Comiskey features as a character in Ring Lardner’s *You Know Me Al*, and the pennypinching owner became a stock character in baseball fiction, including in Malamud’s *The Natural*.

Unfortunately we ran out of space in the chapter on baseball literature too quickly, so we did confine ourselves to fiction. In his chapter on baseball fans, Al Filreis offers great commentary on baseball poetry (Moore, Williams) and nonfiction such as Roger Angell’s. But I have some unused material on drama such as Wilson’s *Fences* and baseball poetry such as Robert Pinsky’s which I hope to make good use of in some other venue in the future. Thanks so much for hosting me, Bev and Dakine, and thanks to all of you for your comments and questions! I’ve really enjoyed this.

Indeed — the Mets and Astros going 15 innings, the Red Sox coming back after being within an out of elimination by the Angels. I was in Boston then, so that was my phase as a Red Sox fan, and so followed the playoffs and the World Series closely. Which leads me all the way back to the question about coordinating with my co-editor and the contributors. Lenny and I were in school together in Boston during the 1980s, and so were some of the other contributors — David Grant, a mathematician who co-wrote the chapter on sabremetrics,and David Venturo, who wrote a great chapter on baseball and material culture, including the memorabilia biz. But aside from them, I have met only one other contributor; Lenny knows a few more. But the majority we knew only from their work. So we worked over the internet, using track changes to make comments and comment on comments. This is what made it possible to put together the book so efficiently.
Jim Bouton wrote one of the best and best-known books on baseball, so he was always high on our list of people to approach about helping to publicize the book, and he graciously agreed when Cambridge UP asked him.

David Finoli, who wrote our chapter on “Baseball and the City,” has written a few books on the Pirates and as one of his chief examples (along with the Dodgers move from Brooklyn to LA), talks about the Pirates’ significance for Pittsburgh and debates about financing stadiums and similar issues.

Yes — plus the people next to you at the hockey game are yelling “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Yes, I remember watching a game on TV where the Texas player who played to the age of 49 came up to bat against Clemens and the announcer was making a fuss about how old they both were, and I was thinking, anything else we notice about these two players?

Our first chapter is a historical overview of “The Rules of Baseball,” by Steve Gietschier who worked for years at The Sporting News; it points out that baseball has long faced the challenge of maintaining the proper balance between offense and pitching/defense, especially of permitting enough offense to keep the fans interested. This is a very important part of the story of baseball in the nineteenth century, as the goal in pitching shifted from enabling the batter to hit the ball to challenging the batter and preventing him from making good contact. Part of this shift was the change from pitching underhanded to overhanded — which was illegal, but pitchers tested and tested the boundaries of the rules by adjusting their pitching motions, until the rules were changed. (A precedent to keep in mind when pondering what the ultimate outcome of the steroid scandal might be.) Once overhanded pitching was made legal, other changes were made to counteract this new advantage for pitchers, such as moving the pitcher’s point further back from the plate. As you point out the 1960s were another crisis point, when pitchers were dominating the games, so changes were made to the pitcher’s mound and the strike zone to allow more offense, and eventually the American League adopted the designated hitter. In retrospect, decades later, you wonder if the balance of power might have shifted anyway with baseball’s further expansion in 1969, and if one factor in the trend toward pitching was simply the presence of some extraordinary talents, like Gibson, Koufac, and Drysdale.

Well, the most famous of today’s voices is . . . Vin Scully, still calling the Dodgers games after 60 plus years. I really like Jonny Miller, who called the Orioles games for a long time; isn’t he now doing radio and/or TV for the Giants games? SF FDLers?

Another issue with steroids is the enforcement mechanism. If your pitches are doing funny things, the umpire looks at the ball to see if it has Vaseline or file-marks on it; if your bat has a lot of pine tar, the umpire looks at it to see if it extends beyond the legal limit (or Billy Martin demands the umpire do so after George Brett hits a homer that defeats Martin’s Yankees). Now, use of steroids can be more obvious than doctoring the ball, since players’ physiques change so dramatically; but it can’t be tested on the spot. When a bulky batter comes up to the plate, the ump can’t ask him to pee in a cup. So baseball has had to develop this system for testing players off the field, against much resistance from them — football went through all of this back in the 1980s or so. That all this is happening now, that there is for the moment a strong backlash against steroid use (partly PR since the owners ignored the obvious signs until they couldn’t any more), is certainly a reason for the reluctance to elect McGwire et al. to the Hall of Fame.

Now, about steroids: I think part of what’s at issue here is the lack of precedent. While Jim Bouton, in *Ball Four* (1970), blew the cover on players’ use of stimulants to get through the long season, the performance-enhancing drugs players have used more recently have brought, well, enhanced performance on a scale no one has seen before. We don’t really know how much difference those drugs made, and this may become clearer only with time; people have pointed to other changes, such as the league expansions of the 1990s (expansion dilutes the talent, including at pitcher, possibly making it easier for the best hitters to rack up spectacular numbers) and temporary differences in the way balls were manufactured. So that’s one way we’re waiting, I think, for more distance on the careers of McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds. Another kind of historical perspective, which our contributors David Luban and his son Daniel discuss in their chapter on cheating, will come when we compare the significance of PEDs with other kinds of “cheating.” The spitball was outlawed in their 1920s, but at least a couple of pitchers who were widely suspected of doctoring the ball during their careers and later admitted to doing so did get elected to the Hall of Fame; they’d won 300 games, in they went. (The Lubans quote Don Sutton’s denial that he’d administered a foreign substance to the ball: “Vaseline is made right here in the United States.”) The Lubans conclude, and I’m inclined to agree, that eventually Bonds and Clemens will go into the Hall of Fame, even though we’ll remember that their numbers, especially later in their careers, were inflated. (Remember that when The Sporting News published their list of the 100 best players ever in about 1997, Bonds was the highest ranking active player — this before anyone supposes he had started with the PEDs.) Sidenote: I think fans turned a blind eye to what Bonds and Clemens were up to because boomers romanticized their continuing to perform at MVP, Cy Young levels into their early 40s.

