The Boy of Summer: The Art and Anger of Roger Kahn

Abstract

The Boy of SummerThe Art and Anger of Roger Kahn Mitchell Nathanson (bio) In the summer of 1970, the future came to America’s pastime. It arrived in the form of, of all things, a book. This one was titled Ball Four, and its renegade author, Jim Bouton, used it as the medium by which he intended to shake a game that had grown stale out of its seemingly perpetual doldrums. Reaction to it was swift and extreme, with much of it coming weeks before the book even hit the shelves. This was largely the result of the work of his editor, former newspaperman Leonard Shecter, who placed an advance, titillating excerpt of it in Look magazine, making sure to include as many spicy scenes as he could shoehorn into it to juice sales of the forthcoming book through conversation, debate, outrage, and praise.1 He was successful on all counts. Before Look readers could even turn the page twice, they read about a hungover Mickey Mantle hitting a pinch-hit home run and pushing little children away as they begged him for his autograph and about players faking injuries and milking their contrived lameness for applause. Quickly on the heels of those stories came accounts of players cheating on their wives and “beaver shooting” on the roof of the Shoreham Hotel in Washington, DC. Tales of “greenies” and make-out sessions with airline stewardesses followed those, and then, when it seemed as if there were no revelations left to expose in the few paragraphs remaining in the piece, boom! The game’s ultimate taboo was broached through a story of drunk players kissing each other on the team buses and planes.2 And this was just the first excerpt. Even more was guaranteed in the follow-up, promised two weeks hence.3 The excerpt, along with the book that arrived in bookstores just in time for Father’s Day, succeeded spectacularly. While it ruffled the feathers of the players who were exposed and the old guard baseball men who protected them and their now tarnished images, it was hailed by most others, including a large swath of the literati, as a generation-defining success.4 This was not baseball writing per se; rather, it was a piece of writing that just happened [End Page 97] to use baseball as its canvas. In this it was hailed as revolutionary. And given the revolutionary nature of the times, it was, at last, a baseball work that felt like it was pushing forward rather than reaching back. The future had come to sportswriting, and for the legion of Ball Four fans, not a moment too soon. One writer, who was unquestionably not of the old guard or the protector of the clay-footed heroes now exposed and who himself was considered not merely a baseball writer but a writer who painted in baseball, was most definitely not amused by what he had read, however. His pique took a half year to make its way into print, but when it did, it landed with not only a bang but a veiled proclamation that a counterpunch was coming. Writing in the December 1970 edition of Esquire, Roger Kahn, late of the itself late New York Herald Tribune and frequent commentator on not merely baseball but the world it inhabited, announced that he, like Bouton, found traditional baseball writing stodgy, boring, and worst of all, fake. The ghostwritten jock pseudo-diary format, which Ball Four had blown to bits, was a piece of trite fiction passing as vanilla fact that needed to go, Kahn wrote. These works “promised to the public inside tips from the secret life of Babe Ruth, Dizzy Dean and Warren Spahn. This was (and is) questionable business. Ballplayers are unlikely to tell on themselves, even for cash advances.”5 Recalling one such piece that ran under Casey Stengel’s byline (but was actually written by someone else), Kahn wrote that the resulting read was “pale as beer foam and just about as substantial. The old man appreciated the money but was damned if he was going to tell about drink, cash and other hard elements in his epochal life. He...