Runs, Hits, and an Era: The Pacific Coast League, 1903-58

Rating:
Summary: Classic minor league story to make the heart Zingg
Review: It's hard to go wrong when you write a book about old-time baseball, and the Pacific Coast League might have been the best of the best.

Paul Zingg's and Mark Medeiros's book is in much the same vein as the equally classic Dick Dobbins books on this subject. However, "Runs, Hits and an Era" is a little more fortified with statistics. The names of Jigger Statz and Buzz Arlett are hardly household words today, but they truly must have been the Henry Aaron and Barry Bonds of their league and era.

And the authors rely less on interviews with the participants and more on traditional written sources - newspaper articles and other books written on the subject. In this book, there is perhaps slightly more emphasis on the Pacific Coast League's relationship to the other professional baseball leagues, major and minor, and on its relationship to the world at large.

This book has the usual collection of wonderful baseball photos from that era but also some photographs from the historical period in general. On page 3, there's a photograph from 1869 of the meeting of the rails of the Transcontinental Railroad that joined the eastern and western parts of the country. This enabled professional eastern teams to compete on the West Coast. The barnstorming tour of the first Cincinnati Reds baseball team took them to the West Coast, and while they bowled over the local teams with the same regularity that they bowled over everyone else during their incredible 130 game win streak, their visit did help set into motion the forces that would promote professional baseball on the West Coast.

Zingg and Medeiros also provide more information on the "color line", which was practiced by the PCL as unjustly and almost as rigidly as that practiced by the majors. Its existence was also just as predictably doomed, as the influx of "colored" talent would prove to be too overwhelming to be denied. Names such as Luke Easter, Minnie Minoso, and Artie Wilson might be familiar to many, but I was surprised to see the name of Piper Davis alongside these others.

A mainstay of the old Negro Leagues that played in the shadows of the white major league teams in the east, Piper Davis is largely known for having first signed Willie Mays to a Birmingham Black Baron contract in the 1940's. I had not known that he made his way to the Pacific Coast afterwards and established himself as a PCL pioneer.

Who hit the longest home run in the history of professional baseball in the San Francisco Bay Area? The first five names that likely came to your mind were Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Jose Canseco, Reggie Jackson and Willie McCovey. The name Roy Carlyle of the Oakland Oaks probably wouldn't have ranked high on your list, but with the immortal Buzz Arlett waiting his turn on-deck, Carlyle's 618-foot Fourth of July blast in 1929 off of the San Francisco Missions' Ernie Nevers (yes, the old football star) probably traveled farther than any "splash down". Carlyle looks like an ordinary-sized chap in his picture, and presumably, he accomplished this without the assistance of andro.

The description of radio recreations of PCL games sounds a little too familiar: if the telegraph or telephone became temporarily inoperative, the "recreater" would have to have the hitter foul off pitches endlessly until the problem was fixed. That sounds a lot like the legend of how "Dutch" Reagan prolonged Billy Jurges's trip to home plate for a half hour. Did these things really happen or are the stories apocryphal? A delay in transmission sounds more like an excuse for giving the advertisers their money's worth than for a succession of foul balls.

Interestingly enough, these authors seem to disagree with Dobbins on the attitude of the major leagues toward PCL absorption. The PCL made a strong bid for major league membership after World War II, and Dobbins seems to feel that the major league owners thwarted this with an intent of possibly themselves relocating or expanding to the Pacific Coast some day. But Zingg and Medeiros argue that skepticism about the West Coast as a major league locale and about the adequacy of the PCL ballparks was genuine and that relocation to the West Coast really was initially regarded as prohibitively expensive, noting that the marginal teams that did relocate first chose locations in the Midwest such as Milwaukee and Kansas City.

Notwithstanding the title, this book has a brief recapitulation of the league's post-1958 history. It yet exists today as a wholly-controlled minor league adjunct to the majors and even has expanded INTO the Pacific Ocean by adding a team in Hawaii. Even Little Rock has a team - Little Rock, Alaska, that is. But it seems universally agreed that when the Giants and the Dodgers arrived in San Francisco and Los Angeles, respectively, in 1958, this was the end of the PCL as traditionally conceived, as the original franchises moved and changed their names.

Still, books like this whet the reader's appetite for more. Surely it isn't too late to ship the Dodgers back to Brooklyn, the Giants to a city like Montreal that might deserve a perennial non-champion, the A's back to Philly or Kansas City, and the other major league West Coast expansion upstarts to oblivion. When the shopping center on 16th and Bryant in San Francisco is torn down to rebuild Seals Stadium and when the studio on Beverly and Fairfax is torn down to rebuild Gilmore Field and when the community center on 42nd and Avalon is torn down to rebuild Wrigley Field and when Oaks Park is rebuilt even alongside the plaque in Emeryville that STILL commemorates the Roy Carlyle blast, the Pacific Coast League can be reborn, and West Coast baseball can awake from its prolonged slumber and begin again in earnest.