Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (32 page)

Berg was marginal on all fronts within baseball—a crummy player, a Jew, and an intellectual. Berg finished both college and law school, and was a linguist by avocation and partial hype. (In Japan, for example, he did what generations of bluffers, including myself, I must admit, have done to convince people of nonexistent competence based upon marginal effort: he learned the fifty or so symbols of the
katakana
, the syllabary used as a supplementary system to traditional
kanji
characters; with
katakana
, any series of sounds can be written out, at least approximately.)

I had not expected to like Moe Berg much, for I thought that all the standard stories of his life had been egregiously embellished, and that his other exploits might turn out to be as mundane as his baseball. Not so, and I thank Dawidoff for the corrections. Though he thrived on exaggeration, in part concocted by the press to give him a persona that could transcend his play, Berg was a genuinely cultured and accomplished man. (I love John McGraw’s comment about Berg’s trip to Europe: “Who ever heard of a ballplayer spending his vacation studying Latin—and in Paris?”)

Moreover, the well-rehearsed legend of his career in espionage turns out to be true. Chosen for his rare combination of charm, good looks, intelligence, genuine bravery, and linguistic ability, Berg worked at high levels of espionage for the U.S government during World War II. He had a major role in a plot, bizarre and futile in retrospect but not absurd in conception, to kidnap (even perhaps to kill) Werner Heisenberg, if the great German physicist had been making substantial progress toward the manufacture of nuclear weapons. (He wasn’t—but no one knew for sure, and Berg could have emerged as a great hero if the German bomb had been a near reality.)

Berg’s life ended in sadness, for he could never move beyond his past, or overcome the maddening secretiveness and idiosyncrasy that ultimately drove nearly everyone away. Rejected by the CIA for work in espionage after 1945 (for they found unsupportable in peacetime the same bravado that Wild Bill Donovan had valued for the wartime effort), Berg spent the last quarter-century of his life (he died in 1972) unemployed, moving and mooching from acquaintance to acquaintance, telling the same old baseball and war stories. During all this time, he tried to write his autobiography, but never could—perhaps because hagiography was then dominant, and Berg had too much self-respect to compose in such a mode. Dawidoff writes of Berg’s inability to complete the book of his life:

If lives of
the marginalized have added one genre of social commentary to the literature of baseball biography, another may be found in retaining the traditional focus on star players, but in writing about their cultural impact rather than their skill on the field. I trust that this genre will be exploited only so far (for genuine sports talk must not end), but I must confess to great interest in Nick Trujillo’s
The Meaning of Nolan Ryan
, the first postmodern biography of a star ballplayer.

Nolan Ryan broke in with the hapless New York Mets in 1966 and pitched until the end of the 1993 season. Very few major league pitchers play into their forties, and those who do usually rely on soft stuff (knuckleballers stay the longest). Nolan Ryan continued to throw the best fastball in the game right to the end. Moreover, he improved through time. He began as a mediocre hurler with no control and no diversity of pitches (the Mets only used him once, in relief for a couple of innings, during the magnificent World Series of 1969). He ended with great control, immense cunning, and a host of additional pitches to augment the heater. In addition, Ryan is a traditional hero in an age that has almost deprived the term of meaning: he is tall, handsome, patriotic, married only once, and living on a ranch, down-home in manner (despite his immense acquired wealth), and gracious and modest. Enter, therefore, the exploiters and the commercializers, for this is America. And enter Nick Trujillo, associate professor of communication studies at California State University, Sacramento.

When Ryan was signed by the Texas Rangers in 1989, Trujillo spent three seasons studying his utility to the team’s owners and fans. Once upon a time, we might have defined utility by performance on the field, and Ryan continued to do some marvelous pitching. But now, with ballplayers marketed in every conceivable outlet from autograph shows to pictures on pencils, the financial value of a genuine hero can be measured only by taking account of all his salable symbols, with on-field performance as a starting point of ever-receding import.

We therefore meet the postmodern Ryan of commercial America, fragmented into his salable symbolic roles, none more genuine or truer than the other. Trujillo lists them as follows: “Ryan the Hall of Fame power pitcher, Ryan the cowboy rancher, Ryan the family man, Ryan the workaholic, Ryan the profit-seeking endorser, Ryan the conservative Republican, Ryan the hunter and fisherman, and even Ryan the sex symbol.”

