Baseballis Maximus
I re-org'd my books last night and came across an old friend.
When I was a child, the bible of baseball record books was the massive MacMillan edition of “The Baseball Encyclopedia”. It was – and is – the Oxford English Dictionary of baseball stat books. Every player ever to appear in the major leagues is in the book. The pure gratuitousness of it is best expressed by this: every pitcher’s at bats, hits, batting avg and home runs is included, not simply his pitching record.
But this was the Cadillac of books - far too expensive for a ten-year-old. One Christmas I got one almost as good –Turkin and Thompson’s “The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball” - which contained a truncated record of every player ever to appear in the major leagues.
I nearly trembled when I first sought the entry for my great-great uncle Harry Wilke. Larger than life, I pored over his entry scores of times, imagining every at bat. I looked up the entry again:
Wilke, Harry Joseph.
b. Dec. 14, 1901 Cincinnati, Oh.
1927 Chi NL 3rd basemen 3 games .000 batting average
The entry packed little, but much. Born in my home town, if he couldn’t play for the home team then the Cubs were the next best thing - what tradition! My relative played at historic Wrigley Field. Surely he wasn’t given a chance to prove himself – how could he in three games? Maybe he faced a pitcher like Burleigh Grimes, who was allowed to use the spitter even after it was outlawed. Or he was injured, ala Wally Pip.
This was a book to be savored and treasured. Its cover barely hangs on after so many years of use and mis-use. The dust-cover is surely dust in a landfill by now. The introduction, preface, and even the endpapers were lovingly examined – apparently even by my mother who scrawled her maiden name twice before writing her married name. (She tended to doodle when she was on the phone. Obviously she wasn't particular about where she doodled.)
The preface starts with the phrase, “It took an earthquake to start this book”, an attention-getter. Hy Turkin felt his chair shake and concluded it was an earthly tremor. He phoned the newspaper and and his report, complete with name and address, was printed. A neighbor, S.C. Thompson read the account and introduced himself to his neighbor and they found something in common: a love for baseball history.
For this ten-year old, death was something that happened to old people. It was sad and slightly creepy for the preface to end with a sentence beginning with, “Following the deaths of Mr. Turkin and Mr. Thompson..”. This was the first book I owned written by the recently dead. But I paid no nevermind.
In 1990, after having had a “real job” for five years, I purchased the MacMillan Baseball Encyclopedia. But it doesn’t hold a candle to Turkin and Thompson's labor of love.
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