Thursday, June 23, 2011

#38: The Original Curse: Did the Cubs Throw the 1918 World Series by Sean Deveney

McGraw Hill, 2010: 242 pages

I come from a long line of Cubs fans. Stout, broad-shouldered midwestern people who love a team that has not been to the World Series since 1945. My grandmother died in 1993 at the age of 80. The last time the Cubs won a World Series, their best pitcher was Mordecai Peter Centennial "Three Finger" Brown and my grandmother would not be born for another 53 months. I rejected this maudlin loyalty and became a Pittsburgh Pirates fan. The Pirates have not posted a winning record since 1992, so maybe the family is cursed.

But, being a Cubs fan is all about curses. The black cat in 1969, Tim Flannery/Steve Garvey in 1984. The Billy Goat in 1945. Sean Deveney, based on good original research, asks the question, "What if the Cubs caused this curse by throwing the World Series?" It is a good question, and Deveney tackles it with a good deal of wit and knowledge. Of course, the real curse here is the Curse of the Bambino: the Red Sox won the series in 1918, sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees the next year. and did not win again until 2004.

Baseball in the first two decades of the 20th century was dominated by pitching and gambling. Pitchers such as the aforementioned Three Finger Brown, Walter Johnson, Rube Waddell and Christy Mathewson posted incredible statistics. In the 1905 World Series, Mathewson won three games, all of them shutouts. On the other hand, ballplayers caroused with "sports", men who operated in the shadowy realm of pseudo-legal gambling. The most nefarious ball player was Hal Chase. On at least two occasions (one documented by Deveney), Chase took to his first base position with several fans chanting "Hal, what's the odds?" Chase was deeply involved in the 1919 World Series fix by the Chicago White Sox, and circumstantially involved in the would be 1918 fix.

Deveney argues that the Cubs threw the 1918 world series, thereby clearing the way for the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. The difference was in the execution. The Black Sox were blatant about it, as Mathewson and reporter Hugh Fullerton noticed during the series. One of Deveney's compelling arguments in this text is that the baseball establishment paid no attention whatsoever. It can (and has) been argued that the only reason the story came out at all was because of the overall hatred for American League president Ban Johnson and the investigation into a game fixing scheme by members of the 1920 New York Giants. While Eliot Asinof's book Eight Men Out makes Sox owner Charles Comiskey an ogre and a cheapskate, it sometimes ignores the fact that gambling was rife in baseball during the period. Deveney does not shy from this, and this makes the book worthwhile.

Deveney details movements of players accused of fixing games and delves into newly found papers in the Chicago History Museum. While my jury is out on Deveney's conclusion, the book is an excellent resource on the culture of baseball in 1918. With war looming, why not try to make a few more bucks on the side? Check out this book and find out.

Monday, June 20, 2011

#37: LZ-'75: The Lost Chronicles of Led Zeppelin's 1975 American Tour by Stephen Davis

Gotham Books 2010, 217 pages

I read Stephen Davis' most well known book, Hammer of the Gods, back in high school. There, along with  every other 15-19 year old male, I went through the "Zep" phase. I could quote most songs, staunchly defended John Bonham as "the greatest drummer of all time" and thought Robert Plant was a D-Bag because of the Honeydrippers. I thrilled to the accounts of groupies being violated by dead sharks (made famous by the Frank Zappa song, "Mud Shark"), TVs being thrown off balconies and general mayhem. Zep were, no doubt, misogynistic, booze addled creepshows, but....chicks loved them!

That book caused a lot of consternation with the surviving members of Zeppelin because Davis got most of his info from the sleazebag that sold heroin to the band and the groupies. The 1975 tour was the only one that Davis went on with Zeppelin, and he says at the beginning of LZ-'75 that "around then (2007) I began to look through my notes of the '75 tour" which he claims he had not looked at for 30 years. (4-5) Maybe Plant and Paige were right when they claimed he did not know what he was writing about in 1985.

