Ring Lardner is best known today for his short stories. Widely admired, he influenced authors as diverse as Ernest Hemingway, John O’Hara, and J.D. Salinger. He is less remembered for his work as a reporter. His sports coverage is almost forgotten today.
“Frank Chance’s Diamond: The Baseball Journalism of Ring Lardner,” edited by Ron Rapoport, redresses that. It is a compilation of Lardner’s work as a sports reporter and baseball-focused newspaper columnist.
Baseball was one of Lardner’s true loves; it’s the focus of much of his writing. He began his career as a reporter in 1905 and continued as a newspaperman for the rest of his life. In 1908, he began covering Chicago sports for the Chicago Inter Ocean. Back then, sports meant baseball, and for a decade, he was the man who covered the Cubs and White Sox.
Back then, baseball was a working-class sport. The decade before and during World War I was the era of Tinker to Evers to Chance, Ty Cobb, and the opening of Babe Ruth’s career. Lardner reveled in it, becoming close to the White Sox. He became disillusioned with baseball after the 1919 “Black Sox” scandal, when White Sox players fixed the World Series. He continued writing about baseball, but with a cynicism previously absent.
This book captures Lardner’s baseball articles and columns and his coverage of the sport in newspapers from 1906 through 1932. Coverage of games and features about players, stadiums, and other aspects of baseball of the period abound, as do baseball-related columns he wrote later as a columnist.
The language is uniquely Lardner, replete with Lardner aphorisms and deliberate misspellings. He never calls the World Series the “World Series.” It is the “World Serious.” The field where the Chicago Cubs played when Frank Chance was both first baseman and manager is transformed to Frank Chance’s Diamond, and Chance to the “Peerless Leader.” It includes examples of his baseball poetry and similar foolery present in the press of those days.
Mr. Rapoport, a sports writer and Lardner fan, edited this book, rescuing Lardner’s writing from forgotten newspapers. He also annotates the writings, explaining now-obscure comments peppering Lardner’s prose.
“Frank Chance’s Diamond” is a time machine that transports readers back a century to the America of the first third of the 20th century. Lardner’s writing reveals its exuberance and innocence, and exposes its prejudices, all while highlighting the joys of the era’s baseball.
