hairs vs. squares
Reviewed by Kenneth Sammond, Department of Literature, Language, Writing & Philosophy, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, NJ
21 july 2016 archive
I remember my first World Series. First Grade. 1975. The Big Red Machine facing off against the Red Sox. I recall the players, the games and the scores as if they had happened last week. Still, I was probably a bit short on some of the details. After all, it was the seventies and all of the details you got were on the back of Topp's Baseball card or in the play-by-play patter offered on TV or the radio.
Dan Epstein tackled this Baseball era broadly in his 2010 retrospective, Big Hair and Plastic Grass. Epstein got some facts wrong, but that did not sully the overarching story of an era where baseball both imitated and mimicked fashion, and innovations like the polyester and Astroturf seemed to presage a bright future for young fans.
Ed Gruver's Hairs vs. Squares: The Mustache Gang, the Big Red Machine and the Tumultuous Summer of '72 is the most recent work to look back on this era, one of the most contentious and intense times for baseball and America. He gets the facts right, but each and every fact is too often correlated to another, which reminds me of how a basic Wikipedia search has often led me through an adventure that is interesting and fun but, ultimately, not so much driven by a narrative.
Gruver's tone at the outset is breezy and recalls the way that Roger Kahn sought to invoke the past in The Boys of Summer, through personal engagement with the game and literary references here and there. Kahn cued us with Shakespeare, Gruver references Dickens (and, yes, a bit of Shakespeare too). Dickens' primary weakness is too many backstories weighing down and distracting the reader from the thrust of the overarching drama. So too here.
This work is a study in contrasts: the juxtaposition of "the Hairs versus the Squares" works great at the outset of Gruver's work. His prologue is deft and dense and driven by the anticipation of recovering the tensions of how Baseball then was pivoting between two ways of playing and how America was perched between an uncharted liberalism and a bridling conservatism. The World Series itself, pitched as a showdown between the "Hairs" and the "Squares" keenly emblematized these tensions. Thus, the prologue promises a narrative along these lines, but I kept getting sidetracked as I worked my way through the book and onward to the Fall Classic.
The succeeding chapters, which are more often than not paired profiles of standout players, are compelling in their own right, but not particularly suited to a prologue that describes the '72 World Series as a "showdown of two of the most vivid and contrasting dynasties in baseball history." A great expectation, but not what followed in the succeeding chapters. The profiles run the gamut of players from that season, from Reggie Jackson and Mickey Lolich in the first chapter through Manny Sanguillen and Joe Coleman in the thirteenth chapter. We also get further insight on Charles Finley (who shares a chapter and quite a few arguments with Vida Blue) and Marvin Miller.
But there were many instances where the information given is not always merited, even if it might raise a thoughtful brow. For example, that Game One of the League Championship series in Oakland "didn't pack the house" due to competition from college football might merit mention, but the fact that Stanford had Big 10 champion at the Rose Bowl in the two previous seasons is more of a distraction than an insight.
Again, Gruver knows his facts, stitching together a quilt of related profiles that create a motif—we see once again how some players are traditional and some are rebellious; but more are ambiguous, confined to varying degree by managers, owners, upbringing, and baseball fans. These distinctions and their implications could have been explored more fully as a force or cultural milieu, signifying how they were influenced by or helped define this tumultuous summer of '72. Perhaps a later edition will show this more concisely.
The last three chapters celebrate the season's compelling close with its stunning matchups, recounting play-by-play between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati, Detroit and Oakland in the Pennants, as well as the clash between Mustache Gang and the Big Red Machine in the Fall Classic. It is in these instances that the narrative becomes more cohesive and begins to fulfill the promise laid out in the prologue.
Gruver comes to this work with a strong track record. His Koufax competes well with Jane Leavy's work on that great pitcher. His Ice Bowl, recounting the 1967 NFL Championship game, is tight and vivid. This most recent work has clear strengths and weaknesses. Overall, like so much of Dickens work, Hairs vs. Squares is filled with intense detail and the author's love for his subject. But it also shares a weakness I find in Dickens: there are too many backstories and too many distractions from the narrative of contrast and change that is promised at the outset.
Perhaps I had too many expectations. Like Gruver, I grew up in Jersey watching the Mets on WOR and the Yankees on WPIX. My earliest baseball memories are of Jerry Koosman and Thurman Munson; but they are also of Steve Garvey and Rollie Fingers. After all, Baseball was ubiquitous in the early 70s. When change came to the National Pastime in the seventies, kids believed unfailingly that it was for the better. It was part of the narrative. But we are always a little short on the details.
Gruver's Hairs vs. Squares reminds us how intense the '72 games were—especially the postseason play. It also forces us to recall the great and conflicting players from that era. But players are part of the strong narrative and become subordinate to it, just like players become subordinate to a strong team and game—even when they act out. That is what I had hoped for here. But that might just be my weakness.
Ed Gruver. Hairs vs. Squares: The Mustache Gang, the Big Red Machine and the Tumultuous Summer of '72. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016. 386 pp. $29.95 (hardcover).
Copyright © 2016 by Kenneth Sammond