Maybe it all started with Shoeless Joe. Riding the Metro to the end of the blue line to finish the nondescript paperback I’d picked up over the weekend at the local Crown Books inside the Beltway. Nondescript on the outside, maybe. Inside, it was pure magic. A lovestruck voyage into vintage baseball from the vantage point of an Iowa cornfield.
From there, it was a short distance to baseball’s immortals, stumbling into the National Portrait Gallery one Sunday afternoon to discover the magic from another perspective. Reprinted from the original glass plate negatives of Charles Conlon, the images were a golden memento of the golden age of the National Pastime, from Grover Cleveland Alexander to Ty Cobb and the Yankee immortals. These were the faces to go along with the names from Kinsella’s story, staring into the future as if it was just another doubleheader to be completed before packing the spikes away and walking home from the ballpark. In between the glimpses into the past, there were excursions to RFK stadium for the Crackerjack Old Timers Classic, a rain-soaked afternoon during which fans unsuccessfully pleaded with Johnny Bench, and Joe DiMaggio to come out from the dugout to sign autographs.
A history lover, I was in heaven during my Washington DC years. This was the best kind of history, alive and tangible, around the corner, whether it was the uneven brick streets of Georgetown or the narrow steep stairways that connected the streets of Harpers Ferry, nestled in the confluence of the Shenandoah and Potomac, upriver from the capital city. Baseball was another gilded layer to the history, although never as glorious as that of other cities, other teams. “First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League” was the famous epithet coined by Charles Dryden in 1904. Still, there was Clark Griffith and of course, Walter Johnson, the “Big Train.”
Probably I never noticed Hal Chase in those years, charmed by the gentlemen players and legends like Christy Mathewson, Connie Mack, John MacGraw, Lou Gehrig, Honus Wagner. Perhaps the first inkling was from Eric Rolfe Greenberg’s The Celebrant, with its lyrical reverence for the great Mathewson contrasted by the looming shadow of Hal Chase and the evil personified by the rottenness of the Black Sox scandal.
I’d moved cross-country myself by the time I discovered Greenberg’s novel in the mid-1990s, and was finding my way in the strange “west of the West” land that was California back then, before the dotcom boom and instant billionaires changed the landscape forever. Maybe it was that old habit, honed from college days on, to read (or at least, skim) every line of the local paper at least a few times a week.
Whatever the cause, somehow, one day, I noticed Hal Chase. And since then, nothing has been the same. I’ve been chasing Hal for almost twenty years now.
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