Playing with the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Playing with the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams Bill Suphan Gary W. Moore. Playing with the Enemy: A Baseball Prodigy, a World at War, and a Field of Broken Dreams. New York: Savas Beatie, 2006. 299 pp. Cloth, $29.95. In Playing with the Enemy, first-time author Gary Moore fondly tells the story of his father's life. The biography opens in 1940 with fifteen-year-old catcher Gene Moore playing for the semi-pro Sesser (Illinois) Egyptians. Gene was locally famous both as a batter and a defensive whiz who could throw runners out from his knees. It was said that a ball never got past him. His exploits on the diamond provided something for locals to talk about in the small, depression-ravaged coal-mining town. Early on, readers may get the impression that this story is a pure adulation piece, but instead they are treated to an honest, interesting account of a life full of shortcomings and second chances. As though it were a final confession, much of the story was related to the author by his father on the day before his death. Playing with men twice his age, Gene attracted attention from the Brooklyn Dodgers. Dodgers scout Frank Boudreau's shiny blue 1938 Buick drew the town's attention as it rolled through the streets of Sesser to the Moore house. In a memorable scene, Boudreau asks the kid catcher to step out of the family pig pen because it is tough to talk seriously about a Major League future to someone standing knee deep. [End Page 137] Moore also explores the sibling rivalry between Gene and his older brother, Ward, who is left to slop the pigs in Sesser after Gene signs with the Dodgers. Then came Pearl Harbor, and fortunes change when the Dodgers place Gene on a Navy baseball team playing exhibitions during World War II while Ward becomes a decorated war hero and receives the Purple Heart and Bronze Star after saving the life of a local Sesser friend in fierce combat. The book's title is inspired by Gene's being reassigned from the baseball team to guarding captured German sailors from a U-505 submarine carrying top secret codes. (The Germans thought the codes safe as they wrongly assumed the sub had been sunk. It is presently on display at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry.) Gene approached the brass with an idea to have the guards play baseball against the prisoners to relieve boredom. Special rules bordering on the ludicrous were adopted for the sake of making play competitive. The guards were allowed to score only three runs in an inning while the prisoners could score as many as they could. The one-sided rules and how they were negotiated are fun to read. A present-day Guantanamo guard read Playing with the Enemy and has asked his superiors if the same could be done at Guantanamo. Reportedly the query has been passed up as high as the White House. Author Gary Moore has asked to throw out the first ball if a decision comes to pass. At war's end Gene returned to Sesser, where locals now spoke of Ward's heroism instead of Gene's baseball exploits. Gene was also seriously injured in the war and struggled to deal with his inability to play ball upon his return. He began spending his nights at Bruno's Mine Shaft Inn and "had become little more than the barstool he sat on, a lifeless fixture. . . . an ordinary drunk" (208–10). The author pulls no punches. The story takes an inspirational turn when Frank Boudreau walks into Bruno's and Gene is given a second chance to reclaim the life that he had seemed to have lost in the bottom of a bottle. Some memorable images of anxiety and self-doubt are painted by Moore as Gene returns to baseball in the Minor Leagues. He tells of Gene's attempts to hide alcohol on his breath by eating a Mississippi white onion and of a disgusted manager flinging a stogie against the clubhouse wall and becoming...