JOHN McGRAW
Charles C. Alexander
New York: Viking, 1988
358 pp., $19.95
Sometime in the early 1950s, the colorful National League umpire Jocko Conlan toted an unscuffed baseball from ballpark to ballpark. He had promised my father that he would collect as many autographs as the sphere's finite surface would accommodate. As good as his word, he soon presented me with a priceless gift: an official NL baseball signed by such diamond immortals as Stan Musial, Ewell "The Whip" Blackwell, Pee Wee Reese, Johnny Mize, Harry "The Cat" Brecheen, Warren Spahn, and Mel Ott. Ott was, I think, a coach in those days, having retired as a player in 1947. But during his many years as a New York Giant outfielder and third baseman he slammed 511 home runs, a senior circuit (National League) record until Willie Mays, another Giant great, surpassed it in 1966.
In this authoritative biography of John McGraw, Ott's first manager, Charles C. Alexander points out; with more than personal regret, that it was not until the early 1980s that occupants of the San Francisco Giants' front office evinced any interest in the team's proud past. Only then did they think to retire Ott's number, 4, along with those worn by Bill Terry, Carl Hubbell, Mays, Juan Marichal, and Willie McCovey. Plaques bearing the names of these players, and of Christy Mathewson--who never wore a number--were affixed to the outfield fence in windswept Candlestick Park. Later, the Giants proclaimed August 9, 1987, "John McGraw Day," retired his numberless jersey, and added a plaque with his name to the place of honor on the fence.
Yet as Alexander observes, few of those who pass through Candlestick's turnstiles are likely to be moved. For most of them Mays, Marichal, and McCovey, stars of the 1950s and 1960s, already belong to the receding past. "They probably wouldn't know or care much about stubby Ott's 511 career homers, Terry's .341 career batting average, Hubbell's 256 victories (twenty-four straight in 1936-37), Mathewson's 373 wins and eighty-three shutouts. Nor about McGraw, once the little Napoleon of baseball."
If there was ever any excuse for such ignorance on the part of those who call themselves baseball fans, Alexander has removed it by giving us a serious and detailed account of McGraw the man, the player, and the manager. A professor of history at Ohio University, he has published studies of the Ku Klux Klan, American nationalism, and the Eisenhower years, and he is familiar with recent scholarship devoted to the history of baseball. In addition to popular magazines such as Sports Illustrated and The Sporting News, one can now consult academic sources such as Baseball Research Journal, Baseball History, and National Pastime, or read footnoted books on the philosophy, psychology, and sociology of the sport.
Alexander makes good use of this growing body of scholarly literature, particularly that which bears on American social history. He is, for example, keenly interested in baseball's long resistance to racial integration, expressing indignation because McGraw had to try to fob off Charley Grant, a talented black second baseman, as a Cherokee Indian! The ploy did not work, of course, and it was not until 1947, when Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers and the equally splendid Lorry Doby donned a
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