I'm sitting in front of a west–facing window, looking roughly in the direction of Lake Michigan, and it is snowing and blowing. My driveway was under six inches of slush yesterday, and today the last 50 feet to the garage was like driving across icy moguls. But, ah, to the south, in the lands of cacti and palm trees, men are squatting in catcher's gear, feeling the whump! of fastballs tossed by other grown men 60 feet and 6 inches away. Baseball has stirred from its ursine slumber and crawled out into the bright sunshine. For lovers of the pastoral game, it is high time.

Not only has it been a long winter here in the north country, but we've suffered through the incessant bad news of substance abuse, the release of the Mitchell Report, and the sleazy drama of the congressional hearings. Ugh.

So what is the path back to some measure of unmitigated, un–asterisked love of the game? One way, not without its risks, is to hear stories of the past, of baseball's "Golden Age." The danger of nostalgia is that we might cover over one set of problems in order to escape from our own present woes—so, for instance, the racial struggles and tyrannical management of the Fifties and Sixties might easily be downplayed. And since the players themselves are not always the best historians, I approached We Would Have Played for Nothing: Baseball Stars of the 1950s and 1960s Talk About the Game They Loved with a bit of a skeptical eye. This second volume of The Baseball Oral History Project, compiled by none other than former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent (yes, there was life before Bud Selig!), has some of the recurring drawbacks of oral history—the stylistic weakness of the interview/monologue, the rambling nature of reminiscence, some unwieldy repetition. Vincent's desire is to match the tremendous liveliness of Larry Ritter's interviews from the early Sixties, of players from as far back as the Teens and Twenties, that became the book The Glory of Their Times. Ritter's work was groundbreaking— he had to hunt down many of the old–time players he interviewed in the depths of their retirement obscurity—and the first–person accounts of fighting with Ty Cobb or breaking a young Babe Ruth into the fraternity were pricelessly delivered by the likes of Smokey Joe Wood and Goose Goslin on the still available original recordings that predated the book. The Glory of Their Times is a true and lasting piece of Americana.

But if Fay Vincent has been unable to measure up to his exemplar, he is not to be much maligned. He has delivered some good interviews, a few great ones even (especially the chapter with quirky Braves ace Lew Burdette—just in the nick of time, it turns out), and a scattering of wonderful anecdotes. The lineup moves roughly chronologically from Ralph Branca, Dodger pitcher and the victim of Bobby Thomson's 1951 "Shot Heard Round the World," up to figures such as Frank and Brooks Robinson. If the volume is a little Yankee–light for my liking (only Whitey Ford chimes in for the Pinstripes), Vincent has nevertheless caught up with players who were in the midst of many of the significant events of their era, so the individual stories intertwine with lore and generally known history in illuminating ways.

 One of the threads that I tried to follow throughout the interviews was the presence, as teammate and nemesis and hero and even enemy, of Jackie Robinson in the lives of these ballplayers. The interview with Branca, who won 21 games at age 21 in 1947, the year Robinson's came to the Dodgers and broke the color–barrier in baseball, reveals the kinship and adoration of one who witnessed Jackie's daily travails firsthand. Branca relates how Robinson got after black fans who naively cheered on his every move that year: "He popped up and they screamed and yelled. He turned and he got on their case, said, 'What are you yelling at? I popped up. Learn this game. Stop acting like fools.' And that would be Jackie."

 Another Dodger—and another rookie from that famous 1947 team—whom Vincent interviewed was Duke Snider. Patrolling Ebbets Field while Willie Mays took charge uptown at the Polo Grounds and Mickey Mantle did the same across the river at Yankee Stadium, Snider helped make New York City in the 1950's the world capital of centerfield excellence. Duke offers a deeper history than most on Jackie's wonderful athleticism, since he was a high school student in L.A. at the time Jackie starred in three sports at Pasadena Junior College and UCLA: "He could stop and start faster than anybody I've ever seen. He had a kickoff [return] one time against Compton in football when he was at Pasadena, and he reversed his field twice, and the third time he came around he went for a touchdown, 80 some yards, but he actually ran about 175 yards, because he dodged everybody." Duke notes that, those first weeks of their mutual rookie year in Brooklyn, "I wasn't prepared to see what Jackie had to go through." Yet, that suffering so close at hand seemed to bond the Dodger team, and Jackie was the undisputed catalyst and leader of that team's maturation into a perennial contender. Snider recalls that reckoning simply: "I will tell you the one thing that I remember more than anything else: Jackie comes into the clubhouse, goes to his locker, disrobes, and puts his baseball uniform on. And when he put that baseball uniform on, he put his game face on with it. You could see it in his eyes. You could see it in his eyes that he was ready to go out there and beat somebody. And that I think helped a lot of us in realizing what the game was all about."

