A Lineup of Midsummer Classics

The best of baseball journalism, from Damon Runyon to David Grann

​​​​Welcome back to Culture Club, a feature where David and I write about what we’ve been reading, watching, playing, and listening to, for paid subscribers. Please enjoy this free preview, and consider upgrading to support two struggling journalists at once! — Talia

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Baseball has been an obsession of mine since before I started forming memories — I was a toddler the first time I went to Yankee Stadium, and first fact I remember my dad teaching me was that Henry Aaron was the greatest player of all time. So in recognition of the 2023 Major League Baseball All-Star Game on Tuesday, this weekend’s column focuses on the national pastime.

Baseball no longer saturates American pop culture the way it did a century ago, of course. In 1923, a World Series game warranted bylines from Damon Runyon, Ring Lardner, and Babe Ruth himself, all on the same sports page (see below). But, as the stories below show, the game has kept right on inspiring some of our finest writers.

There are pieces here on Casey Stengel by Runyon and Jimmy Breslin, written four decades apart. There’s George Plimpton on Hank Aaron, David Grann on Rickey Henderson, and Jackie Robinson vs. the KKK. There are magazine classics like John Updike on Ted Williams and Gay Talese on Joe DiMaggio, not to mention David Halberstam on Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. There’s also a feature on the beauty of the baseball itself — and all the amazing things a pitcher can do with it — by the great Roger Angell, who passed away last year at the age of 101.

“Once again the ball is pitched — sent on its quick, planned errand,” he wrote in 1976. “The bat flashes, there is a new, louder sound, and suddenly we see the ball streaking wild through the air and then bounding along distant and untouched in the sweet green grass. We leap up, thousands of us, and shout for its joyful flight — free, set free, free at last.”

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Casey At the Bat!
By Damon Runyon
San Francisco Examiner, October 11, 1923

This is the way old Casey Stengel ran, running his home run home, when two were out in the ninth inning and the score was tied and the ball was still bounding inside the Yankee yard.

This is the way —

His mouth was open.
His warped old legs bending beneath him at every stride.
His arms flying back and forth like those of a man swimming with a crawl stroke.
His flanks heaving, his breath whistling, his head far back.

Yankee infielders, passed by old Casey Stengel as he was running his home run home, say Casey was muttering to himself, adjuring himself to greater speed as a jockey mutters to his horse in a race, that he was saying: “Go on, Casey! Go on!”

People generally laugh when they see old Casey Stengel run, but they were not laughing while he was running his home run home yesterday afternoon. People- 60,000 of ‘em, men and women — were standing in the Yankee stands and bleachers up there in the Bronx roaring sympathetically, whether they were for or against the Giants.

“Come on, Casey!”

The warped old legs, twisted and bent by many a year of baseball campaigning, just barely held out under Casey Stengel until he reached the· plate, running hjs home run home.

Then they collapsed.

They gave out just as old Casey slid over the plate in his awkward fashion as Wally Schang made futile efforts to capture the ball which eluded him and rolled toward the dugout. Billy Evans, the American League umpire, poised over him in a set pose, arms spread to indicate that old Casey was safe.

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The Babe
By Arthur Robinson
The New Yorker, July 23, 1926

He is a double-jointed paradox of a fellow and must be viewed as such if one is to understand him. He is good or he is bad. It has been necessary for his employers to have him followed by detectives to protect him from himself as well as from confidence men, blackmailers, racetrack touts and bookmakers, gamblers and scheming young ladies. Seemingly, he was born to broil on the griddle of experience and learn in the fat-pan of adversity. Indeed, until the current baseball season began there was little convincing evidence that he had definitely retained any of his learning.

“I’ve been a babe — and a boob,” he told me some months ago, “and I’m through.” Apparently he is. Last winter he went to his farm at Sudbury, came back to New York to condition himself in a gymnasium, and then, in better physical shape than he had ever known, went South in advance of his teammates to prepare for the season ahead. And until he developed water on the knee recently he was well ahead of the record for home nuns he set in 1921, when he drove out fifty-nine of them.

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Jackie Robinson and the Ku Klux Klan
By Arthur Daley
The New York Times, January 18, 1949

That was a rather disturbing story which came out of Atlanta the other day. The Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan has questioned the legality of the appearance of Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella in the Dodger line-up for exhibition games in Atlanta, claiming that this would be a violation of Georgia's segregation laws. Branch Rickey, forthright and outspoken for a change, threw the challenge right back in their teeth by declaring that: “Nobody can tell me anywhere what players I can or cannot play.” Somehow or other the folks up North had grown to believe that the Klan was a disgraced and impotent bunch of bigots who childishly liked to play cops and robbers while wearing bedsheets, disowned and scorned by their own communities. But apparently they still are selling hate as their principal commodity. They haven’t the strength they once had but they still have a certain nuisance value. Yet the issue they raise does serve to focus attention on one phenomenon. That is the fact that Robinson is a Negro. We’d pretty much forgotten about it up here and had grown to regard him merely as another ball player. It is a quite extraordinary development.