‘A man of the greatest honour’: Hemingway, baseball, and the case of John McGraw

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Michael Oriard, Dreaming of Heroes: American Sports Fiction, 1868–1980 (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1982), 10, 101.

2 Ernest Hemingway: Selected Letters 1917–1961, ed. Carlos Baker, (New York: Scribner, 1981), 313.

3 Ibid., 312.

4 Ibid., 313.

5 Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (New York: Scribner, 1929), 161.

6 Ernest Hemingway, By-Line: Ernest Hemingway (New York: Scribner, 1967), 95.

7 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 1932), 16.

8 Hemingway, By-Line, 162.

9 Ibid., 165–6.

10 Ibid., 236.

11 Ibid., 412.

12 Hemingway, By-Line, 92.

13 Miriam B. Mandel, Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon: The Complete Annotations (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2002), 58.

14 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 258.

15 Peter M. Gordon, ‘Nick Altrock’, Society for American Baseball Research. https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/aea7c461 (accessed February 24, 2019).

16 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 421.

17 Carlos Baker, Ernest Hemingway: A Life Story (New York: Scribner, 1969), 644.

18 Steven P. Gietschier notes that baseball ‘was in Ernest Hemingway’s blood’ at an early age: when he was eleven years old, he wrote a poem about the Cubs that his mother kept in her scrapbook. According to Gietschier, ‘evidence suggests that Ernest at some point traded in his youthful enthusiasm for the Cubs for a lifelong devotion, albeit mostly from a distance, to the Chicago White Sox’. Gietschier, ‘Slugging and Snubbing: Hugh Casey, Ernest Hemingway, and Jackie Robinson – A Baseball Mystery’, NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture 21, no. 1 (2012), 28–29.

19 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 263.

20 Mandel, Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon: The Complete Annotations, 154.

21 Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon, 276.

22 Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner, ed. Albert J. DeFazio III (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 30.

23 Gietschier, ‘Slugging and Snubbing: Hugh Casey, Ernest Hemingway, and Jackie Robinson – A Baseball Mystery’, 30–32. See also C. Harold Hurley, ed., Hemingway’s Debt to Baseball in The Old Man and the Sea (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edward Mellen Press, 1992).

24 Peter W. Dowell and Lee A. Pederson, ‘Baseball and Ernest Hemingway’, The Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2002), 199–215.

25 Writing from Michigan to his friend Grace Quinlan after the players’ indictments were handed down in September 1920, Hemingway conceded that he had bet on the White Sox to win, ‘thinking the series was honest’. Selected Letters, 41.

26 Liesl Olson, Chicago Renaissance: Literature and Art in the Midwest Metropolis (New York: Oxford, 2016), 161–62.

27 Ernest Hemingway, In Our Time (New York: Scribner, 1925), 41.

28 Ibid., 42. (The question of why Nick, a native of Chicago, would be rooting for the Cardinals has never been explained.)

29 Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast (New York: Scribner, 1964), 5.

30 Kenneth S. Lynn, Hemingway (New York: Fawcett, 1987), 121.

31 Hemingway, In Our Time (New York: Scribner, 1925), 41.

32 For several decades, scholars debated the timeframe of ‘The Three-Day Blow’ and attempted to find discrepancies in Hemingway’s use of game results and other historical references in the story. See, for example, Howard L. Hannum, ‘Dating Hemingway’s ‘The Three-Day Blow’ by External Evidence: The Baseball Dialogue’, Studies in Short Fiction 21 (1984): 267–68; Luis A. Losada, ‘Not So Precise: ‘The Three-Day Blow’ and Baseball Again’, Hemingway Review 16 (1997): 77–82; William Cole, ‘‘The newly-crowned monarch of all the Goats there are’: Ernest Hemingway’s ‘Heinie Zim’’, http://donutage.org/bill/presentations/Baseball97/HeinieZim.htm (accessed February 24, 2019). Although the debate has subsided with a consensus on the years before Nick’s service in the war, if not precisely on 1916, most would seem to agree with George Monteiro’s conclusion that ‘to enhance the ‘reality’ of the story Hemingway decided to conflate into a single conversational exchange those events dispersed over three or four historical years’. ‘Dating the Events of ‘The Three-Day Blow’, Critical Essays on Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, ed., Michael S. Reynolds (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1983), 174.

33 Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea (New York: Scribner, 1952), 23.

