October Men
Reggie Jackson, George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and the Yankees’ Miraculous Finish in 1978
by Roger Kahn
Harcourt, 368 pp., $26 ALL REAL BASEBALL FANS, especially long suffering Boston Red Sox ones, know what happened in 1978. Just mention the name Bucky Dent in Boston and watch the faces change color. The “Curse of the Bambino”–the loss of Babe Ruth to New York in 1920–was hard to take, but at least he was Babe Ruth and so gave New York an excuse for winning. Bucky Dent was just, well, Bucky Dent: a player who wouldn’t be remembered at all, except that he helped the Yankees defeat the Red Sox, once again.
In “October Men,” Roger Kahn brings that season alive so Red Sox fans can relive their angst. Kahn is the author of one of the most influential baseball books ever written, “The Boys of Summer,” his sad but touching memoir of what happened to the great Dodgers dynasty of the 1950s. His new book seeks to do the same for a great team of the 1970s: the brawling, squabbling New York Yankees of George Steinbrenner, Billy Martin, and Reggie Jackson. “October Men” focuses on the dramatic comeback the Yankees staged to erase the fourteen-game lead the Red Sox held in early August.
THE CAST OF CHARACTERS suits Kahn’s flair for vivid, if sometimes over-the-top prose. How can a book peopled by egomaniacs like Reggie Jackson, overbearing owners like Steinbrenner, or near paranoids like Billy Martin not be interesting? Kahn paints an unforgettable portrait of that Yankee team. There is the General Patton-obsessed Steinbrenner, learning how to run a baseball team. There is Martin, the managerial genius, whose suspicions of those around him drove him to drink and out of baseball more than once and eventually contributed to his death in a car accident. My favorite portrait is of Jackson, the immensely talented and intelligent power hitter whose boast that he was the “straw that stirred the drink” irritated many of his teammates and led them to despise him.
Numerous villains fill Kahn’s book, but the closest thing to heroes are Al Rosen, the former Cleveland all-star third-baseman, brought in by Steinbrenner as president of the Yankees, and Bob Lemon, the Hall of Fame pitcher, who replaced Martin as manager and guided the Yankee comeback. Rosen always behaved like a gentleman and never embarrassed himself, something rare on the 1978 Yankees. He learned the job of baseball executive under Steinbrenner’s trying leadership, quickly left the Yankees, and achieved great success with the Houston Astros and the San Francisco Giants. Lemon took over the Yankees when the team had hit bottom as Martin self-destructed. Calling everyone “Meat” (a term of affection in baseball), he calmed an overwrought team, let them play to their own considerable talents, and eventually led them to victory in a one-game playoff over the Red Sox.
Kahn’s book contains flashes of good writing, as one would expect from an old pro who has been covering sports, particularly baseball, for fifty years. The portraits of the key actors in the 1978 season are gems. He gives Don Zimmer, the feisty Red Sox manager, credit for holding an injured team together as the season wound down, instead of blaming Zimmer for the team’s collapse. His portrait of Jim “Catfish” Hunter is warm, affectionate, and insightful. Hunter, Kahn shows, was anything but a simple country hick. He brought a degree of class to an otherwise classless team. Like Lemon, Hunter was someone easy to like.
Kahn has a weakness for showing off his learning. He weaves in quotes from Robert Browning, Ernest Hemingway, Herman Melville, and Robert Frost, among others. There are also digressions that wander from the drama of the 1978 season, especially a long prologue that is little more than a padded history of New York baseball. Some parts are contradictory or repetitious: Kahn mentions the sale price of Babe Ruth twice and gives different figures each time. Some of Kahn’s assertions are also questionable. “Goose” Gossage, the relief ace, had a “nice but not great year” before signing with the Yankees in 1978, he insists. Gossage in 1977 with the Pirates won 11 games, saved 26, and struck out 151 batters while compiling a 1.62 ERA. He didn’t approach those figures for the Yankees in 1978.
KAHN ALSO ARGUES that Jackson was not recognized as a great hitter at the time, arguing it was the result of racism. Perhaps that’s true. But then he implies that Mickey Mantle, Ted Williams, and Stan Musial received recognition because they were white. And that’s just crazy. Jackson’s lifetime batting average was .262, thirty-six points lower than Mantle’s, eighty-two points lower than Williams’s, and sixty-nine points lower than Musial’s.
Still, Roger Kahn can hardly write a bad book, and “October Men” is a good read for any baseball fan. It vividly captures one of the most memorable seasons in baseball history, and it stands out among recent serious baseball writing.
John P. Rossi, a professor of history at La Salle University in Philadelphia, is the author of “The National Game: Baseball and American Culture.”
