Much has been written about baseball players throughout the history of the sport, but it has only been recently that every other minor league journeyman has felt they had the need and ability to write their story down in book form. For the greats of the past, far fewer autobiographies exist, a sad fact given that most current baseball fans weren’t alive for the majority of the sport and there is no better way to learn about a person than from that person.
With that in mind, this month’s book is Lou Boudreau‘s autobiography, Lou Boudreau: Covering All the Bases
written with Russell Schneider of the Plain Dealer. It was published in 1993, the year he turned 76 (he died in 2001 at the age of 84) and covers every aspect of his baseball career from his amateur days through his final season as a Chicago Cubs radio color commentator in 1988, a job he held for 30 years.
In general, it is a straight year by year run down of his life and while he does delve some into his own personal stats, if you’re only interested in those I can recommend a wonderful site called baseball-reference.com. As with any biography, what makes this one interesting are the relationships that Boudreau had with those around him from his owners, Alva Bradley and Bill Veeck and his managers Ossie Vitt and Roger Peckinpaugh to the players below him during his years as manager and others who he had to deal with, particularly Hank Greenberg and Leo Durocher.
Because it was the most important time of his life and the most interesting to readers, the largest amount of time in the book is spent describing his time as player manager including the very first chapter before he even gets into how his career started. It is an incredible and improbable story that he does a fantastic job telling, so I will leave it to him. As hard as getting the job was, his descriptions of how close he was to losing it are also vivid, although one sided. Since the owner and GM through much of Boudreau’s time as manager, Veeck, died in 1986, there wasn’t much chance of a rebuttal. It is possible that Boudreau was just feeling the anxiety that all Major League managers must feel that they are constantly on the hot seat and that he was simply getting inside his own head too much. Whatever the case was, there is no better way to find out what was going on inside Boudreau’s head than to read his own words about the situations.
Boudreau’s career corresponded with what may have been the busiest, most interesting period of Indians history as a roster full of Hall of Famers played under a Hall of Fame manager and owner. Unfortunately, some of those noteworthy evens, including Larry Doby breaking the color barrier in the AL are basically glossed over, while others, like the creation of the Ted Williams shift, acquisition of another Hall of Famer, Joe Gordon and winning the World Series in 1948 (almost 70 year old spoiler alert or is the spoiler that they haven’t won since?) are covered in greater depth.
If there was a negative to reading this book, it is that my opinion on Boudreau has been irrevocably changed. He comes off incredibly cocky in the book, which he deserves to some point (particularly for his playing days), but not necessarily to the point he takes it. In particular, I’m speaking of his continued insistence that every team he managed that played poorly (he went 434-575 after leaving Cleveland with a 728-649 record) had as good of a season as they could have had under any manager, insinuating that he wasn’t the least bit to blame. While these were some truly awful teams and he may have been right, his attitude when considering himself as a manager is if he were the greatest ever and there is little proof of that. In fact, looking at how he only won 80 games in 1947 and 89 in 1949 given the incredible talent on those teams brings his management abilities into further question.
On the other side, this shouldn’t take things too far the other way. The fact remains that Boudreau was one of the greatest offensive short stops in baseball history and the best defensively at the time, despite his weak ankles (read the book, you can’t miss them). In addition, he did bring the Indians their second and most recent World Series victory as a manager and was arguably the best manager in Indians history when he was let go and has since only been surpassed by Mike Hargove and Al Lopez, another Hall of Famer and the man Boudreau was not resigned to make room for.
A final note about the book, although not a knock on Boudreau at all, is statistical. While he talks about using advanced metrics as a manager, particularly in Williams’ spray chart and knowing how effective the shift was after the fact, whenever Boudreau mentions a player the only stats given generally were win loss record for pitchers and batting average for hitters. He would mention that a certain player was better than his record or average, but wouldn’t necessarily say why, although I’m sure he knew. He was a heavy platoon using manager and obviously knew about split stats, strike out rates and things far beyond average, but the number one thing he always went back to was average. It is obviously just a sign of his era and hopefully when we have the managers of today writing their autobiographies, they will be able to describe their players statistically in a more effective way. Reading between the lines, he obviously knew more than he said, he most likely just assumed the fans wouldn’t understand. Hopefully as the fans become more knowledgeable about the game, the autobiographical histories will be as well.
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