days were over.

They were pivotal to a team's success, a status earned by determination, leadership, and dedication traits that harkened back to earlier American virtues. Morris's coda, "The Catcher's Legacy," examines the role of athlete as hero while baseball became popularly regarded as an honorable profession. Athletic heroism could be reconciled with traditional wholesome values, and ballplayers could now be accepted as role models, at least for their feats on the playing field. By examining the catcher's role in baseball, and expanding his observations to include American culture and selfidentity at large, Catcher covers far more than the evolution of one position. If he were to continue in this vein, we could eventually expect thoughtful studies of the pinchrunner and mop-up man Morris is talented enough to do it. Whether you agree with all of his conclusions, you must admit to being challenged by his thoughts. Throw in excellent writing and copious scholarship (70 pages of notes and bibliography), Catcher is a book that sets a new level of baseball writing.
PHIL BERGEN, a preservation planner, has served as a judge for SABR's Macmillan award for the past decade.

Their Baseball Lives

Review by Andrew Milner The Complete New York Clipper Baseball Biographies: More Than 800 Sketches of Players, Managers, Owners, Umpires, Reporters and Others, 1859-1903 (2 vol.), Compiled by Jean-Pierre Caillault. Foreword by John Thorn. McFarland, 2009, 788 pages, $59.95. Six years after A Tale of Four Cities, his masterful account of 1889's two pennant races, Jean-Pierre Caillault returns with a two-volume collection of over 800 baseballrelated biographies from the New York Clipper, and the result is another thorough look at 19th century baseball journalism. The weekly Clipper, founded in 1853 (after a fashion, it would evolve into the showbiz bible Variety), regularly ran brief biographies and line drawings of top baseball players, managers, umpires, and sportswriters from 1879-1903. On several occasions an entire team was spotlighted (including the 1860 Brooklyn Excelsiors, the 1869 Red Stockings, and the Athletics of 1871 and 1883), and the Clipper also printed obituaries of players they had previously profiled (an unsettling number of whom died in their thirties). As Caillault notes in the preface, "One unique feature of these portraits and biographies is their contemporary nature, produced during the players' careers and lives, not years after their careers or lives were over." The Connie Mack profile (April 23, 1887), for example, calls him "one of the most promising young catchers of the day," probably one of the last times Mack would ever be described as "young." Sometimes, these contemporary sketches are astonishingly prescient. The August 2, 1879, biography of J. Lee Richmond includes the following sentence: "He studies his batsmen well, soon discovers their weak and strong points, and when he is backed up by a catcher who can ably support him in playing his points it becomes a most difficult matter to score base-hits from him, and earned runs are very rare." Ten months after this was published, and supported by Charlie Bennett as a battery mate, Richmond threw
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the first perfect game in major league history. And some entries are unintentionally heartbreaking; an 1899 biography of minor leaguer George Bannon ends with, "If youth counts for anything he has that, not having reached his majority, and everything is in his favor for a bright professional future." There's probably an entire chapter, or even an entire book, contained within the note following this entry: "Major-League Playing Record: None." It is also illuminating to see what early sportswriters defined as a remarkable onfield achievement. The sketch of James E. Whitney (September 23,1882) mentions that Whitney "is credited with the feat of pitching but three balls in one inning before the side was put out." Today, Wikipedia has an entry for major league pitchers who have struck out the side on nine pitches, but does even the Baseball-Reference.com Play Index have a search for Whitney's accomplishment? These articles were very much the products of their era. The 1883 sketch of Athletics manager Lew Simmons praises his ballplaying "when it did not interfere with performance of his professional duties with minstrel troupes." And the 1898 description of Cleveland legend Louis Sockalexis reassures us, "He has the racial features of the redskin but in his civilian clothes passes as a handsome fellow." Caillault reprints the biographies verbatim, with original factual errors included; Eddie Plank's 1902 sketch repeats the fallacy (which made it onto his Hall of Fame plaque) that he attended Gettysburg College when he in fact only attended the college's prep school. The Complete New York Clipper Baseball Biographies constitute a major contribution to the study of 19th century baseball history, and Caillault deserves thanks for bringing these long-forgotten examples of early baseball journalism back to public attention.
ANDREW MILNER has been a freelance writer for more than two decades and has belonged to SABR since 1985. He contributed research to On Any Given Sunday: A Life of Bert Bell by Robert S. Lyons and assisted with the third edition of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary and A Game of Inches. He lives in suburban Philadelphia.

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