 Several of the other interviewees gave interesting, even moving snippets on Jackie; Robin Roberts, in selecting the best players he saw at every position during his long stint as the Philllies ace, notes as an aside: "Jackie? I wouldn't pick him at a position. I just want him on my team. He could play wherever he wants." Carl Erskine, another Dodger teammate, mentions his awe when, after pitching against the big–league club in an exhibition game while still a minor–leaguer, he was approached in the dugout: "And a voice said, 'Where's Erskine?' And a guy said, 'Hey, Carl.' And I said, 'Yeah?' And I saw it was Jackie Robinson … . And he came and shook my hand. And he said, 'Son, I hit against you twice today. You're not going to be in this league very long. You're going to be with the Dodgers soon.' Well, by mid–July, I had won fifteen games in Fort Worth. I was called to the Dodgers. And when I went in the locker room early to get a locker, I was there by myself. When the regular Dodger bus came and the guys were coming in, Jackie was the first guy to my locker. He shook my hand, again, and he says, 'I told you, you couldn't miss.' " Such fraternal, even paternal, kindness reveals an angle on Robinson that we haven't often seen.

Intriguingly, perhaps the best black ballplayer of the generation that followed Jackie's retirement, and the man who eventually broke the next color barrier by becoming the first black manager—namely, Frank Robinson—reveals in his interview that Jackie Robinson's courage was not only inspiring, but perhaps inimitable: "Jackie Robinson meant, at that time in 1947, that if I had the ability to play Major League Baseball, or professional baseball, that I could have the opportunity. That's what it meant at that time. I think Jackie Robinson's contribution to baseball was tremendous, there's no doubt about that. But I think his contribution off the field, in our society, was even more because I think he brought his country together at that time with his baseball play in the way he conducted himself. People said, 'Well, could you think you could have done that, what he went through?' I said, 'No way.' There's no way that I could put up with it and then do what he did. I don't know how he did it, but he was the right man."

Two of the most interesting interviews came from players who battled Robinson tooth and nail through a decade of National League pennant races: the Giants' Bill Rigney, more famous later on as a manager than he was as an infielder, and the Braves' pitcher Lew Burdette. Rigney offers the counterpoint to Branca's account of the 1951 Giants–Dodgers death–struggle. Branca emphasizes the sign–stealing scandal, corroborated a few years ago in the Wall Street Journal, which may or may not have tipped off Bobby Thomson on the inside fastball he drove out of the Polo Grounds, winning the pennant for the Giants in the most dramatic fashion possible. Rigney remembered Robinson mocking the Giants earlier in the year, through the thin clubhouse wall at the Polo Grounds, and there is a bit of a vengeful tone when Rigney recounts the result of the Giants' charge at the end of the season: "when we got on to Ebbets Field that day, Mr. Big Mouth, Jackie, was in the batting cage hitting … and I said, 'Jackie, turn around, you'll never guess who's here.' And he wouldn't turn around. That was the first play–off game." Yet, when Rigney reflects back on his whole career, he finishes with this confession: "I thought one of the worst things I did or one of the things I didn't do—and I regretted all my life—is that that opening day in the Polo Grounds on the eighteenth of April in '47 when Jackie Robinson hit his first home run, I didn't walk over to him and say, 'Hey, I'm Bill Rigney. I just want to shake your hand and wish you the best of luck because it's not going to be easy for you, but I wish you the best,' and leave it at that. And I regretted it all my life that I didn't do it, because I knew I was too late, you know, after I got to know him."

