sla book review: tris speaker

tris speaker

Reviewed by William Boyle

APRIL 10, 2006 archive

Other work kept me from Timothy Gay's Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend for the better part of two months. This past week, though, as I finally had a chance to sit down with the book, I came to the conclusion that fate had dictated that I wait until the beginning of spring, that I wait until that great feeling that comes with the promise of opening day cut through me and filled me with the sense of renewal that I associate most with baseball. Now, a week into the new season, it seems fitting that I sit down to write about a book that so expertly captures the entire spectrum of emotions involved in being a baseball fan(atic).

Tris "Spoke" Speaker, who was born in Hubbard, Texas on April 4, 1888, made his major league debut on September 14, 1907 for the Boston Red Sox. He played in only seven games that year and batted an unimpressive .158. In '08, he played in thirty-one major league games, batting .224. 1909 proved to be Spoke's breakout year, as he batted .309 in his first full year in the bigs, hitting 7 homers, 26 doubles, and driving in 77 runs-impressive numbers for a young player in the dead-ball era. Over his next nineteen seasons, Spoke batted under .300 only twice. In 1919, the final year of the dead ball, Spoke hit .296 with the Indians, an excellent year for any other player, but almost fifty points removed from Spoke's lifetime average, and, in his final season with the Philadelphia Athletics (where he and Ty Cobb were brought in to draw crowds), an injury-plagued Speaker batted .267 in only sixty-four games. In his twenty-two year career, Speaker hit over .330 thirteen times, over .350 nine times, and over .380 four times. His .345 career batting average puts him sixth on the all-time list. He also hit 792 career doubles. 792. (Actually, 793 by some accounts.) Immortal numbers. Timothy M. Gay, in his excellent account of Spoke's life, writes: "He was a better hitter than [Honus] Wagner and a far superior fielder than either [Ty] Cobb or [Shoeless Joe] Jackson. He was the only American League batsman in a thirteen-year span to wrest a batting championship away from the redoubtable Cobb" (23).

Gay's basic aim in this book is to draw more attention to a player who is often unjustly overlooked. He writes: "Movies are produced about Shoeless Joe Jackson and Ty Cobb. Novels are written about Christy Mathewson and Honus Wagner. Cy Young and Walter Johnson make virtually everyone's short list of best pitchers ever. But Tris Speaker has fallen through the cracks. He's the forgotten superstar from baseball's dead-ball epoch" (22). It is strange, in fact, that no one has latched onto Speaker's story. As Gay proves here, Spoke was a complex character. A son of Texas who was sympathetic to the Confederacy and a card-carrying member of the KKK, Spoke, also rabidly anti-Catholic and a compulsive gambler, wound up in Boston, a city, Gay notes, that was "contemptuous of anything and anyone with roots west or south of the Charles River" (54). Gay tells us that

everywhere Speaker looked were painful reminders that his uncles and the Confederacy had lost the war. The city was full of people that Speaker's upbringing had taught him to dislike and distrust-not only the smug heirs of white abolitionists, moneyed Northern intellectuals who looked down their noses at Southerners and Westerners, but immigrants who lived in squalor and worshipped the papacy in Rome, or even more appalling, renounced the New Testament altogether. To an unreconstructed Rebel, 1908 Boston must have seemed like Hades come to life. (54-55)

All of this makes for very interesting reading, as Gay paints a portrait of a hard-boiled Speaker adapting to his new surroundings. Ultimately, Boston embraced the young Texan, and Speaker came of age there, playing some of the most accomplished baseball of his career. Later, as Gay explores Speaker's relationship with his Indians teammate Ray Chapman, who was killed by a pitch from Yankees star Carl Mays, and also Speaker's role in the gambling scandal that would ultimately cut short his managerial career (thus investigating the role that gambling has played in the history of the game and the myth that the Black Sox scandal of 1919 was baseball's single sin), Speaker becomes as tragic a figure as Joe Jackson. Lesson in this: Speaker's life would indeed make one hell of a movie.

Still, at the center of Gay's book, is Spoke's career as a ballplayer. Passionate and fiery, Spoke was a complete player. Gay writes: "[Nearly] eight decades after Tris's retirement, he still holds American League records among outfielders for most career chances, most put-outs, most assists, most double plays, and-here's a statistic not often associated with center fielders-most unassisted double plays" (2). Unassisted double plays! Think about that. Seriously. Spoke, Gay reminds us, "played so shallow and with such élan that perhaps as many as six times in his career he caught line drives and out-hustled the runner to get a force-out at second" (2). He was a three-time World Series winner (twice with the Red Sox and once with the Indians) and an early inductee into the Hall of Fame. Babe Ruth called Speaker the finest defensive outfielder he ever saw. Gay, on that same note, argues that Spoke was "the best all-around player in the history of not one but two franchises" (5), dismissing detractors who would make cases for Ted Williams, Carl Yastrzemski, Lou Boudreau, and Bob Feller. A true hero of the dead-ball era, Speaker was most assuredly a man full of contradictions, but he was also a graceful and hard-working ballplayer, a natural hitter who reimagined the way centerfield could and should be played.

In the end, Gay, who spent four years researching Speaker's life, has crafted a rugged, no-holds-barred look at a player who encompassed all the complex magic of early twentieth century baseball. Speaker's story exemplifies why baseball holds such an important place in the American imagination. It is our story-a story of sin and expiation, of loyalty and love, of courage and dignity. This should be required reading for any serious baseball fan.

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