With The Gashouse Gang, John Heidenry delivers the definitive account of one the greatest and most colorful baseball teams of all times, the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals, filled with larger-than-life baseball personalities like Branch Rickey, Leo Durocher, Pepper Martin, Casey Stengel, Satchel Paige, Frankie Frisch, and—especially— the eccentric good ol' boy and great pitcher Dizzy Dean and his brother Paul.
The year 1934 marked the lowest point of the Great Depression, when the U.S. went off the gold standard, banks collapsed by the score, and millions of Americans were out of work. Epic baseball feats offered welcome relief from the hardships of daily life. The Gashouse Gang, the brilliant culmination of a dream by its general manager, Branch Rickey, the first to envision a farm system that would acquire and "educate" young players in the art of baseball, was adored by the nation, who saw itself—scruffy, proud, and unbeatable—in the Gang.
Based on original research and told in entertaining narrative style, The Gashouse Gang brings a bygone era and a cast full of vivid personalities to life and unearths a treasure trove of baseball lore that will delight any fan of the great American pastime.
Review:
"Seventy-three years ago, the St. Louis Cardinals did what they did only six months ago: They beat the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. But just about all resemblances end there. In 1934 the teams were lily-white, the players mostly were only of average size, their wages were low, they played in relatively primitive ballparks, they traveled between cities by train, they smoked and were featured... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) in cigarette ads, and the game they played dominated the American sports scene with no real competition beyond intercollegiate football. Furthermore, they played at a time when the United States was in an economic crisis almost unimaginable today. The Great Depression had 'reached rock bottom,' John Heidenry writes, with 'massive unemployment, mile-long bread lines, and the westward migration that began when Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and Arkansas turned into a giant Dust Bowl.' The country was almost as desperately in need of distraction and amusement as of jobs and economic recovery. As the 1934 major league baseball season unfolded, Americans got a measure of what they needed from the Cardinals. Not until the season had ended were they christened the Gashouse Gang, but from the first pitch, they had the ingredients of baseball legend: 'They were the unique product of a particular time and place — mostly men who had known extreme poverty and hardship in the South and West, with a few hard-nosed kids from eastern states thrown in for variety. Among their number were a couple of ex-sharecroppers, a pool shark, a handsome dandy who worked as a Hollywood double in the off-season, a grease-stained third baseman who liked to drive his midget auto racer around a track before a game, a surly outfielder who punched any of his own teammates if they looked at him in the wrong way, and even a couple of college kids. Collectively, as the Gashouse Gang, they were the creation of a pious, nonimbibing Methodist who would not even watch them play on a Sunday because his religious principles forbade it.' That pious gentleman was Branch Rickey, the team's general manager, who is now best known as the man who brought Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Then, though, he was in his mid-50s and still making his way in the game. He had found his way to the Cardinals a couple of decades earlier, when they were a marginal team on the edge of bankruptcy, and had turned them into one of the three or four dominant teams in the National League. This was largely because in 1919 he'd had the vision to realize that a low-budget, small-city team could compete with New York and Chicago if it set up a chain of minor-league teams to train young players and feed them into the big-league team when they were ready, all of this at significantly less cost than purchasing established players for $100,000 or more — a huge sum at the time. Fifteen of the 25 players on the 1934 Cardinals had been trained in the farm system, most notably the brilliant and wildly eccentric pitcher Jerome Herman 'Dizzy' Dean. He had come out of the Arkansas Ozarks, poorly educated, dressed in rags, hillbilly to the core — but also a born baseball player and a much smarter guy than appearances suggested. He was 'the unofficial ringleader' of the Cardinals, even though some of his teammates thought he was a blowhard; they knew, as he did, that 'when he was in peak form, he was unbeatable,' and they suffered his antics as the price of his pitching genius: 'Though Dizzy was a braggart and a practical joker, and sometimes just