The Heart Of The Order – Thomas Boswell, 1989 ★★

Baseball's Boswell at Less than His Best

It happens to nearly every sports columnist who becomes a public figure. The price of personality-centric journalism begins to infiltrate their copy until it is as much about the writer as it is the games being covered.

Thomas Boswell had been one of baseball’s most prominent scribes for twenty years when this book came out. His snarky, witty, probing style established him as a worthwhile voice for analyzing changes in the game, like free agency and the rise of the running game. Baseball characters like Pete Rose and Reggie Jackson made regular and welcome appearances in his columns, and got off good quotes.

By the time of the period covered in The Heart Of The Order, 1983 to 1988, baseball was beginning to move into a different space.

The labor issues that caused baseball’s longest ever strike in 1981, its fourth in just ten years, were only getting worse as both sides grew more entrenched in their positions. Cocaine had become a clubhouse drug of choice, exposed in a series of high-profile confessions. No one spoke openly of collusion or steroids just yet, but they were beginning to cast their shadows, too.

Most critically for Boswell, the people he had cut his teeth following in the 1970s were fading away, slowly but inevitably. Rose, Jackson, Rod Carew, Tom Seaver, Earl Weaver, Jim Palmer and others were leaving the scene, and their replacements were apparently not as good, at least as copy. Even the Baltimore Orioles, the team Boswell followed most regularly as a Washington Post reporter, fell in 1984 from a two-decade era of consistent excellence into divisional mopbucket.

This autumnal feeling was impressed upon me reading The Heart Of The Order. It starts out with a profile on Joe DiMaggio in which the Yankee Clipper says he has only begun to appreciate his time in the spotlight now that it is mostly over. “I try to live a normal life,” he says in a kid-gloves interview that reveals little.

The first season Boswell covers here, 1984, is presented not with the rise of the Detroit Tigers, who rode to glory and fostered new legends in the performances of pitcher Jack Morris and outfielder Kirk Gibson; or even the San Diego Padres, who managed to win their first National League title with the help of young batting hero Tony Gwynn. Rather he keys on the fall of the Chicago Cubs in the final game of that season’s National League Championship Series.

“When Tim Flannery’s ground ball trickled into right field, knifing under Leon Durham’s glove and through his Cub heart, baseball’s decade of romantic good luck had finally snapped,” Boswell writes.

A common theme of Boswell’s columns is of players and coaches saying goodbye to the game they love, and trying to configure a new life for themselves after baseball. These were the guys Boswell came up with; it speaks well of him as a human being he had trouble leaving them behind. But it casts a pall reading what should be lighter fare.

Normally a spry wordsmith, Boswell’s prose in this collection comes off tired and hacky:

Profiling Ozzie Smith, star shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals, Boswell writes: “On the back of his uniform should be the word ‘shazam.’ Instead of ‘1,’ his number should be ‘8,’ but turned sideways, because the possibilities he brings to his position are almost infinite.”

On Cincinnati Reds centerfielder Eric Davis, he manages to be more effusive: “Yes, Mark Fidrych, Fernando Valenzuela, Dwight Gooden and Roger Clemens, meet Eric Davis. What you were to pitching, he is to playing.”

Davis was an exciting player for a while, but this proves one of several Boswellian examples of major overstatement.

Even when he does get an undeniable baseball legend, Boswell too often gilds the lily. Profiling former Oriole third-baseman Brooks Robinson, Boswell is not content to talk up the ballplayer’s on-the-field distinctions. Rather, he unleashes his inner Roy Firestone, regaling us at length with Brooksie’s uncommon generosity even as he faced deepening financial debt.

The touchy-feely is ever-present in this tome: Los Angeles Dodgers outfielder Pedro Guerrero comes home to the Dominican Republic to give money to those who ask for it, even if he senses they don’t really need it. Catcher Gary Carter ignores the jealous sniping of his Montreal Expos teammates, smiling all the way to Flushing, Queens and a new home with the New York Mets. American League president Lee MacPhail spends downtime visiting art exhibits.

