Notes #456 — Out East

                             NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN
                                           Observations from Outside the Lines
                                     By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@adelphia.net)
 

#456                                                                                                                  AUGUST 26, 2008
                                                     OUT EAST
 

            Last issue, I borrowed an old baseball phrase, western swing , for the headline. This time, it’s the other direction, and again the phrase has a couple meanings.
 

            First, out east is where I visited recently — eastern New York, that is — Saratoga. Oddly enough, the name of that city is the “Rosebud” of my “Black Sox” disease. Eliot Asinof lived even further east, and a bit south of Albany (in Ancramdale, a speck on most maps), and the main item in this issue is another take on the author of Eight Men Out .
 

 

THE SARATOGA CONNECTION  
 

            In NOTES #327 (4/22/04), I paused to pay tribute to the many “accomplices” who had helped me in some way, after I started my “B-Sox” research in September 2002 — nearly six years ago. The acknowledgements in my book include them all, I hope. Here is what I wrote in #327 about the fellow who got me started:
 

The people on the list are scattered all over the country and Canada, even Hawaii. In fact, my first step on the B-Sox trail was taken in Hawaii. Some of you know the story. I was over there in paradise celebrating my 25th anniversary (you can look it up, in NOTES #261 ), and on our last day in Maui, Barb and I were guests of James Floto, editor (since before NOTES was born) of The Diamond Angle . We had a delightful lunch at James’ house and were talking family with him and his wife, when I remarked that our daughter, back when she was college-shopping, wanted to check out Skidmore, because she liked the city of Saratoga.
 

Saratoga ?   James has been interested in baseball and 1920 for many years, and the word “Saratoga” rang just one bell for him. Rothstein. Saratoga, the place where the Fix was hatched, maybe, August 1919. In another minute, James had placed in my hands the paperback by Brendan Boyd, Blue Ruin . I took it home. That was in early June. I finished the book, skimming some, by late August, and mailed it back. But it left me with a question about the Big Fix: how come Woodward & Bernstein are household names for uncovering the Watergate scandal … but no one knows the who and how about the Black Sox. At least I didn’t.
 

Now recently, with Bob Woodward back in the news, I found out that he is not a household name after all, not with those who were born after Watergate, anyway. But that didn’t matter, I had a question that I’m still answering. It’s taken a book, and more.
 

I’ve come a long way from Saratoga. And miles to go, before I call it a wrap. I’ve always looked forward to the next issue of NOTES … and who knows what friends are still ahead, what accomplices … as the search continues.
 

            A much longer tribute to James Floto appeared in NOTES #354 , “Requiem for a Dreamer,” in June 2005, after James passed away, all too soon.
 

            Perhaps it was after reading Christopher Lehman-Haupt’s book, Me & DiMaggio , that I started including these “Me Ands” in NOTES. The first was “Me & Roger” (Angell, in #15), followed by “Me & Dale Long” (#27), “Me & Willie” (Mays, #63), “Me & Honus” (#120), “Me & Josh” (#133), “Me & Bud S.” (#163), “Me & Shoeless Joe” (#208), and “Me & Barry” (Bonds, #234), and finally “Me and Joe D.” (#254). So I guess it’s been over six years since the last one. It doesn’t seem anywhere near that long. Unlike all the previous “Me Ands,” in this one I actually met and got to know the subject some. In my citations of Asinof below, I have tried to reproduce his comments exactly as he wrote them.
 

 

ME AND ELIOT  
 

            My tribute to Eliot Asinof appeared in NOTES #350 , not too long ago, and I do not need to reprint it here. Indeed, there is much about Asinof and Eight Men Out in my book, so much that I can recommend Burying the Black Sox as a companion to 8MO , or a the Making Of .  “Six Hours,” my account of my 2003 visit with Asinof at his Ancramdale home (in #305 ), was surely the highlight of our relationship. But there was more, and here is the rest of the story .
 