I was most struck by Trujillo’s analysis of the power of the press and television to orchestrate artificial frenzies over trivial events—particularly the immense publicity (and sale of memorabilia) ignited on the occasion of Ryan’s 5,000th strikeout. (No other pitcher had ever reached this number, but once you get to 4,999, number 5,000 just has to come along the next time—no big deal when you are averaging more than nine strikeouts per game. The total accomplishment is, of course, magnificent; the event of number 5,000 itself is meaningless.) Yet the press and the publicists told us we should care, and most Ranger fans swear they can remember their location at the sublime moment, just as all folks of my generation know where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot.

The public may be cheapened by this devaluation of play, but has Ryan (as he became greatly enriched) also been diminished in turn? In 1975, in vigorous midcareer, Ryan told a reporter: “I try to spend all my free time with my family. I could make more appearances and get more attention other ways, I guess, but this is the life I want.” In 1992 he wrote in his autobiography,
Miracle Man
, about his greater willingness to make endorsements: “I have a better idea of what they want, and I’m learning to deliver with every take…. Since the extra income allows me to do things for my family I wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise, I carefully select the right ones and accept them.”

I honor and
value post-Boutonism, but may this fresh wind not blow us too far from the founding subject. The old hagiographies, at worst, relied on invention and hypocrisy, but at least they talked about baseball and told us how their heroes hit a curve and slid into third base. The new books, when they are good, fill in dimensions previously excluded and give voices to a variety of players ignored by the hagiographers. But, when bad, the post-Boutonian books get so tied up in their sociological analyses (the highfalutin ones) or smarmy kiss-and-tell exposés (the vernacular versions) that baseball recedes into a barely relevant background.

Al Stump’s second book is a fine post-Boutonian biography, but the movie version,
Cobb
, has been a crushing failure (and may not even be released nationally) despite some wonderful acting by Tommy Lee Jones. I think that director Ron Shelton lost his bearings and forgot his subject. He became so intrigued with Cobb the aged psychotic that he forgot Cobb the greatest ballplayer who ever lived. Shelton begins with a “newsreel” epitomizing Cobb’s playing career, but the rest of the movie is a chronicle of Cobb’s dying year, his relationship with Stump, and Stump’s anachronistic struggle about integrity. We never again see Cobb on the ball-field.

Hal Crowther, reviewing Stump’s second book in the
North Carolina Independent
, wrote:

Well, it is not clear to me; and I think the answer is “yes.” What price glory, to be sure. Cobb was a vicious bastard, and he brought misery to many around him. But baseball is a beautiful game, an important part of our history as a nation, and a joy and comfort in the lives of millions (if ever the pouting players and owners end their ridiculous pissing contest and return the institution, which they have only borrowed for a while and for their profit, to its true custodians, the fans). And excellence in any honorable form—that rarest and most precious of human accomplishments—must be praised, despite the toll often exacted on the achievers and the victims of their obsessions. Cobb was the greatest ballplayer in American history—and baseball doesn’t kill or maim.

Assessing importance is so much a matter of scale. Cobb sowed misery during his living moment to a small circle of people in his direct orbit. But moments and orbits recede as the generations roll, while unparalleled excellence emerges and holds fast. The asteroid that killed the dinosaurs looked terrible to any particular
Tyrannosaurus
witnessing the impact, but worked out wonderfully well for surviving mammals millions of years later. Who knows or cares any more about the foibles of Aeschylus or Sophocles, but I trust that we shall watch
Agamemnon
and
Oedipus Rex
as long as humanity persists.

No one can say of Tyrus Raymond Cobb, as Antony did of Brutus, that “his life was gentle,” or that “the elements / So mix’d in him, that Nature might stand up / And say to all the world, ‘This was a man!’” Cobb was monomaniacal, and he paid the personal price. But we might say of him, “This was a ballplayer!” Such a judgment should be enough to give life value. Render to Ty Cobb what he couldn’t give to others. His viciousness cannot injure anyone anymore; the excellence of his play endures.