The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball
by Kevin Nelson

California baseball is indeed as large a topic, as diverse, as wide-ranging and hard to categorize as the state itself. Therein lies the difficulty in making a single-volume history that seeks to synthesize these many threads into a coherent narrative. There is, in point of fact, no "story" to tell per se, as there might be on a more focussed topic. The mistake Nelson makes in assembling this collage of stories and details is to try to take any player or baseball figure with a vaguely California-related connection and weave it into a chronological history, as if the broad cloth of baseball characters moving in and out of the Great Bear Republic were part of a coherent box conveniently contained by the state's borders. While an honorable and reasonably well-written and -researched (albeit exclusively from secondary and tertiary sources) effort, the result is rather disappointing.

Nelson is a general-interest sports writer (Baseball's Greatest Insults, Baseball's Greatest Quotes, Football's Greatest Insults, et alia), and The Golden Game seems to be his first attempt at a pseudo-scholarly topic. It is not, alas, scholarly, nor is it an easy read. His style of assembling, cutting, and pasting source material (perhaps appropriate to Baseball's Greatest Insults, Quotes, etc.) is evident in The Golden Game, and ends up being a rather trying way of knitting together often unrelated material. One of the more annoying habits the author has is to try to set a historical "context" for many of the topics. Recapping the stock market crash of 1929 or the bombing of Pearl Harbor is merely redundant padding. The poor job he does at framing Jackie Robinson's place in the history of the civil rights movement or the impact of the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II borders on an embarrassing lack of curiosity about those contexts.

Some other topics (there's a long list) that are ignored or only lightly touched upon include league histories and the importance of college and amateur baseball in the last fifty years. The narratives of Pacific Coast League and various Cal State leagues are split up within the text, so it's hard to figure out what's going on if you haven't read up on these before. It's hard to discuss the various attempts to bring Major League baseball to California unless one also discusses the serious attempts to take the PCL "major" on at least two occasions, or the stillborn Continental League. There's a nice brief section on the powerhouse turn of the century St. Mary's College baseball program, the first of the big West Coast baseball schools, but sadly this is not fleshed out in a discussion of the evolution of college ball or the great Cal high schools.

What the book does feature is a series of snippets, many of which are interesting, crammed into this awkward narrative chronology. There's a lot of emphasis on players and individual figures of the game, with an emphasis on California connections (sometimes a bit strained). While I enjoyed picking up the trivia and the odd factlet -- and on that basis, the book is still worth reading -- this simply made me yearn for the original source material so I could get more questions answered.

There's an interesting stylistic question to be posed by books like The Golden Game. While I'm not a big fan of Bill James' writing per se (as opposed to the content of his ideas -- I'm talking about the experience of reading his overly-personal and under-edited prose), he did introduce a style in organizing and laying out a baseball book which has done a lot for the genre. Starting with the Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, he laid out topics which really didn't fit too well together into what I call a "rolling sidebar" -- boxed off material that doesn't pretend to tell a "story" like the biography of a player or the history of a season, but which in isolating a small topic, ends up being more informative that an attempt to stick the details into a narrative box. Peter Gammons' "Notes" format in sportswriting, started in the mid-70s, is the journalistic analog in a way. The Golden Game is a book which could've been made much better by adopting this format.

There are some great underlying themes in California baseball and California itself: the tension between an historically racist culture which has many diverse constituent elements and the egalitarian ("level playing field") ideal, the relationship between money and power, business and leisure, and professionalism and amateurism, the historical need to leave home to make good which was reversed for Californians starting in the 1950s as the great population migration to the state picked up steam, and that big question of separate identity as Californians versus being part of a great whole -- valid as much for the state's baseball identity as any. For the next person who attempts a book on this sprawling subject or anything similar, I'd suggest taking a more topic-oriented and less chronological approach (perhaps on the model of Volume Three of Harold Seymour's great history of the sport, Baseball, The People's Game.)

One rather annoying feature of this book is the editorial choice to make a false-coloring of all the photos with a faux siena effect. This makes the photos harder to make out, and needlessly occludes details of the otherwise good collection of illustrations. Perhaps it was meant as a "Golden" theme to reflect the book's contents, but it greatly reduces the value of keeping a copy on a well-stocked baseball reference shelf. Similarly, the index is of proper names only (for example, one cannot look up "Japanese Americans" or "Pacific Coast League"), and in a spot-check, even the name-only listing isn't complete. There is a detailed phrase-based list of source notes, which is a step ahead of most similar histories.

All the above said, I give The Golden Game a lukewarm recommendation for those interested in California history and who aren't deeply-versed in the constituent topics. Just don't expect it to be something you can read straight through or for detail. I wouldnt've bothered with this detailed a review had I not thought there was the germ of a great book in The Golden Game, and the careful reader may yet find it. Call it not quite a swing and a miss, but more a nice-looking swing that results in a good-looking but ultimately lazy can-of-corn fly-out on a beautiful cloudless California day.