            Early in my research I was given several articles that had appeared in The Sporting News , February 8, 1961, in the wake of a CBS-TV episode of The Witness . In 1960, 41-year-old Eliot Asinof had been assigned to write a screenplay about the Black Sox scandal, but the topic was too hot for MLB, and they pressured the sponsors to kill the show. Asinof’s several weeks of research surfaced, however, in The Witness , where Shoeless Joe Jackson took the stand and was peppered with questions. To make the thing seem authentic, an urchin appeared toward the end of the show, begging Joe to Say it ain’t so . The program was awful, but I never blamed the fellow listed in the credits as “Writer” — Asinof had done some of the research, but the episode that aired was nothing he ever claimed on his long resume.
 

            By November 2002, I had found Eight Men Out and its little companion, also by Asinof, Bleeding Between the Lines . And I had questions. I was getting into the habit of following up books by contacting the authors. Asinof was not an internet/e-mail guy, but a SABR member had his mailing address, so I dropped him a note. His reply came back within the week, handwritten on the same single sheet that I had sent. (His next reply came back the same way, but by the third exchange, I rated a fresh piece of paper, and that continued — up until our very last exchange.)
 

            At the top of his first note, he wrote, “Pardon my brevity. EMO is over 40 years old. There’s no way I can give you the answers you deserve. Best wishes, E.A.”  He admitted that he did the research for Witness . Asked about Jackson requesting (or begging) to be benched, Asinof circled “to his manager before game one” and in the margin, jotted: “J.J.: ‘I don’t want to play.'”
 

            I asked him for the source of his account of that unusual request — could he recall it?  And did he ever wish that 8MO contained footnotes?  “No! My sources were an amalgamation of hundreds of conversations, impossible to document.”  When we spoke in person, months later, I realized that footnotes was a sore point for Asinof — he must have been asked about them, well, for over 40 years. He had no use for them, and emphasized that with an epithet — or two.
 

            About the “Harry’s Diary” chapter in Veeck’s The Hustler’s Handbook , Asinof wrote, “Veeck told me how impressed he was that E.M.O. was so like The Diary (which he discovered when he took over the Sox.”  Later, in our meeting, Asinof said that he once had a typewritten version of “The Diary,” but had lost it.
 

            We next corresponded in January 2003. By then I was getting curious to dig into sources closer to the events of 1919, and if Asinof had interviewed Happy Felsch and others, his papers or tapes might have some nuggets. “I am keeping all my research material, at least what is left of it. The Hall has something related to Jackson, but nothing more. (I may have donated something to the U. of Chi but I forgot exactly what it was.)”  I don’t believe that I ever followed up with the U. of Chi, but Cooperstown did not seem to have whatever Asinof may have given them on Jackson.
 

            In March 2003, I wrote to Asinof again, noting that my research was “nearly complete.” Little did I know!   I sent him a section (probably the one involving 8MO ), noting that I had drawn not just on his two B-Sox books, but also on 1919 and his ESPN Classic internet article, and on a talk he had given in Cooperstown several years earlier, which I had attended. I asked again for his source about Jackson begging to be benched. This letter drew no reply.
 

            Then we met. “Notes from a Road Trip” appeared in Notes #305 , soon after our Labor Day weekend 2003 visit. After that meeting, I asked Eliot if he’d be interested in reading my manuscript, and he agreed. I sent him one chapter at a time.
 

            His response to Chapter One — on the Milwaukee trial, Donald Gropman’s book, my criticism of Jerome Holtzman — was swift and positive. “Your first chapter is terrific. Don’t worry about trashing Holtzman [Asinof and “Jerry” were friends, I knew] as long as you’re true to your material. The 1924 trial seems to represent all the insidious complexities of the scandal.”
 

            On Abe Attell, whom Asinof had interviewed many times in his own research:
 

Abe Attell called [the Fix] ‘cheaters cheating cheaters’ a moral wrap-up that keeps going round and round. Though he was an A-1 thief and liar, he told me after EMO was published that I had written a right book. He was proud of his role; Curiously, several years ago I considered writing a novel about the scandal using Abe as its central character because he best represented the kind of betrayals Americans seem to excel in.
 

            Asinof then advised me not to “become tied up in” the role of Joe Jackson, “which the world finds so intriguing.”  (Asinof must have been questioned over the same 40 years about Jackson, even more than about his lack of footnotes.) He did not rate Gropman a historian, his Jackson biography was “amateurish.” He added that the copy of Jackson’s confession, his statement to the 1920 grand jury, that he had received from the Chicago Historical Society [now the Chi Hist Museum], “was DIFFERENT than Gropman’s. (Did you know there was more than one?)”  I did not know that, but he may be right — there are a couple versions available on the internet, one that is typewritten, with penciled-in corrections and other marks.
 