Anyway, perhaps it is because I am old. Perhaps it is because I am much more fascinated by the likes of Bukka White of the original "Shake 'em on Down" or The Jeff Beck Group or The Yardbirds. Perhaps I agree with Pete Townshend's assertion that Zep was "just not a very good band." Well, not really. Zeppelin III is still one of my favorite albums, and "The Ocean" from Houses of the Holy is still one of my favorite songs. While this book presents much about the trials of Arena Rock Gods of the 1970s, there is too much of the author. I am on the waiting list at my local library for a copy of Davis's book about the Rolling Stones, Old Gods Almost Dead, and I might change my mind.

Throughout, the author cannot mention any woman without some comment on her "attributes". The name dropping is almost as bad; I mean, who could not be reduced to swooning over "Mrs. Todd Rundgren". You know who that is, right kids? Bebe Buell? Ring a bell? In Playboy back in the 1970s? Well known to most CBGBs bands? Friend of Patti Smith? Wait a minute...what's that? Who the fuck is Todd Rundgren? You commies.

Zep was awash in "chicks", "groupies", "bimbos", "slutty girls" and "local talent", as well as heroin, coke, liquor, kimonos, bowler hats. Bonham was usually awash in stomach ailments, gas and unwanted turds. Could it be because he was drinking nearly a fifth of whiskey a day? In one chapter, entitled the "Prairie Princess", Davis scores a groupie who "looked like Mrs. Nebraska, only more wholesome." (138). Awwwwwwwww, that makes me feel all warm. She was pissed not to get Plant, but had to settle for a Feisty Rock Critic writing for....The Atlantic Monthly? She put out, but....The Atlantic Monthly? Were The Carpenters busy? Was The Kingston Trio on hiatus?

I kept track through this book about which shows Davis said were "shit hot". I took this to mean warm to the touch, somewhat mushy, steamy and more than a little uncomfortable to be around because of the stink. There were about 6 or seven, most toward the end of the tour. One cool item: Zep played on a good night for 3-4 hours. Yes, yes, there was the obligatory 30 minute drum solo on "Moby Dick", the obligatory John Paul Jones 20 minute keyboard jazz experiment, and Jimmy Page playing a guitar with a violin bow, rubber chicken, his own penis and a cast of Aleister Crowley's johnson. All this could be yours for...$10. Nowadays, that is about $35, or roughly $15 less than most Sheryl Crow Concerts.

I don't know. It is easy to make fun of bands like Zeppelin for their antics and hotel destruction, but they were an incredibly influential band. And, like it or not, Page, Jones and Bonham were very strong musicians. Plant's voice by '75 could not hit high notes because of throat surgery in 1973, but he could still belt it out. I would have liked more about the music and less about the author, who manages to track down an old girlfriend "who he never saw again" (155). This book, like many on the subject of Old Gods Long Dead, is a maudlin exercise. I wasn't there, and one gets the feeling through most of the book that the boys in the band did not want to be there either. The excess and the drinking and wanton sex were for the entourage.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

#36: Obama Zombies: How the Liberal Machine Brainwashed My Generation by Jason Mattera

Simon and Schuster 2010, 260 pages.

OK, so I don't really know where to start with this. Is it the constant use of "bro" in reference to Obama, or the constant use of the phrase "beta male" when writing about any TV talking head not named Hannity or O'Reilly? Beta male means "an unremarkable, careful man who avoids risk and confrontation" according to urbandictionary. com. In other words, pussies. I read this to see how one side is trying to reach out to the youth market. I will NEVER read another screed of this kind, regardless of the liberal or conservative person who wrote it. Mattera blathers that conservatives make up their own minds. Well, if you buy what he is selling here, you don't.

Oh, and there is more. Much, much more. Mattera became a minor celebrity back in 2003 for writing that ""pedophiles nationwide ...condemned the FDA's food pyramid as 'bigoted' and 'hateful' because 'anus' and 'penis' were not listed as separate food groups." This is from a Roger Williams University College Republican newspaper called The Hawk's Right Eye that the then 20 year old Mattera published with school funding. Of course, it was a private school. Just like most other people on earth who know a lot about public education, he don't go to a public university.


I'll start in on that D-Bag in a minute, but here are three points I want to make:

1. If the "mainstream media" had numbers of something Mattera calls "O-gasms", especially by female reporters who "got wet panties talking to His Holiness" (9-13), why did the Obama Campaign use YouTube "as a way to bypass mainstream media."? (39) Would you bypass something that was/is as firmly in your pocket as Mattera claims? No? Didn't think so. I do agree with the claim that the big three and most cable news outlets treated Obama with kid gloves; see my review of Game Change.