The best profile by far is the one Boswell draws of journeyman pitcher Doyle Alexander, in 1987 enjoying a terrific season for his latest of many teams, the Detroit Tigers. Alexander is depicted as an ornery guy who initially snubs Boswell’s proffered hand; Boswell manages to make this work for him anyway.

Doyle Alexander pitches for the Detroit Tigers. Despite going 9-0 for the team and leading them to a division title in 1987, the mid-season trade proved happier for the other team, as the Atlanta Braves were able to exchange Alexander for the services of future Hall-of-Famer John Smoltz. Image from https://lastwordonsports.com/baseball/2020/04/06/doyle-alexander-trade-history/.

“When he turns back, he still ignores your hand and looks you hard in the eye instead,” Boswell writes. “Then, the instant you pull your hand back, he puts his forward and you have to shake on his terms. He’s just changed speeds on another hitter and won again. If you’re insulted or defensive, then he’s happy. Because he’s in control.”

To me, this is not only a worthy account of a particular interaction, but sums up the spirit of the “have-gun-will-travel” era of free agency as well as anything else in this book.

Other pluses on offer in The Heart Of The Order include Boswell’s justly-celebrated list, “99 Reasons Why Baseball Is Better Than Football.” [#64: “Baseball means Spring’s Here. Football means Winter’s Coming.”] His account of the 1988 World Series, and the fabled Kirk Gibson home run that won Game 1 for the Los Angeles Dodgers, features some of Boswell’s best prose:

“Already, the home run, probably not a 400-footer, is growing by the hour. Now [Dodger second baseman Steve] Sax says Gibson “hit with one hand.” There’s a palm tree, about 500 feet from home plate. If it ever dies, folks here will swear Gibson killed it.”

A big negative of this book is the teams Boswell covered most closely, and gives every indication of rooting for, had a rough time of it in the mid-1980s. The Orioles had Cal Ripken’s streak, but not much else. The Boston Red Sox made the 1986 World Series, but, well, you know...

As a New York Mets fan, I minded the accent on the negative Boswell employed writing up that series. While his pre-Game Six commentary on what he saw as the Red Sox’s biggest potential Achilles’ Heel, first-baseman Bill Buckner, proved apt [“Is he the worst player on the field in this Series – an utter liability on offense, defense and the base paths who should be on the bench in New York tonight in Game Six so Don Baylor, who at least has joints that move, can play first base?”], the continuous poor-mouthing about the curse of the Sox becomes shrill.

Elsewhere in the book Boswell bemoans “the warping, wounding effects of a big persona in a public life;” the emotional roller-coasters endured by pitchers Dwight Gooden and John Tudor as great seasons gave way to hard times; and what Boswell calls “the flame of fame” that singes more than it enlightens.

It singes Boswell at times, too. On occasion, he manages to insert himself into his writings, to negative effect. He brags about how a column he wrote bothered Orioles outfielder Fred Lynn:

[Orioles Manager Earl] Weaver called my column “the most irresponsible” ever written about his team. Coach Frank Robinson told me, “Thanks, he [Lynn] needed that.” And, in fact, the next week Lynn was the American League’s player of the week.

Obviously, it’s hard to find a calm middle ground on Lynn. Perhaps Carlton Fisk, his teammate for six years in Boston, does it as well as any.

“How bad did you nail Freddie, anyway?” Fisk needled me.

“Maybe a six on a scale of ten.”

“That’s about right,” said Fisk.

Okay, so maybe I got the “six” upside down.

I guess it’s meant to impress us how much Boswell matters to the guys he wrote about. But bragging about his digs and how they hit the targets seems crass.

Elsewhere, Boswell writes about cricket, the introduction of lights at Wrigley Field, and newfangled fitness equipment in ways that showcase his quipping more than anything else.

While liking Boswell enough, I was left a bit flat at this collection. I remember the middle 1980s as generally being a good time for baseball; something his prose here seems to shortchange.