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A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson
A Ball Player's Career - Being the Personal Experiences and Reminiscensces of Adrian C. Anson is presented here in a high quality paperback edition. This popular classic work by Adrian Constantine Anson is in the English language, and may not include graphics or images from the original edition. If you enjoy the works of Adrian Constantine Anson then we highly recommend this publication for your book collection.
178 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2008
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 17, 2015
I was excited when I first started this book. I like baseball and have great memories of watching games on tv with my Dad. So when I saw a chance to read about the man called by wiki 'the first superstar of baseball' I thought COOL!
Anson played back in the 1800's when pitchers made their own baseballs (sometimes using fish eyes as the core...blech), nearly every town had their own team, and team scores could get into the triple digits. Wild and wooly days! I was expecting to sit in the dugout spitting and scratching with the boys while hearing funny stories about various games during Anson's 27-year career in the sport.
While reading the wiki article about Anson, I learned that the book was ghost-written, and the actual writer had a hard time getting our superstar to talk. The first few chapters covered his youth: his lack of success in school, his desire only to be out playing games, and his being a 'natural born kicker'. Not meaning kicker as in soccer but kicker against the traces, to borrow an old-fashioned term. In other words he was a fighter with a terrible temper and resented any attempt by anyone to control his high spirits. But other than a few comments here and there, I never felt like I was getting to know Anson at all.
STRIKE ONE!
He became part of the local baseball team at age 15 or so, and from there went on to playing in Philadelphia and I thought Okay, now I will get my stories. There were quite a few old pictures in the book, and I wanted to hear about those men with their quaint uniforms and their huge mustaches. Who were they and what nifty things did they do? Well, I learned who they were, alright. Big chunks of the chapters from this point became team rosters and game stats, mixed together with little nuggets like Anson taking boxing lessons from a champion boxer, his seeing his future wife for the first time (she was 13 just then but he wasn't much older), and suffering from a frog felon for one season. I had to look that up: it's an infection on the end of the finger, and I imagine would be torture for any ball player.
Eventually he signed on with the new post-Chicago fire team. In 1888 those players and another squad named the All-Americans leave on a trip to Australia to share the delights of the game with the people Down Under. This begins the travelogue portion of the book, where we hear about every testimonial dinner between Chicago and San Francisco and beyond, all the tourist sights visited, and oh, once in a while a paragraph or two about the games they played.
STRIKE TWO!
According to wiki, Anson was extremely prejudiced even for his day, but no such attitude showed up in the book until during this trip, where he made comments about Chinatown in San Francisco. I will not even go into the disturbing, shameful treatment of a man by the name of Clarence Duval, who was signed on as 'team mascot'. Anywhere Mr. Duval is mentioned, Anson's personality shows up, completely overshadowing the ghost writer's style. That any one person, let alone an entire team, could act this way towards another human being makes me ashamed for them. Apologies to Clarence Duval for the humiliations these idiots put you through, sir.
HARD FOUL!
In Australia it was announced to the teams that they would continue on around the world, and they visited Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Egypt, Italy, France, Great Britain. More chapters of travelogue, tourist adventures and ocean storms. I had lost interest in Anson and his cronies by this point and I just skimmed the last few chapters. He gets home, leaves baseball after another couple of years, and starts running a huge pool hall. Whoopee. He may have been the first superstar of baseball, but as a person he was (to me) a despicable stinker.
STRIKE THREE....YOU'RE OUT!
Anson played back in the 1800's when pitchers made their own baseballs (sometimes using fish eyes as the core...blech), nearly every town had their own team, and team scores could get into the triple digits. Wild and wooly days! I was expecting to sit in the dugout spitting and scratching with the boys while hearing funny stories about various games during Anson's 27-year career in the sport.
While reading the wiki article about Anson, I learned that the book was ghost-written, and the actual writer had a hard time getting our superstar to talk. The first few chapters covered his youth: his lack of success in school, his desire only to be out playing games, and his being a 'natural born kicker'. Not meaning kicker as in soccer but kicker against the traces, to borrow an old-fashioned term. In other words he was a fighter with a terrible temper and resented any attempt by anyone to control his high spirits. But other than a few comments here and there, I never felt like I was getting to know Anson at all.
STRIKE ONE!
He became part of the local baseball team at age 15 or so, and from there went on to playing in Philadelphia and I thought Okay, now I will get my stories. There were quite a few old pictures in the book, and I wanted to hear about those men with their quaint uniforms and their huge mustaches. Who were they and what nifty things did they do? Well, I learned who they were, alright. Big chunks of the chapters from this point became team rosters and game stats, mixed together with little nuggets like Anson taking boxing lessons from a champion boxer, his seeing his future wife for the first time (she was 13 just then but he wasn't much older), and suffering from a frog felon for one season. I had to look that up: it's an infection on the end of the finger, and I imagine would be torture for any ball player.
