Bruce Markusen. The Team that Changed Baseball: Roberto Clemente and the 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates. Yardley PA: Westholme, 2009. Print.

The Team that Changed Baseball is a baseball history book for baseball fans. It is direct, clear, and well written, but it mostly summarizes the 1971 season of the Pittsburgh Pirates which culminated in an exciting seven-game World Series.

There is a chapter devoted to each month of the season; then, a chapter for the National League Championship Series—back then each league had two divisions and no wild cards. The winner of each division played for the league pennant. Then there are four chapters devoted to the World Series. The last chapter is entitled “The Legacy” which actually deals with the thesis of the subtitle, why the 1971 Pirates were significant.

As has been mentioned elsewhere in this blog, this reviewer is a Pirates fan. I recall being in New England during the 1971 season, but I followed the playoffs and World Series as best I could when I could find an available television. Also, as a boy, my baseball hero was Roberto Clemente. I always felt he was overlooked because Pittsburgh is a small market city. Markusen writes that after the 1971 World Series Clemente felt for the first time that he got the respect he deserved.

Markusen also tells of Clemente’s reputation as a hypochondriac. He quotes a few people who criticized Clemente for that, though he also explains that Clemente injured his back in a serious auto accident in 1954 and lived the rest of his life with three damaged spinal disks. Perhaps because I was a kid, I remembered it differently (I never knew about the car accident till I read this book). I recall people saying that Clemente only played well when he did not feel good. It was more like, “Clemente’s sick today—wink, wink, nod, nod—thank goodness!”

The Team that Changed Baseball also notes that the then Brooklyn Dodgers first signed Clemente and then tried to hide his talent. They were afraid their rivals the New York Giants would sign him. Even then, though the Dodgers were the first team in the modern era to sign a black player, they also had a quota which limited themselves to four minority players on their roster of 25.

By the mid-fifties Branch Rickey, the Dodgers’ general manager who had signed Jackie Robinson, was working for the Pirates. When a Pirate scout visited the Montreal minor league Dodgers’ affiliate to watch Clemente, the Montreal manager pulled Clemente from the lineup. Still, the scout saw Clemente throw a baseball nearly 400 feet and knew he was looking at some real talent.

The reason that the 1971 Pirates changed baseball was that it was a truly color blind team. For most of the season a majority of its starters were African American or black Hispanic. Even a couple of its starting pitchers were. For the first time in major league history for any team, on September 1, 1971, every starting player for Pirates was black.

I recall Sports Illustrated pointing this out, but no one on the Pirates made a big deal of it. It was not done to make a statement or prove a point like, for example, the Bobby Riggs-Billie Jean King tennis match. It happened to be the best lineup of healthy players available for that game and situation. Manager Danny Murtagh downplayed it. It was only about the third or fourth inning that third baseman Dave Cash noticed it and pointed it out to the others. Murtagh just said, “I had nine Pirates out there on the field.” (109)

Markusen notes that as early as 1967 the Pirates had fielded a starting lineup that had eight black position players with the pitcher as the only Caucasian. Markusen also states that most teams would have black starters but their bench players would be all white. Minority players had to be exceptional to make it to a major league roster.

Markusen had apparently overlooked earlier Pirates teams. Indeed, their previous world champion team from 1960 had only one black player as a regular starter, namely Clemete; but they had seven black bench players: Bennie Daniels, Earl Francis, Diomedes Olivo, Gene Baker, R. C. Stevens, Joe Christopher, and Roman Mejias. Joe Christopher pinch ran in game seven of the World Series and scored a run. R. C. was Stevens’ given name, just the initials. Even a decade earlier the Pirates were filling their roster against type.

Markusen tells us “the 1971 Pirates proved conclusively, and really for the first time, that a pool of athletes representing a variety of backgrounds and nationalities could work together effectively and win a World Series championship.” (189) By the end of the decade other championship teams, notably the Oakland Athletics and the New York Yankees, would be following the same pattern. “There was no pendulum swing back and forth.” (188)

There is something else Markusen notes. Like the 1960 and 1979 World Series which featured the Pirates, the 1971 World Series had some exciting games. That is why the author devotes whole chapters to games six and seven. They were close nail-biters. Willie Stargell said of the underrated Pirates, “When it [the World Series] began you would have thought the Pittsburgh Pirates were nothing more than the invited guests at the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” (181) It did not turn out that way, but it was no cakewalk, either.