2. After blasting Barack Obama for "The Job Stimulus that Wasn't" he chides the Chief Executive for "doubling down on Bush's reckless spending" (199). OK, so if a conservative fucks the budget 18 ways from Sunday and from Hell to Breakfast, it's reckless. If a Democrat does it, he is "the most radical left wing presidential candidate in history." Of course, Mattera, Ann Coulter and the rest of these miserable deadbeats have possibly heard of Eugene Debs, and honest-to-God socialist who ran for president. Of course, if Mattera actually met a real socialist, he would call him a "beta man", getting only 1/2 the second word out before bursting into flames. It is brutally obvious that "socialist" is a buzzword, just like "Fascist" was for liberals in 2003-2008. Both words are meaningless now, bogeymen stripped of their context but not their power.

3. ""I'm all for compromise, but I'd rather see liberals concede to our values." (197) Well, OK. If I go into a dialogue about the family budget with the wife, and want to spend $700 on beer a month thinking "well, I'd rather her concede to my values" we will get in the mother of all arguments that will end with the checkbook rammed sideways up my ass. Notice too, he says values instead of ideas. That's really what this whole Conservative/Liberal thing is about. It is not about whose ideas are better, but whose values are. And that is the precise reason why everything is so fucked up.

And here's for the D-Bag:

This is the best the Conservative movement has to offer. A puerile bag of hot air, spouting values and not any new ideas. In 2010, he offered up this to CPAC, a gathering he termed "our Woodstock":

“Except that unlike the last gathering, our women are beautiful, we speak in complete sentences and our notion of freedom doesn’t consist of snorting cocaine, which is certainly one thing that separates us from Barack Obama.”

This is just fucking tired. Books and authors such as this add nothing but bile to a world perfectly fucking long on that substance. It is not that he is stupid, or a chickenhawk, or a racist, which seem to be the labels of the month for most conservative media darlings. Like all of his ilk, left, center or right, he says things to get attention. These people do nothing to help this country; all they do is add another level of volume to a world that is too loud.

Friday, June 17, 2011

#35: The Eastern Stars: How Baseball Changed the Dominican Town of San Pedro de Macoris by Mark Kurlansky

Riverhead Books, 2010. 272 pages

Mark Kurlansky wrote one of my favorite books (Salt) and one book I used for summer reading for my European History class (Cod). Kurlansky specializes in bringing together the most varied strings of information to produce an overall history of a single item. I was very excited for this book, as:

1. I am a baseball nut.
2. I love the other three books of his that I have read.

Alas, it was not to be.Kurlansky breaks down the book into two sections, Sugar and Dollars.

Sugar
"For those who don't make it, there is sugarcane." (1) So begins the second paragraph of the book, and section one will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the hard labor that is the zafra, the cane harvest, in the Dominican. The first half is by far the more compelling section of the book, as Kurlansky uses his experience as a correspondent in the Caribbean for the Chicago Tribune to excellent effect. The great number of Spanish sources helps in this area. I was astounded by the racial attitudes surrounding the Domincan Republic, down to a 1912 law "that imposed restrictions on bringing in workers who were not white." (41) I would have liked Kurlansky to spend more time comparing the institutional racism of the U.S. with the "pan-Caribbean obsession of calculating racial differences." (71) I found his discussion of race in a decidedly mixed race society quite interesting and wished there was more than the 15 or so pages allotted. I did not know that San Pedro de Macoris was famous for its poets long before it was called "The Cradle of Shortstops" and will look for works by Pedro Mir, whose poems are quoted throughout.

Dollars
The second section is where the book falls apart. In his short discussion of baseball and race, Kurlansky trots out the old chestnut that Cap Anson was nearly single-handedly responsible for the banning of blacks in organized baseball. Well, he wasn't. As Bill James pointed out in The Historical Baseball Abstract, it is downright foolish to think one person could do that, much less enforce his will on club owners. Sure, Anson was a racist, but I would guess 99.5% of whites in the United States in 1890 were racist on one level or another. In another bit, he writes that in 1978 Alfredo Griffin posted a .500 batting average. HOLY SHIT! I thought. Then I thought wait a minute, how many times did he hit? Four times in five games. That's just silly and sort of lazy, but it typifies the attitude of the book towards the research on the sport.

