The Gashouse Gang: How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin, and Their Colorful, Come-from-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series--and America's Heart--During the Great Depression (Hardcover)

~ (Author)
Key Phrases: gashouse district, gashouse gang, pennant drive, New York, Dizzy Dean, World Series (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Heidenry (The Boys Who Were Left Behind) offers a thorough if occasionally dry account of the "immortal, implausible, impossible gang of ballplayers known officially as the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals." The author draws on a wealth of books and publications to tell how a visionary named Branch Rickey invented the idea of using a farm system of minor league baseball clubs to develop talent, and then forged an unlikely, low-budget contender in a city far from the sport's Eastern power base. Rickey's team became known as the Gashouse Gang, owing to its role as a ragamuffin bunch with an indomitable spirit to whom Americans in the Depression could relate. The straightforward, detailed storytelling can make for some dull reading, particularly in the beginning, when Heidenry meticulously lays out the background of Rickey and the club. But anecdotes about the Cardinals' memorable characters, who included Leo "the Lip" Durocher, Casey Stengel, Pepper Martin and brothers Dizzy and Paul Dean, liven things up considerably. Dizzy takes center stage in the book, whether scheming new ways to get more money from management or mouthing off to the press. Baseball fans will appreciate this comprehensive look at the oddball pitcher and the team he led to glory. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

Seventy-three years ago, the St. Louis Cardinals did what they did only six months ago: They beat the Detroit Tigers in the World Series. But just about all resemblances end there. In 1934 the teams were lily-white, the players mostly were only of average size, their wages were low, they played in relatively primitive ballparks, they traveled between cities by train, they smoked and were featured in cigarette ads, and the game they played dominated the American sports scene with no real competition beyond intercollegiate football.

Furthermore, they played at a time when the United States was in an economic crisis almost unimaginable today. The Great Depression had "reached rock bottom," John Heidenry writes, with "massive unemployment, mile-long bread lines, and the westward migration that began when Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and Arkansas turned into a giant Dust Bowl." The country was almost as desperately in need of distraction and amusement as of jobs and economic recovery. As the 1934 major league baseball season unfolded, Americans got a measure of what they needed from the Cardinals. Not until the season had ended were they christened the Gashouse Gang, but from the first pitch, they had the ingredients of baseball legend:

"They were the unique product of a particular time and place -- mostly men who had known extreme poverty and hardship in the South and West, with a few hard-nosed kids from eastern states thrown in for variety. Among their number were a couple of ex-sharecroppers, a pool shark, a handsome dandy who worked as a Hollywood double in the off-season, a grease-stained third baseman who liked to drive his midget auto racer around a track before a game, a surly outfielder who punched any of his own teammates if they looked at him in the wrong way, and even a couple of college kids. Collectively, as the Gashouse Gang, they were the creation of a pious, nonimbibing Methodist who would not even watch them play on a Sunday because his religious principles forbade it."

That pious gentleman was Branch Rickey, the team's general manager, who is now best known as the man who brought Jackie Robinson to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. Then, though, he was in his mid-50s and still making his way in the game. He had found his way to the Cardinals a couple of decades earlier, when they were a marginal team on the edge of bankruptcy, and had turned them into one of the three or four dominant teams in the National League. This was largely because in 1919 he'd had the vision to realize that a low-budget, small-city team could compete with New York and Chicago if it set up a chain of minor-league teams to train young players and feed them into the big-league team when they were ready, all of this at significantly less cost than purchasing established players for $100,000 or more -- a huge sum at the time.

Fifteen of the 25 players on the 1934 Cardinals had been trained in the farm system, most notably the brilliant and wildly eccentric pitcher Jerome Herman "Dizzy" Dean. He had come out of the Arkansas Ozarks, poorly educated, dressed in rags, hillbilly to the core -- but also a born baseball player and a much smarter guy than appearances suggested. He was "the unofficial ringleader" of the Cardinals, even though some of his teammates thought he was a blowhard; they knew, as he did, that "when he was in peak form, he was unbeatable," and they suffered his antics as the price of his pitching genius: "Though Dizzy was a braggart and a practical joker, and sometimes just plain obnoxious, the consensus among many of his teammates was that, at heart, he was a good fellow." He won 30 games that year, which made him the last 30-game winner until Denny McLain of the Tigers won 31 three-and-a-half decades later.

