Turn Every Page: Baseball and Striving For More

I was born as the reign of the Big Red Machine came to an end. I remember Johnny Bench more as a commentator than a player. Pete Rose was more a manager to me than anything else—before he was banned, that is. Riverfront Stadium was a frequent destination for our family, despite living in Dayton, Ohio. My older brother and I treated the family to games with our straight-A tickets, and my parents treated us to dinner and frosty malts.

The Big Red Machine’s decade of dominance comes to mind each October as the World Series takes place. And earlier this week, I was reminded of two baseball books—actually, one article and one book—that reflect on different players, and the game as a whole.

In his September 2005 New Yorker article, “Stealing Time: Why Rickey Henderson Won’t Go Home,” David Grann profiles Henderson’s last years playing baseball. (The article is collected in a volume of Grann articles entitled, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (Vintage Books, 2010).) Henderson’s last years were not spent with the Oakland A’s (with whom he had four separate stints), or with the eight other teams he joined in his 25-year career in Major League Baseball. Henderson’s career ended with the San Diego Surf Dawgs, a Golden Baseball League team. The Golden Baseball League was a now-defunct independent league formed in California to give older MLB players a place to play, and to give younger aspirants some experience. The Golden Baseball League was not part of the minor league system, and was not affiliated with MLB. But almost everyone who joined the league had one dream: to get to the majors—including Rickey Henderson.

Grann’s story about Rickey Henderson and his longing to get back into MLB reminded me of another player and another book, Jeremy Beer’s Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player (University of Nebraska Press, 2021). The book is the authoritative biography of Oscar Charleston, but also chronicles the rise and fall of the Negro Leagues. Unlike the Golden Baseball League, the Negro Leagues did serve as a path to the Major Leagues for a number of players. But because “[j]ust two seasons after Jackie’s April 15, 1947, debut with the Dodgers, the Negro National League had collapsed,” (Beer, 1) many do not remember anything about the Negro League’s best players.

Throughout his career, Oscar Charleston was described as the “colored Babe Ruth.” (Beer, 124) “That was the comparison, far more than any other, that would be most used in connection with Charleston during the 1920s.” (Beer, 124) Bill James, the baseball statistician, “had rated Charleston as the greatest Negro Leagues player of them all—indeed, as the fourth greatest baseball player of all time.” (Beer, 11) “The black press frequently referred to him as the greatest all-around player in Negro Leagues history.” (Beer, 2) And “Buck O’Neil, later described him as ‘Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Tris Speaker rolled into one.’ He was ‘the greatest player I have ever seen in eight-and-a-third decades,’ said O’Neil, ‘and one of the greatest men.’” (Beer, 4-5) As Beer notes: “For the truth was that Charleston is ‘regarded by many knowledgeable people as the greatest baseball player who ever lived.’” (Beer, 13)

So how does a player who is at least the best of his generation, if not one of the greatest of all time, get lost to history? Despite his 25 years in the majors, Rickey Henderson felt that he had become lost to history. At the end of his career, MLB General Managers would not give him a shot because of his age. He was past his prime and did not have that spunk he once did. When Henderson was setting records—his record of 130 stolen bases in 1982 still stands, and he is the only player to have stolen 100 bases in three separate seasons—he was a serious threat to any opponent. “As the former Yankee captain Don Mattingly has said, ‘Basically, he terrorizes a team.’ Henderson would score in ways that made his heroics nearly invisible: he would often get a walk, then steal second, then advance to third on a ground ball, and, finally, come home on a routine fly ball to the outfield. In other words, he regularly scored when neither he nor his teammates registered a single hit.” (Grann, 248) But a career supported by incredible speed and hitting ability necessarily starts to deteriorate with age. Legs become slower. The timing of the swing is off. But Henderson’s hope remained, and the memory of his glory days was too much. He wanted more.

Henderson never seemed satisfied, even when he seemed to have it all. In 1989, Henderson received a 4-year, $12 million contract with the Oakland A’s. At the time, it made him the highest-paid player in baseball. But after a few years, when he saw other players build on his negotiating success to garner even more lucrative contracts, Henderson wanted more for “Mr. Rickey,” as he regularly referred to himself.