In discussing "San Pedro's Black Eye" Kurlansky opines "in America the idea that there is something less than proper about all these foreign and wild "Latins" getting into baseball has considerable resonance." (206). I call bull shit on that. He bases this on more than 100 letters he received after his article for Parade magazine about San Pedro de Macoris in 2007, many from African Americans. I think this is bull shit for several reasons, but the most reasonable is historical development. After the integration of baseball in 1947, black players were dominant throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In the 1980s, baseball featured a good mix of ethnicites, with the exception of Asian players. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, Latin players began to dominate: David Ortiz, Albert Pujols, Alex Rodriguez, Pedro Martinez. As baseball becomes the way out, it stands to reason that there will be more "Latin" players. Sure, Gary Sheffield may complain about the academy system, but to insist that the idea that most fans do not want to see "wild Latins" on the field is bull shit.Kurlansky is correct in writing that baseball is playing second fiddle to football (has been since the late 1960s) and this is one reason why teams are scouring the Caribbean, South America, Australia, Japan and South Korea for players. This is not news; using the views of one player (Gary Sheffield) to support a wrong headed assessment is incorrect.

The most famous son of San Pedro is probably Sammy Sosa. In the chapter entitled "Fickle Judgment from the Peanut Gallery", Kurlansky writes the following: "In 1999, Sosa, the former shoe shine boy too two hundred shoe shine boys in Santo Domingo to lunch, to which Macorisanos responded that he had failed to do anything for their shoe shine boys." (215) I think Kurlansky is on the side of the Macorisanos, especially after his treatment of the baseball "academies" (read: factories) that MLB runs throughout the Caribbean. The tone is ambiguous. I just am confused by the "fickle Judgment from the peanut gallery" chapter title. Kurlansky writes "Heroics is a lot to expect for someone snatched away without education at 16 and handed fame and wealth" (219); while I agree, I do not think that it is incorrect to expect it. Sosa got in trouble for pointing out all he does for the town while really not doing very much. America loves to catch people acting like big mouthed hypocrites, regardless of whether or not they are athletes. Is this wrong? Not at all; it becomes wrong when it is unwarranted. Some ballplayers do a lot for their hometown, some don't. Sosa's big sin was lying about his contributions to charity and hurricane relief.

Ah hell. The first half of the book is great. I'll probably check out a few books on Caribbean history because of it.

Thursday, June 16, 2011

#34: You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup by Peter Doggett

Harper Collins, 2009: 390 pages.

Peter Doggett takes his title from the opening lyrics of the "Abbey Road Medley", and it is apt on multiple levels. Ringo Starr is referred to throughout the book as Richard Starkey, who admonished the author "Don't use my stage name." Doggett quotes my favorite George Harrison line: Avant garde is French for bull shit. Also, Doggett covers in detail the contributions of Neil Aspinall and Derek Taylor. Aspinall started off as the road manager for the Beatles in 1961 and worked as the chief executive of Apple until 2007. After Aspinall was fired, Apple press officer Geoff Baker stated "I fear for the integrity of the Beatles' legacy without Neil." (347) Derek Taylor worked for Apple from 1968 until his death in 1995 and was instrumental in pushing the creation of the Beatles Anthology. Far too often, the contributions of these two in the history of the Beatles is ignored.

You never give me your money/you only give me your funny papers
This book is about money, first and foremost. Consider that EMI and Apple took roughly 23 years to conclude their lawsuits over the Beatles catalogue; that Harrison and Lennon spent most of the 1990s and 1970s respectively being close to bankrupt; that all four Beatles spent most of the 1970s and 1980s having no idea how much money they had or where it was going. Business is something not usually covered in histories of rock bands, but here it is essential. Even though the Beatles were no longer a working rock band after 1969, they were a corporate entity until 1972 and Apple still exists today. Doggett's work is excellent, and he lets all those involved speak for themselves.The title stems from Paul McCartney's opinion of Allen Klein, the manager favored by Harrison, Starkey and Lennon. It also steals from Harrison, who said that all of the legal documents at Apple Corps were equivalent to funny papers.

