The name Ring Lardner should come up not only in a discussion of great baseball writers, but great writers, period. The proof lies in a collection published last year, Frank Chance’s Diamond, subtitled The Baseball Journalism of Ring Lardner, edited by Ron Rapoport. The proper bibliography format dictates that I also provide the publishing company and date and place of publication, but nobody gives a damn about any of that.
Photo Credit: Joe Landolina
Reviewing Frank Chance’s Diamond, The Baseball Journalism of Ring Lardner
In 1905, the 20-year-old Lardner, after quitting several jobs, scammed his way into a job as a reporter despite having no previous writing experience (sort of how I got this job). By 1908, he had written his first article on major league baseball. Eventually, he was covering baseball for the Chicago Tribune. It was there he spent the rest of his career but for a brief intervening stint with the Boston American.
Lardner’s baseball reporting was unique in that he wrote in the vernacular, with a sharp sense of humor. This included misspelled words and mangled use of the language, all of it intentionally. Thus, for example, “organized baseball” becomes “agonized baseball.” The pitching corps becomes the “pitching corpse.” Outfielder Whitey Witt is a “pillow of strength” defensively. Thanks to the Bell Syndicate, newspapers all over the country carried his reporting on the “World Serious.”
Errors in spelling, grammar, punctuation, capitalization, or missing apostrophes found in a quoted text hereinafter are in the original. (Editor: Please leave that stuff as is.)
Lardner on Baseball was Gonzo Before Hunter
Inserting himself into his stories, Lardner practiced Gonzo Journalism long before Hunter S. Thompson and before anybody called it that. In his tales, Lardner played a character named Ring Lardner, much like Jerry Seinfeld played a character named Jerry Seinfeld in the hit TV show Seinfeld. Another reporter once advised Lardner to stop using “I” in his stories and use “this reporter” or “your correspondent” instead. Those phrases are then sprinkled liberally throughout his next article to humorous effect.
Lardner was so famous in his day that he was once invited to play golf with President Warren G. Harding. Yet today, his literary genius is forgotten. It could be because the hard-drinking Lardner preferred the company of baseball players to literary snobs. An exception was his friendship with drinking buddy F. Scott Fitzgerald. (The book’s title comes from a line in a tribute to Lardner written by Fitzgerald.) It may also be because he rejected numerous offers to write a novel.
You Know Me, Al
Lardner did, however, write short stories for magazines and newspapers, not always about baseball. One series of short stories, A Busher’s Letters Home, would be published as his only novel, You Know Me, Al. Writing anything about Lardner without including a mini-review of You Know Me, Al is difficult. In my opinion, it’s the best and funniest work of fiction ever written about baseball or anything else.
You Know Me, Al was first published in 1916. It follows the story of fictional Chicago White Sox pitcher Jack Keefe via his letters to his best friend Al. Keefe is stupid, vain, cheap, selfish, and stubborn. He’s nearly as good a pitcher as he believes. He’s quick to blame others for his failures. But he’s also easily taken advantage of and blithely unaware when he’s being ridiculed. Thus, he’s a sympathetic figure as well.
No Soft Spot
So, when Keefe loses 16-2 to Ty Cobb and the Detroit Tigers, he blames his manager for leaving him in the game with a sore arm, poor effort by his teammates, bad field conditions, and the wind. Playing poker with his teammates, he’s laughed at when he calls with four sevens in his hand. (This was based on a real-life incident witnessed by Lardner where Cubs pitcher Rube Kroh called with four kings.) Keefe eventually marries, and his wife gives birth to a baby boy. Sox coach Kid Gleason visits the Keefe home and picks up the baby. As Keefe writes to Al:
“Then he starts patting the baby’s head and I says Here, don’t do that because he has got a soft spot in his head and you might hit it. He says I thought this was your baby and I says Well he is my baby and he says Well then they can’t be no soft spot in his head.”
