Abstract
Roessner delves into the heady days of what she calls “gee whiz” journalism (p. 2), when sportswriters and journalists embedded themselves with baseball’s biggest stars, and how the symbiotic relationship helped and, at times, disparaged both. The book primarily focuses on the role of newspapers and magazines in shaping and bolstering the images of Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson. Roessner has experience covering sports. Before becoming an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee–Knoxville, she was a sportswriter for the Gainesville (GA) Times.
Roessner provides an interesting analysis of the relationship between three groups: the baseball consuming public, baseball’s early stars, and some of baseball’s pundits. Roessner shows how sportswriters influenced the ways in which consumers of baseball news viewed Cobb and Mathewson, while the two baseball stars and those same consumers influenced how writers packaged information for the public.
In the early twentieth century, sports journalists and major league baseball players shared close quarters. Journalists traveled with the teams they covered, ate with the players, spent leisure time with them, and even visited them in the off-season. Journalists leveraged the close relationships to provide personal tidbits and insights into the players’ philosophies of the game, on-field skirmishes and plays, and off-season activities. Grantland Rice, John Wheeler, Ring Lardner, Damon Runyon, and F.C. Lane, some of the most prominent sportswriters of the early twentieth century, had easy access to stars like Cobb and Mathewson. Roessner uses the words of those writers to tell the stories of Cobb and Mathewson and how those writers drenched the two icons in American virtue and tenacity, while excusing Cobb when he displayed the violent side of tenacity. Sportswriters painted Mathewson as “baseball’s archetypal saint” and Cobb as “the Major League’s quintessential sinner . . . The more reliable sketched him for what he was—an anomaly, a chameleon-like trickster with an eerie knack of transforming just when sportswriters thought they had him figured out” (p. 123).
Roessner does a commendable job of showing the free-wheeling journalistic styles of Rice, Wheeler, Lardner, and their colleagues. These writers “were experimenting with humor, characterization, and dialogue in their pieces—techniques that they put to good use in their literary journalism and in their fiction over the next decade” (p. 122). Rice even used poetry and verse to espouse the nobility of Cobb and Mathewson. Roessner notes that editors gave their top writers more autonomy and independence than other reporters. Still, these writers knew there were constraints. Rice and other writers who developed close relationships with Cobb, Mathewson, and other players knew they could not betray their trust. “Afraid of losing their insider status, they did not dare unearth controversial gossip” (p. 166). Writers not only avoided disparaging the stars they covered, they often served as promoters for the players. Roessner spends a significant portion of the book discussing the conflict that writers faced in maintaining close relationships with stars like Cobb and Mathewson, while trying to maintain some objectivity to their reporting. Roessner couches the discussion in W. Joseph Cambell’s three paradigms of journalism: the activist, narrative, and detached models. In the era of yellow journalism and the early-twentieth-century heydays of sports journalism, the activist and narrative models, or “gee whiz” journalism, became prevalent in coverage of Cobb and Mathewson.
The symbiotic relationship between these players and the writers provided more than good copy; it provided extra money for both. Roessner uses Wheeler as an example. He wrote for both Cobb and Mathewson, penned a book (under the player’s byline) for each, and collaborated with Mathewson on a short series of children’s baseball books. Mathewson and Cobb had their own columns and various newspaper pieces written, of course, by sportswriters. Eventually, a new organization of sports journalists, the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA), condemned the “writer-player” practice, but that did not stop writers from flaunting the BBWAA’s accusations of conflict of interest and using their journalistic platforms to promote Cobb and Mathewson. Roessner notes, Sportswriters transitioned from partners in collaborative journalistic endeavors to trusted advisors and pseudo-press agents, who offered antecedent public relations strategies to sports icons. While Ivy Lee, “the father of public relations,” was consulting with the Rockefellers, Wheeler was advising Cobb and Mathewson in a similar, albeit unofficial, manner. (p. 158)
Roessner does an excellent job of using the timelines of Cobb and Mathewson’s careers and lives to track the evolution of news coverage of major league baseball. Roessner also demonstrates how much that timeline and evolution are intertwined and that attempting to separate the strands diminishes the exploration of both. She frames her discussion in the cultural and social expectations of that era, when the country still followed Victorian ideals and the concept of Christian masculinity had taken root. Writers were also constrained by those ideals in providing content that the general public accepted or would expect. That meant focusing on certain player attributes and ignoring others. That is why Mathewson and Cobb served the writers well. Mathewson became the embodiment of those ideals for Rice, Wheeler, Lardner, and other writers, who cemented his image as baseball’s “Christian gentleman”; and although Cobb’s temper-fueled antics and confrontations, both on and off the field, brought him negative press at times, he was still portrayed as the epitome of steely resolve and a “win-at-any-price” attitude to which the public could often relate. “In short,” writes Roessner, “through human interest coverage of Cobb and Mathewson, journalists helped construct common-sense notions of manhood at the height of the age of the bachelor” (p. 154).
In her telling of the lives of Cobb and Mathewson and their close connections with the press, Roessner straddles the histories of sports journalism and baseball. As a result, this book would work well in both mass communication and sports sociology classes. The book would serve as an excellent companion to Rice’s book, The Tumult and the Shouting, and Fred Lieb’s Baseball as I Have Known It. However, Roessner’s book may be guilty of putting too much focus on a handful of early-twentieth-century sportswriters and giving short shrift to the contributions of other sportswriters of the time, such as Lieb and Heywood Broun. Roessner could have also strengthened her discussion on image-building by drawing from Gary Fine’s book, Difficult Reputations, and other works that explore the process of image-making. Because Roessner’s book focuses as much on sociology as it does on journalism, her work would not be a good fit for a journalism course. Still, Roessner’s book is well sourced, well organized, and enjoyable reading.