She came in through the bathroom window
The she is, of course, Yoko Ono. Doggett avoids the trite "she broke up the Beatles" nonsense. This is perhaps the first book about the Beatles that I have read that did not cast her as a villain or a victim, but as a person. That in itself is very refreshing. Doggett's comparison of the media coverage of Ono and Linda McCartney is quite interesting. McCartney wrote this after a female fan climbed into his house through, you guessed it, the bathroom window.

Boy/You're gonna carry that weight/Carry that weight a long time
The breakup is really secondary to the rest of the book; in a sense, it is the least important item in the book. It happened, and Doggett treats it as the Beatles themselves treated it, a decision made over the course of several years. The Beatles attempted throughout the 1970s and then the 1980s to not be the Beatles. The music industry would not let them, and neither would the fans. I was constantly reminded of Lester Bangs, who wrote this for the LA Times on Dec 14, 1980:

John Lennon at his best despised cheap sentiment and had to learn the hard way that once you've made your mark on history those who can't will be so grateful they'll turn it into a cage for you. Those who choose to falsify their memories -- to pine for a neverland 1960s that never really happened that way in the first place -- insult the retroactive Eden they enshrine.

All of them wanted to escape the cage, and, as Starkey's quote at the beginning shows, they are still attempting to escape. Doggett writes "Almost alone of their generation, they did not want the fantasy to continue." (x) Who could blame them? Fame made them rich, yes. It also made them bitter, recriminatory, jealous and paranoid. Harrison was nearly stabbed to death by a fan in 1999, an event that Eric Clapton and others tied to the recurrence of cancer in Harrison. (320-325)

Doggett has extensive credentials covering the media and popular music, and his views considering the differing coverage of McCartney's divorce in the early 2000s with the failed marriages of the other three Beatles are sharp and well constructed.

This book is recommended.

Tuesday, June 14, 2011

#33: The Hollywood Sign: Fantasy and Reality of an American Icon by Leo Braudy

Yale University Press 2011: 225 pages


Leo Braudy is a Professor of English and American Literature at USC, so it may be a surprise to have him writing a book of history. However, he has long been an influential writer on the subject of fame and publicity (his most well known work, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, has a special place on my bookshelf) and this book is not history as such. This book is part of a series about "American Icons" such as the hamburger, John Cage's 4'33" and Gone With the Wind.

Braudy plays throughout the book with the Hollywood sign as not only an icon but also a sign in the linguistic sense. The Hollywood sign is itself the signifier since it is the word "Hollywood". It signifies Hollywood as a concept, with all the attached things (good, bad and indescribably nasty) that we place there. "Even though the sign that we see is no longer the original sign at all, it still carries the same weight of meaning." (10) This meaning is informed by what we collectively think about Hollywood. In Braudy's text, the Hollywood Sign cannot be separated from the history of the cesspool that it stares down at.

This book is very much a history not of the Hollywood Sign, but of the concept of Hollywood. I knew before hand that the sign originally read "Hollywoodland", but had no idea that it was once outlined in red neon. This was an attempt to get people to buy land, a California past time since forever. Braudy contrasts the ongoing destruction of old Hollywood in the 1960s and 1970s with the restoration of the sign at the behest of numerous celebrities, including Gloria Swanson, Hugh Hefner and Phyllis Diller. For Braudy, the inclusion of Swanson in this movement is revelatory; her great role in Sunset Boulevard as an actress well past her prime jibes with the sign itself.

Braudy writes about images, and as such, nothing is straightforward. "Instead of celebrating one Hollywood, the sign celebrates them all." (190). I ascribe a negative meaning to Hollywood and its denizens. It is a place where fakery knows no bounds, where shallowness is deeply spread. It is a place where people are swallowed by monsters while the rest of us watch. For me, the sign is a symbol of that Hollywood. I am not sure that this needs to be celebrated, and quite frankly I don't care about the Hollywood sign. Why read the book? Because by the 1950s "Hollywood had become an abstraction, a metonym that seemed to refer to everything about the movies except for the town that supposedly gave them birth." (146) Well, that's not the reason, high handed as it sounds. I like Braudy's writing style, but didn't think much of this book.

