BOOK REVIEW: ‘Tinker to Evers to Chance’ by David Rapp

OPINION:

TINKER TO EVERS TO CHANCE: THE CHICAGO CUBS AND THE DAWN OF MODERN AMERICA

By David Rapp

The University of Chicago Press, $27.50, 325 pages

These are the saddest of possible words:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

Trio of bear cubs and fleeter than birds,

Tinker and Evers and Chance.

Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble,

Making a Giant hit into a double

Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble:

“Tinker to Evers to Chance”

 

(David Rapp tells us that a “gonfalon” is a banner or flag.)

That verse, writes Mr. Rapp, “would soon become the manifesto for an epic American saga,” that saga being baseball’s evolution into respectability and our national pastime. Interestingly, that verse may have also helped propel its author into a bigger writer’s league. As Mr. Rapp points out, “F.P. Adams would one day claim a charter seat at the Algonquin Round Table. a member of the Manhattan literati and celebrity circuit until his death in 1960.”

“The highbrow pundit had had one plebian eccentricity, however: He was a rabid baseball fan — and as a transplant from Chicago, he remained ever faithful to his Cubs.” (And as anyone who ever attends or watches an away game in which the Cubs are playing knows, the numbers of transplanted Chicago Cubs fans across the nation are legion.)

During the first decade of the 20th century, Mr. Rapp writes, notions that had governed much of society during the previous century gave way to new social, political and economic ideas, bringing in their wake what he sees as a cultural awakening. “The-rough-and-tumble city of Chicago became the epicenter of this awakening, the Chicago Cubs baseball club its crowdpleasing exemplar.” And at the center of the teams’ success were shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers and first baseman Frank Chance.

From 1906 through 1910, these Cubs won 530 regular-season games, a major league record that still stands. “The word most often heard to describe the Chicago Cubs’ dynasty in those days was ’invincible.’”

Invincible hardly describes the successive Cubs dynasties for the next century, however, which Mr. Rapp briefly laments. However, as a self-described die-hard Cubs fan, he celebrates the 2016 version of the current dynasty that won the 2016 World Series. No longer, he writes, do fans like him have to wait for the moment. “We are no longer a forlorn lot, no longer to be pitied or ridiculed.” (And of this writing, the Cubs have the best record in the National League.)

Mr. Rapp, a respected political journalist and publishing executive with successful stints at Congressional Quarterly and Roll Call who got his start covering sports for his hometown Evansville (Indiana) Press, takes special pleasure in discussing the dawning in Chicago of the golden age of newspapers, sports journalism and its practitioners.

Among his favorites: The Chicago Tribune’s Charles Dryden, whose proteges included Ring Lardner, and some of whose epigrams “were indeed worthy of an Oscar Wilde.” One of Dryden’s best known quips: “Washington, first in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”

Mr. Rapp also has a fine eye for just the right anecdote, as when he links the presidency with the early years of the great growth in popular acceptance and approval of baseball as the national pastime. Attending a game in Chicago, President William Howard Taft, all 300-plus pounds of him, and one of those rare presidents who was genuinely liked, stood up in the middle of the seventh inning to stretch his legs, and the crowd stood with him. Thus was the seventh inning stretch born.

On one level, Mr. Rapp has written a highly readable history of baseball in its early years, as seen through the lives and careers of three very different men, at times personal enemies on and off the field, but among the very best infielders in the history of the sport.

But beyond that, he has given us a highly readable and deeply researched social and cultural history of the United States during the great years of our transition to an industrial society, framed in the rivalry between our two largest cities of the time, and played out by the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants.

• John R. Coyne Jr., a former White House speechwriter, is co-author of “Strictly Right: William F. Buckley Jr. and the American Conservative Movement” (Wiley).