You can make a book out of anything.  If you’re determined enough, you can make a big deal out of a very small deal, of course, an axiom I’ve learned the hard way over the years.

All you need to do is to dig down deep enough, and you can find enough material to fill a pickup truck. Knowing where to dig, and how to dig, helps but the material is out there waiting to be harvested.

When I was writing about Bill Wakefield a few years back, for example, I realized that an entire long article could be devoted to the very last pitch he threw in his MLB career. To make sense of this topic, I would need to explain who Bill Wakefield was, and a thousand other details relevant to his final pitch, but since they were relevant and I was interested in doing the research, I wrung an article (two, actually) out of the subject, and I think I could have gotten a book out of it, given a little more motivation on my part and a lot more cooperation from Wakefield.

Material is a funny subject. When I first got the ambition to write a novel, I had no material. My college offered a fabulous fellowship, founded by the mystery writer Cornell Woolrich, that financed a year’s living expenses for the completion of a novel, which one applied for by submitting the novel’s first 100 pages. I had gone to high school, and had almost completed college, but that’s not even close to being a subject that could hold a reader’s attention longer than 5 minutes, so I was stumped.  Nonetheless, I stuck myself in a farmhouse thousands of miles from the nearest English-speaking person I knew and set out to write a novel, not having a plot or a plan or a clue.

And what do you know? A plot emerged, characters based on the boring people I knew turned into colorful fictional characters, and material begat material. (I won the year’s living expenses, and immediately blew it on a car so I could visit my girlfriend, but that’s a different story.) "Anyone who has survived childhood has more than enough experience to write about," the novelist Eudora Welty assures us, which I wish I’d known before I wasted so much energy fretting about what I could possibly write about.

"Write what you know," I was advised by my creative writing teachers, to which my response was to wail, "But I don’t know anything!" Turned out, I knew enough to get started, and I knew how to research the things I didn’t know. (One of the judges for the Woolrich Fellowship asked me "How do you know so much?" to which I feigned modesty—the immodest answer would have been "I don’t –but I know how to pretend I do.") One of the things I pretended to know backwards and forwards was the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the political machinations behind their leaving Brooklyn when I was four years old, and it happens that those complicated maneuvers are tied into the book under review now, a book that covers in copious detail a subject that I had thought I knew forwards, at least, and at least part of "backwards."

There was a HEY BILL a while back that dealt with the question of how the Dodgers left Brooklyn and the formation of the Continental League shortly afterwards to attempt to put a new team back in New York City somewhere. I referred Bill to the most authoritative work on the Continental League I know, the magisterial biography of Branch Rickey by my friend Lee Lowenfish, but the section of the chapter of that book that addressed the issue was only a small section of a very large book. The actual formation of the Continental League was, as I’ve discovered recently, far more complicated than those few paragraphs summarized, and deserved an entire volume loaded with details to explain it properly.

Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the daring scheme to save baseball from itself by Michael Shapiro explains the underlying problem with organized sports in the period immediately before I came into contact with meaningful consciousness, the late 1950s to the very early 1960s, roughly. After about 1962, I have some glimmers of memory, and some of my more intense memories, of organized sports, but the preceding period is puzzling and fascinating, and I’ve only read about that period in fits and starts. The problem with sports in the 1950s was that they had fossilized. They were pretty much where they had been for years, or else they were not quite major sports yet –the NBA was still less than a major sport, the NFL wasn’t yet close to attracting baseball’s level of interest, the NHL was small and isolated in a tight geographic area, and MLB had just started moving out of smaller cities that couldn’t really support two major league teams (St. Louis, Philadelphia, and Boston). By moving out of the one larger city that could support three major league teams, the Dodgers and the Giants created a void that, at first, was going to be filled by the Continental League. MLB’s first response to the threat posed by the Continental League was to say, "We’re too big to be moved by the likes of an upstart league, and we think we’re fine exactly as we are." That was a mistake. It took them a few years to figure what the correct answer would sound like. This is the story of those few years, 1957 to 1960.

It is edifying to think about the timing of the Continental League. 1960 is just as far in time away from the founding of the American League in 1900 as we are today, in 2020, from 1960. There were men who remembered very well the successful formation of a brand-new league, just as we can recall very well today how firmly established the AL and the NL were in 1960. To Branch Rickey, who turned 79 years of age in 1960, forming a new league was far from a preposterous enterprise. He had seen it done, and was quite serious about doing it again.

One of my misconceptions about the Continental League was that it was purely a fake-out, intended to force on MLB the expansion that began in 1961. This faulty reasoning on my part resulted from viewing the results, rather than viewing the actual convoluted history of the Continental League. Rickey, in particular, emerges from Shapiro’s telling, as the single most disappointed man when the third league idea faded and the alternative idea of the two existing leagues expanding came into focus. Rickey was as serious as death about the Continental League coming to life under his guiding hand—from the moment the Dodgers and the Giants left NYC until the moment that MLB voted formally to expand, he saw himself running the new league and competing equally with the big boys.