He feuded with just about everybody, from Sam Breadon, the owner, right on down. His relationship with Joe "Ducky" Medwick was especially fractious, but then Medwick was -- apart from being a talented hitter and outfielder -- a difficult guy, a loner who was quick to get angry. He had joined the team near the end of the 1932 season and immediately "criticized any teammate who, in his opinion, made a foolish error." He made people mad, "yet none of the players confronted Medwick to his face. He was clearly a man no one wanted to get into a fistfight with."

But that's how ballplayers were in those days. The game was rough, and the players were rougher. The 1934 Cardinals may have been especially boisterous and rambunctious, but their behavior wasn't unusual in a game played mostly by country boys in a nation still heavily rural. The New York Giants, managed by the incomparably feisty John McGraw, were of similar character.

The Cardinals were managed by Frank Frisch, who was in his mid-30s and one of the greatest second basemen the game had known. In his youth, he'd had remarkable speed, and he'd gone to college at Fordham -- hence, in an era when the press gave every player a nickname, "the Fordham Flash" -- and a rather dignified manner, at least by baseball standards. He was "someone who could appreciate fine wine, art, and literature," so it was inevitable that he'd cross swords with Dean, who "liked to read pulp adventure novels about cowboys, preferred nightclubs to museums, and was forever harassing, pestering, and negotiating with the front office, which he loudly and publicly accused of being cheap and exploitative." It finally reached the point where Dean decided to go on strike over what he regarded as inadequate wages, and he insisted that his younger brother Paul walk out with him. Paul -- who won 19 games that year and pitched exceptionally well in the World Series -- seems to have been a somewhat reluctant protester, but he tagged along when Dizzy orchestrated his "two-person mutiny," which "was like nothing the game had ever seen." It lasted only about a week, and the Deans predictably didn't get what they wanted. However the other players may have felt about the walkout, they had to concede that "in the final stretch, the Dean brothers became virtually invincible." As did the Cardinals themselves. They won 20 of their last 25 regular-season games and won the league championship -- the "gonfalon," as sportswriters of the day liked to call the pennant -- on the last day from the Giants, who became the first team to squander a seven-game lead going into September. They then went on to take the Tigers in seven games, including three wins on Detroit's home field. Both Deans pitched well, and Dizzy was his usual irrepressible self.

Heidenry has told this familiar tale competently but with little flair. He is a native of St. Louis, not quite old enough to have seen the Gashouse Gang in person, who has held various journalistic positions over the years and now lives in New York. His love for the Cardinals is obvious -- the only Midwesterners who don't love the Cardinals would appear to be the ones who love the Chicago Cubs -- but it doesn't translate into peppy prose or smooth narrative. He relies far too much on sportswriters of the day and quotes them to excess, especially the dreary, clichéd John Drebinger of the New York Times, whom I am old enough to have read more often than I care to remember. He does have the grace and candor to admit that he wasn't able to find out for certain where "Gashouse Gang" came from, but then neither has anyone else. Let's just say it sounds right, even if no one knows what it means, and leave it at that.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 344 pages
• Publisher: PublicAffairs; First Edition. 1 in number line edition (March 26, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1586484192
• ISBN-13: 978-1586484194
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #662,509 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Thoroughly Enjoyed This Book!, June 6, 2007

By	Concerned Citizen - See all my reviews

Just finished The Gashouse Gang, by John Heidenry, and I'd highly recommend it. I greatly enjoyed this book.

This is a fun, easy book to read that covered the 1934 pennant race and World Series - with Dizzy Dean as the centerpiece of the book.

What makes the book such a joy to read is that the author refrains from going into excruciatingly minute detail of the 1934 baseball season - as many period authors do with a lot of information that you can never hope to retain - but rather presents it all as a interesting backdrop to the improbable cast of characters that made up the Gashouse Gang, including, among many others, the Dean brothers, Leo Durocher, Frankie Frisch, Pepper Martin, Joe "Ducky" Medwick and Rip Collins. He includes just enough relevant detail about the pennant race without the book ever becoming boring and devotes most of his efforts to developing all the zany personalities and all the many interesting baseball interactions and relationships. A lot of space is devoted to Branch Rickey and how he put this team of characters together and actually made it work. There's a lot of "local color" and 1930's "baseball flavor" that I really enjoyed. By the end, you really feel that you know the personalities of this group of talented players and what made the Gashouse Gang click as an exciting, one-of-a-kind championship team.

A lot of the information in the book will be familiar territory to baseball fans, but the author presents it all in such a lighthearted, engaging writing style that it kept me turning the pages. It was one of the few books I've read that I was disappointed when it ended. I've read other books about Dizzy Dean and the Gashouse Gang, but this was easily the most enjoyable. If you want to brush up on this era in baseball history - a time when Dizzy Dean and the St. Louis Cardinals were on top of the baseball world - this is the book for you!

