Comeback Pitchers: The Remarkable Careers of Howard Ehmke and Jack Quin by Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Comeback Pitchers: The Remarkable Careers of Howard Ehmke and Jack Quin by Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg Frank G. Houdek Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg. Comeback Pitchers: The Remarkable Careers of Howard Ehmke and Jack Quinn. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 512 pp. Cloth, $39.95. As one would expect from authors as experienced and decorated as Spatz and Steinberg, Comeback Pitchers is a well-researched, well-documented, well-illustrated, and well-written account of the up-and-down baseball lives of two accomplished moundsmen, Howard Ehmke and Jack Quinn, whose careers spanned the last years of the Dead Ball Era and the first decade of the Lively Ball Era. Though largely forgotten today, Spatz and Steinberg seek to restore the reputations of Quinn and Ehmke by offering ample evidence of the character and talent which helped each earn the admiration of not only their baseball peers but also contemporary fans and press. Regarding Spatz and Steinberg, most NINE readers will be familiar with the quality and quantity of their work. Between them they have produced eighteen baseball-related books as well as articles and chapters too numerous to count. Comeback Pitchers is their third collaboration, following 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York, recipient of SABR's Seymour Medal as the best book of baseball history in 2010, and The Colonel and the Hug: The Partnership that Transformed the New York Yankees, winner of SABR's Baseball Research Award in 2016. Enough said. As baseball historian/writers, they are the real deal. Similarly, not much need be said about the impressive research behind Comeback Pitchers, except to note that 355 pages of text are followed by eighty-two pages of endnotes and an eleven-page bibliography. The writing is crystal clear, and the storytelling is engaging—readers will keep turning pages to find out what happens next in the baseball careers of the book's two protagonists. Finally, fifty photographs, many from Steinberg's personal collection, not only bring to life the book's word descriptions of Ehmke, "tall and lanky" (36), and Quinn, "solidly built" (206), but also are evocative of the game they played a century ago. Although they have written in the past about "some of the most memorable names in baseball history," in Comeback Pitchers Spatz and Steinberg choose to focus "not [on] headliners but rather men who contribute to their teams' success while occasionally flirting with stardom." They believe that Ehmke and Quinn "personify those qualities" (xv). They also understand that even athletes who attain the highest level of their sport "confront major challenges" over their careers, including injuries, aging and erosion of skills, and questions about their commitment. Although teammates on both the Red Sox and Athletics, [End Page 276] it was their ongoing struggles with such challenges that made them ideal as joint subjects for Spatz and Steinberg. Criticism "for both fragility and a lack of competitive spirit" would "haunt" Ehmke throughout his career (106), while Quinn was already considered old when, at age thirty-four, he returned to the majors in 1918 with the White Sox after losing twenty-two games in the Federal League and playing for two years in the Pacific Coast League (PCL). The purpose of Comeback Pitchers is to show their strength and perseverance in meeting these challenges, not just once but over and over again. Spatz and Steinberg write that "[h]ad there been a Comeback Player of the Year Award when Ehmke and Quinn played, each would have been in contention several seasons" (xv). Comeback Pitchers details how these men overcame disappointments and low expectations to achieve startling, even record-setting success over their long lives in organized baseball (Ehmke, from 1914, with the Class AA Los Angeles Angels, to 1930, with the Philadelphia Athletics; Quinn, from 1907, with the Class C Macon Brigands, to 1933, with the Cincinnati Reds). For instance, after Ehmke suffered through an "awful 1915 season at Buffalo [of the Federal League] and being laughed at by [manager] Frank Chance" when he tried out with the PCL's Angels, he responded with "one of the greatest Minor League pitching seasons ever...