Ninety Feet From Fame
Close Calls with Baseball Immortality
by Mike Robbins
Carroll & Graf, 304 pp., $15
MEN WANT ONLY ONE THING--but it's not what mothers tell their daughters. What men really want is baseball stardom. Thwarted by circumstances, they may settle grudgingly for that other.
Among the lot of wannabes and also-rans there are a few who actually arrived at the edge of greatness--only to be rebuffed. And now Mike Robbins, a member of the Society for American Baseball Reasearch, has written Ninety Feet From Fame to describe these players: the utmost of the almost. These are the tales of fate's battered children, who crossed the threshold, only to step into the thresher.
Baseball has always been a favored sociological laboratory, highlighting the fault lines where humanity meets excellence, where greatness meets celebrity. If we can identify what strain of fortitude made Lou Gehrig the Iron Man, perhaps we can use it to help us stick to our projects. If we learn why Whitey Ford could always win big games, perhaps we can finally manage to score those big deals. So how about those who fell short? Failure of nerve and verve? Twist of fate? Third party (umpire, manager, team owner, agent, wife) at fault? Did they just never have their moment? Is there something we can learn to avoid, or is the fickle finger of fate beyond the range of our efforts to control?
Here is the story of Eddie Waitkus, prototype for the fictional Roy Hobbs in The Natural by Bernard Malamud. A six-foot-tall blue-eyed nineteen-year-old insurance company typist named Ruth Steinhagen had a crush on the twenty-nine-year-old bachelor when he played for her hometown Chicago Cubs. He was traded to the Phillies after the 1948 season, so she could no longer adore him daily from the stands. When his new team came to town, she booked a room at the same hotel. She left Waitkus a note to visit her; he came to her room where she shot him with a .22 caliber rifle. Eddie had been enjoying a .300 season and was poised to take his place among the first rank of players. Although he surprised doctors by recovering fully from his wounds, he returned to finish his career mired in mediocrity.
In contrast might stand the player who holds the check for greatness but leaves it unaccountably uncashed. The "great" Fritz Ostermueller pitched in the 1930s and 1940s, and he hovered always on the verge of the fabulous. An umpire said, "When you are there on the diamond with him you have got to realize that he somehow just misses being one of those pitchers that fans will still be talking about fifty years from now." Did Ostermueller miss his chance for fame, asks Robbins, or did expectations simply outstrip his true ability? He lets a Baseball Weekly article of 1940 answer for him: "What makes people like Ostermueller stop short of the pinnacle of success? Is it merely that luck persistently evades them when they seek its finest rewards? Somehow I think that is the answer. Life is so often like that." Fritz finished his career with a losing record, 114-115.
Then there are those players who self-destruct, perhaps averse to success and its freight. We don't need Robbins to introduce us to Shoeless Joe Jackson, but the tale of "Turkey" Mike Donlin both amuses and cautions. He seemed to have merged the virtues and vices of Joe Pepitone and Robert Downey Jr. Mike was a beloved New York playboy who divided his time between the pursuit of baseball stats and Broadway starlets. He often missed games because of drunkenness or was tossed out by umpires after showy altercations. His baseball career began in 1899. In 1902 he made "inappropriate comments" to actress Mamie Fields in the presence of her date. When the beau issued a chivalrous protest, he was slugged by the slugger. Mamie jumped in to stand by her man and she took a punch for her trouble. Donlin spent the six months of the 1902 baseball season as a guest of the state.
Later, he came back and played well again, but in 1908 he romanced and wed the actress Mabel Hite. He took off two years from the game to team up with Hite in a vaudeville act. When she tragically died of cancer at age twenty-seven, he was back within the foul lines, but always just barely. He finished his career in 1914 with an exceptional total batting average of .334, then devoted himself full-time to his thespian pursuits.
The players Robbins chronicles in Ninety Feet From Fame parade across baseball's stage: the lazy and the zany, the tragic and the pathetic. It's almost an Aristotelian drama, chock full of catharsis.
Jay D. Homnick is a columnist at JewishWorldReview.com.