Now on to the Book I’m Supposed to be Reviewing
Frank Chance’s Diamond is divided into sections, the best of which is “The World Serious,” which is also the longest. The stories are more than 100 years old, but fortunately, there are helpful explanatory footnotes from Rapoport, who, like Lardner, worked in Chicago. (Rapoport also wrote Let’s Play Two, a definitive, warts-and-all biography of Ernie Banks.)
There’s nowhere Lardner wouldn’t go in these stories. Of one young White Sox player, Lardner wrote, “he and a bath tub are only casual acquaintances.” Frequently, he wrote a game story in rhyme. His report on Game 6 of the 1917 World Series was written in broken French under the headline “The Modern Voltaire.” Lardner knew his literature as well as his baseball.
Providing inning-by-inning coverage of Game 5 of the 1916 “Serious,” for the fifth inning he wrote, “I was out getting a sandwich.” Covering the annual City Series between the two Chicago teams in 1918, he described pitcher Lefty Tyler’s control problems by writing, “he hadn’t no idear where they kept home plate, though it was right in plain sight.”
The World Serious
On to the 1919 “World Serious” and Game 1, where the Cincinnati Reds’ Jake Daubert was hit in the head by a pitch and lay prone until he finally got up and took first base. Lardner described it as a calculated but failed strategy on the part of the White Sox to kill each Red. Besides being the backdrop for the Black Sox Scandal, it was the first Series to go to a best-of-nine format. (That idea was abandoned after the 1921 Series.) Asked who gets the advantage from a nine-game Series, Lardner wrote, “Well gents all as I can say is it isnt the newspaper men.” Slyly referencing the Scandal in his story on the 1920 Series, Lardner says “the winners share of the players in this serious wont be as much as some of the losers got in 1919.”
Soon, Lardner’s personal problems took precedence over the games, and his name even often appeared in the headlines. Maybe it’s because he lost interest in the game. That’s explained toward the end of the book in his 1921 article, “Why Ring Stopped Covering Baseball.” Turns out Lardner wasn’t a fan of Babe Ruth and the brand of baseball he wrought.
Thus, Lardner began to openly and humorously complain in his articles about having to be at the ballpark. The 1922 World Series took a back seat to a story about Ring’s wife wanting a fur coat. He wrote of a Pittsburgh hotel losing his shirt when he was there for the 1925 Series. When he returned for the 1927 Series, the last one he covered in person, the lost shirt is mentioned again.
A Brilliant Writer
Lest the reader think Lardner was a clown masquerading as a writer, I direct you to his story about the end of the 1912 World Series, “The Tears of Christy Mathewson.” The poignant opening paragraphs describing the aftermath of a tough loss endured by Mathewson, a Lardner favorite, are brilliantly written and stand with anything ever written about a baseball game.
The Baseball Writing Style of Lardner
Lardner’s style of writing wouldn’t fly today. His intentional spelling and grammatical errors wouldn’t even pass the readability test in the program we use here at Last Word On Sports. Another reason, and a sadder one, is that we take our sports too seriously these days. Lardner wrote during a time when fans didn’t spend every waking moment worrying about why their teams weren’t better.
Today, therefore, we’re not in the mood for his brand of humor in sports reporting. Social media, talk radio, and cable TV are competing for our attention 24 hours a day. They do this by feeding us topics designed to keep us anxious, angry, and miserable, ensuring that we’ll be back for more. Thus, we’re made to believe, inter alia, that if our teams stink, we must be getting screwed over. This phenomenon is called the “attention economy,” as described in another fine book, How to Do Nothing by Jenny Odell. My wife says I didn’t need to read a book by that title, as I could write one myself. In any event, I recommend it.
The Last Word
In conclusion, the writings of Lardner are essential for any baseball fan. I’d call Frank Chance’s Diamond a “good read” except that I hate when verbs are used as nouns. Whatever one wants to call it, there are plenty of hard belly laughs along the way.
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