The Team that Changed Baseball reminds us that baseball is exciting. A column in the New York Daily News said, “The 1971 World Series renewed for most people the assurance that baseball is indeed an exciting game, something, for some reason, they had been brainwashed into doubting.” (186) Even this year (2015) the ALDS between Texas and Toronto reminded us of this. As longtime Pirate broadcaster Bob Prince would say of the 1960 Series: “It makes baseball unmatched in the world of sports.”

P.S. As a kind of postscript there is an interesting appendix, a kind of “Where are they now?” which lists the subsequent careers of many of the 1971 Pirates and what they were doing as of the time the book was published. The Team that Changed Baseball could also be a companion to Color Blind, about a pioneering integrated minor league team from the 1930s.

Parnell Hall. A Puzzle in a Pear Tree. New York: Bantam, 2002. Print.

A Puzzle in a Pear Tree is one of a series of crossword puzzle mysteries featuring Cora Felton and her niece Sherry Carter. This clever “cozy” murder mystery begins as a Broadway washout director is directing both a high school production of The Sea Gull and some skits in the town of Bakerhaven’s Christmas pageant. The pageant’s pièce de résistance is a live re-enactment of the “The Twelve Days of Christmas” in which both ladies have small parts.

During a rehearsal the model partridge in the artificial pear tree prop has been replaced by an acrostic puzzle which warns that a leading lady is going to die. The police dispatch a deputy to keep surveillance on Becky Baldwin, the lead singer in the pageant. Only the person murdered turns out to be Dorrie, the high school senior who had the lead in The Sea Gull. She was killed while posing as Mary in a live nativity scene on the town green.

The local police arrest Sherry for the murder with the help of an officious but experienced British detective who happens to be visiting his daughter who lives with his ex-wife and who was best friends of the murder victim. Sherry does not even know the victim, though her family is prominent in town, but the police are convinced she killed Dorrie by mistake instead of Ms. Baldwin. In an ingenious plot twist, Becky Baldwin is also acting as Sherry’s defense attorney. Even the judge cannot figure that one out!

There are more surprises, including more acrostics, as Cora and Sherry try to prove Sherry’s innocence. More people die, but the story retains a lighthearted tone. There are enough clues that the reader might solve the mystery before it is solved in the book—and this one is not revealed until the very end. This reviewer did correctly identify the murderer with about fifty pages left, though I misjudged the killer’s motive. That was still a surprise.

Bakerhaven is supposedly a small town in western Connecticut. The nearest city is said to be New Haven. Even though it has haven in its name, we are told that the town in not on the coast. While the setting may not be as specific as the novels of Justin Scott or John J. Gilmore, the fact that the director used to work in New York City makes a Connecticut setting realistic, though it could be an American small town anywhere. I am familiar with the village of Bakerville in Litchfield County, Connecticut. While Bakerville is a little closer to Hartford than New Haven, a Litchfield County setting does seem most likely.

This is a cozy, character-based mystery. There are numerous jokes about the number of ex-husbands Cora has had. Like Chaucer’s wife of Bath,

Of remedies of love she knew perchance,
For she could of that art the old dance. (Prologue.477,478)

Still there is a streak of realism in the court scenes and the fact that not all the loose ends are tied up.

Sigmund Brouwer. Nowhere to Hide. Eugene OR: Harvest House, 2015. Print.

Nowhere to Hide is fast-paced young adult thriller. William King—call him King—lives on a sparsely populated island in Puget Sound in Washington State. He and his buddies helped the FBI solve a mystery, and he and his two high school and college friends are recruited again.

This time some things do not ring true. The agent who contacted him does not know the pass phrase. He and his friends are taken to a posh Seattle hotel where it appears they are going to be temporarily imprisoned. Each of the 58 chapters averages slightly over three pages. In plot complications one might call this a Robert Ludlum for teens. In pace of action, it is more like Tony Abbott.