Hi CTuttle and others posting about gambling, steroids and the Hall of Fame: It’s true that Rose gets his records, and nobody argues with them, because no one supposes that his gambling ever affected the way he played. (Though it may have affected some of his decisions as a manager.) I think there is great resistance to accepting him back into baseball because of the game’s history with gambling, especially the Black Sox scandal of 1919, which is generally regarded as the greatest threat the professional game has ever faced. (And it was the culmination of a series of problems with gambling on baseball in the early 20th century.) Ever since, gambling has been a big taboo in baseball (and other professional team sports). Thus the banning of Mickey Mantle, for example, from official baseball events in the 1980s because he had started working for a casino. So, there’s a precedent for being very strict with Rose; although, at much the same time, there’s been a trend toward rehabilitating Shoeless Joe Jackson, the best known of the 1919 Black Sox who were banned from baseball for life, through such narratives as Kinsella’s novel Shoeless Joe and the movie Field of Dreams which was based on it.

Hi Bev, I have’t seen Mamie “Peanut” Johnson speak — that’s so great she’s on the lecture circuit — but Leslie Heaphy does mention her in our chapter on the Negro Leagues. And Effa Manley was a very important co-owner and then owner of the Newark Eagles of the Negro Leagues; for example, when the major leagues were integrating by signing players from the Negro Leagues, she insisted on being compensated for the loss of her players, as minor league teams long had been, and in this she set a precedent for all Negro League owners to follow.

We have an entire chapter on baseball’s economy, written by Andrew Zimbalist, who’s acknowledged as the authority on the topic and treats sports team owners quite critically. It’s certainly true that Shrub benefited from the “socialism for owners” that seemed to peak in the 1980s and 1990s. My impression is that this trend has cooled somewhat in more recent years; the first example that comes to mind is Seattle’s refusal to take on the costs of a new arena for the Supersonics basketball team, calling their threat to move elsewhere (which they did, to Oklahoma City).

Hi Aitch, Our writer of the chapter on “Baseball at the Movies,” George Grella, points out that the director took a great deal of care to make the film of “The Natural” faithful in its period details, and also that Robert Redford was one of the first actors to portray a baseball player convincingly. I agree, however, that the film’s tone is very different from the novel’s. I think of the film as reflecting the spirit of the 1980s, trying to be very upbeat about America, especially an idealized rural past, and it does steer completely away from Malamud’s harsh critique of American life. The novel was his first, and so had been written long before, in the early 1950s. By the way, I think this is the best novel about baseball.

Hey bro. Our chapter on “Baseball and War” talks about the establishment of women’s leagues during World War II, and our chapter on the Negro Leagues mentions that a few women played there. Marianne Moore, who wrote some of her poems about baseball, was sometimes invited to throw out the first pitch in Brooklyn. And I think the integration of Little League is increasing the chances that we’ll soon have a female president who won’t need extra training for this presidential task.

My co-editor and I started a couple of years ago by sketching out the chapter topics, and identifying possible contributors. Once Cambridge confirmed that they’d like us to do the book, we started recruiting contributors. We made our initial instructions to them as simple as possible, and then once they submitted drafts, we started editing and negotiating. One of the book’s strengths, I think, is the number of different fields the contributors come from; so, for example, a law professor, David Fidler, co-wrote the chapter on Latin American baseball, and in that chapter he extends the case he’s made in several publications that baseball’s practices in recruiting young players in the Dominican Republic and elsewhere need closer oversight. Historians and literary scholars are well represented among our contributors, and several of the chapters provide short historical overviews of their topics, but we also asked a law and philosophy professor, David Luban, who’s a specialist in ethics, to cowrite the chapter on “Cheating in Baseball.” We did insist that everyone write in an accessible style; many of the contributors have written popular books or journalism about baseball.

Ray will be happy to hear about your interest in the horse racing book. He’s choosing topics with an eye to readers in the US and the UK, and the idea of publishing the baseball and cricket books almost simultaneously is one for us, one for them.

I should say too that the contributors are of course baseball fans, but it was part of the book’s goal to treat the game’s history and its contemporary situation objectively and critically. So, the “lyrical bandbox” style was not on for this project.

Good afternoon Dakine. The book is part of a series of Cambridge Companions which have focused either on specific authors (Milton, Eliot, and many others) or on writing from a particular place or period, or on a particular theme (the literature of New York). The idea with these books is to get together a group of experts on specific aspects of the topic to write the chapters, and the book overall should be the best place to start when you’re getting to know about an author or topic. Ray Ryan, the editor at Cambridge, came up with the idea of companions to sports with a strong literary tradition; in a couple of months CUP will publish their companion to cricket, and work is in progress on companions to soccer and horse racing. So, our book on baseball is the first in a series of Cambridge companions to various sports.

Bev, thanks so much for giving me this chance to talk about the CCB. I’m looking forward to questions from Dakine and those who are “attending” today.