            “You do good, as Yogi Berra likes to say. Don’t make the mistake of thinking you’re on a par with Gropman or Holtzman. You’re much sharper. Okay?  Real nice to have met you.”  Needless to say, this letter was a boost — I was still looking for a publisher.
 

            If that first response raised my hopes that Asinof would be giving me detailed feedback on each chapter, they were soon brought down to earth. By the end of October, he had received all of the chapters, but had not responded to any after the first. So I dropped him a note.
 

            He wrote back October 28. “I’m long gone on the Black Sox. Too many years beating those details.”  He was concentrating on his latest book.
 

I must say, I enjoyed your visit though. Like recalling old memories of times gone by. I also enjoyed the first sections of your book, as I wrote. But what followed was too much for me to deal with. I read it, of course, but its detailed recounting of all that material, while necessary for your book, was more than I could get interested in.
 

Whatever, good luck with it. As for intros and blurbs [I had asked if he might like to contribute something], I have long since stopped doing that. Only publishers think they matter which is another illustration of how helpless they are.
 

            He closed with a comment on the Rothstein biography which had just been released: “I read the relevant sections and found them ridiculous.”
 

            In December 2003, I tried to strike up our old conversation about his recollection of Jackson’s request to be benched. I asked if perhaps he had seen The Sporting News 1961 material, and got it from there. Asinof’s reply began with a criticism of TSN , “a mouthpiece of the club owners,” that “never took the ballplayers side through all the years leading up to free agency.”  Remember, Asinof had been a pro ballplayer. He thought TV shows “such as WITNESS are, at best, 25% truth.”
 

As for my source on Jackson’s desire not to play in the first game, my best recall that I’d read/heard it from a variety of newspaper clips and people. Felsch? Red Faber? … You challenge my fading memory, pal. Good luck on your ms.
 

            Our next contacts were a couple of phone conversations, in the spring of 2004. The SABR convention the coming summer would be in Cincinnati, and by now I wanted to “go public” with my research, and perhaps that would lead to a book contract. (It did.)  I proposed to the convention planners that we pull together a panel on the 1919 World Series. The first person I would invite would be Eliot Asinof. He would be a guest, flown in and given a free stay. That is, if I could recruit him.
 

            Eliot was wintering down south (Georgia?) when we first talked. He did not say yes or no, it was too soon to decide. He asked who else would be on the panel. I mentioned that Dan Nathan had agreed to participate, and Asinof asked if I could send him a copy of Dan’s book, Saying It’s So .
 

            In the March 21 note I sent with the book, I wrote that “a panel on the 1919 World Series without Eliot Asinof would be a shame. (Like your absence on the Ken Burns thing.)  I do not need to tell you how unique your contribution to our understanding of the events of 1919 are. … But I won’t twist your arm, it’s your call.” 
 

            It did not take long, after receiving Saying It’s So , for Eliot Asinof to decide about the panel. One author out. While he had Saying , he showed it to John Sayles. By April 10 he had sent the book back. I wondered if it was the trip that was the problem — he had not given a lot of reasons, and I did not press him for any. So I asked him if he would consider joining the panel on a conference call, for some Q & A, if that could be arranged. That idea never materialized.
 

            The next month, May, we were exchanging letters again, this time about a manuscript of James T. Farrell — one published later by Kent State U. Press as Dreaming Baseball . I knew Farrell had been Asinof’s original guide on the B-Sox trail, and asked him about the manuscript. His reply to me was “for your eyes only” but I’m not sure why; maybe he did not want to hurt the chances of Farrell’s manuscript getting published.
 

I was a friend of Jim’s when I began EMO, or before in fact, I went to see him because I heard he’d written that novel. Indeed he had. He said it stunk, unpublishable, etc. In fact, he had begun to write a lot of bad stuff and he knew it. But he gave the ms to me, “Make of it what you can,” he said. He had done no research, he was using only what he himself had confronted as a young Chicagoan. (see MY BASEBALL DIARY). Then he began to tell me what he DID know. Whom to talk to in Chi. And best of all, “Find out WHY they did it!”
 