The need to get paid more and more for playing baseball was something that Charleston criticized toward the end of his career. Charleston “agreed that baseball had changed, but he blamed the new economics of the game. Players used to play for love of the sport rather than money because there was so little of the latter to be had, he maintained. Kids would come for a tryout and hang around for nearly two weeks without payment ever being mentioned. ‘But now, they don’t pull a glove until somebody says how much.’” (Beer, 320-21). Oscar Charleston was more interested in playing well—in becoming an excellent player—than in any monetary compensation: “Charleston allowed nothing and no one to get in the way of the pursuit of his craft, which he brought as close to perfection as anyone ever has. The perfection was its own reward. It had to be.” (Beer, 25)

Ironically, after integration began in 1947, there were fewer opportunities for black baseball players to make money playing ball. Soon, “For Jackie, as for most others—including Hank Aaron—who made their names in the post-1947 world, the Negro Leagues were something about which to be embarrassed.” (Beer, 6) When the Negro Leagues became a thing of the past, the additional opportunities for many players dried up.

Rickey Henderson, born several years after Charleston died, was lucky to get a chance. But we should not forget the long history that preceded it. In its day, “black baseball was socially significant because it provided a locus for the formation, expression, and maintenance of a positive collective identity in the face of prejudice, fear, and hatred.” (Beer, 21) And reading about Charleston is, in some ways, like reading about Henderson’s later exploits:

As said by one sportswriter, Oscar “stole second, and on the throw down to catch him, the lad was forced to make a long hook slide, landing on his back; the ball rolled out to center field and before Charleston had cleared the ground, the fielder had the ball up; urged on by [his manager,] ‘Rube,’ Charleston sprang to his feet and made a break for third; he gained that base after one of the speediest exhibitions of running and injury-defying hook slides ever executed upon a diamond. If that boy is not pushed into a severe injury, we predict he will shatter all things ever attempted on the base paths.” (Beer, 109)

“‘Were it not for his color,’ it was claimed in one long feature, Charleston ‘would be in the big leagues and would be classed as one of the “greatest outfielders of all times.”’ To see ‘this superman of the diamond in action’ was ‘a rare treat.’” (Beer, 125) One could say the same thing of Henderson.

“‘I never got the chance to play in the majors because of the color-line,’ [Charleston] commented to Wendell Smith. He was therefore committed to doing all he could ‘to see that these kids I’m managing get their chance. Everyone who goes up compensates in some way for me.’” (Beer, 310) Ted Williams, when he was inducted into the Hall of Fame, expressed a similar sentiment, explaining how players like Charleston paved the way for later black players in the post-integration world: “‘The other day Willie Mays hit his 522nd home run,’ said Williams from the podium during his 1966 Hall of Fame induction speech at Cooperstown, New York. ‘He has gone past me,’ Williams continued, ‘and he’s pushing, and I say to him, “Go get ‘em, Willie.” Baseball gives every American boy a chance to excel. Not just to be as good as someone else, but to be better. This is the nature of man and the name of the game. I hope that one day Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson will be voted into the hall of Fame as symbols of the great Negro players who are not here only because they weren’t given the chance.’” (Beer, 7)

Eventually, “Charleston’s turn came in 1976. He was the seventh Negro Leagues star to be elected to the Hall via the special Negro Leagues Committee.” (Beer, 8) Henderson was inducted into Hall of Fame in 2009 at age 50.

A chance. That’s all Charleston asked for. And, in the end, that is all Henderson wanted:

“As Henderson was talking to me, one of his teammates, who had tousled hair and looked to be about eighteen, walked over. He was holding a baseball and a pen in his hand. He said to Henderson, ‘I feel funny asking, but could you sign this?’ Henderson smiled and signed the ball. ‘Thank you, Rickey,’ the young man said, holding the ball along the seams, so as not to smudge the ink. Henderson turned back to me, and said, ‘I’ll tell you the truth. I’d give everything up—every record, the Hall of Fame, all of it—for just one more chance.” (Grann, 245)

David Grann, The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (Vintage Books, 2010)

Jeremy Beer, Oscar Charleston: The Life and Legend of Baseball’s Greatest Forgotten Player (University of Nebraska Press, 2021)

Remember to turn every page. Enjoy your weekend. Please let me know whether you need anything.

Best,

Aaron