The ending contains a surprise twist. One reader shared that the twist ruined the story, as though it were more like Alice in Wonderland where the conflict builds to a head and it is “only a dream.” However, there are enough clues dropped so that the twist is not a complete surprise and the story does wrap things up. No one is killed and no national secrets are betrayed.

Folks from Washington State on either side of the Cascades will get a kick out of the setting. From an urban computer hacker to a survivalist living in a desert trailer, welcome to the modern Wild West.

Baroness Emmuska Orczy Orczy. I Will Repay. 1906; Project Gutenberg, 2014. E-book.
———. The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel. 1919; Project Gutenberg, 2004. E-book.
———. The Elusive Pimpernel. 1908; Project Gutenberg, 2013. E-book.
———. Lord Tony’s Wife: An Adventure of the Scarlet Pimpernel. 1917; Project Gutenberg, 2011. E-book.

They seek him here, they seek him there;
The Frenchies seek him everywhere.

Readers may be familiar with The Scarlet Pimpernel, a swashbuckling novel about an English nobleman and master of disguise who helps Frenchmen destined for the guillotine during the French Revolution to escape. I read that many years ago in high school and enjoyed it immensely. About twenty years ago I saw the 1930s film version which was also lots of fun. In the thirties they knew how to make swashbucklers—Robin Hood, Captain Blood—Sorry, but the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, except maybe the first, are really science fiction or fantasy.

Even back in high school I had a vague impression that Baroness Orczy had written a sequel or two. I was inspired recently to read some Scarlet Pimpernel stories, so I checked on my source of pre-1924 classics, Project Gutenberg. There I saw a substantial list, and Wikipedia listed them in order of publication and in historical chronology. Many were written after 1924, so I suppose non-Americans can check those out at Project Gutenberg Australia. A list follows this review if WordPress lets me use html tables.

I read the above books in the order listed. One might call it a binge, except that the books are quick reads. I have not had such relatively mindless fun reading books in a while (maybe since a Gordon Korman book). These books are a hoot.

I Will Repay establishes a continuing conflict between Committee of Public Safety officer Citizen Chauvelin and the Pimpernel. Indeed, the Scarlet Pimpernel becomes Chauvelin’s nemesis. In I Will Repay Chauvelin hatches a plan to trap the Pimpernel, but I am not giving away much of the plot by saying that his plan is thwarted.

One could say that Chauvelin is Wile E. Coyote to the Pimpernel’s Roadrunner. Like the Coyote, the reader never quite sympathizes with Chauvelin. He is a friend of Robespierre and devastated when Marat is killed. He is ruthless and self-serving. However, he had been an ambassador to England before the Revolution and traveled in the same circles as Sir Percy Blakeney. Blakeney is the Pimpernel’s alter ego. What adds to the intrigue of many of these stories is that in I Will Repay Chauvelin identifies the Pimpernel as Blakeney. In other words, he is not like Lois Lane who seems to have never figured out that Clark Kent is Superman. That also, of course, heightens the tension.

(It has been noted by many that The Scarlet Pimpernel may have inspired the Superman-style superhero with an alter ego like the Shadow or the Phantom, both of whom predated Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne.)

The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel is a set of short stories or episodes each involving an escape from France assisted by the Pimpernel or one of his associates. There are somewhere around a dozen friends of Sir Percy who have joined him in his adventures. These tales reminded me a lot of the Sherlock Holmes stories in style and effect. The difference is that instead of solving a mystery as Holmes does, the Pimpernel creates mystery and distraction and disguise to outwit his adversaries.

Some of these stories like The Elusive Pimpernel novel remind us that the Revolution did not only go after selfish aristocrats but also that many middle and lower class workers were victims as well. I was reminded of the seamstress who gets executed along with Sydney Carton in A Tale of Two Cities. The Pimpernel does not limit his aid to aristocrats.

Like the Holmes stories, some were better than others. A few had plots similar to other stories in the series, but for the most part they were fresh enough.

The Elusive Pimpernel may have been the tensest of the four books. Here most of the victims are not aristocrats but people who worked for aristocrats and were still faithful to the Catholic Church. We are reminded, too, of Merlin’s law, what Dickens called the law of the suspected: “that every man, woman or child, who was suspected by the Republic of being a traitor was a traitor in fact.” (1597-1598). This law was originally proposed by a deputy named Philippe-Antoine Merlin, so Orczy often calls it Merlin’s Law. This was not unlike Article 58 in the Soviet Union which proscribed “anti-Soviet behavior,” which in reality meant nearly anything if they wanted to get you.