plain obnoxious, the consensus among many of his teammates was that, at heart, he was a good fellow.' He won 30 games that year, which made him the last 30-game winner until Denny McLain of the Tigers won 31 three-and-a-half decades later. He feuded with just about everybody, from Sam Breadon, the owner, right on down. His relationship with Joe 'Ducky' Medwick was especially fractious, but then Medwick was — apart from being a talented hitter and outfielder — a difficult guy, a loner who was quick to get angry. He had joined the team near the end of the 1932 season and immediately 'criticized any teammate who, in his opinion, made a foolish error.' He made people mad, 'yet none of the players confronted Medwick to his face. He was clearly a man no one wanted to get into a fistfight with.' But that's how ballplayers were in those days. The game was rough, and the players were rougher. The 1934 Cardinals may have been especially boisterous and rambunctious, but their behavior wasn't unusual in a game played mostly by country boys in a nation still heavily rural. The New York Giants, managed by the incomparably feisty John McGraw, were of similar character. The Cardinals were managed by Frank Frisch, who was in his mid-30s and one of the greatest second basemen the game had known. In his youth, he'd had remarkable speed, and he'd gone to college at Fordham — hence, in an era when the press gave every player a nickname, 'the Fordham Flash' — and a rather dignified manner, at least by baseball standards. He was 'someone who could appreciate fine wine, art, and literature,' so it was inevitable that he'd cross swords with Dean, who 'liked to read pulp adventure novels about cowboys, preferred nightclubs to museums, and was forever harassing, pestering, and negotiating with the front office, which he loudly and publicly accused of being cheap and exploitative.' It finally reached the point where Dean decided to go on strike over what he regarded as inadequate wages, and he insisted that his younger brother Paul walk out with him. Paul — who won 19 games that year and pitched exceptionally well in the World Series — seems to have been a somewhat reluctant protester, but he tagged along when Dizzy orchestrated his 'two-person mutiny,' which 'was like nothing the game had ever seen.' It lasted only about a week, and the Deans predictably didn't get what they wanted. However the other players may have felt about the walkout, they had to concede that 'in the final stretch, the Dean brothers became virtually invincible.' As did the Cardinals themselves. They won 20 of their last 25 regular-season games and won the league championship — the 'gonfalon,' as sportswriters of the day liked to call the pennant — on the last day from the Giants, who became the first team to squander a seven-game lead going into September. They then went on to take the Tigers in seven games, including three wins on Detroit's home field. Both Deans pitched well, and Dizzy was his usual irrepressible self. Heidenry has told this familiar tale competently but with little flair. He is a native of St. Louis, not quite old enough to have seen the Gashouse Gang in person, who has held various journalistic positions over the years and now lives in New York. His love for the Cardinals is obvious — the only Midwesterners who don't love the Cardinals would appear to be the ones who love the Chicago Cubs — but it doesn't translate into peppy prose or smooth narrative. He relies far too much on sportswriters of the day and quotes them to excess, especially the dreary, cliched John Drebinger of the New York Times, whom I am old enough to have read more often than I care to remember. He does have the grace and candor to admit that he wasn't able to find out for certain where 'Gashouse Gang' came from, but then neither has anyone else. Let's just say it sounds right, even if no one knows what it means, and leave it at that. Jonathan Yardley's e-mail is yardleyj(at symbol)washpost.com." Reviewed by Benjamin ForgeyJoseph J. EllisWilliam Jelani CobbJames T. CampbellMichael DirdaRon CharlesJonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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Synopsis:
The definitive and rollicking story of one of the best, and one of the wackiest, teams of all time, during one of the most vital eras in baseball
John Heidenry is a native of St. Louis and was the founding editor, in 1977, of St. Louis magazine and the St. Louis Literary Supplement. He is currently the Executive Editor of The Week. The author of several previous books, he lives in New York City.
How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin, and Their Colorful, Come-from-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series - and America's Heart - During the Great Depression
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