Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rumor in Town by Matt Dahlgren, December 8, 2007
Re: Rumor in Town by Matt Dahlgren
I loved this book because it touched me and intrigued me in so many ways. The author's personal story of his relationship with his grandfather evoked for me childhood memories of listening to baseball games on the radio with my father and sharing his delight in baseball newsreels at the local movies. Living in a small town in central Indiana in the late 1940's and the 1950's gave us no other access to these bigger-than-life heroes.
This book also reminds me of why these men were our heroes, what qualities America once revered in the making of our heroes, and how the men who played the game of baseball in the first half of the 20th century represented these values. The tragedy of Babe Dahlgren's story is that he clearly belonged in the pantheon of these heroes; the actions of those who denied him the chances to claim his place reveal the petty politics and personal power plays that mere mortals can bring to a sport.
Although the author doesn't directly speak to this issue, I think the book provides a glimpse of the sport's reflection of American racial prejudices and stereotypes of the time. I also think this may be a relevant piece of the Babe Dahlgren story. Matt Dahlgren provides us with plenty of convincing evidence that Babe's outstanding performance on the field and at the plate was completely inconsistent with the marijuana use rumor. So, the reader begins to wonder, what is behind the power of this particular rumor? The stigma of it that fuels the retelling? One clue, in my opinion, is the comment of one of his contemporaries who scoffed at the rumor saying, " Babe was too classy a guy for that". In the context of white American social attitudes of the time, marijuana use was something done by "negroes" and people who admired their jazz music (which was not regarded as a genre of proper American culture). Perhaps this unspoken tagging was part of the damage to Babe's career that statistics can't tell us.
My dad would have loved this book. I hope someone makes it into a movie.
Rita Milhollin
Portland, OR
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
NY Times Nov 18 2007 , November 17, 2007
Rumors of Drug Use Have Damaged for Decades
By MURRAY CHASS
Barry Bonds may go to jail if a jury believes he lied about using steroids. Many other players could face suspensions next season if George J. Mitchell identifies them in his coming investigative report on steroids in baseball.
But the story of Bonds or any other player doesn't approach the tale of Babe Dahlgren, a major league first baseman from 1935 to 1946, whose career and life were ruined by an unsubstantiated rumor that he smoked marijuana.
Under Major League Baseball's drug-testing program today, players get 50-game suspensions for testing positive for steroid use, 25 games for amphetamine use. Dahlgren, whose career ended nearly 60 years before testing began, merely had his life wrecked.
The first player tested for drug use, in 1943, Dahlgren volunteered to be tested, and he underwent a series of examinations by a doctor in Philadelphia to prove he was not a user of marijuana.
This bizarre and sad, heart-rending story is told in a new book, "Rumor in Town" (Woodlyn Lane), by Matt Dahlgren, the player's 37-year-old grandson, who had promised that he would get to the bottom of the scurrilous talk.
He did, learning that it was started by Joe McCarthy, manager of seven Yankees World Series champions, and propagated by Branch Rickey, father of baseball's farm system and a brilliant executive.
In this engrossing book, Matt Dahlgren also writes that a succession of baseball commissioners did nothing to help Dahlgren clear his name, starting with Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who told him, according to the book, that "castration would be an appropriate punishment for the culprit behind the rumor."
"Babe would write to Landis every time he heard of someone who heard the rumor, but Landis never did anything," Matt Dahlgren said Friday in a telephone interview. "Babe wrote to other commissioners, and none of them did anything."
By the time Fay Vincent took office in 1989, Dahlgren, then 77, had wearied in his pursuit of trying to get a commissioner to help him salvage his reputation.
"It's too bad; I wish I had been involved," Vincent said by telephone from Florida. "I would have tried to fix it."
He added: "People railroaded him for illegitimate reasons. It's a sad story. He was accused of being on drugs when I doubt very much that he was."
Vincent, who lauded the book, said, "It's not one of baseball's prettiest stories, and I regret that it didn't get fixed before he died."
