Baseball stars flash across the sky so quickly you often not only miss them, but never know they were there. Take Harry Hooper.
A key piece of four World Championship teams when he played for the Boston Red Sox, Hooper was still overshadowed by two other outfielders. Master of the sliding catch and stealing bases, he still holds the record for the most assists at his position yet statistically falls a bit short of the greats of his era. Everyone admired him, but despite his smarts he got passed over for manager jobs after retiring.
Paul J. Zingg asks some questions about why Hooper is so obscure among the players enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame, and unknowingly provides answers, too. Hooper had a stellar career, alright, but he also makes for dull copy.
Maybe it is the author. Zingg acknowledges coming into the project with one strong connection with Hooper, being a dean at Saint Mary’s College of California where Hooper was a student-athlete. Zingg makes much of the college’s place in Hooper’s life, enough for me to wonder if this project had its origin as an article for the alumni magazine.
Harry Hooper is a baseball legend best remembered for two things outside of his own play on the diamond. One is recommending his team move its best pitcher into the outfield, which is how we know Babe Ruth. Zingg elaborates on Hooper’s lobbying efforts:
He reminded [Red Sox manager Ed] Barrow that the manager’s sixty-thousand-dollar investment in the club was only as sound as Boston’s ability to draw fans to the park. Why not give them one of the game’s top gate attractions on a more regular basis?
 |
| Harry Hooper at batting practice later in his career. While a rookie in Boston, Hooper was shut out of the batting cage by the veteran players, and had to take his practice swings in the outfield. Image from https://digitalcollections.detroitpubliclibrary.org/islandora/object/islandora%3A165868 |
The other highly notable thing Hooper did, long after his career was over, was sit down with Lawrence Ritter and talk about the game he played, making for one of the many memorable voices of The Glory Of Their Times.
Zingg includes Ritter’s book in his bibliography and some footnotes, but does not reference it in any other way, which surprised me. His focus instead was on surviving members of Hooper’s family, specifically his children, who kept scrapbooks and letters they shared with the author.
If you want to engage a neutral reader about the life of any person, famous or not, don’t start it off by interviewing the kids. Too often, the insights you get are well-meaning but bland, and difficult to put aside in favor of less invested, more objective viewpoints.
Maybe this is the reason Hooper never emerges from behind his Cooperstown plaque to become a truly vibrant or empathetic figure in the pages of this book.
 |
| Hooper's plaque at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. His fielding average looks low for such a renowned gloveman like Hooper, but Zingg points out how poorly kept fields and dinged-up baseballs back then made errors less avoidable. Image from https://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/player.php?p=hoopeha01 |
Hooper played in the Major Leagues from 1909 to 1925, coming up with the Boston Red Sox at around the same time as one of the franchise’s greatest-ever players, Tris Speaker. A reliable leadoff hitter and base stealer, Hooper was a key part of the team during four World Championships seasons: 1912, 1915, 1916, and 1918.
Zingg describes Hooper’s winning approach as a cerebral one:
His effortless running style and quick reflexes belied his actual speed afoot. Later, as he carefully studied opposing pitchers and batters, he added a calculated anticipation to his repertoire as a fielder and baserunner.
Hooper’s own maxim for success was simple:
“You will hit your hardest balls,” Harry observed, “when you are not trying to.”
The book is at its best when Zingg covers the meat of Hooper’s career, where he provided needed on-field leadership to prevent the factionalism common on winning ballclubs. Speaker, for example, didn’t like the other star outfielder on the Red Sox, Duffy Lewis; Hooper made a point of befriending both.
 |
| Hooper (at left) with Boston teammates Tris Speaker (center) and Duffy Lewis (right). Together, they made up what was called "The Golden Outfield" from 1910 until Speaker was traded before the 1916 season, winning World Championships in 1912 and 1915. Image from https://medium.com/@riley.poole/red-sox-legends-run-the-golden-outfield-fe6dcc0893b6 |
While Zingg’s writing lacks for color, I have to respect his desire not to fill in the blanks with imaginative conjecture, a common failing of pre-television baseball histories. Instead, he writes in broad strokes:
Nineteen twelve was a year like none other in Red Sox history. The fresh winds of spring that carry pennant hopes, no matter how faint, to even the most desperate ranks of the league brought more than just renewed expectations to Boston. They swept in newness everywhere – new owners, a new manager, and a new ballpark.
That ballpark, Fenway Park, still stands; Hooper helped open it with a championship inaugural season.
