Customer Reviews

Hal Chase: The Defiant Life and Turbulent Times of Baseball's Biggest Crook

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Ever since I was a little boy I`ve heard of Hal Chase from my Dad and Uncle and always wondered. what they were saying in undertones after they told me what a completly peerless fielder he was and so fast and quick that he made everyone else look slow. After studying the 1919 scandal I learned a little more of his deviousness but in being able to talk to Ty Cobb and also Swede Risberg in the 1950`s I learned how great he could be if he wanted to. This book is a great work and I can`t believe the research and digging that had to go into it. What a great complete history of Prince Hal. There are more pictures than I`ve ever seen of him and incidents in his career that I had`nt heard of.Chase was such a complex character that he was very hard for some people to dislike; others loathed him and indeed he was baseball`s biggest crook.The description of his slide to oblivion was well done especially his life in Arizona and his final demise in California. As a matter of fact he died in the town where Ilive. I never got to see him play as I had only been home from overseas less than a year when he died but others have told me how he would go out to the high school diamond and help some kid trying to play first base. He was old at the time but my friend said you should have seen the moves he showed the youngster. They electrified the adults watching. The book brings this out. All in all to me a great book and I enjoyed it immensely.

Sportswriter Fred Lieb wrote that Hal Chase had "a corkscrew brain." Author Martin Kohout provides us with a very detailed account of the life of Hal Chase, "baseball's biggest crook." Whatever you want to know about Mr. Chase can be found in this book and some readers may feel they are being told more than they care to know. Chase is often given credit as being the greatest defensive first-baseman. His strength appears to have been on fielding sacrifice bunts and forcing the lead runner either at second or third base. This account provides the reader with a number of errors, purposely or not, Chase committed during games. In addition, he often was out of the lineup for one ailment or another. Hal bounced around a number of major league teams after wearing out his welcome with the one he was currently on. Each time he pledged to turn over a new leaf. Crooked ball playing took place during the turn of the century, and such times were ripe for a player with Chase's lack of morals. His personal life was a mess as well as his reputation on the field of play. I enjoy reading about players from the turn of the 20th century and was happy to be able to read about teams such as the New York Highlanders, the original Yankees, and players such as Hal Chase, even though he was a shady character. This book is definitely worth your time if you are interested in baseball history. If you are a casual fan, find something that is lighter reading.

Martin Kohout has penned a fascinating account not only of Hal Chase's eventful career, but of early 20th century baseball as well. One need not be well-versed in baseball lore in order to derive great pleasure from this work.

The book rests on a mountain of research. One of its many strengths is the insightful description of how the easy morality of the times spilled over into what I had previously believed to be the pristine world of baseball. The connections which existed among certain owners, managers, and underworld figures during Chase's major league career shatters the myth that the 1919 Black Sox scandal was an abberation. Especially interesting is the linkage that Mr. Kohout finds between the poisonous aftermath of WWI and that scandal.

The book is well written and carries the reader briskly along with a season by season account of Chase's exploits, both on and off the field. Unlike Pete Rose, whom this reviewer always found detestable, Hal Chase comes off as a sympathetic, likeable fellow, popular with the fans of every team for which he played. Yet, as Mr. Kohout tell us, he threw it all away -- his career, his family and friends, and his health. One is left wishing that Chase had possessed the character of a Gehrig.

Martin Kohout's "Hal Chase: The Defiant Life and Turbulent Times of Baseball's Biggest Crook," is a well-written and well-researched book about a man who, to use a worn-out phrase, "had it all." Chase was someone who could run, hit, throw, hit with power and field superbly, at all levels of baseball. He is not considered a superstar now or for many years before because when the list of crooked baseball players is drawn up, Hal Chase is either at the top or extremely close to it. Kohout looks at Chase's life, and attmepts to show us the "why" of this happening. The conditions of the time were vastly different than they are now, regarding player control and management control at the top of baseball's structure. What Chase was accused of and apparently did was not an extreme case in those days, when players could be approached by gamblers (or know of teammates who were) and be offered money to not try their best for a particular game. It was crooked and cheating and deceitful, but most associated with baseball were happy to hide these indescretions until the 1919 World Series came along. Chase was notable for the depth and quantity of his cheating, to obtain easy money, and carried his notoriety and reputation right out of the league and into other fields that he played on to the end of his days, even becoming estranged from most of his family. Kohout does an excellent job of displaying this living example of how potential and life can travel a path of darkness in pursuit of easy money, only to come to an unhappy ending.

While quite impressive in its volume of detail, which is fully footnoted and sourced as any academic tome, and obviously a project that the author slaved over for years, he seems incapable or unwilling to take this mass of information and do anything with it. Chase is one of the more controversial figures in the history of the game and worthy of a full length biographical treatment, but this reads like a private genealogy; since the author comes to none but the most tentative conclusions, the day-to-day probing of Chase's activities is, in the end, numbing and tiresome, a pointless excercise in minutiae as the author sits squarely on the fence in regard to each and every of the many indiscretions that marred his career. A book should amass information and through the authors' powers of insight and persuasion, arrive at some kind of conclusion or point of view. This does not, and I wish it did. While this will be useful as a source book for those who want to know what Chase did during a given season or particular time, the larger questions around Chase and gambling are not advanced beyond what is already known. A book of this scope should have answered those questions.