An even more poignant manifestation of the competitor/companion effect that Jackie seemed to embody comes in the interview with Lew Burdette, which I found the most entertaining and thoughtful in the book. Burdette's description of the mind–games that he played with hitters, many of whom were convinced that he threw a spitball because of jerky machinations on the mound, is hilarious. His other quirks, such as breaking the hold that Orlando Cepeda had on him as a hitter by having the catcher tell the Baby Bull what was coming, or his decision, along with catcher Del Crandall, to occasionally pitch whole games without using any signs at all, provide refreshing fodder for those a bit wearied by the hyper–serious modes of modern pitching and catching.

But when Burdette tells of his tenuous on–field relationship with Robinson, and the face–to–face conclusion of it, he is dead serious, and surprisingly lyrical: "[Jackie] tried to run me over once when I was covering first. He went over top of me once, but I raised up and threw him on his back. I mean, we had a lot of it for a lot of years, and I got all kinds of hate mail, you know. Racial. 'Dirty racial slurring degenerate' and all that stuff. And my son even got into a fight in school because of it. But when I found out that Jackie was not going to go to the West Coast, I asked Walter Alston, 'Is Jackie not going to the coast?' He said, 'No.' I said, 'Well, can I talk to him in that little room behind your dugout?' He said, 'You promise me you won't fight?' I said, 'I promise. But if he's not going up, I want to settle something with him.' He said, 'Promise me you won't fight.' I said, 'Yeah.' He went back in the dugout in the clubhouse, and we were over in our clubhouse, and Walter came right in, came up to me, and he said, 'Jackie says he'll meet you there in five minutes. Promise me you won't fight?' 'Yeah, I promise, Walter.' So I went up there and Jackie comes in in a little bit, and he said, 'Hi, Lew.' I said, 'Hi, Jack.' He said, 'What do you want to see me for?' And I said, 'I want to tell you something; that you pulled the best play that I've ever had against me. You laid a perfect bunt down, scored the tying run, and that's better than popping up or something like that, you know. But I thought it was a very brilliant play. But I turned around and called you what I would call my mother for bunting in that situation. I called you a 'dirty bunting so–and–so' and you charged me on the mound.' I said, 'I wouldn't change anything, because you and I had some great collisions down the first–base line.' He said, 'I don't think I got the best of that.' I said, 'Well, I wanted you to know that I understand you're not going to the Pacific Coast, and I wanted you to know what a great play you pulled on me, and you thought I said something about being black.' I said, 'But I didn't.' He said, 'Gee whiz.' He said, 'We went through all that stuff and you didn't even say it?' He said, 'You hurt me several times.' And I said, 'Well, you tried to hurt me, but I had the advantage because I had the bulk.' And he said, 'Lew, I'm sorry.' I said, 'Don't be. I enjoyed it.' He said, laughing, 'I understand that.' He said, 'You make me feel a lot better.' " Okay, it's not exactly Achilles and Priam reconciling in the last book of the Iliad, but there is a beauty to this rapprochement that stirs the heart.

***

 Turning from We Would Have Played for Nothing to the latest installment from the high priests of statistical sophistication, 'the Baseball Prospectus team of experts,' and their thick tome It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over: The Baseball Prospectus Pennant Race Book, edited by Steve Goldman, I thought at first that I would be trading the allusive power of story for the hard empiricism of the number–crunchers. Having previously reviewed a book of essays by this innovative squad, I knew that I was in for elaborate formulae, charts and graphs a–plenty, and a Soviet–style panoply of acronyms with strangely affecting phonetics, such as VORP (the crucial measure of a players worth over a completely average replacement player), and WARP (Wins Above Replacement Player, a yet–more–elaborate calculation that gets at the bottom–line: how many wins did the player create?). These are new kinds of numbers, generated by the desire to show real worth, rather than just let us live by the "nutrition–less bread" of Batting Average, RBI, and ERA (all of which delude more than clarify).

