Fred's Book Club: Kahn!

Welcome once again to our Wednesday book club, the Humpback Writers club, where we pull out a book I've read and discuss it (no actual humps required). I am not expecting anyone to read these books, which are not always recommended, although today's is. 

Since it's that time of year for America's pastime to shine, which is of course Rooting for the Yankees to Fail (YOU STUPID TWINS! DOWN TWINKLES ON YOU!), I thought we might look at a classic by beloved baseball writer Roger Kahn.

The first book that anyone reads by Roger Kahn, of course, is The Boys of Summer, his brilliant 1972 history of the 1955 World Series-winning Brooklyn Dodgers. Except me. I read that book later, but the first book of his I read was about another important team: The Utica Blue Sox.

Good Enough to Dream (first published 1985) is about the year that Kahn bought the Class A franchise in Utica, New York, a team in the still-extant New York-Penn League that was unaffiliated with a Major League Baseball farm system. Because of that, the Blue Sox were made up of career minor leaguers and rookies who were not really considered prospects (the image of minor league teams being stocked with washed-up old-timers was long out of date by the early eighties). As Kahn details in his story, minor league ownership, especially at such a low level, is a labor of love. No one is getting rich but lots of guys lose money, and all of them have to work and promote hard. Not being affiliated with an MLB team had the advantage that none of the players would be called up during the short (June to September) season, but the disadvantage that there was no support from a wealthy club, no rehabbing big leaguers to draw fans. And there were horror stories about independent teams that ran out of money and forfeited games because they couldn't buy baseballs, or took the team on a road trip and had no money for food, all of which Kahn admits probably should have scared him off: "According to people in baseball organizations, running an independent team was moving into a neighborhood beyond redemption."

And speaking of which, Kahn came to own the club this way: a violent mugging in Fun City, a.k.a. New York. Following this, Kahn was in pain and for a long stretch unable to sit and use his typewriter. During his convalescence he was talking with some colleagues about what he could do, and the idea arose that, the Dodgers not being for sale (or in Brooklyn anymore), he might consider buying a minor league team if the financing could be secured.

After many, many false starts, they wound up with the unaffiliated team in Utica: "They had not become independent on ideological and practical grounds, like the thirteen colonies two hundred years before. They were independent because no major league organization wanted to claim them. Even the Falkland Islands were being claimed. Nobody wanted the Utica Blue Sox." But ultimately, Kahn did.

The title of the book comes from the woman who was the team's general manager for the club in 1983.

"We'll have everything fixed up in a few days," Joanne Gerace promised. "It'll look real nice."
     So this was my ball park. After all the joyous times at Ebbetts Field and Fenway Park and Yankee Stadium, I was assigning myself to work in an elephant graveyard.
     "A little paint and some weeding," Joanne continued.
     She stopped. "Bad, isn't it?"
     I attempted to cheer myself by closing my thoughts to the drying mud and shaggy weeds. I imagined athletes performing on this wasteland.
     "These fellows I hear are coming back," I said. "Hendershot, Jacoby. Moretti. Coyle. Are they really major league prospects? How good are they?"
     Joanne stood on her high heels in the infield and thought for a while. Then she said, "They're good enough to dream."

One of the many memorable moments in the book comes early on, when Gattis, the grumpy manager -- thirty-one-year-old drill-sergeant grumpy, not Wilford Brimley grumpy -- is trying to teach his squad the signals they intend to use. The system of signs is baffling to the crew, as the signs are situational and the same sign might mean something different depending on the count. He is failing to get through to them.

"Look," he said, "these signs are pretty complicated. Maybe they're too complicated for all of us. So instead of using the ones that I've been showing, we'll just use voice signs this year. Like this."
     Gattis cupped his strong, hitter's hands about his mouth and bellowed over the heads of his players down the orange corridor of the W.P.A. clubhouse.
     "Swing!"
     "Steal!"
     "Take!"
     "Bunt!"
     "Did everybody get those okay?" this fierce manager asked mildly. 

There are times in business meetings where I wanted to pull a Gattis.

Late in the book, when the club is a serious contender for the league title, Kahn breaks down the situation the way only a veteran of it could:

The fans imagined the Blue Sox as a gallant band of brothers, everyone supporting everybody else, smiling and heroic in the shared bounty of the glory.... The reality of the Blue Sox, as pressure increased and the season waned, when any mistake could be our undoing, when rival egos clashed with clangor and shouts, when everyone felt that his manhood lay on the line with each night's game, when the terror of a misplay loomed as large as hope of victory, was too much to explain to civilians, even if they had wanted to hear it, which they did not. 

The book is full of interesting incidents, delightful to any fan of the game; it doesn't matter if you never heard of any of these guys. You also get some fun facts about the city of Utica, an hour and a half west of Albany -- and a place I've been two a couple of times, all because of this book.

Early in my so-called publishing career I worked for a man who was a huge baseball fan, and recommended Good Enough to Dream. I remember him writing the title and author's name on one of those little pieces of notepaper that he favored for leaving me instructions. I loved the book, and I somehow got some of my friends interested in making a weekend trip up to see a Blue Sox game at the very place, Murnane Field, described by Kahn. This was several years after Kahn had sold his involvement with the club. The park looked pretty good; no elephant graveyard.

The second time I went to Utica I traveled with a fellow writer. We wanted to write a story about minor league ball, and were traveling to teams in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. That time we interviewed the then-current owner of the Blue Sox, a guy named Fowler, who was helping direct cars in the parking lot when we met him. By then the Blue Sox did have an MLB affiliation, the Chicago White Sox. We asked Fowler about Kahn's ownership of the team. "He just owned it for a year," he sneered. "Got his book out of it."

We never wrote the piece, but we did drink a lot of beer.

The Blue Sox were affiliated later with the Red Sox and the Marlins and then... nothing after 2001. The NYP League franchise left Utica for good, or for as long as anything is permanent in Class A ball. But now a new Utica Blue Sox team plays at the same park in the Perfect Game Collegiate Baseball League. They've tried other names for Utica teams, but they always come back to the Blue Sox.

One little trivia note -- minor league teams used to be named for their parent club; the NY-Penn League had teams like the Oneonta Tigers and the Pittsfield Mets. Later, teams found they could sell a lot more jerseys if the teams had good, regional nicknames, regardless of the parent club. The league now has teams like the Williamsport Crosscutters and the Vermont Lake Monsters. This phenomenon seems to have occurred in the minors all over the country now, and I applaud it.

If you like baseball and can get hold of Good Enough to Dream, I think you'll enjoy it a lot. Kahn is a terrific writer, even if not a dedicated owner, and he tells the story well. I'm sure some things about owning a minor league team have changed in the last thirty-six years, but probably not the main ones -- money problems, personal squabbling, tough competitors, and dreams. That's baseball.

The Mets are the team that captured me in childhood, but thanks to Kahn's book, and the trips I made with my friends, the Utica Blue Sox will always be among the boys of summer to me.