Book Review: Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and the Sporting Press in America, by Amber Roessner

Abstract

Amber Roessner Inventing Baseball Heroes: Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and Sporting Press in America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. 227 pp.Roessner delves into heady days of what she calls gee whiz journalism (p. 2), when sportswriters and journalists embedded themselves with biggest stars, and how symbiotic relationship helped and, at times, disparaged both. The book primarily focuses on role of newspapers and magazines in shaping and bolstering images of Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson. Roessner has experience covering sports. Before becoming an assistant professor in School of Journalism and Electronic Media at University of Tennessee-Knoxville, she was a sportswriter for Gainesville (GÂ) Times.Roessner provides an interesting analysis of relationship between three groups: baseball consuming public, early stars, and some of pundits. Roessner shows how sportswriters influenced ways in which consumers of base- ball news viewed Cobb and Mathewson, while two baseball stars and those same consumers influenced how writers packaged information for public.In early twentieth century, sports journalists and major league baseball players shared close quarters. Journalists traveled with teams they covered, ate with players, spent leisure time with them, and even visited them in off-season. Journalists leveraged close relationships to provide personal tidbits and insights into play- ers' philosophies of game, on-field skirmishes and plays, and off-season activities. Grantland Rice, John Wheeler, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, and F.C. Lane, some of most prominent sportswriters of early twentieth century, had easy access to stars like Cobb and Mathewson. Roessner uses words of those writers to tell stories of Cobb and Mathewson and how those writers drenched two icons in American virtue and tenacity, while excusing Cobb when he displayed violent side of tenacity. Sportswriters painted Mathewson as baseball's archetypal saint and Cobb as the Major League's quintessential sinner . . . The more reliable sketched him for what he was-an anomaly, a chameleon-like trickster with an eerie knack of transforming just when sportswriters thought they had him figured out (p. 123).Roessner does a commendable job of showing free-wheeling journalistic styles of Rice, Wheeler, Lardner, and their colleagues. These writers experimenting with humor, characterization, and dialogue in their pieces-techniques that they put to good use in their literary journalism and in their fiction over next decade (p. 122). Rice even used poetry and verse to espouse nobility of Cobb and Mathewson. Roessner notes that editors gave their top writers more autonomy and independence than other reporters. Still, these writers knew there were constraints. Rice and other writers who developed close relationships with Cobb, Mathewson, and other players knew they could not betray their trust. Afraid of losing their insider status, they did not dare unearth controversial gossip (p. 166). Writers not only avoided disparaging stars they covered, they often served as promoters for players. Roessner spends a significant portion of book discussing conflict that writers faced in maintain- ing close relationships with stars like Cobb and Mathewson, while trying to maintain some objectivity to their reporting. Roessner couches discussion in W. Joseph Cambell's three paradigms of journalism: activist, narrative, and detached models. In era of yellow journalism and early-twentieth-century heydays of sports jour- nalism, activist and narrative models, or gee whiz journalism, became prevalent in coverage of Cobb and Mathewson. …