The Gashouse Gang

This time of year I like to read a baseball book, so when I saw the History Book Club offered a book called The Gashouse Gang by John Heidenry, I jumped at the chance. Years and years ago I read excerpts of Leo Durocher's biography, Nice Guys Finish Last, in Sports Illustrated and I was fascinated by the Gashouse Gang, the St. Louis Cardinals of 1934, who were a motley combination of hillbillies and city kids who won the World Series. Secondly, I once knew John Heidenry (Jack to most) when he was the editor of Penthouse Forum.

Sorry to say that though the subject matter is engaging the writing is not. This is really just a regurgitation of the events of that year. Many baseball books about the old days use the syntax and grandiloquence of the sportswriting of that particular era, sometimes to an excess that borders on the inane. Heidenry does not do that, but he goes too far in the other direction. He doesn't really have a style, instead it's just a pedestrian recounting, as if he had been assigned a school report on the subject. The prose does not sing, it is a monotonous hum.

What makes the Gashouse Gang memorable are the colorful characters associated with. The first chapter is a biography of Branch Rickey, the architect of the club and the creator of what is today known as a farm system. The Cardinals weren't historically doormats, not in 1934--they had won two world titles in the previous eight years, so this isn't a David vs. Goliath story, but Rickey did bring them out of the second division in the mid-twenties.

The second chapter is a bio of Dizzy Dean, who was the heart and soul of the team and one of the most larger-than-life figures in baseball history. He was a country boy with an uncertain command of grammar, and a braggart of the highest order, but he was so charming that even opposing players liked him. He was a pitcher with a blazing fastball, and won 30 games in '34 while his brother Paul won 19. Other players on that team were Pepper Martin, Joe "Ducky Wucky" Medwick, Leo Durocher, and player-manager Frankie Frisch.

While filling us in on some of the other players it sometimes becomes confusing what year we're in, as Heidenry doesn't get down to the week by week progress of the '34 season until about half-way through the book. There are some sloppy copy editing mistakes along the way: he has the Cardinals beating the Phillies in the '31 season (it was the A's), misspells Braves' star Wally Berger, and places 1925 during the Great Depression. He also makes some arguable points, such as stating that during the twenties and thirties there was a larger pool of players than there are today. That may have been true of white Americans, but today the Majors draws from players from Latin America, Japan, Korea, even Australia, and of course men of African descent, who were barred from the Majors. He does teach me a few things I didn't know, such as that the National League considered the designated hitter back in 1933.

Heidenry's description, almost inning by inning, of the '34 World Series between the Cards and the Detroit Tigers is factually plump but again, a bit bloodless. He then has a very short epilogue that left me scratching my head. He mentions an injury to Dean in one sentence, when most baseball fans know that he was injured by a line-drive to the toe in an All Star game, came back too soon, and threw off his delivery, thus hurting his arm. After all the ink spent on Dean in the book, why dismiss all that? He also says that Frisch became an "inept manager." How does a manager become inept? He was good enough to win a world title, but then got worse? Further explanation is necessary.

It's a shame that this book didn't do justice to such an interesting team.