Enough said on the numbers racket, because I was wrong about this book! The authors are interested in story, the true story, the deep–down story of reasons, besides (but not precluding) luck and cruel twists of fate, for why several great pennant races in baseball history were great. And whether you go numbers–heavy, digging into the charts and taking stock of the VORPs and WARPs, or numbers–light, skimming the charts and muttering, "This is why I teach English" frequently under your breath, you will be enlightened by this book. These mathematician–writers are able to captivate us with pinpoint moments, exact pitches or managerial moves or mental errors or emotional collapses (or all of the above) that decided the outcomes of entire seasons. Horrible moments for the eternal goats (such as Ralph Branca giving up the "shot heard round the world," or Gene Mauch micromanaging the 1964 Phillies into a late–season collapse, or Fred Merkle's boneheaded play that seemed to sink the 1908 Giants) are shown as only small pieces of much more complex puzzles. Likewise, legendary feats like Carl Yastrzemski's final two weeks of torrid hitting for the Red Sox miracle in 1967, or Tug McGraw's emotional bravado with the "You Gotta Believe" 1973 Mets, are scrutinized and "right–sized"—fine feats, yes, but surrounded always by a broader context. The writers thus walk a fine line between clarification and revisionist demythologizing, and I think they carry the task out with a healthy balance of both love of science and love of mystery. In some ways, their work is more true to Medievalism than to Modernity.

 I can only give a few highlights of this elaborate, somewhat diffuse volume, so I'll just trot out my favorite quirky points. Jay Jaffe's essay "The Replacement–Level Killers" reveals how managers sticking it out with certain veteran players during a pennant race can do irreparable damage, all in the name of loyalty and supposed worth. So the Angels use of Bob Boone as their catcher throughout the 1984 AL West race, with his supposed defensive acumen used as a cover for a horrific year at the plate (hitting only .202 and slugging a mere .262!), led to a VORP of –24.1, a pennant–killing formula. Not quite as numerically destructive was Don Zimmer's perverse insistence on playing Butch Hobson at third base for the 1978 Red Sox, victims of the Yankee charge and the "Boston Massacre." We read with fascination this description: "Revered by Zimmer as a gamer, Hobson played the field despite bone chips that locked up his elbow when he threw and—cringe!—had to be rearranged after each play. He made 43 errors, was 21 runs below average, and fielded .899, becoming the first regular to break the .900 barrier since 1916, when gloves were little more than padded mittens." It's just this mix of numerical exactitude and rhetorical flourish that gives It Ain't Over its flair, a combination that gets at baseball's distinctive appeal as the sport of both head and heart.

 Because baseball is a game of at least supposed fairness, with the same strike zone for everyone and the same number of chances for each team, the story of 1972 AL East race stands out like a jagged, unnatural feature of the landscape. Clifford J. Corcoran's essay "The Book of Job," which leads off Chapter 7, hints at the dark questions of theodicy bound up in the first strike–shortened season, now mainly forgotten because of the confusions of the 1981 strike and its double season, and especially the brutal amputation of the pennant races and World Series due to the 1994 strike. What the 1972 strike did, with the unwieldy and uneven sets of cancellations during the two–week deadlock at the beginning of the season, was leave teams playing different numbers of games, and hence, at season's end, the Tigers and Red Sox each lost 70 games, but the Tigers played one more game and won one more game, and hence took the divisional crown in an ugly numeric conundrum. Corcoran's essay traces carefully the final weeks of the season, when Baltimore and New York were both hanging around as well, and Corcoran notes that many other small decisions and events, like Tolstoy's "calculus of history," added up to the Boston failure. The mid–season trade of Sparky Lyle to the rival Yankees for first baseman Danny Cater not only gave the Yankees a key to their bullpen (and robbed the Red Sox of their closer) but also caused the Red Sox to keep hot first base prospect Cecil Cooper in the minor leagues, while Cater did next to nothing. Double Whammy! Even on the field, the minutiae, often the ironic minutiae, began to add up to disaster for the Red Sox. In the final three–game series at Detroit, the Red Sox had the pennant in their crosshairs if they won two out of three. Game one was against their nemesis, Mickey Lolich, the Tigers rotund ace, but somehow, down 1 to 0, Yastrzemski got a pitch to hit with two men on, and crushed it off the top of the wall, the ball bouncing halfway back to the infield. One run scored, and the venerable Luis Aparicio was rounding third with Yaz chugging behind him when Aparicio slipped and began scrambling around. As Yaz narrated it, "He comes back to third and I'm on third and I'm still thinking I'm going to go. So I pushed him off the bag and said, 'Luis, you can still make it.' And he started running and gets halfway and falls down again. I was all set, even watching the relay, before he fell down the second time, to still go for an inside–the–park home run and follow him in. I just couldn't believe it. One of the greatest base runners who ever lived. You don't mind getting beat, but not to have the best base runner the game had ever seen fall down twice going from third to home." The Red Sox never took the lead, and then lost the next night on two uncharacteristic errors. The on–field ironies were thus the icing on the proverbial cake of the final irony, that, having won the third game, they had no final chance to tie the Tigers, since they played one less game that year. The strike had added to the Red Sox curse in new and seemingly unjust ways, but, as Corcoran ends his piece: "Sometimes, kids, opportunities aren't equal; the world isn't always fair."

