I’ve always thought of Jim
Brosnan as complete in a way that few other
players have been in the whole sprawling history
of baseball. Of course, if you look at nothing
but the cold hard facts of his career, you might
call me delusional. Brosnan came off the
Cincinnati sandlots, where he grew up playing
with Don Zimmer and Jim Frey and considered
himself lucky when the Cubs signed him out of
high school 60 years ago. A pitcher lucky to be
a Cub? Broz would soon learn what it meant to be
naïve.
He survived by letting his inner
realist emerge and went on to play in the major
leagues for nine seasons. In 1954 and from 1956
to 1963, as a starter and reliever with four
teams – the Cubs, the Cardinals, his hometown
Reds and the White Sox – he won 55 games, lost
47 and had 67 saves, all to the tune of a 3.54
earned-run average. He was, in his own words,
“an average professional baseball player.”
But he rose far above that
description with a statistic that the Baseball
Encyclopedia fails to note. Number of books
published: two. Both were nonfiction, written by
him in diary form over the course of two
baseball seasons. Their titles, as I hope you
know, are The Long Season and Pennant
Race. There is nothing average about either
one. They are, rather, a window into what made
Jim Brosnan a complete pitcher – smart, funny,
insightful, irreverent, marvelously well-written
and, most important, honest.
Pennant Race follows the
Reds’ march to the 1961 National League
championship. Brosnan salted it with one
well-observed gem after another, the best
remembered of which may be this: “Candlestick
Park is the grossest error in the history of
major league baseball. Designed at a corner
table in Lefty O’Doul’s, a Frisco saloon, by two
politicians and an itinerant ditch digger, the
ballpark slants toward the bay – in fact, it
slides toward the bay and before long will
be under water, which is the best place for it.”
It was, however, The Long Season,
a chronicle of the 1959 campaign, with which Jim
Brosnan made history. This is not the fiction
that Ring Lardner, Bernard Malamud and countless
other non-playing writers have served up. Nor is
it a kid-friendly biography of the kind that has
cluttered bookstores since publishers discovered
the market for baloney and outright lies.
Brosnan used The Long Season
to take readers onto the field, but he didn’t
stop there. His tour continued on into the
dugouts, clubhouses, planes, trains and hotel
rooms where baseball players lived out their
lives, from February until October. He laid bare
strengths and weaknesses, triumphs and
indignities, good times and bad, his own as well
as his teammates.’ Granted, he realized his era
wasn’t ready for the vulgarity that is a staple
of baseball conversation. And he steered clear
of the sexual shenanigans we have come to
realize are part of big league recreation. (In
the days he wrote about, there wasn’t even a
designated hitter, and the champions of the two
eight-team major leagues went straight to the
World Series.) And yet Brosnan’s readers – not
just baseball fans but thinking people
interested in the human condition – got the
picture.
It was right there on Page 1. Broz,
working in the off-season at a Chicago
advertising agency, calls home to see if there
are olives for martinis. (That was the first
surprise: He didn’t drink milk.) His wife, Anne
Stewart, tells him his contract from the
Cardinals has arrived. He’s coming off a strong
season and looking for a big raise, all the way
to $20,000. On Page 2, he finds out the Cards
have no intention of giving it to him.
Welcome to the big leagues before
agents and free agency, when the ballplayers
were indentured servants.
By lifting the veil of secrecy from
his world, Brosnan ventured where no player had
ever gone. There are those who say that John
Montgomery Ward, a 19th-century
fireballer, was the first to break this literary
ground. But my old friend Jerome Holtzman,
baseball’s tireless unofficial bibliophile,
doesn’t include anything by Ward in his
collection. And as Broz once told me, if Jerry
Holtzman doesn’t have it, it doesn’t exist.
So Brosnan was the first of
baseball’s dugout literati. Without him, there
might have been no Ball Four by Jim
Bouton a decade later, which would have been a
loss of epic proportions. Then again, Sparky
Lyle might not have put his name on the scabrous
Bronx Zoo, which would have been a blow
for good taste. And what to say of Jose Canseco
and Juiced? You take the wretched with
the sublime, I guess.
But never forget this: The Long
Season by Jim Brosnan was, and is, the best
of its kind.
Not that there weren’ those who
howled angrily when it was published. Some were
the chowderheads in baseball too dim to
appreciate his affectionate portrayals of
players like Don Blasingame and Smoky Joe
Cunningham and his reverence for Fred
Hutchinson, his manager in Cincinnati. I’m
embarrassed to say that other detractors were
sportswriters who may not have known what to
make of a player who wore glasses, smoked a pipe
and read books. As Brosnan wrote later, “I was,
on those accounts, a sneak and a snob and a
scab.”
But I am here to tell you that he
was a model of intellectual courage. It’s a
quality in short supply no matter how long the
parade is of hitters willing to risk stopping a
97-mile-an-hour fastball with their heads. If
there were more courage of the mind – if there
were more ballplayers who could face the truth
and stand tall when they did it – we might know,
for instance, just how rampant steroid abuse was
during the Great Home Run Epidemic. But Brosnan
was, obviously, a rarity.
When he wrote about his life in
baseball, he did it with candor sustained by
wit. You can turn randomly to almost any page in
The Long Season and find an example of
what I’m talking about. Consider this: “I
maintain a small library in my locker and in the
clubhouse. Nothing like a book to keep your mind
from thinking.”
Or this, when Broz learns that the
Cards have traded him to Cincinnati, just as the
Cubs once traded him to the Cards: “I sat back
on the couch, half-breathing as I waited for
indignation to flush good red blood to my head.
Nothing happened. I took a deep breath, then
exhaled slowly. It’s true. The second time
you’re sold you don’t feel a thing.”
And then there is my favorite, which
tells so much about the era and the art of not
just pitching but of getting your mind right to
do it: “[Willie] Kirkland ran up to the plate,
eagerly. My old homer-hitting buddy. Six home
runs off me in three years. I stepped back off
the mound to hate Kirkland with my eyes. (Early
Wynn says a pitcher will never be a big winner
until he hates hitters.) I growled a negative
growl at [Dutch] Dotterer’s sign. No, sir, if
Kirkland hits a home run off me on this pitch it
will be from a prone position. Down he went. My
control was excellent. He fouled off the next
slider, fouled off a curve, and fanned on a
fastball right under his chin.
“Well, that pitch did it. When a
pitcher can rid himself of the feeling that he
can’t get a certain hitter out, he knows
he’s got good stuff. The Giants stared at me for
six innings, waiting to see Old Broz, Old
Nervous Broz, start to waver, start to think on
the mound. They waited in vain . . .”
Brosnan’s improvement as a pitcher
was a welcome side effect of The Long Season.
As he told me when I interviewed him in 1980, “I
was rid of all the B.S. that had always
cluttered my mind. I’d always dwelled on my bad
days, my embarrassments, and as a result, I was
just competent. The book finished that. It gave
me the self-confidence I’d always lacked.”
Think of that for a moment: He got
his act as a pitcher together and we got a
classic in baseball literature. To my ears, that
sounds like one of the greatest trades ever.
So it is that we are gathered here
today to salute the pitcher, author and
freethinker who was known by so many names: Broz
in his own thoughts, Meat to his wife, and The
Professor to his teammates. Now we have
something else to call him: Eternal.
Please join me in welcoming Jim
Brosnan to the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of
the Eternals.
The full text of John Schulian’s introduction
also appeared in the
Los Angeles Times, under the title “Before
‘Ball Four,’ there was Brosnan,” in the July 22,
2007 edition.
|