The Red Sox didn’t totally dominate the American League in the 1910s; the Philadelphia Athletics also won multiple championships that decade, and the Chicago White Sox were frequently tough opponents. But Zingg explains how the Red Sox won not with homers (no one did in the so-called “deadball era”) but with crisp fielding and smart baserunning.
 |
| A photograph taken at the 1912 World Series at Fenway Park. Hooper was a clutch player with a .293 batting average and 11 walks during his postseason career. Image from https://chapmandeadballcollection.com/portfolio/boston-fenway-park-1912-world-series/, which has some great analysis as to the specifics of this play. |
No one was smarter than Hooper, Zingg adds:
Respecting Hooper’s judgment of the game, [Red Sox manager Jack] Barry often deferred to his right fielder’s judgment on matters ranging from the determination of lineups and the order of the pitching rotation to game strategy and even pitch selection.
Listening to Hooper was also a factor when it came to Ruth. Hooper quickly saw the young lefthander could hit towering home runs when he got his turns at the plate, and pushed the idea on management as early as 1915, while Ruth was still emerging as one of the best lefthanded pitchers in the game.
What impressed me was that Ruth, while quite a lot trimmer as a young man, was never going to work out long term in center field or at first base, making Hooper, a veteran corner outfielder, an advocate against his own long-term interests.
According to Zingg, Ruth sang Hooper’s praises as a player and teammate, and the two men remained close until Ruth’s death. “He could do anything any other outfielder could and on top of that he was a great position player,” Ruth is quoted recalling of Hooper.
 |
| Babe Ruth as a young Red Sox pitcher. Hooper recalled when Ruth first joined the Red Sox in 1914, he was "not so very different from a lot of other 19-year-old would-be ballplayers" but for a gargantuan appetite and an ability to hit a ball farther than anyone he had ever seen. Image from https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/why-was-babe-ruth-so-good-hitting-home-runs-180961998/ |
If Hooper didn’t always get along with other players, Zingg isn’t the kind of writer to speculate about it. The only time there was a hint of that was when Hooper was let go by the White Sox while manager Eddie Collins said nothing, despite earlier assurances he had Hooper’s back. But this is not a point Zingg elaborates upon at all.
The baddies in the story – no surprise if you know about this era of baseball – are the owners, particularly Charles Comiskey of the White Sox, who jettisoned Hooper after Harry objected to a drastic pay cut after a subpar season. Hooper joined the White Sox after the 1919 Black Sox scandal, helping stabilize the franchise with some of his best-ever seasons, but Comiskey was a tyrant and a cheapskate enabled by a corrupt system.
Red Sox owner Harry Frazee was different, a spendthrift with too many side projects to fund. In 1919, Frazee sold Ruth to the New York Yankees (and simultaneously mortgaged Fenway Park) when his latest Broadway show bombed. A year later, he traded Hooper to trim payroll. “He had no business in baseball,” Hooper said of Frazee.
After his career ended, Hooper briefly managed in the Pacific Coast League and at Princeton, before settling down in his family’s California home to be a postmaster. The game soon changed, but for a long time, the milestones Hooper set while playing it still stood.
 |
| Hooper Beach in Capitola, California is one way Harry Hooper is remembered in his hometown. Another is an exhibit near the beach detailing his contributions to the community and his baseball career. Image from https://www.californiabeaches.com/beach/hooper-beach/ |
Zingg notes:
When he retired after the 1925 season, Hooper held every major fielding record for an American League right fielder, including most games (2,153), putouts (3,718), assists (322), double plays (79), and total chances (4,180). Two of his league records – assists and double plays – have never been equaled, and the latter still stands as the all-time Major League mark. [As of 2022, this is still true.]
It still took a while for Hooper to get his plaque at Cooperstown. When he was finally enshrined in 1971, he was a recent widower just weeks away from his 84th birthday. Several players were enshrined during that period for reasons that reeked of sentimentality if not outright cronyism, but Hooper doesn’t ever get called out for that; his qualifications were solid for the Hall, if not spectacular.
Zingg’s book is weakest when he writes about Hooper’s family; it opens with a long and ponderous account of his Canadian and German ancestors and toward the end draws on some candid letters from his wife Esther, who was understandably frustrated by the enforced separation baseball caused. “Wives were acknowledged for the stabilizing effect they could have on their husbands but essentially marginalized for the ‘problems’ they were perceived as causing,” Zingg notes.
Such
social commentary is brief and rare; this book is just the facts most of the
way through. If you have to have a signature failing in baseball biography (or
any other non-fiction book), that is not an awful thing.
No comments:
Post a Comment