In many shades and nuances, this is the message of this book, that numbers and percentages and normal expectations don't always measure up to reality, a notion well–captured in the introduction, where chief editor Steven Goldman notes that "Baseball is the most accessible of sports: The players are not hidden behind masks or beneath helmets, not blurred by constant motion, but are knowable. In no other sport are the outcomes of games and races so susceptible to individual quirks, strengths, weaknesses, and prejudices. If 'it ain't over 'til it's over,' it's because the players' very humanity skews the odds, upsets predictions, causes them to delight and disappoint." And so the human stories—and, without too much of a stretch, the opportunity to reflect on the wonderful mystery of humanness—are the chief pleasures of these two very different baseball books, and of baseball itself.

One other brief comment of storytelling baseball books—I have found in the children's section of my local library (my kids are young and rambunctious, so I rarely get out of that wing!) several gems, including books about Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, and a very funny history in cartoons of old–time baseball. But I recently found a stunningly beautiful text called We Are the Ship: The Story of Negro League Baseball, written and illustrated by artist Kadir Nelson, the recipient of a Caldecott Honor and several NAACP Image Awards for his illustrations of books about Harriet Tubman and Duke Ellington, and books by Spike Lee and Will Smith. After looking at the exquisite paintings of players and scenes from the Negro League's past, I can see why he has been so lauded. The text of the book, Nelson's first effort at writing, is good, broken as it is into nine innings, moving chronologically from the early days up to Jackie Robinson, and told in a discursive, anecdotal style that captures the rambling, hand–to–mouth lives of these great and often forgotten players. But it is the paintings, the portraits more or less, that are most captivating. They somehow show the strength, the suffering, the toughness, and the pride of these men, from the cover portrait of Josh Gibson, the "black Babe Ruth," with his biceps flexed, showing sheer power, but his face sad, showing the frustration of never playing in the Major Leagues. The portrait of Willie Foster of the Homestead Grays, in street clothes in a Pittsburgh neighborhood, with four little boys carrying his spikes and his glove, is stirring beyond words. Finally, the tableau that Nelson offers Josh Gibson in the foreground, on deck and waiting, while Satchel Paige delivers a pitch to Buck Leonard in the near distance, with the distant stands of Griffith Stadium in D.C. swelling with thousands more fans than likely ever saw a Senators game there, hints clearly and achingly at what baseball missed by the disallowing of all the greatest players of the world to compete together.

***

 This great experiment, of true integration of the game with all the best players in the world, continues right up to this moment, and as we look toward the 2008 season—the umps will be yelling "Play ball!" any day now—the faces and names of a score of nationalities peer back at us, with more to be revealed, perhaps, at the Summer Olympics in Beijing. Apparently, the home Chinese team has been thriving under intense tutelage, and the Latin American and other East Asian teams are gunning for medals as well. I read a recent interview with the Tigers' triple–threat centerfielder Curtis Granderson, who mentioned his tour of South African and the flourishing of baseball in such outlying realms. We will see if the Cubs' massive investment in the latest Japanese imported star, their new right fielder Kosuke Fukudome, will give them a boost anything like the fabled Ichiro gave to the Mariners in his "rookie" year.