Hollywood is an abstraction of our dreams, fears and desires. I may dislike 99% of movies made these days, think that most "movie stars" are horseshit, but by God I will read anything about Hollywood. Hollywood and its gossip is the long running car crash of my life. I can't turn away. I shudder when my favorite books get "The Hollywood Treatment" and think the best line in movie history is from My Favorite Year when Peter O' Toole yells "I'm not an actor! I'm a movie star!" Yea, it's fake, but in many ways what isn't? That's the real question.

Monday, June 13, 2011

#32: Campy: The Two Lives of Roy Campanella by Neil Lanctot

Simon and Schuster, 2011: 523 pages

The title of this book is apt on several levels, not just the pre and post December 1957 life of Campanella.

Roy Campanella started playing in the Negro Leagues in 1937 at age 15 and in 1946 became the second African American ballplayer for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Between 1947 and 1957, Campanella was a three time National League Most Valuable Player as the Dodger catcher. His third and last MVP came in 1955 as the Dodgers finally defeated the hated Yankees in the World Series. By the end of the 1957 season, Campanella was slowing down and was not the player he once was. Still, he planned on going to LA after the Dodgers moved.

Lanctot does not fall victim to a common problem in many baseball biographies, that of hero worship. Campanella is presented as a man; albeit a man who considered himself quite lucky to be able to play major league baseball. Perhaps the most interesting part of the text is the deterioration of the relationship between Jackie Robinson and Campanella, which is reported on by Lanctot in an even handed fashion. The author lets the players speak for themselves, thereby allowing the reader to develop his/her own ideas about the place of race in Eisenhower's America. This is another way in which the title is apt, as Campy had two lives about race. He was beloved, to be sure, but in some ways did not carry the respect of the black baseball community that Robinson did.

Campanella was rendered a quadriplegic in a December 1957 car crash; Lanctot does a masterful job of describing not only the professional but the personal fallout from this accident, and does not sugarcoat Campy's post-accident life (all 35 years of it). When Campanella was injured, most quadriplegics died within a few years. Of course, this is the "second life" that the title refers to, a man who literally has all that he knew taken away from him. What Lanctot delves into is the idea that is shied away from in Campanella's autobiography It's Good to be Alive. In many ways, Campanella's accident could have been avoided. Campanella's car crashed into a utility pole at 3 am, one of many late nights returning to his home from his Harlem business and mistress. In many ways, Campanella's own actions, as much as his paralysis, destroyed his second marriage.

Lastly, this book deals with the two lives that many ballplayers face, the one before and after baseball. It is easy to blast today's players for making too much money (most of them do), but consider this. I am now 38 years old and a teacher. If I was a baseball player, my playing career would most likely already be over or would be within a few years. The question becomes "Now what?" The baseball establishment is still very much an old-boys network, and most former players are completely shut out from what they knew. Babe Ruth was one example and for several years, until Walt Alston and Tommy Lasorda demanded he be on staff during spring training, Campanella was another. In this final facet of the two lives, Lanctot again remains even handed. All in all, an exceptional biography.

Thursday, June 9, 2011

Two Day Research Job 1: Were African American players in the majors between 1947 and 1952 hit by pitch more often than white players?


Here is a new feature for the site, simply for personal enjoyment.

Currently, I am reading a biography of Roy Campanella, and within this excellent book is an assertion that comes up frequently. This assertion is that the first black players in the majors after 1947 were hit by pitches more often than anyone else.

