Baseball's Best Ever: A Half Century of Covering Hall of Famers by Ira Berkow (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Baseball's Best Ever: A Half Century of Covering Hall of Famers by Ira Berkow Mark McGee Ira Berkow Baseball's Best Ever: A Half Century of Covering Hall of Famers New York, NY: Sports Publishing, 2022 478 pp. Cloth, $40.00. As a sportswriter reading Ira Berkow's collected work in Baseball's Best Ever: A Half Century of Covering Hall of Famers, I became painfully aware of how inadequate my offerings are. Berkow is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and he proves it with each selection in this book. The collection is divided into thirteen parts starting with topics dating back to 1903 and continuing through the present. A sports columnist and reporter, primarily for the New York Times, Berkow is a wordsmith without parallel. Players, managers, sportscasters, sports writers, and those who had an effect on baseball without ever playing the game, like Marvin Miller, are profiled. Each story provides an in-depth look at these greats of the game. Berkow's love of the game is obvious throughout each page. In "Introduction: The Smell of the Ball," he reveals how he became enamored with baseball as a youngster, spending time with his friends watching the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. One of his most vivid memories is a baseball given to him by Cubs' coach Roy Johnson when he was eleven. "I smelled that tan horsehide smell that has not changed in 20 years, that has not changed in a hundred years," Berkow writes (xxiii). Berkow's access to the greats of the game is enviable to those of us in the sports writing field. He humanizes the game's legends and is not afraid to deal with their tragedies and failures as well as their successes. In addition to picking and choosing decades, each profile stands on its own so readers can learn about "Babe Ruth and a Jug of Whiskey Sours" on page one and then quickly turn to page 399 and discover "Tommy Lasorda's Recipes for Winning and for Minestra E Fagioli." [End Page 118] The profiles, for the most part, average around three pages each. Like a bowl of potato chips, you are not going to want to stop at just one. The reader is going to want to continue to the next profile, relishing each story. It is a quick read because of the way it has been organized. Berkow obviously has great insight in the game of baseball and its participants. Due to his stature as a writer, he has been blessed with access to so many of the greats of the game and their family members. However, through the years he also developed friendships with many baseball personalities, giving a special poignancy to stories such as "The Tom Seaver I Came to Know" that provides an in-depth look at the great pitcher's health struggles and death. I will wager that even the most dedicated baseball fans are going to learn more than a few knew things about the game and those who have made significant contributions to it. Not all of the members of the Baseball Hall of Fame are included in the book. As he mentions in his forward on page xvii, he only features "those I had a journalistic contact with, or interest in"(xvii). He also includes some players who have Hall of Fame credentials but do not have a plaque in Cooperstown in the final part of the book, "A Few Who Knocked at the Hall Door, But Have Been Denied Entry." Pete Rose, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Barry Bonds, Curt Schilling, and Alex Rodriguez are included. Berkow presents a strong analysis for why Pete Rose should one day have a plaque at Cooperstown. One of the most interesting aspects of this chapter is the full signed confession of Shoeless Joe Jackson about his involvement in the "Black Sox Scandal" where eight Chicago White Sox were banned from baseball for their alleged roles in helping hand the 1919 World Series to the Cincinnati Reds. Perhaps Berkow sums the organization of this book best in his "Forward: On Visits to the Hall" when he writes, "I had endeavored when in the throes...