Chauvelin here gets wind that the Pimpernel is in town. He has his victims placed in the most secure cells in the most secure prison until they can be put on trial. At the same time, he hopes to trap the Pimpernel and his allies. Great fun!

Lord Tony’s Wife concerns Blakeney’s friend and Pimpernel League member Sir Anthony Dewhurst. Dewhurst has fallen in love with a French emigrée, and the feeling is mutual. However, Blakeney (who disguises himself even in England) finds out that her father, the Duc de Kernogan, wants her to marry someone else. The reader knows that the “someone else” is really the duke’s sworn enemy, but the duke is too inattentive to realize it.

While we do sympathize with Lord Tony and his new bride, we also understand that like the Marquis de St. Evrémonde in A Tale of Two Cities, the duke here is at best careless and at worst evil himself. Orczy does remind us that there is a reason why the French Revolution began in the first place.

Lord Tony’s Wife is mostly set in Nantes. The political leader in Nantes is extraordinarily cruel. Jean-Baptiste Carrier was frustrated at the slowness of executions using the guillotine. He instituted the noyades (“drownings”) where fifty or more people roped to each other were placed on a specially constructed barge. Plugs would be pulled when the barge was in a deep part of the Loire River to sink the barge and drown all its passengers. He also instituted what he called Republican Marriages, where a sentenced man and woman would be tied together and weighted and tossed into the river. Thousands “slept with the fishes” in Nantes.

While the main characters in the Pimpernel stories are fictional, there are people appearing in the story like Robespierre, Carrier, and the Prince of Wales who are historical figures. There actually was an ambassador to England named Chauvelin, a marquis who joined the Revolution and survived. While Orczy seems to indicate that the Chauvelin in her stories and novels is different (e.g., he has a different first name), there are some career similarities with the real Ambassador Chauvelin.

While the historical setting is important in all the Pimpernel stories, we do not read them primarily for the history. We read them for the adventure. They are great entertainment.

Note: Books with publication dates before 1924 are available from Project Gutenberg. Those with dates after 1923 are available from Project Gutenberg Australia. The first two titles are about Blakeney’s ancestors. The last one concerns his descendants. The reference is a Kindle E-book position, not page numbers.

For reviews of three more Scarlet Pimpernel stories, click here.

Bernice L. Rocque. Until the Robin Walks on Snow. Trumbull CT: 3 Houses, 2012. Print.

Until the Robin Walks on Snow is great little story about a miracle baby—and an excellent portrayal of a family of recent immigrants to the United States circa 1922. The author tells us a fictionalized account of her family’s experiences. Although set some forty or so years later in history, its style is reminiscent of the Little House on the Prairie books though Until the Robin Walks on Snow shares the actions of the adult characters.

What one could consider the main character does nothing much but eat and sleep. The story focuses on the birth and infancy of the author’s Uncle Tony—Antoni in Polish, but they made sure his birth certificate said it the “American” way, Anthony. Antoni was a preemie, only one and a half pounds at birth. This was before any neonatal care units. Premature babies at this time had about a 5% chance of living. Birth at only a pound and a half even reduced those small odds.

For six weeks after he was born on November 29, his mother Marianna virtually never left his side. She never slept more than three hours at a time. Her midwife and best friend Helena spent most of that time with the family until the following March.

In mid-January in order that Marianna could get more sleep, they placed the baby overnight in a section of their wood and coal-burning stove wrapped in a towel in a basket. Anyone familiar with such stoves in a New England farmhouse knows that these stoves heat the whole house and are tricky to regulate.

Still, Until the Robin Walks on Snow is more than just the story of a baby’s survival. We see the dynamics of a family new to the New World but having opportunities that would have been unheard of in Poland and Lithuania.

Marianna’s husband Andrzej, from a Poland ruled by Russia, came to America after registering for the Russian Army’s draft in 1911. Stories tell us that peasants who were drafted were often coerced into a lifetime commitment and would become cannon fodder in the World War that would begin three years later.

