Where They Ain't

Every year at this time, to coincide with my trip to Cooperstown for the Hall of Fame induction, I like to read a baseball book. This year, because of Cal Ripken's association with the Baltimore Orioles, I read a book about that team, only this was about the Orioles of the 1890s, one of the best teams of all time. The book was called Where They Ain't, by Burt Solomon.

The title comes from a quote by Willie Keeler, one of the best of the Orioles, whose response to how to be a good hitter was, "Keep a clear eye, and hit 'em where they ain't," which over the ensuing hundred plus years has been a koan of baseball from the little league fields to the majors. Keeler is one of the six main characters of this book, which is basically a chronicle of major league baseball from the early 1890s to the first decade of the twentieth century, when the American League emerged as an equal to the existing National.

The Orioles were way ahead of their time, mostly because of their manager, Ned Hanlon, who pioneered what became known as "scientific" baseball. He employed the sacrifice bunt, the hit and run, and the "Baltimore chop," which was hitting down on the ball so it bounced high off a hard surface, enabling runners to beat throws to first. In addition to Keeler, who once hit .424 for a season and had a 44-game hitting streak, the other major players on these teams were John McGraw, the scrappy third baseman, Hughey Jennings, the chipper shortstop, Joe Kelley, a matinee idol outfielder, and Wilbert Robinson, the catcher. All of these men would one day make the Hall of Fame.

In reading books about early baseball, though, one thing becomes clear: the more things change, the more they stay the same. As the book begins, the Player's League, which was an attempt by players to form a league in which they got a fair shake, folded. The battle between management and the players has been going on probably since the first player has ever been paid. In fin de siecle America, though, it was particularly nasty, and Solomon relates this sharply through the way the Orioles fans were treated. After winning four pennants with the Orioles, Hanlon cooked up a deal with the owners of the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers. The Dodgers and the Orioles would be owned by the same consortium, and all the good players, including Keeler, would be assigned to Brooklyn, leaving the Orioles team a shambles (McGraw and Robinson would refuse to go). Hanlon would manage in Brooklyn. Suddenly a dominant team was an also-ran. Things got worse a year later when the team was disbanded entirely.

The owners behaviors toward the players were like feudal landlords toward serfs, but the players couldn't get much sympathy because they were still well paid when compared to a typical working stiff. I was interested to learn that late in the 1890s the National League became very close to being a cartel, with ownership owning all teams, and freely moving players around without their say-so. The plan failed by one vote.

The American League came along in 1901, and Baltimore was granted a team, which was managed by McGraw. He soon jumped to the New York Giants, and took with him a lot of the Orioles best players (he would manage the Giants imperiously for the next 30 years). Then the Orioles moved to upper Manhattan to become the New York Highlanders, who in a few years would become known as the Yankees.

The book has a lot of interesting facts, and Solomon tries to invest the human element in the story, beginning the book with Keeler's untimely death at the age of 50, but I thought the prose was still dry. Solomon's normal beat is politics, and that shows through. I'm also grateful he didn't succumb to what other writers of baseball books do, and that is write in the style of sportswriters of the time. He does use a few terms that have fallen out of fashion, such as "cranks" instead of fans, and "twirlers" instead of pitchers, but that is easily digestable.

As for my trip to Cooperstown, it was a blast. Eighty-two thousand people attended the ceremony, smashing the record by over fifty percent. It's great to think that Ripken and Gwynn play essentially the same game that Keeler and McGraw and the like played, and that the tradition still is going strong.