Elysian Fields Quarterly - The Baseball Review

Donald Dewey and Nicholas Acocella. The Black Prince of Baseball: Hal Chase and the Mythology of the Game. Wilmington, Del.: Sport Media Publishing Inc., 2004, 436 pp., $23.95, cloth.

Shoeless Joe, Charlie Hustle . . . and Prince Hal. Names that live in that particular baseball infamy reserved for gamblers and fixers. It can be plausibly argued that there is no greater sin in the game than betting on its outcome when one has an active stake in producing that outcome, either as player or manager. Despite what the Taiwanese and their massively corrupt professional league may think, the reason we care about the ups and downs of the season is precisely because we want to believe that the performers are doing anything and everything they can to achieve victory. Take that away and what have you got? Another suckers' game.

Given that, why should we care to exhume the life and times of Hal Chase, whose mercurial career is remembered less for his often-brilliant fielding at first base than for the lingering stench of "laying down" that dogged his steps from league to league. (And league to league is exactly how Chase seemed to want it: he played not only in the American and National Leagues, but in the Federal League, the California State League, the Pacific Coast League, various collegiate leagues—without bothering to attend classes, or even enroll at the institutions—and anywhere else that dangled a paycheck of sufficient worth.)

Well, for one thing, Chase was a far more complex man than a brief synopsis of his life might suggest. And Dewey and Acocella have compiled an exhaustive study of the historical record to bring to life the man behind the myth. Indeed, as their subtitle trumpets, their subject extends to examining the game behind the myth.

Their method produces moments of great insight, humor, complexity, and tragedy . . . but it's unlikely to be everybody's cup of tea. Let's take those elements in turn and see if we can't lay bare the essence of the book.

Insight

The authors quote archives and interviews from seemingly every angle of baseball life during Chase's career. In the process, they illuminate many former dark corners of the game. A quick example that was news to me: the fair and noble Christy Mathewson was an inveterate gambler. Not that we should bemoan his feet of clay. Dewey and Acocella establish the depth of the gambling culture nationwide in the early twentieth century and make the salient point that for the college-bred Mathewson, "gambling was a natural way of fitting in with his teammates as well as an obvious outlet for his 24-hour-a-day competitiveness." (There is not the slightest hint that Mathewson bet on baseball.)

One of the biggest questions I had coming into the book was how Chase's legendary status as the best fielder of all time at his position might possibly be quantified. Again, the authors produce. Aside from the many verbal affidavits provided by contemporaries like Nap Lajoie and Ty Cobb, we get actual descriptions of specific Chase plays. Imagine these, among others: "[C]rossing all the way over to the third-base line to gather up a bunt and throw the runner out at first . . . charging a bunt, grabbing the ball, and tagging the batter on his way to first before throwing to second or third to complete a double play." We're told that Chase actually caught pop flies behind the catcher, not once but many times. We'll give the Babe the last word: "ëPrince Hal was the greatest fielding first baseman that ever played. He was worth the price of admission just to watch him toe-dance around first base and pick those wild throws out of the dirt.'"

Humor

Given what Chase ultimately did with that talent, we might expect that humor would be hard to come by, but the authors—whose deft one-liners are sprinkled far too lightly throughout the text—have a subtle sense of the sardonic. With Chase playing on the worst Yankee team of all time (1908), we're told, "If there was a merry note at any point in the season, only a dog heard it." When assessing Prince Hal's singular approach to contracts and daily effort, they point out, "As for his big league seasons, they were merely the annual centerpiece of games around the calendar." (Chase loved either the game or money so much that even on off days he'd play semipro ball—sometimes for both teams in the course of a doubleheader!)

They also develop a great keystone-cops atmosphere around the attempts to smuggle Chase back and forth between Canada and the United States while the law seeks to prevent him from playing for his new Federal League team in Buffalo. Picture Prince Hal in drag, hiding in a dark shed outside the ballpark. . . .

Complexity

If there was any aspect of the book with which I had difficulty, it was the authors' determination to explore every loose end of Chase's life and to embed his story in the machinations of the baseball establishment. There are several chapters ("Inlaws and Outlaws," "A Federal Case," etc.), which are really side notes, that are less about Chase than the mores and laws of the time. Mind you, it's hard to fault the authors' intent. After all, sections on the anti-German climate in WWI Cincinnati help explain why (during Chase's tenure with the team) the German owner of the Reds is busy looking for a scapegoat, and the duplicity of team owners fighting to maintain legally dubious contracts as they bury upstart leagues provides a rationale for Chase's own willingness to "get his" while he can. In the end, I accepted these portions as useful background but fidgeted until the story moved back onto the field of play.

The flip side of my impatience was that as the second half of the book moved into the post-WWI accounts of game fixes, the authors provided brilliantly detailed accounts of all the schemes and scams. Here, I was happy to slow down and examine the evidence carefully. This, to me, was the heart of the story. Without this context, Chase's own actions and reactions would be unfathomable.

Tragedy

Dewey and Acocella are too clever to reduce the life of Hal Chase to simple tragedy. In fact, one of their main points is that Chase's marred reputation as soiled fixer has been exploited to cleanse the dirty deeds of many others in the game. But it's hard not to see his downward spiral from ace first-sacker of the Highlanders and toast of the Manhattan clubs to embattled defendant in various gambling scams (including the Black Sox scandal) and then a decade-long career of outlaw ball on the Mexican border without musing on the existence of a fatal flaw.

And quite aside from Chase's gambling, the man endured a succession of almost-biblical plagues. He had pneumonia, erysipelas, malaria, skin infections, smallpox, a nervous breakdown, and a succession of sprained ankles and torn tendons. Once drink got the better of him in his later years, he became a pretty pathetic figure.

Don't think that this brief review has set forth all the intrigue or delicious stories to be found between the covers. We haven't even touched on Chase's family life, his glory days in his home state of California, his prowess as pool shark and kleptomaniac, or his dusty years in the Arizona-Mexico border leagues . . . not to mention his genuine accomplishments as a hitter. It's all here.

I can't resist mentioning a few oddities about the book package itself. For one, the subtitle is listed one way on the cover and another inside. The same is true for the publisher. (In case this leads to any difficulties at your local bookstore, check out www.sportclassicbooks.com.) Other items of unconventionality include the use of an appealing typography for titles that feature capital and lowercase letters mixed together, and the absence of both career stats and interior photographs, which so often embellish biographical texts of this sort. Several classic shots of Chase appear on the well-designed cover, though aside from his smile, they leave me bewildered as to where his reputation for lady-killing looks might come from.

Maybe it suits the story exactly right. Prince Hal Chase was both more and less than advertised—but certainly never quite what one expected.

—EFQ