#28: The House that Ruth Built: A New Stadium, the first Yankees Championship and the Redemption of 1923 by Robert Weintraub

Hatchette Books, 432 pp 2010

Robert Weintraub does an excellent job in this text of exposing what many people (non-baseball history types, or, 97% of the population) do not know about the NY Yankees. Babe Ruth arrived in NY in 1920, in a trade looked at by several writers as a mistake (Read Rob Neyer's great book Big Book of Baseball Legends for several nice articles about the Babe).  Between 1920 and 1922, the Yankees won the AL pennant in 1921 and 1922, only to lose in the World Series to the NY Giants. Before Ruth's arrival, the Yankees (AKA the Highlanders) posted 5 winning records in 17 years. When Yankee Stadium was built, it was immense, larger than any other baseball stadium. It pissed off a lot of people, including a lot of folks in baseball. Why? It was a gold mine with 60,000 seats. Weintraub tells us that Waite Hoyt, a teammate of Ruth's and longtime Cincinnati Reds radio announcer, told his kids to thank God and Babe Ruth. Ruth was the attraction, and only a stadium as large as Yankee Stadium could accommodate him

More, and this is where Weintraub's book excels, is the battle of style and will between Ruth and John McGraw, manager of the Giants. Ruth fundamentally changed baseball. In 1920, Ruth hit 54 home runs. The second, third and fourth highest totals for a player that year (George Sisler, Tillie Walker and Happy Felsch) combined to hit...50. In 1921, Ruth hit 59, with the next highest players tied at 24. This was anathema to McGraw.

John McGraw came to the majors in the 1890s and played third base with the old Baltimore Orioles. The 1890s were a time period of downright thuggery in baseball, and McGraw was one of the chief thugs. Not that we wasn't a good player, he was. He could hit a little and excelled at getting on base and scoring runs. McGraw was small (5'7 and 155 pounds) but never met a fight "he didn't like or could win" according to his teammate Wee Willie Keeler. When McGraw managed, he was the Bobby Knight of his time: foul mouthed, pugnacious, irascible, intensely loyal to old players who played hard and merciless to those who he thought did not give everything they had. But, he won. McGraw took over the Giants in 1902, and by 1920 won 5 NL pennants and the 1905 World Series. In truth, his world series losses in 1911 and 1912 could be chalked up to some bad luck and errors.

McGraw's teams stole bases and played "scientific baseball", what now would be called "small ball". Before Ruth began to hit home runs and a lot of games were decided by scores of 3-2 or 2-1, this made sense. As McGraw's teams won the series in 1921 and 1922, two things happened:

1. Ruth wasn't Ruth. In 1921 and 1922, he hit 94 homers in 262 regular season games. He hit only 1 in 11 world series games and hit .212. "Throw him slow stuff and the big idiot falls all over himself," McGraw said. Weintraub's description of McGraw baiting Ruth is first rate.

2. In 1921 the Giants had two player (first baseman High Pockets Kelly and catcher Oil Smith) hit more than 10 home runs. The Yankees had only two as well...but Ruth and Bob Meusel outhomered the entire Giants team.

This was the direction the game was going. When the Yankees won the world series in 1923 (Ruth played well, and it was a redemption for him), more people started looking for power in the lineup. One common trap that Weintraub tends to avoid in this text is using the 1923 series as an example of how baseball passed McGraw by. It didn't; McGraw's health began to fail in 1924. He hung around until 1932 and he adapted. Between 1924 and 1932, his Giants teams led the National League in home runs 5 times, with Ed Ott using the short right field porch in the Polo Grounds to tremendous advantage. This book is a great introduction to the importance of Babe Ruth not only in baseball history, but also within a pop culture context.

#27: Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall by Frank Brady

First off, let me say RIP to Harmon Killebrew. It is rare that you never hear a bad thing said about a sports hero, but Killebrew was a genuinely good hearted and decent man. Plus, he was one hell of a hitter. The one connecting element to his obits over the day is not his baseball career, but his generosity. It is not often we see the like of him.

The same could not be said of the subject of today's biography, Bobby Fischer. Fischer was a "chess prodigy", who won the US Chess Championship 8 times, the first when he was 14. He also recorded the only perfect score in the US Championship tournament in 1961. In other words, he was a certified fucking chess genius. He defeated Boris Spassky in 1972 in Iceland for the World Title, then refused to play and lost the title in 1975. The man won 22 international tournaments in 15 years; between 1957 and 1961 he did not lose a game in US Championship tournaments.

Brady's text is engrossing, well written and a good read from, start to finish. One does not need to know much chess to get through the book, as Fischer's games are not treated in detail. What emerges from the pages is a man who is convinced of his own greatness and more or less proves it on the world stage. He was a singular player; imaginative, brilliant, driven. His studies of the game from the age of 7 or 8 on are amazing. Brady does not spare the social effects on a young man who would rather spend his time reading chess books in elementary school than talk to girls. The only passion that came close during this time was baseball, specifically the Brooklyn Dodgers.

One gets the feeling in Brady's text that Fischer began to feel the pressure to be not only Bobby Fischer, but "Bobby Fischer, Chess Champion and Slayer of the Russian Dragon." He certainly saw that in himself, and Brady does not shy away from the more difficult portions of Fischer's personality. In the 1970s, as his life spun out of control, Fischer became more and more enamored of anti-Semitic, Neo-Nazi ideologies. This is the only drawback from Brady's text. Brady, as someone who knew Fischer, seems hesitant to call Fischer for what he was in the 1970s: an insufferable egotist, 24 karat asshole and all-around dick. The routine apologies offered by Brady read as poor excuses for boorish behavior on the part of someone who began to realize that even though he was the youngest grand master in the world, he could have been more.

One character I wish I knew more about was Fischer's great opponent, Boris Spassky. The two maintained cordial relations, and Spassky called Fischer a brother after Fischer's death. This is certainly one of those instances when only one genius could understand another, and I believed every word. Fischer was undeniably brilliant, and Brady does an excellent job at showing readers who may be unfamiliar with that brightness what "genius" in a chess context means. The book falls down when Fischer is not playing chess; Fischer comes off as a quarrelsome jerk-off, who coasts by on the genius that makes him unique. People get tired of that, and the second part of the book reads like a long list of burned bridges.

All in all, this is a wonderful study in the pressure of being "The Best." One gets the feeling that the pressure of being better at something than anyone else would be too much. It may have been for Fischer. This book is recommended.