Bill Kirwin: Pioneering a Community of Baseball Scholars

Abstract

At the Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture in 2003, Rich Puerzer gave a paper on baseball's literary journals--Elysian Fields Quarterly, Fan, and Spitball. (1) It got me thinking that no one had recorded anything about the origins and development of NINE, which had become the leading scholarly journal on baseball, and that someone should interview Bill Kirwin. I talked to Bill and he agreed to an interview but later decided it was too indulgent to include the narrative in his own journal. I filed away the transcript and forgot about it until March 2007 when I learned of Bill's terminal illness and his decision to turn over the editorship of the journal to Trey Strecker. I again raised the idea of a narrative about Bill's life and the founding of the journal; this time he agreed to share some stories. (2) EARLY INTEREST IN BASEBALL My first memory of great interest in baseball was the day after my sixth birthday in 1943. It was October 3, and my father took me to see a doubleheader between the White Sox and the Red Sox at Fenway Park. It was a small crowd, the last game of the regular season, and what I remember is sitting in the right-field pavilion seats in the bottom of the eighth inning when the Red Sox scored their only run. The Red Sox lost both games, but to me that run was some sort of victory, and I always kept that in the back of my mind. The first day I retired, I went to the library and looked up that game in the New York Times archives. Sure enough, it was just as I remembered, with the Red Sox scoring that one run in the bottom of the eighth inning, preventing a shutout. It was a moral victory in the eyes of this eight-year-old. To me, after all these years, it is still clear as a bell. Other early baseball memories surface, like one in 1948 when I would have been eleven, and again on my birthday. It looked like it would be the Red Sox and the Braves in the World Series, and my father wrote for and got tickets for the seventh game of the Series. What has always surprised me was that he let me take those tickets to school. My father was very strict, and I didn't have a very fond upbringing in any way, but he let me take those tickets, and I waved them around the schoolyard like I was a big shot. I could have easily lost them, or someone could have taken them. Well, the Red Sox ended the season in a tie with Cleveland and then lost in the playoff. So it was Cleveland and the Braves in the Series, and I never got to go. It's part of the reason I've always hated the Braves so much. Only an eleven-year-old could think that way--I mean, why didn't I hate the Indians? [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One of the things my father always did was throw the football with me. I had to jump over about two feet of shrubbery to catch the ball, and if I fell down on the sidewalk, which was on the other side, and started crying, he would say, know, no nigger would ever cry, so don't you ever cry. That was drilled into me. I always saw this is as some sort of backhanded respect for what blacks were going through in this country, though he didn't call them blacks or even Negroes. A much bigger sport, football was the be-all-and-end-all where I grew up in Beverly, Massachusetts, a small industrial city northeast of Boston. It was the hot sport in high school, and several thousand would turn out. [As a running back, Bill starred at Boston College in the late 1950s and after graduation was invited to the New England Patriots camp; he declined because of a knee injury.] About the time my father died, I started thinking about either writing about baseball or perhaps developing a journal on baseball, or something that would combine the two. I suppose the death of my father prompted me to want to make sense of my childhood memories of him. You see, the best memories of my father are associated with baseball. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] FOUNDING A JOURNAL I had an idea for a journal, but I was a neophyte, and I didn't really know where the hell to begin. …