Road Trips: A Trunkload of Great Articles from Two Decades of Convention Journals

Edited by Jim Charlton, Reviewed by Matt "The Crank" Wall

Every year SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research, releases several publications to its members. As might be expected from a group both erudite and fanatical, the subject matter of these releases can often be a bit obscure and frequently veer into the realm of excessive detail. Attending a SABR convention is a sort of immersion process in serial obsession, as one is alternately delighted or mystified by the abstruse, inspirational, and hithertofore unknown dusty corners from the attic of our sport.

Road Trips is a marvelous sampler of 53 short papers and presentations from SABR conventions from the last 34 years. It has particular appeal to a fan like me, who enjoys the relatively obscure stories but has neither the patience nor time to read through the longer scholarship that emerges in book format from SABR's membership. Road Trips is available now to SABR members, and will be released January 1st to the mass market outlets; at a list price of $14.95 and a pre-release price on Amazon of under $11 for over 150 pages of articles, it's a great bargain. Since the articles are all short, it's great bedside/reading room fodder. (I read a good portion of it while waiting for my car to get fixed and in various lines.)

There have been thirty or so SABR convention meetings, starting with the founding meeting of 16 at Cooperstown in 1971, and a regular publication has been produced at the annual meeting since 1984. It came as a surprise to me that SABR itself did not have a complete collection of its own publications -- perhaps, like many start-up groups, it did not take scholarship of its own history quite so seriously from the beginning. So the publication of Road Trips is in itself a sort of meta-scholarly project.

Selection of the articles was made with some sensitivity to representing the local history of baseball at each convention site, so there's a geographic and chronological diversity to this anthology, with a bit of a skew towards the more ancient corners of the attic. The quality of the writing and research and the type of topic varies considerably, as might be expected, and rather than review each article in great depth it may be better to just provide a subjective sampler of some of the articles I enjoyed the most. I expect most regular Diamond Angle readers' typically eclectic tastes will be satisfied by something on this neat smorgasbord of SABR sweetmeats.

• A neat history of the Dodgers' Vero Beach spring training complex, which touches on a variety of related topics: integration, evolution of the minor leagues, the emergence of spring training as a revenue source, etc.
• "Brewery Jack" Taylor -- Big Talent, Big Problem, the sad tale of a turn of the century pitcher with star potential who died young under somewhat mysterious circumstances.
• One of the first stories on Bud Fowler, the African-American who played in the majors in the 1870s and 1880s and unfotunately became the casus belli for baseball segregationists of the era.
• A detailed look at the meteorology around Coors field that will make you reconsider more simplistic explanations of the Coors Field Effect.
• The politics that went into the creation of the American League -- shall we just say that, as today with Mr. Selig, the strange fact emerges that all roads lead to Milwaukee?
• The story of the San Francisco Missions/Mission Bells, the "other" SF team in the PCL. I found this to be a sort of eery echo of the plight of multi-team markets' "second" teams from later years, from the Mets to the White Sox to the present-day A's.
• The story of the 1878 Buffalo Bisons, perhaps the greatest pre-modern minor league team at a time when the distinction between minor and major leagues was thin.
• A recap of the otherwise-obscure Dale Long's eight-game-straight homer streak in May 1956, a feat since matched by Don Mattingly and Ken Griffey, Jr.
• Cal Abrams, the Great Jewish Hope of Brooklyn before Sandy Koufax.
• The story of a great college game thrown by Gary Gentry for Arizona State in 1967.
• When Providence, Rhode Island was the shining star of professional baseball. I've been a victim of crimes three times in my life, and all three were in Providence on brief and random visits, so this article went a ways towards redeeming the city a bit in my jaded eyes.
• An interesting essay about the chicken and egg of the theory of baseball-as-cultural adaptation vs. preservation in Japanese-American communities. It points out that a lot of Japanese immigrants actually brought baseball with them, and picks a bit at the myth of baseball-as-assimiliation.
• Bumpus Jones, his life and times - another flawed pitcher of the late 19th century, whose media-created legend is a sort of prequel to Bo Belinsky, et alias.
• The Greatest Catch Ever Made -- and it wasn't the Willie Mays/Vic Wertz catch, it was made by Red Murray of the Giants at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh on August 16, 1909.
• The first real all-star game, played in memory of Addie Joss (yet another great pitcher who died young), a game which featured eight future hall of famers, including pitchers Cy Young and Walter Johnson. Plus a gent not in the Hall named Joe Jackson.
• The story of the sojourn west of Cal McVey, star first sacker for the first professional club, the 1869 Cincinnati Reds, by Daryl Brock. Brock incorporated the story of the '69 Reds into his novel "If I Never Get Back", which I consider one of the best works of historical baseball fiction.
• The Marty Bergen murder-suicide case, one of a number of disturbingly violent incidents surrounding turn of the century Boston Red Sox players. And you thought steroids was a scandal. This was also alluded to in my recent review of "The Hurrah Game", and the incident is still vaguely remembered in Western Massachussetts.
• The story of Ed Reulbach and the last doubleheader shut-out pitched by one pitcher. This also made me wonder how many of these tragic early pitchers' careers might have been extended with pitch counts. I've often wondered whether instead of the Curse of the Bambino, the Red Sox might've been paying attention to the Curse of Joe Wood. For every Iron Man story from the deadball era, there seems to be a half dozen sad stories of arms that fell off or pitchers that fell off the wagon.