Book Review: The History of The Sporting News
In Search of the History of the Game's Bible
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Book Review
Review of The Sporting News First Hundred Years: 1886-1986
You might be wondering why I’m putting a book review into this blog. After all, this blog is centered around baseball replays, right?
Well, this is no ordinary book — and this is no ordinary replay blog, for that matter.
I plan on reviewing books of interest to baseball replayers from time to time. And, to be frank, there is nothing more pertinent to our hobby than understanding the history of the erstwhile Bible of Baseball, the late, great Sporting News.
Beyond the Boxscores
I remember having a conversation about 20 years ago with somebody I met on a message board about scans of The Sporting News. This person, whose name I don’t recall at all, somehow managed to secure PDF format scans of selected pages of The Sporting News from 1950, and was more than happy to send them to me.
I was overjoyed to receive at least something — but was disappointed when I realized that my friend had only scanned the pages with major league boxscores.
There’s a trend among replayers that I don’t quite understand. The fascination with the boxscore, and only with the boxscore, really puzzles me. As nice as it is to look at a boxscore and understand what happened in a game, it’s actually the feature stories that really create the feel for the era.
Looking at just the old Sporting News boxscores is kind of like eating a hot dog without condiments. It works, but you’re missing out on a lot of flavor.
Fortunately, this book includes quite a bit of flavor. The history of The Sporting News is woven together here with the history of baseball itself. It’s not the greatest general history of baseball that I’ve ever read, but it was certainly interesting, including numerous anecdotes and stories that I was unfamiliar with.
How Times Change!
Now, you can’t read Lowell Reidenbaugh’s book without sighing with at least a bit of regret over what eventually happened to The Sporting News.
There’s almost a poetic cadence to the history of the publication. The paper started out as a multi-sports journal in 1886, designed to compete on a national scale with Sporting Life, a weekly publication that itself was only a few years old by that time. The Sporting News slowly jettisoned off all non-baseball coverage, finally turning into a baseball-only publication around 1906, dedicated to the major leagues, minor leagues, and, of course, those infamous bores.
The other sports came back, of course. They came back slowly at first, starting with some college football in 1942, and then gradually expanding until baseball became just another feature by the late 1970s.
This book, which was published in late 1985, exudes optimism for the future of the publication. It’s an infectious optimism, and it makes sense given the history of the paper. After all, The Sporting News was able to survive two world wars, near bankruptcy in the early 1930s, and numerous scandals and run-ins with the most powerful men in baseball. You’d think that it would be able to flourish in the early information age.
As you are almost certainly aware, The Sporting News decided to remove boxscores completely from its pages not long after this book was published. In less than a decade, it transformed from a news tabloid to a magazine designed to compete with Sports Illustrated. The competition was a failure, sadly, and The Sporting News found itself in no position to compete during the early years of the internet.
The publication technically does exist, though not in print form. You can visit its website and see for yourself. I’ll let you be the judge.
An Honest Assessment
One thing that surprised me about this book is that it is no hagiography. Reidenbaugh had served as managing editor of the paper for decades by the time this book was published. You’d expect him to gloss over some of the more uncomfortable details. You’d be mistaken.
Reidenbaugh discusses subjects such as J. G. Taylor Spink’s constant feuds with Kenesaw Mountain Landis and the paper’s skepticism towards Jackie Robinson with remarkable honesty, clarity, and balance. You won’t find any excuses here, or any lame attempts at blaming society or American culture for the mistakes of the past. The facts are treated as facts, and judgment is reserved for the reader alone — just the way it should be.
Losing Steam
Unfortunately, this book loses steam as it moves forward.
Early sections, such as pictures of and discussions about the early offices of the paper, are absolutely fascinating.
Sadly, these give way to dry discussions of staff member changes in later years, much of which seems in hindsight to have had no real historical relevance. Some of these later sections feel more appropriate for an academic setting, or a high school reunion, than for a book about the history of the most influential and important of all baseball publications.
Going Forward
So why bring all of this up? Why look at a book that was published in the mid-1980s?
First of all, I learned here that the poor quality of The Sporting News scans at Paper of Record are not because of the digitization process, in contrast to what many message board posters have guessed over the years. It is clear that the photographed pages used for this book were also faded and unclear. I believe the blame lies with the microfilm conversion process, which I’m guessing may have taken place over 70 years ago.
Second, there isn’t really a useful history of The Sporting News out there. This is the best that I could find.
And this second point really is a problem. These pages, and in particular the stories therein, are absolutely vital to baseball replayers. This is where the heart and soul of the game really lies.
I want to help remedy this problem. No, I’m not going to write a huge history of this paper; I don’t have the resources for that. Instead, I am planning on going through the history of The Sporting News in a slow and comprehensive fashion designed for replayers.
Over the coming months, I’m going to start writing posts on The Sporting News as a research source for your replays. We’re going to dive as deep as we can. In particular, I want to research and report on which years and eras are actually legible, which features are important, and what other primary sources could serve as a substitute for the less-than-legible issues.
So stay tuned! We’ve got some great stuff coming up.