Perhaps the most interesting character is Marianna’s father Nikodimas. Her family had lived in Lithuania near the German border. Her brothers actually crossed the Nemanus River into Germany to go to school. Her mother stayed in Lithuania for almost twenty years as her father at first went back and forth a few times between the Old Country and America. Because of the political and educational realities of where they were brought up, some of the main characters could speak four languages: Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, and German. When they came to the United States, they had to learn a fifth.

At the time Toni was born, Nikodimas, who was a trained carpenter and who had worked at an American rifle factory during the war, now discovered that he could make more money delivering adult beverages “imported” into New York and sold to Connecticut speakeasies.

Nikodimas was not worried about being arrested because he said that the police and authorities for the most part did not like the Prohibition law. It gave him a chance to earn more money than he otherwise would have.

We also hear of the faith of the entire family, both men and women as they pray for Antoni and support each other in taking care of him and his older brother and sister. Their prayers to God, to Mary, and to the Archangel Michal [their spelling] are answered.

Because of the serious nature of the baby’s condition, midwife Helena stayed with Marianna’s family until spring. She had no children at the time, but her husband was not happy with the arrangement. There is, then, additional conflict as well, but the main effect of the story is one of faith and family and how not only a premature baby survived but how an immigrant family, relatively speaking, thrived in their adopted homeland.

I am not giving anything away to say that the author recently informed readers that her Uncle Tony celebrated his ninety-third birthday last week! A miracle child indeed! And a tender, endearing story tells us how he came into the world.

Charlie Lovett. The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge. New York: Viking, 2015. Print.

If you like A Christmas Carol, you might like The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge. It is not terribly original, but many Christmas stories are not. In this story Scrooge has become almost a buffoon, but it may do for a short Christmas tale.

Over the years there have been many tales which are variations of A Christmas Carol such as the film Scrooged. I am not talking about adaptations of the story like the Muppets’ or Mr. Magoo’s versions, but slightly different stories that tell of someone’s conversion by a series of dreams or supernatural visits.

In The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge, our protagonist has his ghostly partner Jacob Marley arrange for his three Christmas ghost friends to visit his nephew, Bob Cratchit, and a couple of bankers. Scrooge believes that they all have something that they need to learn, and with the help of the ghostly visions of Christmases past, present, and future, they do.

Alas, Scrooge comes across as a kindly fool. He wishes people Merry Christmas and Happy New Year even in the middle of June. Amazingly, he seems to have forgotten how to balance a checking account. There is a sense that The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge is becoming a parody, more like something by Monty Python than a tribute piece or sequel.

If the reader can overcome this aspect of the novella, The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge may satisfy. Same plot, different people. Oh, there is just a touch of It’s a Wonderful Life—considered by some a variation of A Christmas Carol. Marley’s ghost is still wandering the earth with the chains he forged in life, but significant good deeds resulting from his visitations may result in losing a link. Scrooge’s conversion caused him to lose five links; perhaps these three conversions can help him to lose a lot more.

The best part of The Further Adventures of Ebenezer Scrooge was its afterword. The author was not trying to be cute or clever with that. Indeed, it was direct and heartfelt. His personal tribute to Dickens’ story and his description of a Christmas in England and in Episcopal (i.e., Church of England) churches in America do make us appreciate Christmas celebrations and the original A Christmas Carol a bit more.

See also the review of Inventing Scrooge.

Wilkie Collins. The Frozen Deep. 1856; Gutenberg.org. 2012. E-book.

Wilkie Collins may be my favorite author I hardly ever read. When I was a teen, I read The Moonstone. I loved its exotic mystery. A few years ago I read Woman in White—another great mystery. Both books had chapters by various narrators. This gave multiple sides to the tales but also made readers wonder how reliable each of the testimonies really were—a technique that the po-mo’s are beginning to overdo.

Collins was a friend of Charles Dickens, and together they produced a theatrical version of The Frozen Deep. The published edition was turned into a novella that reads like a play. There are five acts with a good deal of action, though I am not sure it is as grippingly written as each of the two books mentioned above.

