Rough Diamonds

It’s What’s Inside the Lines That Counts

Credit: Corbis

Baseball Stars of the 1970s and 1980s Talk About the Game They Love (The Baseball Oral History Project, Volume 3)
by Fay Vincent
Simon & Schuster, 328 pp., $25

It is no criticism to say that the third installment in Fay Vincent’s oral history of baseball cannot compete with the classic that inspired it, Lawrence S. Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times. Ritter, a professor of finance at NYU, spent the first half of the 1960s tracking down players from the early decades of the 20th century and recording their stories—capturing a wonderful slice of American history that would otherwise have been lost. 

In those early days, the business of baseball was not yet rationalized. Independent teams and leagues flourished. There was no panopticon of sports media to scour elementary schools for talent, no conveyor belt to trundle boys to the majors through youth teams and a system of captive minor leagues. Sixteen-year-old Rube Marquard hopped a freight train and, five days later, presented himself to the Waterloo club in the Iowa State league, where a friend of his was playing. “Keokuk is here tomorrow,” the manager said, “and we’ll pitch you.” (He won the game and then hopped a train back when they wouldn’t immediately give him a contract.) 

Off-season, players barnstormed; and during one tour the mayor of Oxnard, California, insisted that Hans Lobert, reputedly the fastest man in the majors, put on a postgame show by racing a horse around the bases. (The horse won, but cheated.) The trainers, said Wahoo Sam Crawford, “didn’t know any more about health or medicine than the man in the moon.” One had a single all-purpose remedy, a rubdown with a mixture of Vaseline and Tabasco sauce, which he called “Go fast.”