            Just looking at the leaders, this seems to be the case. In 1947, Jackie Robinson was hit 9 times, the second most in the National League. In 1948, Larry Doby was 3rd in the American League while Robinson led the NL. Doby tied for the AL lead in 1949 while Robinson was second. Campanella himself was hit in his first major league plate appearance in 1948 by Ken Trinkle of the New York Giants. I decided to dig a little deeper, and found some interesting things about the road of the black ballplayer in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

            From 1947-1952, Jackie Robinson was hit by pitch 52 times, more than any other National League player. Based on the league average of HBP per at bat, Robinson would have been hit 17 times. More importantly, here rates of HBP of Robinson and the rest of the Dodgers

Year
Robinson HBP
Rest of Team HBP
Robinson AB/HBP
Dodgers AB/HBP
1947
9
20
65.6
232.95
1948
7
11
82
432.1
1949
8
25
74.1
192.2
1950
5
22
103.6
220.2
1951
9
35
60.9
141.2
1952
14
21
39.1
226.1



            In these years, the Dodgers featured a team with several black players: Robinson, Campanella, Sandy Amoros and pitchers Dan Bankhead and Don Newcombe. Let’s consider the percentage of the HBP that the Dodgers African American players racked up compared to the % of the Dodger plate appearances during the season:


Year
# of AA
A.A. Plate Appearances
AA HBP
HBP/PA
Rest of Team
Rest of Team PA
Hbp/pa
1947
2
706
10
70.6
19
5419
285.2
1948
2
646
7
92.2
11
5083
462.1
1949
3
1313
11
119.3
22
4860
220.9
1950
3
1217
7
173.8
20
4869
243.4
1951
4
1320
14
94.2
30
4894
163.1
1952
4
1261
17
74.1
18
4807
267.0



            In three of these years, the African American Dodgers were hit as often or nearly as often as the rest of the team combined. Larry Doby integrated the American League in 1947 with the Cleveland Indians, and by 1949 the Indians featured four black players: Doby, Luke Easter, Satchel Page and Minnie Minoso. Here is a table for them 1947-1952




Year
#of African Americans
African American Plate Appearances
AA HBP
PA/HBP
Rest of team PA
Rest of Team HBP
PA/HBP
1947
1
33
0

5942
14
424.4
1948
2
525
5
105
5676
19
298.7
1949
4
740
9
82.2
5228
14
373.4
1950
2
1232
16
77.0
4848
22
220.3
1951
4
1102
14
78.7
4845
13
372.6
1952
3
1107
5
221.4
4953
15
330.2


            This looks somewhat familiar to the Dodger table, especially 1950 and 1951. Why anyone would want to hit Luke Easter (6’4 240 lbs) is beyond me, but anyway.  Overall, let’s consider the HBP rate of black players from 1947 to 1952 with the rest of the major league baseball.


Year
African American Players
% of Players in MLB
African American Batters HBP
% of MLB HBP
1947
5
0.9%
10
3.1%
1948
5
0.9%
13
3.8%
1949
9
1.6%
21
5.6%
1950
9
1.6%
37
8.5%
1951
18
3.3%
67
14.9%
1952
18
3.2%
60
12.4%


            Black players in these years were hit by pitches at a higher rate than white players. Part of this is most likely racism, part of it  (Minnie Minoso and Jackie Robinson to a point) was the importance of getting on base in any way possible to score runs. Minoso led the AL in HBP nine times between 1952 and 1961.
           
Using www.baseball-reference.com, I looked up who hit Robinson, and after 1950 had play by play information. In 1947, pitchers hit Robinson nine times. Four of these were by the Pittsburgh Pirates, who were second in the league to the Brooklyn Dodgers in pitchers hitting batsmen. Beanball wars? Most likely. The only suspect here is a pitcher named Mort Cooper from the Boston Braves. According to the Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers, Morton had outstanding control. He was the ace of the staff of the St. Louis Cardinals in 1942 and 1943. He hit only two batters in 83 innings in 1947, both Jackie Robinson. In Cooper’s defense, his pitching line in 1947 against the Dodgers was not very good. Cooper in 1947 just wasn’t very good:



W-l
IP
H
R
ER
BB
SO
ERA
Vs BRO
0-3
19
21
17
15
11
5
7.11
Vs Lg
3-7
64 1/3
78
41
35
15
21
4.89


            And this seems to be the pattern, especially after 1950, for pitchers who hit Jackie Robinson. They were getting bombed by the Dodgers, and took out their frustration on the symbol of integration. Consider July of 1951, where Robinson was hit in two games. Both times the beaning came within four pitches of a Brooklyn home run. In 1952, Robinson was beaned on June 21 after Pee Wee Reese and Andy Pafko homered in the 8th against Pittsburgh.