The main conflict in The Frozen Deep involves a love triangle. The problem is that none of the three characters in the triangle is especially sympathetic. Frank Aldersley is really a cipher. We are repeatedly told that he is popular, but we do not see how that reputation is earned. Richard Wardour is a Tom Buchanan character, a hulking brute with a temper. He is strong and good looking but scares everyone a little. The woman they both love, Clara Burnham, is pretty, but she mostly acts strange. She claims to have “second sight” but seems to make herself and others miserable because of it.

I finally read The Frozen Deep because Dickens mentions it in his short preface to A Tale of Two Cities. He says that working on the production of the play inspired him as did reading Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution. I have read The French Revolution twice and consider it the best non-Biblical history book every written. I can see how a romantic realist like Dickens would be inspired to write a novel set in the French Revolution after reading that book. I have tried over the years to read works alluded to in books I teach (e.g. Castle Rackrent and Simon, Called Peter from The Great Gatsby), but I had never gotten around to The Frozen Deep.

I see now why Dickens would acknowledge this story. The adventurous part was engrossing. Both Aldersley and Wardour are officers on a British naval expedition to find the Northwest Passage. Their experience is not unlike that of Sir John Franklin’s ill-fated voyage to do the same in the two ships, the Erebus and the Terror. Interestingly, Franklin’s voyage is mentioned in both Thoreau’s Walden and Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, two books with contrasting themes if there ever were.

Aldersley and Wardour are each on different vessels, so they do not really know one another. However, Wardour has vowed to make life miserable for whoever has stolen Clara’s heart from him. With his strength and his temper, we understand that if Wardour ever finds out who that man is, he is as good as dead. It is strictly an unusual coincidence that the two men end up in the same flotilla.

After the two vessels are stranded in the Arctic ice, Wardour discovers who Aldersley is as the two of them join a search party. It is a great plot even if the characters are not developed. Of course, because The Frozen Deep was written to be performed as a play, good actors and a good actress could make a character who seems flat on paper come alive.

If a reader has read A Tale of Two Cities, he or she will see similarities. The characters in Dickens’ love triangle—Lucie Manette, Charles Darnay, and Sydney Carton—are certainly more sympathetic, though Darnay is more of a cipher than the other two. Still, there are similarities in the plots of the three characters in both books. The similarities are not enough for anyone to accuse Dickens of plagiarism, but one can see how he was inspired.

As I read The Frozen Deep, I thought from time to time of Ford and Conrad’s The Inheritors. That also involves a love triangle with two men and a woman of unusual abilities. In that book Miss Granger, our heroine, is from another dimension and the British expedition is to Greenland. It does make me wonder, though, if either of those co-authors might also have been inspired by The Frozen Deep.

Read The Frozen Deep as if some excellent actors were performing a play or a film of it, and it is a great yarn. It may not have the depth of the two Collins novels mentioned at the beginning, but it has wisdom to share. And the reader can certainly see how Dickens was inspired in his rendering of the love triangle in his classic novel.

P. S. On Gutenberg.org, the two novels by Collins mentioned above have over a thousand downloads. His four dozen or so other works mostly have download figures of under a hundred. The two I have read are the two of his that most people have read. The others are not so well known today. Even The Frozen Deep had only 62 on the day of this posting in spite of Dickens’ own recommendation.

Dave Barry. Live Right and Find Happiness. New York: Putnam, 2015. Print.

This is going to be a short review because I was too easily distracted reading this book. Dave Barry is one of the funniest writers around. Live Right and Find Happiness is ostensibly written to his fourteen-year-old daughter about safe driving, sports, and how to live a fulfilling life. I lost track at the number of times I laughed out loud reading this book. As I write this, my wife is reading it and I hear guffaws coming from her direction occasionally.

Live Right and Find Happiness does contain some scatological language, but it mostly features Barry’s typical humor style—hyperbole. Good hyperbole always has an element of truth in it. So, for example, he tell us that when his daughter was two and joined him watching American football on television she said:

When the teams lines up: “Ready!”
When the ball is snapped: “Fall down!”

Read this and have a lot of fun—especially if there is a specific sport you hate (he nails all the biggies) or you have your doubts about either the news media or the Russians. Who doesn’t?