Sports This Week: Dive into the golden era of baseball with 'The Called Shot'

YORKTON -  We sometimes think of sport as something which exists in a vacuum, but it doesn’t.

Sport is influenced by the era in which exists and the world as it is at a given point in time, and at the same time sport influences the world.

The somewhat symbiotic relation of sport – in this case baseball – with the world around it is at the heart of The Called Shot: Babe Ruth, the Chicago Cubs, and the Unforgettable Major League Baseball Season of 1932 by author Thomas Wolf.

At it’s heart this book, from University of Nebraska Press, is a baseball book, one focused primarily on the year 1932, and the legend which grew up around Babe Ruth supposedly calling a home run in the world series. Is it historic fact, or a baseball myth? Well, for that you’d have to read the book.

What I can tell you is that Wolf weaves a great story looking back some 90 years.

The baseball story here is outstanding, in part thanks to Wolf’s fine writing, but also because the era was filled by some of the greats of the game, from Ruth, to Jimmie Fox, to Honus Wagner (by then a manager). It would be difficult not to write a book of interest based strictly on the statistics of the great players of the day.

And, it was most certainly a different time in terms of the game, a more rough and tumble, no holds barred baseball.

“In a more serious escalation between a player and an arbitrator involving a disputed call, Ty Cobb challenged umpire Billy Evans to a fight, and the two men met under the stands after the game, stripped off their shirts, and battled for forty-five minutes, punching and kicking each other. Players from both teams watched the altercation and eventually broke it up. Evans went to the hospital with a broken nose and other injuries. Cobb came away less bloodied and claimed victory,” writes Wolf in the book.

It was an era where pitchers pitched and pitched and pitched too.

“Doyle had been impressed by (Guy) Bush's stamina and durability after seeing him pitch both ends of a doubleheader, shutting out a Minor League team from Vicksburg, Mississippi. Doyle had been right in his assessment. In 1927, Bush pitched a complete eighteen-inning game against the Boston Braves, facing seventy one batters in a contest that lasted nearly four hours.”

Still, why write about an era where much had been written before?

“I grew up a baseball fan,” he said, adding as he aged “. . . I became more interested in baseball history.”

That interest soon focused on the 1920 and ‘30s because “so many major stars played in the era.”

Then Wolf honed in on 1932 because of its pivotal nature not so much in terms of baseball but for the U.S. and the world.

That’s how Wolf creates something a cut above the norm in telling stories of the era that swirled around and intermingled with, the sport of baseball.

Stories such as, the impact of the Great Depression, Chicago Cubs Billy Jurges was shot by showgirl Violet Popovich in a Chicago hotel room, Ruth promising home runs to children in hospital and the election of a new U.S. president are woven into what remains at its heart a book about baseball played on the diamond. These are the stories upon which the greatness of this book are solidly created.

Of course the depression hit the game, even the greats took pay cuts – Ruth held out at one point wanting a better deal, but the game was also a diversion for a troubled country.

Not surprisingly the Great Depression permeates the story line.

“But the most pervasive and disturbing news concerned the state of the deteriorating economy. The calamity of the Great Depression had deepened and intensified. The economic decline rippled through cities and towns, reaching from Maine to California, from Oregon to Florida. No region of the country was spared. Only the very rich or those securely employed were not directly impacted. The decade of speculation, false hopes and easy money had passed. For many Americans, the situation had become unfathomable, and their futures seemed bleak at best,” wrote Wolf.

“As farms failed and banks closed, families lost their homes and broke apart. Shelters and soup kitchens took in and fed some of the most desperate and out of luck, but government resources were unavailable to millions of other citizens. Enclaves of plywood shacks – called Hoovervilles – appeared in major cities. The homeless lived under highway overpasses and in caves or vacant factories. Many roamed the country seeking work and food, riding trains from place to place in crowded boxcars. Young boys and girls, also homeless, travelled together for safety.”

It took some digging through records books and online newspaper resources, but Wolf found lots to write about.

“I steeped myself in the era,” he told Yorkton This Week, adding in the end that is what a writer of history must do, gather material.

“Then it’s winnowing it down to what fits in the book … what you think readers will be most interested in,” he said.

“In the top of the fifth inning the game took a historic turn. As Ruth was jeered mercilessly by Cubs players and fans, he gestured toward the outfield and then blasted a long home run. After Ruth circled the bases, Roosevelt exclaimed, “Unbelievable!” Ruth’s homer set off one of baseball’s longest-running and most intense debates: did Ruth, in fact, call his famous home run?” noted the publisher page online.

“That was a hook for readers,” said Wolf, who said he tried to add something new to the history. He said he thinks readers have “found things in the book they didn’t know, or hadn’t fully realized about players of the time.

Often though he hears from readers later it was the off field aspects of the book they enjoyed most – something this writer can himself appreciate.

Certainly when the book is taken in its entirety – as a story of baseball and 1932 America – it becomes a book to be highly recommended.