Abstract
Amber Roessner’s book Inventing Baseball Heroes explores how Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson captured the attention of the nation and explains why select members of the sporting press glorified them and other baseball players. While this book might be attractive to the casual baseball fan, it lacks the academic heft I consider necessary when selecting a book for course adoption.
Roessner, an assistant professor in the School of Journalism and Electronic Media at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, notes that a “‘gee-whiz’ school of journalists” developed in the 1920s, a period marked by reporters celebrating the on-the-field exploits of baseball players while abandoning critical coverage of them. She states, Baseball was a culture craze. It so resonated with the American public by 1919 that it prompted noted American philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen to label the game the national religion. And if baseball was indeed the national religion, then sportswriters were its proselytizers, the sporting press was its bible, and the American public was its willing worshippers.
As Roessner tells us on multiple occasions, they worshipped Mathewson, who the press consistently reported had conducted himself as a “Christian gentleman.” The New York Giants’ right-hander deserves consideration as one of the game’s all-time best pitchers, and Roessner details that the press ensured he also would be recognized as kind, generous, hard-working, and humble. Whatever faults he might have had either were never adequately explored or were ignored by the reporters who spent lots of time with him on and off the field. In short, he was the classic Victorian gentleman.
Cobb was a more complex figure for both the men who covered him and the public that watched him. It didn’t take long for him to develop “a reputation as an arrogant firebrand” but also as someone who had a “‘scientific’ style of hitting and base running.” He was unlike Mathewson—not loved like Mathewson but never lacking in attention for the way he played the game. His perceived recklessness on the diamond added to the perception of a man with swagger and bravado. He was a different kind of man than Mathewson but definitely a man.
Unfortunately, this book does not fully develop the personal and professional lives of the sports reporters identified in its pages. Roessner makes clear that they were influenced by the aforementioned “gee-whiz” reporting, and that eventually their publishers demanded “celebrity-style journalism.” The inevitable result was that these men found it “difficult to maintain a level of detachment” from Cobb, Mathewson, and other top baseball stars. However, additional biographical, personal, and professional information about the reporters would have allowed us to know more about them. By extension, our understanding of this fascinating era of sports journalism would have been strengthened. Instead, we are told too often about the “gee whiz” school, and how Mathewson and Cobb were portrayed because of it.
One chapter in this book was structured unlike any of the others and because of that looks awkward. “The Quintessential Saint and Preeminent Sinner” includes multiple subheads, which appear in none of the other chapters. Moreover, it reads much like a roughly twenty-page summary of the book. The editing process should have caught these shortcomings.
If Roessner were a baseball player, this book, her first, would represent her rookie season. In it, we would be able to find periods of success and moments when she struggled. She might not have won the Rookie of the Year Award, but she certainly has demonstrated the potential for a long and fruitful career.