The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

Every year when I go to Cooperstown I try to bring a baseball book with me for reading material, and this year I picked a good one, The Summer of Beer and Whiskey, by Edward Achorn. Not only is it well written and suspenseful, but for someone who thinks he knows a lot about baseball it told me a lot I didn't know.

Ostensibly, the book is about the 1883 season of the American Association, a league that only lasted about a decade but is credited by Achorn as solidifying baseball as America's pastime. "All over the country, it had become an open question whether professional baseball could even survive. Spectators were abandoning the sport, which seemed destined to wilt away, another American fad on its way to oblivion."

But the American Association, which was also known as the "Beer and Whiskey League," changed that. The dominant league at the time was the National League: "with its fifty-cent tickets and ban on Sunday ball, marketed the game only to the rich, or at least the upper middle class--the lawyers, accountants, and businessmen who had the freedom to take a break late in the afternoon and go out to the ballpark."

A German immigrant name Chris van Ahe, who had a thriving grocery and beer garden business, "had another idea: to welcome working men and fellow immigrants, those who toiled all week and could not break free from their jobs to attend a game."

Van Ahe founded the St. Louis Browns (to make things confusing, these are not the Browns of the later American League who moved to Baltimore to become the Orioles, but instead are the antecedents of the Cardinals) and with seven other cities founded the upstart American Association. William Hulbert, who ruled the National League with an iron fist, resolutely banned Sunday ball and alcohol, but van Ahe, who didn't know much about baseball, saw it as a way to sell beer.

Van Ahe is the emotional center of the book. Achorn describes him as "George Steinbrenner, Charlie Finley, and Bill Veeck rolled into one--haughty, temperamental, driven to win, wildly experimental, and madly in love with a dazzling show. He had a splash of Yogi Berra in him, too, which surfaced in his expression of Zen-like axioms." Late in the season, van Ahe interferes with his manager Ted Sullivan so much that Sullivan quits, leaving the team without a manager during the stretch run. Steinbrenner and Billy Martin, anyone?

Achorn covers the season in great detail. The game was not quite as we know it today--players didn't wear gloves, there was only one umpire (runners would routinely take a sharp left at second base and cut across the diamond toward home if the ump wasn't looking), batters did not take a base upon being hit by a pitch (which gave pitchers free reign in throwing chin music), it took seven balls for a walk, and when there were big crowds, the spectators could stand in the outfield.

But baseball was wildly popular, especially in the cities where the teams were winning. The '83 season came down to the Browns and the Philadelphia Athletics (not the team that today is in Oakland). Achorn covers the colorful players, such as the Browns' Arlie Latham, who had a big mouth, the young Charles Comiskey, who would one day own his own team (the AL White Sox), and Tony Mullane, known by the great nickname "The Apollo of the Box." On the Athletics were Harry Stovey (a pseudonym--he didn't want his parents to know he played the degrading sport of baseball) who was the game's early home run champion, Bobby Matthews, only five-foot-five and 140 pounds, but winner of the most games of anyone who is not in the Hall of Fame (he died of syphilis at 46), and Daniel "Jumping Jack" Jones, a pitcher recruited straight from Yale University who had an odd way of delivering the ball--he made what looked like a jumping jack, which delighted and amused spectators.

Perhaps what's most different about the game then than it is now is the way pitchers were used. Teams only had two or so, and they threw until basically their arms fell off. There were no relief pitchers per se--a pitcher just went until he couldn't go anymore. As Achorn covers the pennant stretch, the Athletics are struggling because Matthews was hurt and Jones had a dead arm. I won't spoil the result--I didn't know who won the pennant, and it was a thrilling read.

There are other interesting tidbits about that season. It was when the term "fan" was coined (short for fanatic, and it replaced the usual term of "crank") and the first Louisville slugger was made by a woodworker named Hillerich. There is also a sad chapter on the color barrier. Moses Fleetwood Walker, depending on your definition, was the first African American player in professional baseball. He played one season for the American Association, but of course had it tough. Mullane, his pitcher, wouldn't even acknowledge his signs. It was Cap Anson, manager of the NL Chicago White Stockings (now the Cubs) who doomed blacks in baseball by refusing to take the field with them: "Anson vowed that he would never again share field with a black man. He was determined to devote his considerable influence, for the rest of his career, to making sure that no other white professional would, either. Regrettably, he succeeded."

The American Association eventually folded, doomed by rival leagues and players who defected. Four teams--the Cardinals, Dodgers, Reds, and Pirates, merged with the National League and exist today. A few players, such as Comiskey and Reds second-baseman Bid McPhee, are in the Hall of Fame. Many are largely forgotten, such as van Ahe, whom Achorn believes should be in the Hall. I'll conclude with this passage which pretty much sums it up: "In a league of drunks, actors, minstrels stars, cartoonists, tea merchants, dreamers, newspaper correspondents, bombastic grocers, epileptics, hot-tempered Irish managers, fainting catchers, fetishistic and hard-of-hearing sluggers, great shaggy mammoths, owners playing in their street clothes, inauspicious yellow dogs, and seriously confused left-handed third basemen, anything might happen."