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Mostly Diz, July 1, 2008

By	Dave Schwinghammer "Dave Schwinghammer" (Little Falls, Minnesota USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Gashouse Gang: How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin, and Their Colorful, Come-from-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series--and America's Heart--During the Great Depression (Hardcover)

When I was a boy, I used to watch Dizzy Dean and Buddy Blatner (later, Peewee Reese) on the "Game of the Week" every Saturday afternoon. I remember Ol' Diz driving the English teachers crazy with his fractured English.

The Ol' Diz in Heidenry's book isn't quite so loveable. He went on strike in the middle of the 1934 season, demanding a larger salary for him and his brother Paul; he was a braggart, and he laughed at Hank Greenberg's futility against his pitches in the World Series. I find that last example rather hard to believe since a hitter can always drag bunt and take it out on the pitcher at first base.

The title of Heidenry's book is somewhat misleading. Most of the book is about Dizzy, I would imagine because Heidenry had the most information about him and because Diz was the most colorful of the Gashouse Gang. Heidenry refers to Ducky Medwick as a solitary loaner who picked fights with his fellow Cardinals, but the only evidence he gives us is a fight with Paul Dean that Dean started. The second most talked about player is Leo Durocher. Heidenry details his many marriages, his pool hustling, and his bench jockeying capabilities, but there's not that much detail. Heidenry limits himself, for the most part, to play-by-play, especially in respect to the 1934 World Series. About the most interesting segment was Heidenry's explanation of how the Gashouse Gang got its name. Apparently they were named after a New York street gang from the gashouse district of New York, an especially depressed area of the city. They were generally unshaven and their uniforms were dirty and in need of repair.

We also get a brief look at Dizzy's childhood as a sharecropper and his time spent in the Army, which helped him get onto a semi-pro team, which in turn led to an eventual contract with the Cardinals. Dizzy also had an older brother named Elmer, whom Branch Rickey gave a job as a peanut vender at Sportsman's Park. Dizzy and his wife Pat were embarrassed and demanded an office job for Elmer. Rickey wouldn't relent and Elmer wound up back in Arkansas.

The epilogue also leaves quite a bit to be desired. Heidenry tells us Dizzy only had four good years in the majors because he got hurt, but he doesn't tell us how. Legend has it he was hit in the foot by a come backer, broke his toe, and came back too soon, damaging his arm. Heidenry also leaves out the beaning incident that ruined Ducky Medwick's career. He was able to play but he was never the same player.

If you're a baseball fan, there's enough in THE GASHOUSE GANG to keep you turning pages. There's an occasional tidbit I didn't know, such as the beaning Dizzy took when he tried to take out the second baseman during the World Series. That's where the famous quote, "They ex-rayed my head, but there was nothing there," came from. Heidenry also provides a bibliography that may provide some answers. Try St. Louis sportswriter J. Roy Stockton's THE GASHOUSE GANG AND A COUPLE OF OTHER GUYS. It was published in 1945, and Stockton was actually alive to see the Gashouse Gang play.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Will we ever see their like again?, January 1, 2008

By	Roger Fraser (Rolling Meadows, Illinois) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This was a fun read marred by an annoying and inexcusable flaw: The book's poorly edited. The author's often entertaining anecdotes are more often then not inserted into the story in ways that break up the already choppy narrative flow: a sin of using a word processor and being in too much of a hurry. In addition to mistaking the Phillies for the A's (which other reviewers have noted), Heidenry loses an out in an exhaustive recounting of Detroit's half of the third inning in the pivotal sixth game of the Series. In addition, the author quotes a columnist (a certain "Polner") on page 120 without any description of who he was. (A quick check of the index gives his full name as "Murray Polner"; anyone interested has to look elsewhere to find out who he was, something even a half decent editor would have caught). And was the long account of the 1934 All-Star game really necessary?
The book's strengths are its attempt to discover the origin of the sobriquet "Gashouse Gang," the description of Dizzy's and Branch Rickey's early life, and the account of the battle Dizzy waged for higher compensation for himself and his brother during the summer of '34. (By the way, the author might have mentioned the dramatic Minneapolis Teamsters strike led by Trotskyists that year which may have also inspired Dizzy in his efforts to stand up to the club's owner, general manager, and later the commissioner). In any event, what a brave guy Dizzy was! Will we ever see his like again on a ball field?