book review by Chris Lareau
Rebel With A Cause
Author Tim Gay is a member of the Warren Area High School Class of 1972. 314 pages, The Lyons Press, $16.95 This book was originally released as a hardcover in 2005 by the University of Nebraska Press. Currently it is available at Amazon.com through The Lyons Press, an imprint of The Globe Pequot Press. Photo: Library of Congress
History, it has been said, is written by the winners.
This may explain why you probably never heard of Tristram Speaker, who will forever hold the all-time record for unassisted double plays. Speaker lived from 1888 to 1958 and played for the world champion Red Sox and the world champion Cleveland Indians, with a lifetime batting average of 344. With the possible exception of Willie Mays, Tris Speaker was arguably the greatest center fielder of all time. At the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, he is at least acknowledged as the "Greatest centrefielder of his day."
Corruption in baseball, which takes up quite a bit of this book, was so bad in the early 20th century that one wonders if the national pastime of betting was what made baseball so popular or if baseball was invented just to give gamblers something to wager on. If you read between the lines in Gay's flawlessly expressed prose, there was probably more money bet on games than the games actually earned. Those smart enough to pick the winners may have made a fortune and those smart enough to fix games probably made even more.
When the corruption bubble burst, the stock of Tris Speaker, the highest paid athlete in the country, plummeted. So did his place in sports history.
Until now, of course, in this biography by Warren, PA native Timothy Michael Gay III who, while visiting the ballplayer's gravesite in Hubbard, Texas, found that people there didn't even know who Tristram Speaker was.
The guy was a baseball genius, if such a thing has a genetic basis. According to Gay, just playing next to Speaker or just being on his team improved your own ability. Although he was never formally found guilty of betting on games when regulation began in the 1920s, he was nevertheless black listed out of the majors. Betting was so rampant in the days before this that if all ballplayers, managers, and owners who gambled on the game were expelled no one would have shown up to play ball, I suspect.
Yet Tim Gay never apologizes for Speaker's transgressions. Instead he unabashedly shows us all the warts and weaknesses of an otherwise greek god of the baseball diamond. To say that everyone was involved in the sordid grabs for lucre does not excuse Speaker, it just makes him human, I suppose. Suffice it to say that some of the shenanigans of owners and players of the era would have made "Pete Rose blush," as Gay coins a phrase.
What Gay is trying to tell us is simply this, that Tris Speaker played ball like no one ever did before him and most likely few ever will again, even on steroids.
Any ball player today suffering from a batting slump or excessive fielding errors could probably improve instantly just by reading Gay's innumerable anecdotes of inspired play by this Texan who saved the day countless times for his team. This biography is a piece of lore no player should do without and any self-respecting sports fan can't miss.
Read about the pitcher struck by lightning in the middle of a game who went on to win. Read about unassisted triple plays. Or read about one player's contract that stipulated he must drink alcohol after every game. The clause, written by Speaker when he player-managed the Cleveland Indians, actually cured an alcoholic.
"Rough-and-Tumble" Speaker was quick to fight because he seemed to always have a chip on his shoulder, always having something to prove, from the very first day he put on a major league uniform. He had the genuine pedigree of a Rebel, raised in a Texas that saw three wars in three decades just before he was born: the Texas War for Independence, the Mexican War, and the War Between the States.
The "pill" for his affliction was a baseball and it was also his cure. The three wars that created Texan culture gave us Tris Speaker, a flawed hero who turned his complaints into some of the best baseball the world may ever see, according to the author.
Up until now, his feats remained unsung. With this book, Tristram Speaker now sits rightly in the pantheon of Cobb, Ruth, Matthewson, Young, Wagner, Johnson, and Jackson. Nicknamed "Spoke" by his teammates, he kept baseball fever rolling for two decades.
So don't wait for the movie. The multitude of perspectives, the detail of relevant and salient anecdotes afforded in the book are probably untranslatable by even an excellent documentarian like Ken Burns. I don't think even David Lynch could capture the surreal aura of this phenomenal sports era whose front page newspaper headlines pushed aside the sinking of the Lusitania. Perhaps baseball fan Stephen King could attempt the screenplay first. (Opening scene: pitcher gets struck by lightning. Scene two: a high-inside pitch kills a batter. Scene three: baseball riot in Boston. Ad infinitum.)
As a first effort at a book, author Tim Gay makes an outstanding achievement by a son of Warren, Pennsylvania and a big win for the survival of books, in general. I can't wait to see the next one.
The current book is available at Amazon.com.
Chris Lareau is the editor of Allegheny Almanac
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