Customer Reviews

A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Montgomery Ward

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Bryan Di Salvatore has captured the early history of baseball with his fascinating biography of baseball's early days. His profile of John Montgomery Ward, a pitcher and later an infielder, provides a detailed look at the evolution of baseball in its formative years. This was a time of numerous rules changes from underhand pitching, walks counting as hits, absence of a fixed pitching rubber, changing rules on how many balls it took to walk. The author meticulously but always in interesting prose tells us about the many battles between owners and players, the reserve clause, poor playing conditions. Ball players were lazy, overpaid, carousing drinkers(sound familiar) said the owners. Owners were greedy, interested in squeezing players for every nickel(sound familiar) said the players. Clearly the era evoked has many parallels to today except the average player salaries were clearly more in line with real wages. The average ball player made 3-5X the salary of the average working man. Generally the players were more accessible to the public although in one scene John Ward complains about the annoying fan groupies. For the baseball fan this book will clearly be educational and is well worth reading. Very few books describe the pre-1900 era and this book is a rare and thorough glimpse on the emerging popularity of baseball.

Between 1878 and 1894 John Ward Montgomery amazed major league baseball fans on the field and exasperated owners off of it. As a pitcher for Providence, he won 87 games in the two seasons of 1879 and 1880. He also pitched only the second perfect game in National League history. He later moved to shortstop and led the New York Giants to pennants in 1888-1889. His natural leadership skills ensured he had a future as team captain and manager.

But Ward infuriated the owners by bucking their system of control over the players. The National League had established a "reserve clause" binding a player to his team for life by "reserving" his services for the next season even without a signed contract. While the contract and hence the player could be traded, a player could not unilaterally choose to play for another team. The manner in which owners erected this legal means of controlling players amounts to some of the most interesting sections of this book.

This infuriated Ward, who was also a lawyer; he believed players should be allowed to ply their trade wherever someone was willing to pay them. Accordingly, he organized the Brotherhood of National League Players in 1885 as a fraternal order not unlike the Grange and other secret societies of the Gilded Age. In effect, this was the first union of professional baseball players. When Ward learned in 1889 that the owners had established a fixed scale of salaries, setting the upper limit at $2,500 for each season, he led a walkout and established the Player's League controlled by ballplayers. It was a good idea but it failed after only a year because the competition ensured a financial disaster for both leagues.

Bryan Di Salvatore's fine book is largely the story of Ward's efforts to overcome the "plantation-style" rule of baseball owners. He was never able to do so, and he finally retired at age 34 after a 17 year career to lead a lucrative law practice. This is very much a "life and times" biography and one will learn much about the milieu of the latter nineteenth century as well as about Ward and his baseball career. Broadening the story helps significantly, as it places in context the larger owner/labor dynamics that have shaped Major League Baseball to the present.

I love 19th Century Baseball and this book is 19th Century. Mr. Salvatore makes this book wildly enjoyable to any fan of baseball history. At times the book shows a little "subject jumping," but all in all this book is fantastic.

I bought this book used and found that it was too simple to even be considered a book. Mr. Disalvatore seems like the type of author that got published because he knew someone not because he produced a good book.
This book was difficult to get into and even more difficult to follow. I know several people who tried to read this after I lent it to them and none of them would have bought it for themselves. Do not buy this book, it's better used in your fireplace for a little warmth.

The problem with Mr. Di Salvatore's book is that it never seems to decide what it wants to be. At times, it attempts to study Ward in the context of his time--and, indeed, it spends more time on his youth in Bellefonte and his brief time at Penn State than it does with his involvement in the players' movement and his marriage to Helen Dauvray--while at other times it seems to want to break into a full-fledged novel. The chronology is equally inconsistent, and he varies between giving too little detail (e.g., the Players' League) in some areas and unconscionable amounts--there is a full section on the history of baseball that adds little or nothing to the book as a whole--in others. By failing to establish some central theme or organizing principle for the book, Mr. Di Salvatore comes perilously close to writing about nothing at all.

Although it's not easy to criticize a book which the author says took four years of his life, and I believe him, shoppers should know that at times this book would be better titled "The Late 19th Century Including a Few Vignettes From the Life of John Montgomery Ward." Yes, this book is symptomatic of the modern trend to make them at least 25% longer than they need to be. The author thinks nothing of spending page after page describing oddities of Ward's hometown which really tells us nothing more about him than the single line "he grew up in the middle class of a small town in Pennsylvania" would have. The entire first chapter is devoted exclusively to speculations on various pictures of Ward without even putting the pictures next to them. There is at least one chapter which fails to mention Ward at all. The narrative wanders off the path often, even in the early going when the reader's attention is most at risk, and stays off for long periods of time. I would have much preferred it if this book had been one of those tall affairs with a great, wide margins and little info boxes along the side. Then one could read or not read the boxes at one's option. Or, it could have been a hypertext document and then if one wanted to read more on some of these topics, click and read more, but no reader should be forced to wade through some of this material, especially as some important details are buried in the middle of it, risking the skimming reader missing it. I suppose the fault is with the editor, but it's difficult to say as words like "faro" and "turnverein" are included without explanation -- maybe originally that wasn't the case. Please note that there are 32 pages of footnotes as well. On the other hand, entirely at the author's door are some very big questions left completely unfielded. Why is there no speculation, for example, about why Ward never participated in that most common of human activities, creating children? Also, in this connection, I am surprised that the possibility that he was tricked into his first marriage by a possible false pregnancy is never considered. His wife was after all an actress and must have been familiar with the trick from the Dramatic tradition. Another important issue: who was Ward actually? What were his politics? He seems a very unlikely revolutionary. Rather, like Aristophanes and W.S. Gilbert, he seems to criticize the system from the right, not because he fails to believe in it, but because he finds those in charge to be no-talent hacks and, significantly, because he can. His "revolution" seems to have been accomplished more by cleverness and opportunism than by principle and reality so naturally it was only a matter of time before the cards came crashing down. A little more of the author's or others' judgement on this would have been welcome, or even just a more inside look at how Ward went about his recruiting and alliance building, but all we get are two sentences. Other than these issues, I did enjoy the book quite a lot and although I cannot recommend it as highly as some others, I feel no doubt that on a research basis at least no stone has been left unturned. Certainly its topic is both rare and enjoyable.

A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life And Times Of John Montgomery Ward is the riveting tale of John Montgomery Ward's life and historical baseball career, from his expulsion from Penn State University for stealing chickens, to pitching baseball's second perfect game in 1880, to becoming a member of the New York Giants. More than just a biography for baseball history buffs, A Clever Base-Ballist also paints a bright, engaging picture of American life at the turn of the century. For baseball enthusiasts and millennium enthusiasts alike, A Clever Base-Ballist does not disappoint!