34 Ibid., 23.

35 Ibid., 23–24.

36 Philip Melling, ‘Cultural imperialism, Afro-Cuban Religion, and Santiago’s Failure in Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea’, The Hemingway Review 26, no. 1 (2006): 6–24.

37 Bob Reising, ‘Revisiting Ernest Hemingway and Baseball: Sanity, Success, and Suicide’, The Journal of American Culture 39, no. 2 (2016): 169.

38 George Monteiro, ‘Santiago, DiMaggio, and Hemingway: The Ageing Professionals of The Old Man and the Sea’, in Hemingway’s Debt to Baseball in The Old Man and the Sea, ed. C. Harold Hurley (Lewiston, N.Y.: The Edward Mellen Press, 1992), 34.

39 New York Daily News, 12 December 1951; as quoted in Lawrence Baldassaro, ‘Joe DiMaggio’, Society of American Baseball Research. https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/a48f1830 (accessed February 24, 2019).

40 Monteiro, ‘Santiago, DiMaggio, and Hemingway’, 34.

41 Charles Alexander, John McGraw (Viking: 1988), 7.

42 Bill James, The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers from 1870 to Today (New York: Scribner, 1997), 47.

43 Ibid., 54.

44 Alexander, John McGraw (Viking: 1988), 216; Sporting News, 11 November 1920, 1.

45 Alexander, John McGraw, 7.

46 The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, vol. 2 (1923–1925), ed. Sandra Spanier, Albert DeFazio III, and Robert W. Trogdon (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 188.

47 Alexander, John McGraw, 256–58, 262–65.

48 Ibid., 266.

49 ‘Mister Muggsy’. The New Yorker 1:6 (28 March 1925), 10; according to Frank Deford, the story was the first sports profile to appear in the magazine. Deford, The Old Ball Game: How John McGraw, Christy Mathewson, and the New York Giants Created Modern Baseball (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005), 210.

50 Alexander, John McGraw, 177.

51 ‘Mister Muggsy’, 9.

52 Ibid., 62; Maury Klein, Stealing Games: How John McGraw Transformed Baseball with the 1911 New York Giants (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016), 8–9.

53 Hemingway, In Our Time, 44–45 and passim.

54 Alexander, John McGraw 317.

55 Hemingway had fraternized with the Dodgers during their spring training visits to Cuba in the 1940s, often inviting players to his home near Havana. For a thorough and incisive investigation into the charge that Hemingway’s invitations were racially exclusive just as the Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Don Newcombe, and Roy Partlow in order to break the longstanding major-league color barrier, see Gietschier, ‘Slugging and Snubbing: Hugh Casey, Ernest Hemingway, and Jackie Robinson – A Baseball Mystery’, 12–46.

56 Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 24.

57 Alexander, John McGraw, 159. According to Alexander, McGraw had been responsible for coining the name of Jose Abeal’s restaurant, Sloppy Joe’s (ibid., 203). The current website for the Havana restaurant does not mention McGraw in its history, although it does promote Hemingway as a frequent patron in the 1940s and ‘50s. The restaurant has no connection to Sloppy Joe’s bar in Key West, Florida, with which Hemingway is more famously associated.

58 Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 24.

59 Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea, 25. Knowingly, Manolin then asks whether Dolf Luque or Mike Gonzalez, the longtime rival managers of Almandares and Habana in the Cuban leagues, is in fact the greatest manager of all. Santiago, refusing to choose between the two men, replies that he believes they are equal. Luque and Gonzalez, who have been called the ‘two true patriarchs of baseball in Cuba’, also played for many years in the major leagues. See Peter C. Bjarkman, ‘Dolf Luque’, Society for American Baseball Research. https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/29c1fec2 (accessed February 24, 2019). Both Luque and Gonzalez played for McGraw in New York; Luque also pitched for Cincinnati against the White Sox in the 1919 World Series.

60 Lynn, Hemingway, 159. Lynn notes that Hemingway needed ‘three or four years to put the addiction behind him’.

61 Hemingway, A Moveable Feast, 61–65.

62 Alexander, John McGraw, 160.

63 Ibid., 162.

64 Ibid., 166.

65 Ibid., 137–141; Klein, Stealing Games 301–305.

66 Dear Papa, Dear Hotch, 30; Gietschier, ‘Slugging and Snubbing’, 28.

67 Alexander, John McGraw, 162.