Peter Golenbock’s Whispers of the Gods – Baseball’s Golden Age
We will have baseball! Major League Baseball and the players – after a 99-day lockout – have finally reached agreement on a new contract. While spring training will be truncated, the regular season should open on schedule.
That’s good news for the players, the owners, and, most of all, the fans. Sports have a way of lifting us up during the darkest times. Think of the days after 9/11, when teams returned to the field. There was that moment during the third game of the 2001 World Series when then President George W. Bush took the mound at Yankee Stadium to throw out the ceremonial first pitch. After two years of a pandemic, and several weeks of a brutal battle in the Ukraine, baseball could not begin at a better time. Throughout history, sports, and in particular, baseball, have created that special place where we can come together, even for a short time, to cheer and also comfort each other.
But like so much else, baseball has changed. There was a time when players didn’t command multi-million dollar salaries or profit from lucrative endorsement deals. (Some Yankees even rode the subway to the Stadium.) Owners did not have to manage huge payrolls and try to keep expenses low to avoid a competitive balance tax. In his new book, Peter Golenbock looks back on these special days, now remembered as baseball’s golden age.
Golenbock, one of the country’s best known sports writers, has written numerous books about baseball, including Dynasty: The New York Yankees, 1949-1964, hailed by Yankee Manager Joe Torre as one of the best books on baseball. Golenbock, with Yankee pitcher Sparky Lyle, also co-authored The Bronx Zoo, about the wild shenanigans behind the scenes that led up to the 1978 Yankees winning their second consecutive World Series after overcoming a 14-game deficit in July.
In Whisper of the Gods, Golenbock pulls from hundreds of hours of taped interviews with players that he conducted over many years. All of these players have since died, but their observations about the game they played, the game they loved, will inspire current and future stars, as well as baseball’s fans.
Think you know these players? Think again. Golenbock, mostly though the words of those being interviewed, reveals facets of their personalities, encounters behind the scenes, and character strengths and flaws that may not have been apparent on the field. (Golenbock does not always provide a baseball bio before each player’s chapter, so you may find yourself doing a search to fill in necessary stats.)
Jim Bouton, who also authored the 1970 tell-all book, Ball Four, pitched for the Yankees from 1962 to 1968. His descriptions of spring training, where some players went on drinking binges and got little sleep, bear little resemblance to the disciplined camps that we see today. “We never really needed spring training,” Bouton said, noting that once the regular season began, stalwart Yankees like Moose Skowron and Bobby Richardson would rise to the occasion, hitting the ball out of the park. Was it because the Yankees had such an overabundance of talent that they far surpassed whatever the opponents put on the field, even without a strict training regimen? That behavior was tolerated by previous managers like Ralph Houk and Yogi Berra, but when Johnny Keane, formerly with the Cardinals, took over, players were ordered to get in line, and they didn’t like it. Bouton related the back-and-forth he used to have with Mickey Mantle talking about what Squeaky (their nickname for Keane) might respond if Mantle were to say, “My back fell off.” Keane: “Good, Mick, I know you can play.”
Trainer Ed Froelich shared many anecdotes about Babe Ruth. The myth that Ruth pointed to center field before hitting a home run in the 1932 World Series? Not true, said Froelich, saying that the story made Ruth uncomfortable. “He sneered at the legend because it wasn’t true and because he had too much respect for Chicago Cubs pitcher Charlie Root to perpetuate it.” Froelich’s chapter in the book is really a tribute to “The Sultan of Swat.” “Ruth’s feats were so well known that the term Ruthian has become part of the language,” he noted. What comes through, however, is not only Ruth’s talent, but his humanity. Worried that hitting a line drive back to the box and injuring a pitcher, he would tell the batting practice pitchers: “Don’t pitch me outside. I don’t want to hurt anyone.” Froelich said that if Ruth had hit a pitcher, he would have “disabled him at best, killed him at worst.”
My favorite chapter in the book is about Phil Rizzuto, “the Scooter,” who after retiring from the Yankees, was a familiar voice on radio reporting Yankee games. His “Holy Cow” predated other broadcasters’ signature phrases, like John Sterling’s “It is high, it is far, it is gone!” Rizzuto made it to the Yankees in 1941 and was on two World Series-winning teams before he entered the Navy. He talked about the difficulties he experienced getting back up to speed when he returned. He reveals his emotional response when he was released in 1956. “Suddenly you’re without a job, and you hadn’t gone to college, and what the hell am I going to do?” But Rizzuto didn’t “blast anybody – the Yankees had done a lot for me – and as a result, I got television appearances.” Something that worked out, not only for Rizzuto, but for his grateful audiences.
Golenbock covers many other players in this volume, those who are well known – Stan Musial, Ted Williams, Roy Campanella, Roger Maris – and those not as well known – Ron Santo, Ellis Clary, Gene Conley. We still have some time before the regular season begins. Until then, Golenbock’s books is a welcome read.
Whispers of the Gods: Tales from Baseball’s Golden Age, Told by the Men Who played It
Peter Golenbock
Top photo: Peter Golenbock (at right) at the Trop in Tampa. Photo courtesy of Peter Golenbock