Let us begin there, smack dab in the middle of things in the NL Central, and let us assume that this infusion of polished talent will take the perennially disappointed Cubbies and their loyal fans strugglers all the way to the Promised Land—or at least to the divisional crown, which Chicago will snatch away from the Cardinals with their damaged star, Albert Pujols, and the scrappy but unconvincing Brewers. NL West, you say? Will Joe Torre continue the trend of successful Yankee managers of yore being unable to replicate their Bronxian success, as he settles into (ach! the horror to a Yankee fan who came of age in the late '70s!) Dodger blue? No, but the untimely rise of the Rockies last year will be exposed as a fluke, and the D'Backs will struggle as well, as the Padres ride young pitching all the way up the hill this year. The NL East shows the Mets usurping the Yankees usual place as the New York team spending huge money in free agency to shore up a desperate run under impatient management—but will Johan Santana's golden left arm put them over the top? I say they find the wildcard, but that the Phillies, stocking up on power hitters in their micro–dimensional park, batter the fences and take the division, with the Braves retooling and the Marlins starting half the Tigers' minor–leaguers after trading their core again! Playoff time will find the Cubs wreaking vengeance on the Mets for the 1969 pennant snatching, and the Padres outlasting the Phillies in a full–series. The Padres–Cubs NL showdown, 1984 revisited, will see a seventh game, a Peavey–Zambrano battle with an unlikely hero hitting a solo shot in the tenth for the 1-0 win and the pennant—but for whom?! Wait and see … we must traffic through the American League first.

 In the AL East (we'll reverse our order of prediction), the Red Sox look good—too good, in my incredibly biased estimation, and I think Josh Beckett's heavy innings last year and Schilling's advancing age take them both down for 10 or so starts. Hence, the patchwork Yankees (if you can call $200 plus million dollars on the payroll "patchwork") sneak away with the division. The Devil Rays, in breaking news, will stink. In the AL West, Seattle seems primed, the Angels are already very good, but I'm choosing Texas, getting a little proximate magic as the Cowboys move into their new facilities next door in Arlington. I'd talk about the Ranger pitching staff if I could name any of them … . Hmmm, no, don't second–guess these picks! So that leaves the AL Central, and since I've lived in Michigan for a decade, and since I love the grizzled sagacity of Jim Leyland, and since the Tigers picked up a front–line starter and a middle–of–the lineup star when they traded for the Marlins' Dontrelle Willis and Miguel Cabrera, it will be hard to pick against the them. Assuming that the Indians' one–two punch of Sabathia and Carmona cannot possibly be so dominant late in the season this year, and assuming that the highly talented but highly flammable White Sox will struggle under Ozzie Guillen's misrule, and assuming that the Twins just don't have enough arms without Santana, and assuming that the Royals, well, are still the Royals, the Tigers will get in, but I'm going to have to say wildcard, with the White Sox surging late. So, with Texas out–bashing the White Sox in a divisional series that sees 50 runs scored, and with the Tigers nipping the aging Yankees' staff (wait! can Mariano come through one last time … ?), Detroit will then render the Rangers helpless in the October cold for a Game Six victory and the second pennant in three years.

And so, with that eleventh–hour home run by a mid–season acquisition—yes, the 50–year–old Julio Franco (!)—the Cubs are flung into a rematch of the 1935 (and 1945) World Series with the Tigers, with snow and wind in the Great Lakes air as the series goes six chilly games back and forth, until power outages force a seventh game as a day–game at Wrigley, with no P.A. and no scoreboard, and just the Achillean right arms of Zambrano and Justin Verlander shearing off bats and nerves, until the portly Cabrera, already a veteran at 25, experiences "dé;jà; vu all over again," remembers his cruel dominance of Cubs' pitching as a teenaged rookie in 2003 with the Marlins, and finds Waveland Ave. in the glow of a late afternoon sunset. The Tigers are world champions, and the Cubs, well, wouldn't it spoil the very basis of Cub–ness (to steal from Heidegger) to win it all? Hasn't anyone seen how pedestrian and ho–hum the Red Sox fans have become in the midst of their winning ways? We need the Cubs to be the Cubs, because we need some baseball stories to remain, in the parlance of Tokien, "true myths" by which we find our way in the world.

Michael R. Stevens is professor of English at Cornerstone University in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

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