The Bilko Athletic Club: The Story of the 1956 Los Angeles Angels by Gaylon H. White, and: The Continental League: A Personal History by Russell D. Buhite

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Bilko Athletic Club: The Story of the 1956 Los Angeles Angels by Gaylon H. White, and: The Continental League: A Personal History by Russell D. Buhite Lee Lowenfish Gaylon H. White. The Bilko Athletic Club: The Story of the 1956 Los Angeles Angels. Lanham, md: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014. 301 pp. Cloth, $38.00. Russell D. Buhite. The Continental League: A Personal History. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 201 pp. Cloth, $24.95. When it comes to writing baseball history about the 1950s, Steve Bilko and the Continental League are not topics that immediately come to mind. Among the big stories of the period were westward expansion and the emergence of such African American superstars in the National League as Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Frank Robinson. Yet there is a place in the annals of history for the tales of legendary slugger Steve Bilko, belter of 389 home runs (all but 76 in the minor leagues), and the abortive Continental League of 1959–60, which tried under Branch Rickey’s leadership to create a third major league. Though there are weaknesses in each endeavor, authors Gaylon White and Russell Buhite have made worthwhile contributions. Steve Bilko’s story is the stuff of legend. Born in 1930 in the southeastern Pennsylvania coal-mining town of Nanticoke, Bilko was signed by the St. Louis Cardinals before his junior year in high school by scout Bennie Borgmann. “I was convinced that here was a guy who one day would hit sixty-five home runs in a single season,” Borgmann said upon the premature death of Bilko in 1978 (84). (Borgmann was a well-regarded talent hunter who, incidentally, [End Page 179] was a great basketball player honored in the Basketball Hall of Fame in Springfield, Massachusetts—unfortunately, his name is misspelled by White with only one n in his last name.) The Cardinals brought up Bilko for a cup of coffee as a twenty-year-old in 1949; and in 1953, he enjoyed his best year in the majors when he hit 21 homers with 84 rbi. He collected a respectable 70 walks; but he hit only .251, with 125 strikeouts, a disturbing number at a time when a stigma was placed on striking out more than 100 times a season. Bilko was fated to play at a time when Stan Musial was being shuffled from the outfield to first base. “I always had Musial hanging over my head,” Bilko later reflected. “Like if I went oh-for-four or oh-for-ten . . . Stan comes in and plays first” (84). Another strike against Bilko was his excessive weight, which bordered on three hundred pounds—his postgame beer consumption was the stuff of liquid legend! “Few sports were as intolerant of excess flab as baseball,” White notes accurately (73). Soon the nicknames of Stout Steve, Lard Zeppelin, and Big Boy Balloon were hung on Bilko, who was sensitive to criticism. In one of the more profound comments in the book, outfielder Albie Pearson, who was later Bilko’s teammate on the American League expansion Los Angeles Angels, remarks, “Steve was constantly fighting a complex that everybody was against him. He didn’t handle rejection very well” (81). Another teammate, the pitcher-turned-author Jim Brosnan adds, “He was an introverted man. He was like Ferdinand the Bull” (81). The Cardinals let Bilko go to the Chicago Cubs in 1954, but he never came close to duplicating his best year. By 1955, Bilko was toiling for the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League, where his legend really took flight. When comedian-actor Phil Silvers was looking for a name for his conniving army sergeant in the cbs network tv show You’ll Never Get Rich, he chose the name Ernie Bilko. “I could just as well have been Corporal Hodges or Private First Class Musial,” Silvers explained. “I gave it to a guy who needed it” (91). Bilko got off to a great start in 1956 and by mid-July had equaled his 37 home runs of the previous year. He became not only a local phenomenon but a national one. Los Angeles Times columnist Ned Cronin suggested...