            Being sent on that mission to uncover motives must have been a vivid memory for Asinof to the end. Sometimes I wonder if it skewed his research, because he assumed “they did it” and was more interested in why, than in figuring out exactly who did what. But maybe that’s just me — I came at this thing from a different angle, and no doubt that skewed my research some.
 

I spoke with [Farrell] several times during the course of research cross checking from one name to another. Jim had a fine memory for names and facts. I even had the notes he gave me re various episodes I pursued. (God knows where THEY are)  I read the novel, of course, and as he suggested, it was of no help to me. It wasn’t informative, it was badly structured as a novel, it was as sad as he was in those last years of his life. You can find in wherever your access takes you, his review of EMO which was highly complimentary. (Years before, he also reviewed MAN ON SPIKES, again, complimentary.) I am happy to say that he liked me as much as I liked him.
 

            In my reply, I thanked him for his note on Farrell, and asked him a few more questions, but he never answered them. My final question was this: “If you were asked to do a new edition of 8MO, what would you change or add?”
 

            When Burying the Black Sox was at the printer, I wrote to Asinof one more time, promising him a copy. I knew that he was opposed to providing blurbs for the jacket (although he provided one the next year for Dreaming Baseball !), but I had to ask anyway. Could I cite something from our correspondence, something he had already written?  Maybe just “Your first chapter is terrific” and a few other words?  “A detailed recounting”?
 

            His reply restated his opposition to all blurbs. “Sorry. Congratulations on your publication. Best wishes, Eliot.”
 

            Those were the last words between us. But I find myself talking more and more about Asinof, when I talk about the B-Sox and my ongoing research. He has become part of the narrative. I guess that I have too.
 

            His was a pioneering role, suited for the rugged individualist that he was. He credited James Farrell with giving him that initial shove in the right direction, but after that, he moved ahead with his own swagger, his own language, his own style. If anyone objected, “[Expletive deleted] them!”
 

            Eliot Asinof passed away June 10, shortly before I spoke in Indianapolis on the occasion of the 20th anniversary of the film based on Asinof’s 1963 book. Upon my return, I sent a sympathy card to his family. I am hopeful that his B-Sox research, with or without his taped interviews, will someday rest in a safe haven and be accessible for researchers. Eliot himself never bothered to revisit the material, it was confined to his attic. He had grown tired of looking back , the last four decades of his life, sifting for clues. He was more interested in his next book.
 

 

ANOTHER BASEBALL MUSEUM IN UPSTATE NY?  
 

            Apparently, and it’s out east — in Howe’s Caves. OK, it’s not a baseball museum, it’s the Iroquois Indian Museum , but thru the rest of 2008, you can find there a display from Cooperstown. “Baseball’s League of Nations: A Tribute to Native Americans in Baseball” honors Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot from Maine; Jim Thorpe, Charley Bender, Allie Reynolds and many more Native Americans who made it to the majors. The New York Times of Sunday, August 17, has a nice article on it.
 

 

SPEAKING OF UPSTATE MUSEUMS  
 

            Yes, there’s another one that I can squeeze into this issue: the National Museum of Racing and Hall of Fame , in Saratoga. You can look it up, at www.nyra.com. It’s tiny, compared to baseball’s, but it has a few things you won’t find in Cooperstown. For example, there’s the Anatomy Gallery, where you can compare a human skeleton to that of a horse … and just to offer a perspective, there’s a lion skeleton nearby, too. Why Cooperstown does not have a similar display, allowing visitors to compare a human skeleton to that of a ballplayer, is not at all clear to me — what are they covering up?  Why do they keep their skeletons in a closet?
 

            The NMRHF was a friendly place, perfect for the hour before the race track gates open at 11 AM (you can get in for breakfast and other stuff in the morning, but then you have to leave at 10). It is a stroll through history, about 150 years’ worth, mostly via paintings, photos, statues and captions. There’s a lot more than I want to describe here, including movies, but suffice to say that even with a heavy dose of knowledge, your betting at the track across the street will not be any more successful.
 

 

WHAT-IF DEPT.  
 

