Bermuda Shorts - James Patterson [46]
Baseball’s Big Train
(a book review)
How do you like a baseball book that begins with post-Civil War border clashes between Kansas and Missouri, with renegade Confederate cavalry remnants terrorizing the countryside, with Cole Younger and the guerilla gangs of William Quantrill and “Bloody Bill” Anderson?
When Walter Johnson’s mother was just eight years old, two men asked for her father’s permission to sleep in his barn. He stayed up all night to make sure they didn’t steal his horses. While her mother cooked breakfast the next morning, the two strangers sat on the porch and regaled the little girl with stories. One even whipped out a pistol and took down a blue jay with a single shot. Later that day, a sheriff’s posse rode up and informed them that their visitors had been none other than Frank and Jesse James.
From the lawless Great Plains to the oilfields of southern California at Olinda, America’s second gold rush, a narrative begins to weave its way, for baseball is old enough and geographically broad enough to be storied in parallel lines with the making of America. They called it “town ball” back then, at the turn of the last century, when, on weekends, the men of one town would challenge the men of another to a game. Local bands would play, there would be cookouts, special trains would roll between the competing municipalities, and, certainly, there would be lots and lots of gambling.
Everywhere Walter Johnson played baseball in those early years of the twentieth century, he was legend. They called him “The Big Swede,” though he had no Swedish ancestry, but he was so fair, so big and strong, he challenged everyone’s frame of reference. As his legend grew, it became known that his size and strength and toughness of spirit were only matched by his gentleness and consideration for smaller, weaker mortals.
It didn’t take long for him to gain notoriety in a sport endlessly seeking talent. He worked his way from the coastal leagues in California to the big time in just three years. Word reached Joe Cantillon of the Washington Nationals Baseball Club about a pitcher in the Idaho State League who mowed down 166 batters in eleven games and pitched seventy-seven consecutive scoreless innings. The scouting report comes down to us, “This boy throws so fast you can’t see’m… and he knows where he’s throwing the ball because if he didn’t there would be dead bodies strewn all over Idaho.”
Later, the pitcher’s wife would keep scrapbooks, meticulously preserving the precious artifacts of the man’s life and career, the man whose arrival in the nation’s capital had been so anticipated he was nicknamed by the press “Big Train” for the big train everyone was waiting on that would carry the Nationals’ new phenom into town. The year was 1907, and he was still mowing down hitters for the hometown Nats when they won the World Series in 1924.
Sixty-five years later, his daughter’s son, a grown man, would pull those massive albums of clippings and press releases, photographs and family memorabilia down from their glass cases, and be awed by the story pieced together from those fragmentary artifacts collected along life’s way.
We have that grandson, Henry (Hank) W. Thomas, to thank for the incredible story of Walter Johnson: Baseball’s Big Train.
Now fifty-eight years old, Hank Thomas stands in the beer garden at the ballpark in Hagerstown, Maryland, cracking peanuts, sipping beer, and talking baseball. Watching a baseball game with Hank Thomas is a unique experience. He chats amiably about politics, history, and music, tossing in a random appreciation of the odd skirt floating by, and certainly he talks about times past and present in the great game of baseball. And when I say past, I don’t just mean over the course of his own lifetime, but three lifetimes and more. He articulates the word itself with a certain reverence, like you might hear an artist use the word “painting,” with the emphasis on the consonant in the middle of the word: “Baseball.”
During a game, you notice that Hank Thomas has developed a sixth sense for baseball