Whispers of the Gods
The unchanging game has changed, and so have we
Friend Peter’s latest book will be published in March but it is now available for preorder. He and I published our first books in the mid-1970s; today we are what the baseball press once termed “grizzled veterans.” This is my foreword to his oral history. https://www.amazon.com/Whispers-Gods-Baseballs-Golden-Played/dp/1538154870
When Henry Aaron died in January 2021, just short of his 87th birthday, he became the tenth member of the Baseball Hall of Fame to pass in a distressing nine months. Ruefully, Keith Olbermann noted that “All of the baseball cards are dying.” I knew exactly what he meant.
It was the cards of 1950s stars like Aaron that forever linked my generation with its baseball idols. Even today, on the dark slope of life, I cannot hold a 1950s Topps card without feeling, in a sensual way, the heat of a Bronx sidewalk, the thrill of fanning the cards to see “who I got,” the taste of a Mission orange soda, the smell and peculiar feel of the pink slab of bubblegum, and the thrill of flipping my hard-earned prizes toward the wall of our apartment house, hoping to vanquish my mates. I was young only yesterday.
Like Peter Golenbock, I have spent a lifetime thinking and writing about the great American game. Unlike him, however, I have had few friends who were former players. I luxuriated in the game’s recorded history, forming friendships with folks I had never met, especially those who died before I was born. Yet like Peter I was a child of the 1950s and 1960s, when I came to love the game and create my personal pantheon.
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In the 1950s, we were measuring ourselves amid an age of heroes — those who had won the War and rid the world of Fascism. As we entered young adulthood in the 1960s we were entering into another age of heroes, the maelstrom of the civil rights struggle, winning battles if not, as we see all too clearly now, the war. By the 1970s we “put away childish things” and gravitated to antiheroes. In baseball it was out with Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig and in with Jim Bouton and Sparky Lyle. Peter was close with Bouton then, as I was to be later on, and in The Bronx Zoo he created an all-time sports bestseller with Lyle.
As it has turned out the heroes of our youth did not disappear as we aged; they hibernated. Baseball may not matter now as it did then, but magically they do. We no longer need them as models of rectitude, talismans against evil — what would Jackie do in this fix, one might wonder … or the Duke? As we hit middle age and beyond, and look at our lives in the rearview mirror, the ballplayers reemerge in all their old vigor.
Time mercifully casts a hazy aura over our ancient missteps; our baseball heroes, more burnished than tarnished for reemerging as real people, become welcoming guides to the lost world of our youth. How good it is to have as companions on that journey Ted Williams or Stan Musial, Roy Campanella or Monte Irvin, still in their baseball-card poses but now in three dimensions. Thank you, Peter!
To the anticipated cavil that Whispers of the Gods is just the latest in a long line of baseball books for boomers, I draw your attention to the subtitle: Tales from Baseball’s Golden Age Told by the Men Who Played It. The Golden Age of Baseball (or movies or rock and roll or most anything else) is not this decade or that one, but the year in which you hit puberty and everything changed. It cannot be long before middle-aged baseball writers create paeans to the game of the 1980s.
Baseball is a backwards-looking institution. It pleases us to think that giants once strode the earth and their like will not be seen again. This is baloney of course. But serve it up between two slices of bread, with a shmeer of nostalgia, and count me in.
Are the players of today better than those of the Fifties and Sixties? Certainly. But in The Paradox of Progress, we know it is better and cannot explain why it feels worse. Blame it on the Designated Hitter, or the carousel of relief pitchers, or steroids, or the rise in strikeouts. But the best explanation is simply that we are older now. The unchanging game has changed, and so have we.
It has been a pleasant conceit to imagine that amid the continuing swirl of events a childhood game has been the constant of American life. For all our complaints today — and a widely held perception that the world used to be a better place and it must be someone’s fault that it isn’t any longer — it may likewise be argued that America is better than it ever was. To view our present state, in the game and in the land, with clarity is the calling of the past.
What was it like, to be alive then? That may seem simple for the autobiographer of a certain age (though it is not); it is a harder mission for the historian, to go beyond the recovery of accurate fact to recording an accuracy of feeling. For the oral historian, the mission is to present his interlocutor as he was in life, to go beyond stenography, as Peter Golenbock has done so brilliantly here. Like Larry Ritter, who may be said to have invented the genre of oral history, he has left behind mere transcription, like the Works Progress Administration interviews of the mid-1930s, to present word portraits more eloquent than voice.
He wakes the echoes.
