

Attendance at major-league baseball games declined.

Television ratings for baseball games declined.

The number of boys signing up for Little League declined.

And to the above we can now add:

Both the number of published books about baseball and the number of baseball books sold have declined since the strike.

“Oh, yes, I can confirm that for sure,” said Ty Wilson, a buyer for Tower Books. “It was due to the baseball strike. In particular, we don’t seem to sell the preseason books - those books for the rotisserie leagues - as much as we used to.”

Wilson went on to say that “golf has taken over as the most published sport.”

So instead of reviewing this season’s new crop of baseball books, here instead are reviews of the eight new biographies of Tiger Woods …

Just kidding.

Just because the baseball owners have behaved like venal and stupid robber barons, and the players like spoiled and pampered rich kids doesn’t make baseball any less enjoyable to play, watch - and read about.

Most appropriately, in the season honoring Jackie Robinson’s integration of major-league baseball 50 years ago, Jules Tygiel has edited an excellent compilation, “The Jackie Robinson Reader: Perspectives on an American Hero” (Dutton, $23.95). Tygiel is the University of California, San Francisco, historian who in 1983 wrote the single best work on Robinson and his legacy, “Baseball’s Great Experiment.”

That book is more of a social history than a biography, so in the new collection Tygiel has assembled magazine and newspaper articles, as well as excerpts from books, that tell Robinson’s life story. They start with Robinson’s brother Mack and sister Willa Mae reminiscing about Jackie growing up poor and tough in Pasadena and former teammates reminding us what a gifted all-around athlete he was at UCLA.

They continue, using contemporary newspaper stories and oral histories, to describe what Robinson went through as he first broke the segregation barrier in the minor leagues with the Montreal Royals in 1946 and then the majors with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Other excerpts present highlights from Robinson’s career with the Dodgers, as well as his post-baseball life as a father, businessman and civil rights leader. They include a fascinating exchange of combative open letters with Malcolm X in 1963, in which the two men debated such issues as integration and the value of that year’s March on Washington.

One of the most moving stories in Tygiel’s reader is an excerpt from Roger Kahn’s memorable “The Boys of Summer,” the 1971 book about the Dodgers of the early ‘50s and their lives after their baseball careers ended. It’s fitting that this year Kahn has brought out a new book, “Memories of Summer: When Baseball was an Art, and Writing About it a Game” (Hyperion, $23.95), that adds to our understanding of Robinson’s unbridled courage, what he had to go through and what he accomplished.

Kahn began covering the Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune in 1952 and became a close friend of Robinson. Even though Robinson had been with the Dodgers since 1947, and by the early ‘50s had several other African American players on his team, he still faced tremendous hostility on the field and off.

Kahn reveals what the atmosphere was like, and the attitudes of different white players toward Robinson and the other minority ballplayers. Kahn doesn’t flinch from discussing the racism that also existed at the Herald Tribune and Newsweek (where he later worked) that prevented him from writing, at least in those publications, about such things as the segregated hotels Robinson and other African American players encountered in various American cities.

There’s also a lot of great baseball writing in “Memories of Summer.” It’s filled with Kahn’s vivid recreations of such events as the 1952 and 1954 World Series, as well as revealing stories about Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle and Leo Durocher.

Another new book that gives readers this type of immediacy is “Covering the Bases: The Most Unforgettable Moments in Baseball in the Words of the Writers and Broadcasters Who Were There” (Chronicle Books, $14.95 paper). This collection, edited by Benedict Cosgrove, covers the field from “Merkle’s Boner” in 1908, when a base-running error by a young New York Giants first baseman named Fred Merkle led (indirectly) to the Giants losing the National League pennant, to the Baltimore Orioles’ Cal Ripken playing in his record-setting 2,131st consecutive game in 1995.

These aren’t magazine articles or book excerpts in which writers had the advantages of distance and, more important, time to compose their prose; rather, the articles reprinted here were written on tight deadlines for daily newspapers. Or, in the case of the radio broadcasts, they were unrehearsed accounts of events that went out live over the airwaves.

Other new baseball books of note:

“The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball” by David Nemec (Donald I. Fine, $49.95): This large volume covers the period from 1871, when the first major league, the National Association, was formed, to 1900, the last year that the National League (founded in 1876) was the sole major league. (The American League came on the scene in 1901.) In addition to presenting illuminating stories and annual summaries of play, and rare photographs and illustrations of baseball’s pioneers, the author endeavors to list every team roster and every ballplayer who played professionally in the years under consideration. Given the obstacles involved in obtaining such statistics, this is a formidable achievement.

“Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers From 1870 to Today” by Bill James (to be published May 14, Scribner, $30): Any new book by the combative and always challenging author of “The Historical Baseball Abstract,” a revisionist history of baseball, and “The Politics of Glory,” the strongest critique ever written about the baseball Hall of Fame, is a welcome event. Here James presents incisive discussions of the game’s most famous managers, men like Casey Stengel, Earl Weaver and Tommy Lasorda, studying such issues as how they used their personnel, their game strategies, and how they handled their pitching staffs.

“Tales From the Dugout: The Greatest True Baseball Stories Ever Told” by Mike Shannon (NTC/ Contemporary Publishing Company, $18.95): Not to be confused with the Mike Shannon who played for the St. Louis Cardinals in the 1960s, this Mike Shannon is the editor of the baseball literary quarterly “Spitball.” Since there are dozens of baseball anecdote books already available, Shannon promises to include only new stories. That’s not entirely the case; he repeats a story from Roger Kahn about Roger Maris that Kahn himself tells, slightly differently, in “Memories of Summer.” But for the most part, this assortment of quips and stories makes for lively reading.

“Chasing the Dream: My Lifelong Journey to the World Series” by Joe Torre with Tom Verducci (Bantam, $23.95): One of the few big-name baseball autobiographies this year (Cal Ripken’s is due later this spring), this one reveals the Yankees manager to be just what most of us already know: intelligent, modest, loves his family, knows his baseball. And as he proved last season, contrary to Leo Durocher’s famous dictum, some nice guys do finish first.