Ring Lardner was one of America’s finest sports columnists. His work appeared in more than 100 newspapers and was consumed by millions of faithful readers. His admirers included authors such as H.L. Mencken, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Virginia Woolf. He also wrote short stories (“Haircut,” “Gullible’s Travels”), plays (Elmer, the Great, June Moon), poems, Zigfield Follies skits, and scripted a comic strip, You Know Me Al, based on his popular novel about fictional ball player Jack Keefe.
Lardner died in 1933 at age 48. Few people today are familiar with his unique writing style, sharp tongue, and satirical wit. His columns, particularly on baseball, have largely been forgotten with the passage of time. But now, we have former sports columnist and NPR commentator Ron Rapoport’s exquisite book, Frank Chance’s Diamond: The Baseball Journalism of Ring Lardner, aiming to change this. If anyone is to understand a sports writer, it would be another sports writer.
Then again, Lardner was far from a conventional sports columnist. He “pursued parallel careers,” writing short stories while working as a full-time journalist who covered topics including politics and opera. Meanwhile, a common feature in Lardner’s fiction and journalism was something that’s regularly frowned upon, namely “literary aberrations as ungrammatical dialogue, misspellings, haphazard punctuation, and odd abbreviations.” Rapoport suggests this trait must have “driven his copy editors crazy,” which would be a massive understatement.
Nevertheless, Lardner’s baseball writing, analysis, and his prose style captured the public’s imagination. He focused on legends such as Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. He shone a light on lesser-known players such as Frank Schulte and Heine Zimmerman. He reported on some of the game’s biggest controversies and scandals. He tore apart the game like none before him, and very few after him.
Frank Chance’s Diamond is an ode to old-time baseball. It’s the purest form of a love letter by Lardner to America’s game, from the regular season to the World Series. The sights, smells, and sounds of the ballpark come to life, and the personalities of players and managers are on full display, warts and all. The game he covered was segregated, meaning unsavory attitudes about race and religion were prevalent. While he may have been a product of his times, he had quite the time discussing every minutiae of the sport that infatuated him so.
Let’s start with “The First Game,” written on Sept. 28, 1913, for the Chicago Tribune by A. Athlete (who was apparently “unassisted”). This young ball player’s description of a day on the baseball diamond was somewhat crude, pedestrian, and bloody hilarious. Some classic lines included “that little bum couldn’t hit a curve ball with a mattress,” “I ain’t no pitcher, but I bet I know as much about pitchin’ as some of them pitchers,” and “I never seen a team have the luck break for ‘em like it does for them big slobs.” This is the type of chatter and bluster that used to reel in newspaper readers time and time again!
Lardner’s assessment of baseball’s heroes is superb. A June 1915 article for The American Magazine contained many memorable descriptions of Cobb. One gem: “He’s got a pretty good opinion of himself, but he ain’t no guy to really brag. He’s just full o’ the old confidence. He thinks Cobb’s a good ball player, and a guy’s got to think that way about himself if he wants to get anywheres.” Ruth wasn’t one of Lardner’s favorites, but his Aug. 8, 1920, Bell Syndicate column noted the best way to stop the Bambino from hitting home runs “is to refuse to pitch when its your turn.” In Lardner’s view, “the most useless thing in the world when this guy’s up there to bat is the opposeing catcher, because if you can throw a ball past Mr. Ruth why it don’t make no difference if its catched or not whereas if you try and throw one over the plate, it won’t never get as far as the catcher.”
There’s a mesmerizing section on Lardner and the World Series, featuring a description of New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson’s heartbreaking loss in Game 7 of the 1912 World Series. As he wrote in his Oct. 17, 1912, Chicago Examiner column, “the tears streaming from his eyes, a man on whom his team’s fortune had been staked and lost and a man who would have proven his clear title to trust reposed of him if his mates had stood by him in the supreme test.” This is baseball writing at its finest. An Oct. 8, 1917, Chicago Tribune column titled “The Modern Voltaire” and written “at the French front” in fractured French is an unconventional masterpiece. “Il est the unanimous verdict autour de here that les Giants are the most consistent world’s series in le monde,” he humorously concluded. As for the infamous Black Sox betting scandal that was a blight on baseball history, he described that final World Series game in an Oct. 9, 1919, Bell Syndicate column as “the most scandalous and death dealing story ever wrote about a world serious ball game.” Couldn’t have been much closer to the truth had he tried.
In the book’s final chapter, Rapoport selected a July 23, 1922, Bell Syndicate column, “Kill the Umpire,” with a profound concluding paragraph. “Every ball park should ought to be equipped with a expert sniper that could pick off the umps the minute he was wrong,” Lardner wrote, “and then the ground keeper’s staff could rush out and roll him out of the way like a canvas infield cover.”
Ah, the number of fans who would have agreed with this assessment back in the day would surely have reached in the millions! Similar to the number who devoured every word Lardner wrote in his baseball journalism. And now, modern readers have the same chance.
CLICK HERE TO READ MORE FROM THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER
Michael Taube, a columnist for four publications (Troy Media, Loonie Politics, National Post, and Epoch Times), was a speechwriter for former Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.