The early years of baseball’s so-called “modern era,” after 1900, used to be part of the dark ages, as far as visions of the athletes went. Their stories existed, for the most part, in the form of statistics. The few photographs that remained in circulation were like the woodcuts peppered sparsely through old novels. Only in oral histories like Lawrence Ritter’s “Glory of Their Times”–still one of the best baseball books ever printed– did the figures come to life.
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Yet not only does “Baseball’s Golden Age” resurrect old players. The photos in and of themselves–in their texture, focus, and composition–are frequently of museum quality. And the captions, by Neal and Constance McCabe, go well beyond just naming the players and their claims to fame. They dig up curiosities and anecdotes that even baseball aficionados will be unfamiliar with. (Umpire Silk O’Loughlin, for instance, was such a well-known dandy that the players insisted he would rather call a man out than safe–the better to show off the diamond ring on his right hand.) In short, “Baseball’s Golden Age” is probably the best baseball book since “The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract” was published in 1985. It is essential to the devoted fan’s baseball library, a delight for the hot-stove league, a future pleasure at televised rain delays.
By 1911, Conlon was the principal photographer for both those publications, and he would fill that role for 30 years, shooting the players as they came through New York. But he never gave up his straight gig as a proofreader. His baseball photos, he seemed to consider, were a way of augmenting his income. The McCabes write in the introduction that he was not a fanatic about the sport. He seems to have known his subject and been devoted to his craft, but in a distant, professional way–a prototype of the photographer Wegee, with baseball stars replacing mob figures.
There are players both beautiful (Wes Ferrell and a truly pretty picture of Ted Williams in his rookie season) and ugly (Joe Martina, authenticated as what the “James Historical Baseball Abstract” labeled the ugliest player of the ’20s). There is a late picture of Walter Johnson that is the image of a manager waiting to be fired: he is standing in the dugout, his shoulders hunched, his two coaches at his sides, both trying to present a confident facade, secure in the knowledge they’ll be there longer than he will. There is a picture that shows, once and for all, why Johnny Mize was nicknamed the Big Cat. The book’s centerpiece is an amazing set of close-up, sharp-focus portraits of the 1927 Yankees, Murderer’s Row.