            My excursion into the world of horse racing — Saratoga may be precisely where the plot to fix the 1919 Series was hatched, so it was not a world totally unrelated to baseball — got me thinking (uh, oh) about — well, what if baseball had gone the way of, say, wrestling, after the B-Sox thing?  Enjoying the Mardi Gras atmosphere at the track in Travers Week — and remember, the big race day, Saturday, would draw 70,000 — I couldn’t help but think that baseball would have done just fine, had the powers that were decided to embrace and encourage gambling, instead of considering it a mortal sin.
 

            I have noted here before — baseball had great appeal for the gambling American, almost from Day One, whenever that was. It offered an almost infinite number of things on which bets could be placed. Would the next pitch be a ball or strike? Would our first baseman out-hit theirs? Step back, look at the league — which team would score the most runs today, or this week ? It was always a feast for those with the itch to win a quick buck.
 

            Imagine a ballpark filled daily with 70,000 fans … some will watch the game in progress, others will lounge away from the action near a wall of monitors, where other games are shown. We can bet on those games, too. There will not only be “daily doubles” for back-to-back innings in each game, but we can bet on today’s game and tomorrow’s , so yes, let’s come back. Baseball would figure out how close to an inning’s start, for the betting to be cut off. The statisticians, given an important new role, would set the odds for fans who want to play the innings game: no profit in predicting no runs, but increasing rewards for calling the shots, for one, two, three runs per inning, and so on.
 

            Tickets will be cheap, but the food will be great, so fans will arrive for lunch, then settle in and scout the program. Stay for dinner, the night games on the west coast make the east coast parks almost 24/7 operations. All the parks are open all summer, of course, whether there are home games or not.
 

            Would the games themselves be played hard, and not taken lightly, as exhibitions?  No, because although the results of the games may not be so important — one reason that the parks of the teams in last place still fill up in Septembers — they do count, and the players are rewarded (like jockeys) for each win, and for where their teams finish each month.  In the post-season, only the best teams move on, so those players get the bonus, too. I think with some tweaking, and a lot more thought and discussion, we can figure out how to get every player doing his damnedest to win every game. Yes, we will need to police them carefully from betting themselves, and that could be tricky.
 

            Am I serious here, or just doing my Pete Rose impression?  Well, I’m not sure. I’ve married baseball before to the opera, to broadway, and theme parks (see Ballpark USA , reprinted in #230 ). And I’ve compared it to the WWF. Gambling has always been, it seems, the national pastime, and maybe baseball’s divorce back in 1920 was too much of a knee-jerk reaction, a decision that looked good on paper, like prohibition, but maybe was too harsh. What do you think, Judge Landis? 
 

 

RETROSHEET  
 

            I hope everyone by now has bookmarked Retrosheet on their home PCs. It’s a fabulous research tool, that anyone can use. At the Hall of Fame, the staff at the research center have mastered it, so visitors are routinely treated to printouts of the play-by-play and box scores of their favorite memories.
 

            After observing this on a recent visit, I mentioned to the staff in charge, a game I recalled from 1958, at old Forbes Field. What I recalled was that it was a Sunday game in April [the 20th, it turned out], and the game was almost suspended by the Pennsylvania blue laws. Instead, it ended abruptly when Pirate prospect R. C. Stevens, who had hit safely in his first three at bats that spring, clouted a homer over the section of the left field wall that would later be known as “Maz’ spot.”
 

            In seconds , I had the box & P-by-P in my hands. Stevens indeed was 1-for-1 with that HR; he had entered as a late-inning sub for Ted Kluszewski. The Pirates beat the Reds, 4-3, that day. Don Hoak was still a Red.
 

            I recall my reaction at the time: would Stevens make ANY outs this season? — hey, I was just 11, what did I know?  I’m sure if I had been allowed to place a bet, I’d have bet that R.C. would do something … I think he had the game-winning hit in the season opener in Milwaukee. (OK, I just looked that up; he did.) He started 1958 with a bang: his first 11 hits drove in 11 runs, and included two doubles and five HRs. Then reality set in, and he finished ’58 in Salt Lake City. But not before he earned the nickname “Recking Crew” — and a lasting place in the Hall of Fame section of my baseball memory.