Black History Month Surprise: The Meatiest Baseball Biography of 2006 will be on Cap Anson, the Player Most Blamed for the Most Infamous Color Line in U.S. Sports History

This spring will mark the release of the definitive biography of the player most often blamed for the advent of baseball's color line, Cap Anson. Before serving as city clerk of Chicago exactly a century ago, he was the only player through 1900 to reach 3,000 hits. He played 27 seasons, 1871 to 1897, mainly for Chicago of the National League, when it was known as the White Stockings or the Colts (it was later re-dubbed the Cubs). One of his teammates was future evangelist Billy Sunday. In announcing his 2006 book Cap Anson 4: Bigger Than Babe Ruth: Captain Anson of Chicago (560 pages, 24 straight pages of which will address Anson's racial and ethnic prejudice and its alleged impacts), author Howard W. Rosenberg points to the record of bias of U.S. mainstream media in favor of 20th-century Hall of Famers.

Arlington, VA (PRWEB) February 1, 2006 -- Mainstream U.S. media, despite their professed love of the First Amendment right to free speech, have been pandering toward well-known 20th-century baseball Hall of Famers, to reaffirm their audiences' bonds with the sport's more recognizable past. While bad habits that help perpetuate the bias may be hard to break, a great engine of it, biographies of 20th-century Hall of Famers from large publishers, are about to face their meatiest counterweight: the definitive biography of 19th-century giant Cap Anson. Anson, who was bluff and gruff, arguably had one of the five most dominating personalities in the sport’s history--if all of it still counts.

"When it comes to most icons of baseball history," author and independent publisher Howard W. Rosenberg says, "the vast majority of ones from decades ago have had a definitive biography written. But considering how much Anson can be wrapped around racism--a huge subject in sports--his has taken a surprisingly long time to come. This spring, the public will finally be able to bask in a no-stone (and no-library) unturned treatment of Anson, and befitting the man whom Baseball Magazine writer H. H. Westlake once called 'probably the most independent character baseball ever knew.'"

Anson exercised his independence most strongly as the longtime captain (player)-manager of Chicago of the National League, from 1879 to 1897 (a record for a playing manager with the same team), while becoming the lone player before 1900 to attain 3,000 hits. While other players who led their teammates as captains were known as Cap (a parallel today is that coaches in basketball are often called "Coach" by their players), Anson so personified the role that "Cap" became most closely associated with him. In addition, he is sometimes invoked today with Ty Cobb as one of the sport's two most notable racists. However, Anson's behavior was, by a landslide, potentially the more historically significant. That's because historians ranging from Ken Burns (in his 1994 PBS series on baseball) to Jules Tygiel (in the foreword of the 2006 National Baseball Hall of Fame-commissioned black baseball book Shades of Glory, which has been released just in time for Black History Month) squarely put the focus on Anson for the advent of baseball's "color line," which kept blacks from the major leagues from the mid-1880s until Jackie Robinson in 1947 (the last two black big leaguers before Robinson played in 1884: brothers Weldy and Fleet Walker). For the first time anywhere, Rosenberg's spring 2006 release, Cap Anson 4: Bigger Than Babe Ruth: Captain Anson of Chicago, provides a methodical documentation of the case against Anson (24 straight pages, plus other scattered references). The fully endnoted book clocks in at 560 pages and includes a possible record number of graphics for a Hall of Famer's definitive biography, 180.

On racism and other aspects of Anson's roughly 50-year public career (1871 to 1922), Rosenberg has run the table on the overwhelming majority of available original sources. In particular, far more than just about any other Hall of Fame player biography to date (one exception being the author's other full-blown biography, on Hall of Famer Mike Kelly), Cap Anson 4 takes advantage of the world's best source on early baseball, the massive newspaper microfilm collection of the Library of Congress. Rosenberg also came close to exhausting early baseball-related holdings of libraries in Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Columbus, Oh., Pittsburgh, New York and Cleveland (making at least two treks to each city). And, for the first time anywhere in a book, he cites Anson’s private letters (a few dozen exist) and includes dozens of never-before-published graphics, many of which are buried in library microfilm. The author also had access to Anson's last surviving grandchild, who died in 2005, and to the family’s old clippings and pictures. In addition, he has been able to account for the Chicago Tribune's non-electronic archival holdings on Anson, which produced some key articles.

Cap Anson 4 also blazes trails by showing how old baseball writers were remarkably witty in writing about Anson and his teammates. And yet, virtually none of those writers have received the Hall of Fame’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award, which annually honors a writer from the past or present. While Cap Anson 4 is a great corrective to the obsession of newspaper book review sections with 20th-century Hall of Famers, a number of those sections have informed Rosenberg that they have a ban on independent-minded books such as his: the (Salt Lake City) Deseret News, Newsday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Providence Journal and the Washington Post. Invariably, the above newspapers are obsessed with the notion that books must go through professional editors, such as in New York City, where the largest of publishers are and which often have the prettiest promotional material. However, Rosenberg thinks newspapers should at least give some weight to a book’s significance without requiring the book to carry a mainstream brand name (especially if the independent book contains complete endnotes, which Rosenberg's have). After all, the New York City-based publisher Doubleday admitted last week that, as part of its editing process, it failed to do any fact checking on James Frey’s best-selling book "A Million Little Pieces." It made the omission on Oprah Winfrey's television show, after Frey conceded to her that he had invented details about each of the book’s characters.