Shapiro breaks up this strange untold story, like Caesar’s Gaul, into three parts. The main narrative is of the business dealings and machinations of forming a new league, which would have made for a small but tightly focused little book, and the two other narratives are the broader one of sports in general in this era, largely the NFL and its own upstart league, the AFL, that had certain parallels to baseball’s situation at the time, and the narrower narrative of what was going in baseball itself, the game on the field, while the other stories transpired.

It’s hard to complain about Shapiro’s choice to tell the baseball story: he tells it well. The 1960 World Series between the Pirates and the Yankees is told, for example, in fine detail and it unfolds masterfully. But I will complain about it, anyway. It’s essentially irrelevant to the other two narratives Shapiro is spinning with equal skill. Look at it like this: if you took any other season in baseball’s history, 1980 or 1940, that narrative would fit into the structure of Bottom of the Ninth just as well. The story, told at length, of what was going on in the fifth game of the 1960 World Series is arbitrary. Just a guess, but I suspect what propelled this story into the text so prominently (and propelled Casey Stengel into the sub-title so prominently) was Shapiro’s running across MLB game stories as he was researching the business story that his book is about, and then realizing that not only was it inherently interesting (which it is) but he could re-tell it skillfully (which he does).

Bottom of The Ninth contains one of the best detailed narrative renderings of the 1960 World Series that I have ever read, chockful of facts that I’ve never read before so clearly and crisply told, like the rendering of one crucial moment we have discussed here several times in the past few months, for one bizarre reason or other:

Nelson fielded Berra’s shot deftly. And then he stepped on first. A prudent move but not a bold one. The better play, the game ender, would have been to throw to second to retire Mantle, and be ready to take the return throw that would complete the double play. But by stepping on first, Nelson had retired Berra, precluding the possibility of forcing Mantle. He would have to be tagged out.

            Mantle knew this. He also knew that he made a dreadful mistake. He had drifted too far off the bag, and now stood in limbo as he faced Nelson, who had the ball and the game in his hands and the chance to make good.

            For a moment the two men looked at each other. And then Mantle dove for the bag. Nelson was a moment late in applying the tag. Mantle was safe. McDougald had scored from third. The game was tied at nine.

I quote this passage, not because I’m fascinated by this play, which I am, https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/sports/baseball/01mantle.html?ref=sports&_r=0 but to illustrate the level of detail Shapiro puts into describing one moment in one inning in one game in a small part of the 1960 MLB season. He describes other moments in other games in similar detail, and there are many such moments, but all the on-the-field stuff such as this is really peripheral to the story he is trying to tell.

Immediately following his 38-page-long blow-by-blow description of the 1960 World Series, which ended on October 13, 1960, Shapiro returns to the main narrative on October 14, 1960, when NYC Mayor Robert F. Wagner sent a wire to Walter O’Malley and the other members of the NL’s expansion committee, who had been resisting expanding to ten teams, that the project to build a new baseball stadium in Queens "will be ready for bidding by December 1, 1960."  Three days later, O’Malley caved and the NL agreed to expand into New York City and Houston, leaving Los Angeles and Washington (which would replace the old Senators, moving into Minneapolis-St. Paul, with the new Senators) to the AL. The squabbling between the two existing leagues as to which one gets which city is told in thorough detail, and this squabbling is a major issue in Shapiro’s book, with various powerful figures in each city exerting their influence on various powers in Congress, local politics, and MLB, all stuff I never knew a thing about.  In mid-October, the two narratives link up—in fact, the Yankees’ news (Stengel’s firing was announced that same day) pushed the expansion news off the top of the sports page.

This is a good-sized book, just over 300 pages, so maybe if Shapiro would have cut the familiar on-the-field material short, this volume might have been on the slim side, but I found it disconcerting to follow three competing narratives at once. The gripping part is all the behind-the-scenes business dealings, and the background of previous attempts to form new leagues, especially the American League in 1900 and the Federal League in 1914 and the Mexican League in 1947, with all of the moves, and feints, and ploys, and counter-maneuvers, some of which worked and some of which fell flat. All of this wheeling-dealing of the past is explained in order to show how it was used, or abandoned, by the wheeler-dealers in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

In order to tell the wheeling-dealing section of the narrative, he must give extensive background on the players, which is fresher ground than giving the well-trodden backgrounds on the baseball players. One such figure is the Yankees’ co-owner in the 1950s, Delbert E. Webb, about whom I knew very little, other than the name, with which I have been acquainted as long as I’ve followed baseball. Webb, it turns out, was the more reclusive of the two co-owners (Dan Topping was his showier partner,) and a bit of an eccentric: Webb had made his fortune in the construction business, much of it in Las Vegas, where he befriended gangster Bugsy Siegel and, later, chief gangbuster J. Edgar Hoover. To the point of this book, Webb was not only reclusively mysterious but a very powerful force within the American League—his influence on other owners is compared to that of Walter O’Malley in the National League, with the note that Webb’s influence was as strong as the Yankees’ dominance in the 1950s, and causally related. The other seven A.L. clubs depended on the Yankees for much of their annual revenue, and Webb used that dependence to pressure other owners to vote as he needed them to vote. (O’Malley’s influence, while strong, was just getting established in the 1950s, and his Dodgers, while a strong ballclub, never controlled the same box-office revenues over the NL that the Yankees commanded through the AL in the 1950s.) Among his other achievements, Webb successfully got Happy Chandler removed as MLB’s Commissioner, replacing him with the far more docile and pliable Ford Frick, thus changing forever the role that the Commissioner played in relation to the owners:

"Perhaps we need a different kind of commissioner—a top executive with a big business and preferably a legal background," Webb said, making his case against Chandler, who had rooted out by fiat the possible influence of gambling, suspending Leo Durocher for a year in 1947, for example, merely for socializing with known gamblers and suspected gangsters. It was Chandler’s power over the owners, not the players, however, that alarmed Webb, who followed up his comments on the kind of commissioner he did want: "I don’t think we need a commissioner merely to club us over the head and keep us in line. That is a by-gone stage of the baseball business." Chairing the search committee for a new commissioner, Webb didn’t get the executive he asked for, but he did get a weaker and more compliant man in the former sportswriter Frick, who did the owners’ bidding eagerly. "If I’ve never done anything else for baseball," Webb declared in 1960, "I did it when I got rid of Chandler." Eventually of course, the owners did get exactly what Webb was asking for, a lawyer who would do whatever his clients asked, in Bowie Kuhn.

There are many other figures on whom Shapiro provides much-needed information in order to make sense of the often convoluted machinations involved in planning the creation of a third major league: the Athletics’ owner, Arnold Johnson, for example, who bought the team from the near-penniless Mack family and who had long-standing business ties to the Yankees’ owners, Webb and Topping, or the eventual baseball executive, Bob Howsam, who in the mid-1950s was the young son-in-law of Colorado businessman Ed Johnson, who appointed Howsam to run the Denver Bears and who wanted to own a Denver franchise in the Continental League, which Johnson named and which he conceived as an equal  third major league.

The chief conflict described in this book is among the Continental League owners themselves: some of them sincerely wanted a third major league to emerge from their efforts, and had no ethical problem raiding the American League and the National League for the new league’s players, nor in bidding for high school stars and college stars and free-agent players of every stripe to make the new league equal to the existing leagues. But other prospective Continental League owners, such as Lamar Hunt, a wealthy young oilman (who would eventually own the AFL’s Kansas City Chiefs) who wanted a franchise for Dallas, were not as singly focused on that goal, and would have gladly settled for an expansion franchise in the AL or the NL. And most of them vacillated between the two opposing goals, favoring at different points in time whichever goal would make them the owner of a big-league franchise.

This is where the Bottom of the Ninth lacks clarity: Shapiro provides copious details about the discussions, public statements, wires and letters and phone calls exchanged between the various and ever-changing cast of characters, which are all as complicated and as subtle as you can imagine, and more, but he fails to provide a clear overall sense of how the entire scheme progressed. Reading Bottom of the Ninth is like reading a long series of daily newspaper accounts of a years-long process—it bombards you with information, but what I need is not information as much what the information means. Shapiro delivers a disorganized, fast-shifting, conflicted process with no real high points or low points. A bunch of guys got together to form a new baseball league, and some of them wanted that new league more than others, and even more than they wanted it themselves at other times, and in the end, the league failed to coalesce but four expansion teams were created in the existing leagues. Well, that’s kind of what I understood coming in—I had no idea of all the convoluted dealings, and the personalities involved, and their motivations, and their personal issues, which was all fascinating stuff, but no narrative line ever emerged here.

The closest Shapiro got was in his portrayal of Branch Rickey, and that’s probably because Rickey was the least conflicted (and the most devious) of all the Continental League figures. From the start, he was dead-set on forming a third league, and in the end, he was the most disappointed at the league’s demise. Rickey seems utterly crushed by the Continental League’s failure to thrive. He makes it into the book’s subtitle (I still don’t quite get what it means to "save baseball from itself" or how the Continental League was proposing, exactly, to achieve that goal) but for long stretches the book ignores Rickey’s part, dwelling instead on on-the-field accounts of baseball games in 1959 and 1960 and on the formation and growth of leagues in other sports, where Rickey played no role at all. A better approach to this complex subject would have been stay within Branch Rickey’s head as much as possible, and introduce the other figures as Rickey dealt with them.

This would have meant omitting the two side-narratives that didn’t involve Rickey at all, the day-to-day baseball games and the formation of leagues in other sports, but it would have meant that I could have understood the Continental League better. In the end, I learned a good deal about the tremendous problems in starting a third major league, and the characters who struggled to do so for years, and the ones who struggled to prevent that from happening, although I never got a sense of any crucial points along the way towards its potential success or its eventual failure.