Baseball is back and Chicago’s Ira Berkow gives us dozens of tales about ‘Baseball’s Best Ever’
The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd … the game of baseball, long part of the American landscape and firmly placed in the hearts of millions, is back.
Writers have always been drawn to the sport, to its practitioners, its meaning and its inherent poetry. Walt Whitman, referring to what was then a relatively new addition to the country’s sports scene, may have once said something along the lines of: “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game — the American game.”
I am not the wildly passionate fan that I was when young, but still, before every season arrives, I reread what I consider the best novel written about baseball, Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural” (1952) — not to be confused with Robert Redford’s “The Natural” film in 1984 — and John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” a remarkable story in The New Yorker about Ted Williams hitting a home run in his last at-bat in Boston’s Fenway Park in 1960.
There are all manner of thoughts, memories and emotions that pepper the opening days of a new season, and here are some from writer Ira Berkow, who told me a few days ago, “I always look forward to opening day in major league baseball. The Ohtani-Trout matchup in the final game and final out of the recent World Baseball Classic gave us fans, and quasi-fans, a delicious taste of the intense pleasures that baseball can provide and are to come, from spring to summer to fall.”
I too was grabbed by that Shohei Ohtani-Mike Trout duel that week, two of baseball’s greatest players, teammates on the underachieving Los Angeles Angels, having at it dramatically in the ninth inning. There were two outs and the count was 3-2 as was the score, Japan ahead, when Trout struck out on an Ohtani slider, giving his team the WBC victory over the USA.
Berkow has seen thousands and thousands of baseball games and is the author of the recently published “Baseball’s Best Ever: A Half Century of Covering Hall of Famers,” a collection of his writing that contains 150-some columns and feature stories written between 1967 and 2022. In it, he writes that “Baseball retains its appeal because it is not frenetically and self-consciously modern … No other spectator sport in America has meant so much to so many for so long … the game is still timeless.”
Berkow has long lived in New York, but he is of Chicago, born and bred in the Lawndale neighborhood before his family moved north. He attended and played sports on the teams of Sullivan High School. After getting a degree from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and working for the Minneapolis Tribune and the Newspaper Enterprise Association, he went to The New York Times in 1981 and was there until 2007, sharing a Pulitzer Prize along the way and freelancing to this day.
He has written 20-some books. In 1974 he co-wrote “Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool” with New York Knicks star and fashion plate Walt “Clyde” Frazier. It was a collaboration that prompted this assessment from the great E.B. White: “(The book) has kept me steady for several days, and I have been enjoying it, particularly since I never heard of Clyde (I live a sheltered life).”
In 1977 he wrote one of the best books ever written about Chicago, “Maxwell Street: Survival in a Bazaar.” In 2014 he wrote, with former Tribune reporter Josh Noel, “Wrigley Field: An Oral and Narrative History of the Home of the Chicago Cubs.”
Nearly 20 years ago in the Tribune magazine, I wrote a story in an attempt to answer a question posed in the headline: “Does Baseball Still Matter?” Berkow’s book “Baseball’s Best Ever” shouts, “Yes!” even though most of its characters and heroes are long gone. There are plenty of them in this book’s nearly 500 pages. Think of a former player and you will likely find him here, with a number of Chicago folks.
Read the story about Ernie Banks, out of baseball and selling life insurance, because “the most he ever earned in one season was $65,000. He was, though, able to save a substantial amount, but most of that is gone”; Nellie Fox’s widow awaiting a phone call telling her whether or not her late husband would be inducted into the Hall of Fame; Harry Caray, returning to the broadcasting booth at Wrigley in 1987 after suffering a stroke, “being cheered like mad, and warbling as of old”; Berkow’s memories of Bill Veeck; and his 1990 column about Chicago sports writer Jerry Holtzman, then “64, stocky, with a shock of wavy gray hair, eyebrows furry as caterpillars, wearing suspenders and smoking a cigar not quite as long as his arm, has made his way, one of the brightest, most respected men in his profession.”
There is so much to enjoy here, to savor. You might laugh, surely smile but also will be grabbed by sadness, no more so than reading about Ferguson Jenkins, who, still coping with the death of his wife, gets hit with the news of the deaths of his girlfriend and daughter … and how it happened.
I have no idea what this new season holds for the White Sox or Cubs, what effect some new rules — larger bases, a pitch clock, ban of defensive shifts — will have on the sport. Berkow told me, “The few new rules and various changes don’t bother me. It still can’t take away such artistry as a shortstop going deep into the hole to his right and throwing out a base runner by half a step.”
OK then. Play ball.