Why did McCarthy start the rumor? With detective-like qualities and using as a guide a manuscript his grandfather wrote, Matt Dahlgren pieced together the story.
It began with a meeting, at the suggestion of James Dawson, who covered the Yankees for The New York Times, between Dahlgren and Lefty O'Doul, an expert hitting instructor, at the wedding of Joe DiMaggio and Dorothy Arnold.
McCarthy, apparently seeing O'Doul as a threat, learned of O'Doul's hitting help and confronted Dahlgren about it. After that season (1940), McCarthy orchestrated Dahlgren's trade to the Boston Braves.
At the time, McCarthy explained the trade by saying that Dahlgren's arms were too short to play first base, even though Dahlgren, who had replaced Lou Gehrig the year before, was widely considered the league's finest first baseman.
But in a subsequent conversation with "baseball insiders," McCarthy offered a different reason for the trade, demonstrating his resentment of Dahlgren at the same time. Dahlgren, his grandson quoted McCarthy as saying, would not have made a game-losing error in a late-season game that hurt the Yankees' pennant chances "if he wasn't a marijuana smoker."
Dahlgren did not become aware of the rumor for a couple of years, but it was responsible for a series of moves in his career. In the next two seasons, 1941 and '42, he played for the Braves, the Cubs, the Browns and the Dodgers. Early in 1943, Dahlgren had an unpleasant salary session with Rickey, a frugal -- cheap -- general manager.
According to the book, Rickey infuriated Dahlgren by asking, "Do you smoke marijuana?"
Rickey traded Dahlgren to Philadelphia before the season, and during a trip to play the Dodgers, Dahlgren and a teammate, Danny Litwhiler, encountered Charlie Dressen, a former Dodgers coach. Dressen said Rickey was asked by his bosses why he traded Dahlgren, and "Rickey told them he traded you because you smoke marijuana."
The trail went further. The Phillies traded Dahlgren, who was an All-Star, to Pittsburgh in December 1943. Matt Dahlgren figured it out.
Ted McGrew had been the Dodgers' chief scout and attended the meeting at which Rickey cited marijuana as the reason he traded Dahlgren. Bill Cox, the Phillies' owner, who was about to be barred for life for betting on their games, hired McGrew in October. Two months later Dahlgren was traded.
It was not his final move. In April 1946, the Pirates sold Dahlgren to the St. Louis Browns, his seventh move in six seasons.
In 1985, 11 years before he died, Dahlgren wrote a letter to an old teammate, Al Lopez, asking the name of a scout who Lopez said was present at dinner when the owner of the Indianapolis minor league club told him that Rickey had "gone to great lengths to damage my reputation by saying I smoked marijuana."
In a handwritten reply, the 77-year-old Lopez told Dahlgren, "The scout's name was Ted McGrew."
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Rumor in Town is an Absolute Page Turner!, December 2, 2007
The author has a way of writing that makes the reader
smell the leather of the glove, hear the crack of the
bat, share the tears in history as he takes you into
the Yankee dougout on the date that Lou Gehrig took
himself out of the game. Of course it ended his
streak, but along with the members of the Yankees, I
cried.
The author's promise, getting to the bottom of the
"rumor" is so touching. There is no doubt in my mind
that the best firstbaseman in history is now in the
big show in Heaven. One doesn't need a love for the
game to appreciate, the talent, frustrations, respect,
character, and most of all love for the game by Babe
Dahlgren, as well as well as the love he shared with
his grandson. An incredibly well written book by a
new young author.
The way Babe Dahlgren's career was handled was a
travisty. Nobody with his credentials and ability
should have in those days been constantly traded,
demoted and traded.
It is a true testimony to the pettiness of the men
who are still little boys that own the clubs. They can
crush the hopes and dreams of a great athelete in what
is supposed to be a game. Most important, "Rumor in
Town" A Grandson's Promise to Right a Wrong is not
just another sports book destined to end up on the
sale shelf at the book store, it's a true love story
of a young boy for his Grandpa and the promised that
he kept.
Jim Campbell Benga Lagoon Resort, Fiji
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