Bibliotech: Bethlehem Shoals of FreeDarko

Welcome to the BallHype Spotlight Series, Volume 2: Bibilotech, a series of essays about books. We start with Bethlehem Shoals of FreeDarko (and soon, The Sporting Blog). Shoals takes us through the tomes which helped form his liberated fandom. Enjoy.

As a pre-teen, I was quite ordinary. I spent a lot of time in synagogue, and read baseball history till it became its own kind of liturgy. In fact, the two often came to pass in tandem. Being groomed for a relatively prim bar mitzvah means lots of Sabbath morning immersion, and being nine means you need some form of distraction. Remember, they don't even teach us what the words mean—just that they matter.

I haven't set foot in a shul since college, and, family gathering aside, really don't think much about baseball. But in that fateful year of 1986, both were tried-and-true features of my week. Every Saturday, I'd spend three hours listening to a bunch of academics solemnly moan and sway, trying their damnedest to stave off the forces of reform just down the street. And, budding compulsive that I'd was, I'd spend the whole time thumbing through the same too-large-too-conceal hardback each time: Donald Honig and Lawrence Ritter's "The 100 Greatest Baseball Players of All Time."

Looking back, I have zero idea how this book fit into the seamhead climate of the time. I had some Bill James at home, but that shit was too bulky to smuggle into a place of worship. And frankly, glancing back and forth between columns of numbers and equations I barely got was only slightly less fun than re-reading Gog and Magog for the hundredth time. I didn't need Honig and Ritter for the "this is our sport" overview they so loudly proclaimed. Yet this book seemed to have one foot in myth and another in cold, slate-eyed judgment. Idiosyncrasy didn't make players great, but "Old Aches and Pains" certainly made you care more about Luke Appling's upper echelon shortstop stats. What united these various players, and the eras they ruled, were the smart-aleck's way with data and the romantic's belief that such tinkering was part of a higher calling. 

But nothing called to me in this book like the entries on Pete Reiser and Herb Score. They were about three pages long each, and I must've memorized every last word of them. Here were two players whose inclusion seemed some in itself a bold statement about the nature of talent, meaning, and faith. Both made Sandy Koufax or Gayle Sayers look like Seaver and Dorsett, respectively; between the two of them, Reiser and Score put together about three seasons of top-flight play. By Honig and Ritter's numbers, this output could be extrapolated out into something mightily impressive. However, even the young Shoals knew that baseball is notoriously prone to the "career year" syndrome, and any number of pitfalls--including less dramatic injuries, which never get given the spine-tingling treatment--could derail this kind of early promise.

If you're looking for the exact moment FreeDarko began, it was on one of these Saturday mornings (maybe a few Fridays, too), as I regarded Msrs. Score and Reiser with a combination of outrage, awe, and profound reverence. These were just baseball players, and fairly obscure ones at that. And yet they'd inspired these kings of letters to put their legitimacy on the line—whether as a lark, an in-joke, or some more solemn statement of purpose—and infest their "100 Greatest" with a form of fantasy. Or at least a kind of subjectivity that threatened their delicate balance between well-rounded humanism and quantitative exploits.

Honestly, I don't think I would've bought it without the religious backdrop. And I think it's no accident that I came to associate this book—and to this day, these players—with the half-dour, half-exultant sounds of Jew worship. Or that, with each passing week, I felt more and more of an urge to read these two entries in the presence of ritual. Which, if you didn't catch it already, made them into my own kind of semi-spiritual ritual. Their stories were sad, sure. But in a way, the "what if" posed by Reiser and Score took on an almost cosmic aspect, a sense of freedom and exhilaration that seems to me the very basis of most Western religions. No matter who you ask, the world beyond our own consists of things avoided, imagined, otherwise unthinkable, and quite possibly blinding in their glory.

Score and Reiser became not only athletes whose careers stood for something far more profound than "damn," but also a way of seeing just why organized religion offered up more than rules and dress pants. Of course, baseball's disappeared from my life, and I rarely feel the need to consult my local rabbi when life seems drab or empty. Maybe, just maybe, though, Herb Score and Pete Reiser allowed me to take these same lessons and unfurl them elsewhere. Maybe FreeDarko's messianic wail isn't just a take-off on doomsday cults, and maybe, even if I can't play the sport they played, I see Score and Reiser in my mind every time I sit down to ponder Today in Travis Outlaw, or Josh Smith.

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