A Tale of Three Cities: The 1962 Baseball Season in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco by Steven Travers is one of the most frustrating books I have ever read. For a topic that is so intriguing, the text falls completely flat. Until the Yankees visited San Francisco to play the Giants in interleague play in 2007, I knew nothing about the 1962 World Series except that the Yankees had beaten the Giants in seven games. I didn't know how Game 7 had ended. I did not know that Ralph Terry, the pitcher who threw the pitch that Bill Mazeroski hit over the wall to win the 1960 World Series, was the man on the mound for the Yankees in the 1962 Game 7. I learned about all of that when the Yankees came to San Francisco two summers ago.
The 1962 season is something of which I still knew nothing. When I saw the title of Travers' book and read its inside cover, I thought this was going to be the book to quench the thirst created by that interleague series. I was wrong.
While the author is responsible for most of my issues with A Tale of Three Cities, I cannot blame them all on Travers. The printing and editing were problematic. There were several occurrences of misspelled words, hyphenated words in the middle of a line, and two words run together with no space between them. There was also a case of something I had never seen before in a book: a paragraph was cut off in mid-sentence. In the middle of the author's thought, there was white space followed by text about an entirely different topic. These errors made for a very difficult read.
Secondly, the author inserted way too much of his political views into what was supposed to be a book about baseball. At some level, I feel as though Steven Travers really wanted to write a political commentary about the 1960s in America. Travers' politics were too much. Frankly, it makes me sick to read someone repeatedly call 1962 the last year of American innocence. Not that things are anywhere close to perfect now, but referring to any time in America prior to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as "innocent" is insulting.
The author comes across as very dismissive and condescending of all the Black and Latino players on the 1962 Giants who ever expressed that some of the treatment they received in San Francisco was due to racism. This book takes place in 1962! And Alvin Dark, the Giant manager, was a man known to have trouble with the idea of non-White ballplayers in his clubhouse. Wait, why am I even defending my position here? Let me move on.
Chapter One begins with a long riff against the Bay Area, San Francisco in particular. Travers spends these 27 pages recounting all the ways San Francisco is an inferior, less intelligent, and less American place than Los Angeles, "the jewel of the Golden State." He rails against San Franciscans for believing in "the myth that they were indeed superior!" He dismisses every columnist who wrote for the "rag" San Francisco Chronicle. Comparing the San Francisco paper to the Los Angeles Times, he wrote, "Again, the contrast with Los Angeles excellence manifested itself…"
My absolute favorite part, though—and by favorite, I mean the part that made me put the book down for four weeks and only pick it up again because I really did want to learn about the 1962 baseball season—was Travers' rant against a Chronicle columnist who wrote favorably about an experience he'd had in Paris when the people there learned he was from San Francisco. The City, "like John Kennedy," wrote the columnist, Charles McCabe, "has been formally canonized in Europe." Oh boy, does this set off Steven Travers, whose response is to say Europe is a continent that merely starts wars (World War I, World War II, Vietnam), that America has to take over and win for them. He blames the conflicts in the Middle East on the failures of the French. This next passage is Travers at his elitist best (bold text for my emphasis):
McCabe in his column wailed against our nation's tendency towards wealth and power thrust upon the whole world. The elite columnist again seemed unable to see that which was placed before his eyes. Here were a few tiny agrarian colonies, separated by an ocean from the salons of political, economic, and political influence, yet in a scant 200 years we had become the most powerful empire in the annals of mankind. McCabe and his kind were the last people on God's Earth to embrace the knowledge of the fact that such a thing could happen only by a divine, guiding hand.Manifest Destiny, anyone? My goodness. Remember, this is a book about baseball. Baseball, Ray. And this was Chapter One!
The biggest gripe I have with A Tale of Three Cities: The 1962 Baseball Season in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco is that the story of the 1962 baseball season is largely missing. The first half of the book is comprised of descriptions of the cities, players, managers, general managers, owners, and stadia leading up to 1962. The baseball season and its National League pennant chase are discussed in Chapter Seven. Chapter Eight is the story of the three-game playoff between the Giants and Dodgers. And one chapter is spent on the World Series. To be honest, the majority of the actual baseball in the book centers around three games: Game 3 of the National League Playoff and Games 4 and 7 of the World Series. Then Travers closes the book by going through all the players, general managers, managers, and owners again, this time to tell us what happened to them all after 1962. And then there are two pages about baseball in the current decade.
There is so much more there. There is so much more about that baseball season, particularly in the three cities mention in the book's title, that I wish to learn. I thought this book was going to teach me a great deal of it. Instead, it gave me nothing; it added nothing new to the scant knowledge I already had.
In the end, I'm sad to say that A Tale of Three Cities was a waste of my time. Not nearly enough baseball, not nearly enough about one of the all-time classic series. As is far too often the case, great idea, poor execution. I wish Roger Kahn had written it.
D+
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