Customer Reviews

Spoke: A Biography of Tris Speaker (Sport in American Life)

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Baseball biographies of deadball era players are all the rage now. I was really excited to see that Mr. Alexander had written about one of the true early greats- Tris Speaker- as I was a big fan of his Cobb and McGraw biographies. I was a little disappointed though with this bio, for some of the same reasons I was disappointed in his work on Rogers Hornsby. Speaker almost seems like a ghost in this book, as I never could get a feel for him as a person (in contrast, Hornsby just came off as a colorless jerk). Alexander's text at times almost reads like a play-by-play retelling of every major game that Speaker was involved in. So one gets a feel for his greatness as a player, but at times I felt like I was slogging through play-by-play for chapters on end. That got tiring. I think the problem is that there is just not enough written material available to truly justify a biography of Speaker, the person. That's really sad, as he truly was great and simply had the misfortune of playing in Cobb's shadow his entire career. Consequently, when he retired and left baseball, he was largely (and unfairly) forgotten by baseball writers. Lastly, Speaker retired from the major leagues 80 years ago, and that there just aren't any people alive to shed insight into him as a person. So I guess Mr. Alexander did all right, given the limited material available- but I still felt largely unsatisfied after finishing.