The most notable book review section, that of the New York Times, has some wiggle room when it comes to nonestablishment books only where authors make competing claims, former Times Book Editor Charles McGrath told Rosenberg last year. But as a practical matter, that may not matter. For example, Rosenberg informed the Times in March 2005 that his 2005 book Cap Anson 3 was refuting aspects of Frank Deford's 2005 book The Old Ball Game (and provided the Times with finished copies of Cap Anson 3). However, in May 2005, in reviewing Deford’s book, which was heavily based on prior book authors, the Times still portrayed, as foregone facts, vivid statements in The Old Ball Game that Cap Anson 3 had refuted through original research: that the 1890s Baltimore Orioles "spiked [opponents' shins with abandon"; "were known to hide extra balls in the outfield grass"; and were known to "impede opposing runners by holding onto their belt loops."

As far as Cap Anson 4, Rosenberg has already noticed a major overlap. In the very first sentence of its promotional material, a 2006 Babe Ruth book, The Big Bam: The Life and Times of Babe Ruth, is claiming Ruth to have been baseball's original superstar. However, as is explained in Cap Anson 4, Anson and Mike Kelly can each lay claim to part of that distinction by 19th-century standards (the witty coverage of Anson for making him arguably "the great icon of contemporaneous, written coverage in the sport's history"; and Kelly for crossing over into the theater before Anson, and being the subject of a mainstream popular song, "Slide, Kelly, Slide"). Rosenberg believes that especially by virtue of Doubleday's use of Ruth's first-superstar status as a chief marketing ploy, that Cap Anson 4's strong counterclaims on that point deserve notice, so as to be fair to competing points of view that are being expressed simultaneously. Otherwise, mainstream media will yet again be sucking up to a 20th-century power grab, on a baseball era that, as far as brilliant coverage, cannot hold a candle to what Anson and Kelly received. And Rosenberg is not alone in making a claim along the above lines. So did Marty Appel's 1996 biography of Kelly, which he fairly titled Slide, Kelly, Slide: The Wild Life and Times of Mike 'King' Kelly, Baseball's First Superstar. And Appel's publisher, Scarecrow, isn't as big as Doubleday.

As far as the overblown era of sportswriting in the 1920s, a chapter in Cap Anson 4, "Anson and Ruth," contrasts it to the great wit in coverage of Anson. Not only that, the later age was contemporaneously considered one of the most corrupt in sports journalism, even though it's the "Yellow Journalism" age of the 1890s that media today love to discredit. Speaking in 1927 on behalf of a sports reporting panel of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Will Owen Jones of the Nebraska State Journal said, "Most of the things we had heard and suspected were true. We could make a sickening list of bribery, improper influence, stupid betrayal of the public, venal participation in profits and overplaying of mediocre events." One recent overplaying, in relative terms, of the personalities of 20th-century players, can be gleaned at the following link: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2004/12/prweb184677.htm. It raises the possibility that the Boston Globe's book review section in 2004 induced a form of censorship of Rosenberg's 2004 biography of Kelly, a Boston Hall of Famer (while that same book section and the rest of the newspaper were giving red carpet treatment to a Boston Hall of Famer book by a Globe alumnus, Leigh Montville's biography of Ted Williams). An update to the above link is that in 2005, Globe Books Editor James Concannon informed Rosenberg that the Kelly biography had indeed been eligible for Globe review in 2004.

In a totally different vein, New York daily newspapers have entirely ignored a finding from Rosenberg’s first book, Cap Anson 1 (2003), relating centrally to the biography of captain Derek Jeter of the New York Yankees (the seventh-most searched U.S. athlete on America Online in 2005). More about that can be read at the following link: http://www.capanson.com/cap_anson_release_1.html.

And the Baltimore Sun is now blocking significant local history from its readership. Although not readily stated to the public, the Sun has a policy that bans, from its news pages, anything that has first appeared in a book that it does not feel is from a suitable publisher (even though "suitable publishers" are usually in business to make money). The Sun's basis for such a policy is that a book that does not go through the hoops of an established editor (like a Doubleday one) amounts to one person's opinion, and thus is eligible for mention only in a letter to the editor or on the op-ed page. Rosenberg's 2005 book Cap Anson 3 refuted Sun reporting going back to at least 1955 that Baltimore was the origin of the sport of duckpin bowling. All that the Sun would need to undo its reporting (including two repetitions of the whopper in 2005), is to acquire a May 25, 1894 article on microfilm of the Lowell (Mass.) Sun, a newspaper that is still in existence. While Baltimore Sun readers have yet to be informed about that, New York Times readers have been exposed to detail along those lines (in December 2005, the Times's Connecticut edition noted the existence of contradictory research). So have readers of the Richmond (Va.) Times-Dispatch, which cited a feature story that ran in a Baltimore publication, the Baltimore Jewish Times. Ditto for readers of bowling's lone remaining national magazine, Bowlers Journal International (see http://www.bowlersjournal.com/current_issue/display_article?id=71).

Cap Anson 4, beyond featuring Anson and the arguably wittiest age of U.S. newspaper journalism, contains close analysis of Anson's relationship with a dozen of his most colorful teammates, including future evangelist Billy Sunday. For his part, Anson was the first huge player in baseball to age gracefully in a high-profile way. Following a 27-year playing career, he was elected city clerk of Chicago, the city's number three post (the current city clerk, James J. Laski, was formally indicted on corruption charges Jan. 26, 2006); founded and played for a semi-pro team, during which he had friendly interactions with blacks; went into bankruptcy; and performed for a decade in vaudeville, during which he was widely interviewed about his views and the events of his life. Also in his retirement, Anson stands out for how he unabashedly touted the exploits of his age relative to the 20th century. His was a voice that was truly independent, and Rosenberg hopes it is treated without prejudice.

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