Orator O'Rourke: The Life of a Baseball Radical (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Orator O’Rourke: The Life of a Baseball Radical David Ball Mike Roer. Orator O’Rourke: The Life of a Baseball Radical. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005. 342 pp. Paper, $29.95. If you know much at all about baseball history, you probably know James "Orator" O'Rourke as a nineteenth-century Hall of Fame outfielder and catcher. But you may not know that he was much more than that. During nearly half a century of serious involvement in what was gradually becoming the national pastime, O'Rourke served as a Major League player-manager and umpire and then continued playing well into his fifties for a Minor League team he owned in his native Bridgeport, Connecticut. Besides acting as his own manager there, O'Rourke served as league secretary and a member of the board of the Minors' National Association. Over the course of his long career, he negotiated with club owners on his own behalf with uncommon stubbornness, helped lead the Player's Brotherhood in its revolt against management, designed catcher's equipment, and, in his spare time, earned a law degree from Yale University. O'Rourke began his Major League playing career catching underhanded pitchers without a glove and ended it as Christy Mathewson's teammate. He fought the sales system for the Brotherhood and lived to sell his own son's contract to the team soon to be known as the New York Yankees. In short, Jim O'Rourke was a man who saw it all and did most of it. Mike Roer has produced a biography of this remarkable figure, somewhat rough in places but always entertaining and informative. A man of such long and varied experience might have served as the center for a life-and-times study rather than a biography, and while Roer has not chosen to write such a book, he includes a sometimes embarrassing wealth of detail that is not always either relevant to O'Rourke's life story or really integrated into the presentation. Still, if you care enough to pick up a book on Jim O'Rourke in the first place, you'll probably find little here that won't interest you. Those of us who know nineteenth-century baseball history well can still learn a lot from Orator O'Rourke, but inevitably Roer covers a good deal of familiar ground. What will probably be completely fresh to most readers is Roer's treatment of the more than two decades O'Rourke spent in the Minor Leagues. Because O'Rourke was active on so many levels, this section of Orator O'Rourke is almost a primer on the challenges facing Minor League operators at the level of club, league, and national organization. Orator O'Rourke does not do quite as much justice to O'Rourke's character as to his playing and executive career. Roer is an admirer of his subject to a fault, with the result that critics of O'Rourke's conduct as manager of the Buffalo club and as Minor League and club executive are almost invariably dismissed as self-interested or otherwise unreliable. This may well have been [End Page 141] the case much of the time, yet what they said might be worth considering nevertheless. Born of Irish peasant stock and the son of illiterate parents, Jim O'Rourke parlayed skill at a boy's game into a career as a baseball club–owning capitalist and Yale-educated lawyer. Roer's O'Rourke is an ambitious, intelligent, and highly disciplined man of abstemious personal habits, aggressive yet cautious in defending his own interests, a baseball politician who preferred conciliation, an attorney who habitually advised his clients to settle out of court, anything but the "baseball radical" the book's subtitle promises. Roer is surely not mistaken to believe that O'Rourke could not have accomplished what he did without considerable quantities of energy and intelligence. Yet he was a rather more complicated and colorful character than emerges from this book. Just look at the photograph of him on the book's front cover. Look at that massive soup-strainer mustache, a thing of beauty and wonder in an era of magnificent mustaches...