Good reading

I’ve always been reluctant to recommend books I have enjoyed to others, mainly because my taste runs to an eclectic mix of non-fiction. In fact, until this week, there was only one fiction work on my all-time list of top 10 books (“Lonesome Dove, by Larry McMurtry). That has now changed.

Maybe 10-15 years ago, before Kindles, Nooks, I-pads and the like, I ordered audio books to ease the freeway commutes to and from work in Southern California. One of the audio tapes I listened to was an incredibly well-narrated cassette called “Veracruz Blues.” a novel based almost entirely on fact, about the 1946 raid on baseball players of all races by Jorge Pasquel, the millionaire owner of the Veracruz Blues.

The other week, as I drafted Ray Dandridge on one of my teams, I was reminded of it and trackied down a used copy on Amazon, I read it in about three hours, and it is now the second work of fiction on my top 10 list.

It features wonderful details of many of the 25 ML whites who jumped to Mexico for Pasquel’s dollars, like Danny Gardella, who leaped after having a good season for the Giants diring the war years. He might have had his own Strat card if manager Mel Ott hadn’t hated him and if Van Lingle Mungo hadn’t peed on his leg once in the showers. He was followed by Max Lanier, Sal Maglie, Mickey Owen, Vern Stephens and others.

It is also the story of Dolph Luque, who won a World Series game against the Black Sox in 1919 and then managed in Cuba and Mexico until coming out of retirement at age 60 to throw the final pitches of the ‘46 Mexican league season—and of other ML Cubans such as Luis Olmo, Bobby Estalella and the gentle HR champ, Roberto Ortiz, who had a Senators card in the 1941 Strat season recreation.

Then there are the blacks—Dandridge, Burnis (Wild Bill) Walker, Bonnie Serrell, Double Duty Radcliffe and Theolic (Fireball) Smith (google him!) And, of course, cameo appearances by the likes of Babe Ruth, Ernest Hemingway, Gene Tunney , the beautiful Mexican actress Maria Felix and the poet Diana James, all part of Mexican baseball lore. But it’s not just a baseball book; it uses the sport as a lens through which to examine postwar life in both America and Mexico, particularly the difference in how black players were regarded in each..

Honestly, I would not recommend this book to anyone but you guys, and only to those of you who, like me, are still enchanted by the history of the sport.

The book was published in 1996 by Penguin Books. The author is Mark Winegardner. If you can track down a copy, it is a marvelous read. I cannot recommend it more highly.

Tom

The book sounds really interesting. I appreciate you bringing it to our attention. I'm now on the prowl for it and look forward to reading it.

Thanks for review of the book Tom. Amazon has a fair number of hard copies available (from its used bookstore partners) for the $4 shipping charge.

how long did the players stay in mexico and did the veracruz team win?

Most ML whites played only that one year in Mexico. One, Stephens, snuck out of Mexico in his father's clothes after Commissioner Happy Chandler threatened a lifetime ban on those who jumped (Stephens' "escape" was well-documented in the book). After Chandler did institute a lifetime ban, Danny Gardella filed suit challenging that ruling as well as the reserve clause. When it looked like the suit was gaining momentum, the Giants offered Gardella $60,000 (big bucks in the postwar period) to drop it. He accepted, and the lifetime ban was dropped. But Gardella's suit laid the groundwork for the successful challenge that eventually killed the reserve clause. Sal Maglie, incidentally, taught the proper way to throw a curve by Dolph Luque (who was taught himself by Christy Mathewson) in Mexico actually made it to stardom.

The 1946 "war" with the Mexican League certainly hastened the integration of ML ball, even though Rickey had signed Jackie Robinson prior to that season and he played in Montreal. Some of the better blacks (particularly Wild Bill Wright and Dandridge, regarded by his peers as the best third baseman ever), made it as far as AAA ball in America after leaving Mexico) and Roberto Ortiz actually made it back to the Senators for two years in the late '40s (but was well past his prime).

Thanks for the recommendation bontomn. Sounds like a good read. I just got an Amazon gift certificate for my birthday so I'll check it out. I am kind of like you, I prefer offbeat non-fiction or straight-up sports non- fiction. But I do like a couple of baseball novels by W.P. Kinsella. The first of course is Shoeless Joe. The book is so much better than the movie and the movie was pretty good. For those of us who have lost our fathers the idea of having your father come back so you can play catch with him is very powerful. In fact it is a universal story of reconciliation. I wish I could play catch with my dad again.
The other book by Kinsella is The Iowa Baseball Confederacy. It is a really weird book but again it brings up the idea of getting a second chance. I am sure many of you have read these books but if you haven't check them out.