The Shortstop
Not long ago, my daughter Regan was in Cooperstown, New York, where the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum is located. She happened to pass by a rare book shop and, being a rare book specialist at the University of Pennsylvania, couldn’t resist going in. She was looking for a Father’s Day gift. I couldn’t have been more thrilled with what she found.
It was an early edition of The Shortstop by Zane Grey, first published in 1909 by Grosset & Dunlap. But what does Zane Grey have to do with baseball, I wondered. Most people including myself associate him with novels about the Old West like Riders of the Purple Sage and The Last of the Plainsman.
As it turns out, baseball was one of his passions. He attended Penn, my daughter’s school, on a baseball scholarship in the early 1890s and, as a pitcher, wowed spectators with his sharply dropping curve.
Then again, that was when the distance from the pitcher’s mound and home plate was 10 feet shorter than it is today. When it was lengthened to 60 feet 6 inches in 1893, Grey’s pitching fell off and he was shifted to the outfield where, according to Wikipedia, he became a “solid hitter.” He received numerous offers from professional clubs but ended up playing for the Orange Athletic Club of East Orange, New Jersey, one of the top amateur clubs in the U.S. and a team many considered better than some pro teams.
Writing, however, became Grey’s main love and The Shortstop is one of three novels about baseball that he wrote.
His story gets off to a fast start. “I need money quick,” Chase Alloway tells his mother, “and I’ve hit on a way to make it. I am going to be a baseball player.” Mrs. Alloway is aghast.
“Ball players are good-for-nothing loafers, rowdies. I won’t have my son associate with them.” She begins to cry but Chase, a strapping seventeen-year-old, holds firm. Ever since his father abandoned them, he’s been the family’s breadwinner. The $6 a week he makes working in a factory, however, isn’t enough and his mother eventually gives in.
After an emotional farewell, Chase begins train-hopping through the Midwest looking for a team to join. These were the days when nearly every small town and city had a baseball team.
As quickly becomes apparent, these were very different times.
Chase is asleep in an empty boxcar when three thieves, one of them “a Negro,” climb in and begin fighting over how to divide their stolen loot. The Negro is killed but because it’s the middle of the night, the other thieves don’t notice Chase who has hidden himself in the shadows.
After they leave the boxcar, Chase jumps out and hightails it to a nearby farm where he tucks himself into a haystack for the rest of the night. A cow is there, too. “Hello, bossy,” said Chase. “I’d certainly rather sleep with a nice gentle cow like you than a dead bad nigger.”
Readers should keep in mind that Grey wrote The Shortstop more than 100 years ago. While some of the writing is awkward and offensive by today’s standards, the book is still a fun read for it reminds us how much the world of baseball and the world itself have changed.
“Buggies, wagons and vehicles of all kinds” arrive in Jacktown, Ohio where Chase finally finds a team to play for. It’s the visiting team, Brownsville, whose regular pitcher is injured. Chase is asked to fill in.
As he begins warming up, the catcher asks what he’s throwing. Chase says it’s a curve. “I’ve read about it,” the catcher replies. “You are throwing the new way. But these lads never heard of a curve. They’ll break their backs trying to hit the ball.” Grey also describes how some of the right-handed batters for Jacktown held their bats with their left hand over the right which made it impossible for them to hit Chase’s curves. In their frustration, says Grey, they became “wild-eyed and hopped along the baselines like Indians on the war-path.”
But it’s the eye deformity, Chase’s “crooked eye,” that the Jacktown players blame for their futility and causes a near-riot. Baseball players have always been a superstitious lot and those with Jacktown are no exception. “It’s his eye, his crooked eye,” whined one Jacktown player. “See thet! You watch him, an’ you think he’s goin’ to pitch the ball one way, an’ it comes another. It’s his crooked eye, I tell you!” The umpire agrees. Even though Chase’s team is winning 11–0, the umpire stops the game and declares Jacktown the winner, 9–0.
Chase is then chased out of town by the Jacktown team. Newspapers capture the moment: “Chaseaway, the Crooked-Eye Wonder, hoodoos the Great Jacktown Nine,” blares one headline.
He hits the road again in search of a team, hopping coal trains and cattle trains but living like a hobo and having to beg for scanty meals at backdoors of farm houses. He’s about to give up when he meets a farmer in Findlay, Ohio who recognizes him. “Gol darn my buttons, if it ain’t thet Chaseaway fellar!” he exclaims. When Chase learns that the local team is looking for a shortstop, he tries out and is signed for $100 a month.
Suddenly, life is good. Chase impresses with his fielding and hitting and leads Findlay, “the crack team of Ohio,” to one victory after another. His best friend is the team’s mascot, described by Grey as “a diminutive hunchback” with a “hideous deformity” who stands about three-feet tall and is cursed with “an almost useless body and the face of an old man.”
Unfortunately, some of the Findlay players are unnerved about having having Chase as a teammate. It’s his crooked eye. They fear it will jinx them, one warning Chase, “What do you want to queer the team for? Don’t look at me with that eye!”
The new shortstop tries not to look at them but the team, rattled by his presence, goes into a tailspin. Only after several disgruntled players are fired does the team get back on track and begin winning again.
At this point, Grey’s narrative becomes tedious with over-the-top writing as Chase thinks about home: “He saw the tired face of his mother and her toil-worn hands.” We also go for a rowboat ride with Chase — several, in fact — as he courts a young woman named Marjory, or Margory as Grey also spells it at times. Love blossoms when Chase has an operation to fix his crooked eye.
The best part of The Shortstop is the chapter entitled “Sunday Ball.” At the time it was written, playing baseball on Sundays was frowned on in many places. When Findlay’s manager announces that the club’s directors have approved Sunday ball, many players are outraged. Chase is torn. He’d been trained to respect the Sabbath, but he also knew how much baseball meant to the others, those who worked in foundries, factories, refineries and brickyards, those who had no time to play but for whom the next best thing was seeing someone else play. And Sunday was the only day they could do that.
Although Findlay’s players are disgruntled, they agree to take the field and that first Sunday game takes place. No sooner is it over, however, than a local minister goes to court in an effort to block further ones, branding Sunday ball an “abomination” and a “desecration of the Sabbath.” Chase is then asked to state his views and makes a passionate defense. “When I learned we were to play on Sunday, I was sick with doubt, but then it came to me in that game when I saw five-hundred men and boys who had never attended one of our games. They were crazy but it was with happiness. . . .It is very easy for ministers and teachers to tell us working men how to spend the one free day, and no doubt they mean well, but they miss the point. On Sunday those shrieking, boisterous diggers, cappers, puddlers and refiners, had gone back to their boyhood. They played the game for us with their hearts, their thoats, their tears.”
Chase goes on and on, four pages worth in fact. Again, Grey’s writing becomes a little over the top but it finally comes to an end, and a happy ending is had by all.
Sunday baseball is approved. . . Finday wins the league championship. . .and Chase wins the heart of Marjory, or Margory, as the case may be.
The Shortstop may not rank as great literature but it is a fun-read and, more importantly, for baseball aficionados, a window to the past.