Eventually he signed on with the new post-Chicago fire team. In 1888 those players and another squad named the All-Americans leave on a trip to Australia to share the delights of the game with the people Down Under. This begins the travelogue portion of the book, where we hear about every testimonial dinner between Chicago and San Francisco and beyond, all the tourist sights visited, and oh, once in a while a paragraph or two about the games they played.
STRIKE TWO!
According to wiki, Anson was extremely prejudiced even for his day, but no such attitude showed up in the book until during this trip, where he made comments about Chinatown in San Francisco. I will not even go into the disturbing, shameful treatment of a man by the name of Clarence Duval, who was signed on as 'team mascot'. Anywhere Mr. Duval is mentioned, Anson's personality shows up, completely overshadowing the ghost writer's style. That any one person, let alone an entire team, could act this way towards another human being makes me ashamed for them. Apologies to Clarence Duval for the humiliations these idiots put you through, sir.
HARD FOUL!
In Australia it was announced to the teams that they would continue on around the world, and they visited Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), Egypt, Italy, France, Great Britain. More chapters of travelogue, tourist adventures and ocean storms. I had lost interest in Anson and his cronies by this point and I just skimmed the last few chapters. He gets home, leaves baseball after another couple of years, and starts running a huge pool hall. Whoopee. He may have been the first superstar of baseball, but as a person he was (to me) a despicable stinker.
STRIKE THREE....YOU'RE OUT!
June 2, 2024
Read a copy of the first edition published in 1900 and given to me by my daughter who found it at thrift shop in Chicago.
Hard to put a rating on a book that is both a product of its time and that was perhaps primarily ghost-written about a figure who, fairly, was a racist even by the standards of his day and contributed to the establishment of the color line that wasn’t broken until 50 years after he finished his playing career.
Much of the book is a travelogue recounting tours of England and a world tour with some interesting commentary on the composition of various teams Anson captained and their records and performance. Also an interesting description of the first attempt by players to unionize through the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, which Anson did not support, and that led to the creation of the Players League in 1890.
Hard to put a rating on a book that is both a product of its time and that was perhaps primarily ghost-written about a figure who, fairly, was a racist even by the standards of his day and contributed to the establishment of the color line that wasn’t broken until 50 years after he finished his playing career.
Much of the book is a travelogue recounting tours of England and a world tour with some interesting commentary on the composition of various teams Anson captained and their records and performance. Also an interesting description of the first attempt by players to unionize through the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, which Anson did not support, and that led to the creation of the Players League in 1890.
February 24, 2014
Written in 1900, Anson's autobiography provides a
fascinating perspective to the pre-modern era of baseball.
A period many contemporary fans consider 'not real baseball',
full of odd rules, outlandish statistics, and
handlebar mustaches.
It is fairly amusing to read Anson looking back at
the '70s as a time when the ballplayers were 'real'
stars, the 1870s.
For a time pitchers did toss underhand, catchers
did not use a glove, in 1866-67 there were 25 games
in which one hundred runs were scored, by the winning
team. Even Anson marvels at how good of shape the
base runners must have been in to circle the bases
so many times.
Despite these extremes, baseball did start taking
shape to the game we know today in the 1880s. One of
the main problems teams faced was not how the game was
played, but keeping players. Other teams would hire
players away causing teams to collapse, thus the reserve
clause was born, which gave much needed stability to the
leagues, but it didn't take long for the players to
rebel against it.
Though Cap Anson was a star player of the era and
organizer, there isn't a lot on his 'great plays' or
game winning hits, or replays of notable games. Cap
does note the rosters of his teams, occasionally
a well known name will popup, AG Spalding for instance.
Most baseball stories are at a higher summary level,
such as what cities were in the league and in what
place they finished.
The middle 14 chapters describe a baseball
barnstorming tour they took across the West of
the United States, onto Hawaii, New Zealand,
Australia, and from there deciding to go around the
rest of world, showing how baseball is played and
taking on a few cricket teams.
As this travelogue takes place in 1888-89 it does have
an interesting perspective on the world at the time,
but there isn't much history of baseball in these
chapters (should you want to skip them).
Cap Anson is usually noted as someone who was a
proponent of the segregation of baseball, so I kept
a look out figuring that written in 1900, he didn't
have to worry about editing any thoughts because of
political correctness or modern attitudes, however
there were no insights.
The story is told in a modest, self-effacing often
amusing style. You'll be treated to Cap tales, as
when a favorite player, though a good batsman,
did have problems in the field, but kept optimistic:
"By Gad, I made it hit me gloves, anyhow."
The book makes me want to re-watch the first episodes of
Ken Burns' 'Baseball' to see how they compare.
As with celebrities today, the book was ghostwritten
by sportswriter Richard Cary Jr., pen name Hyder Ali.
This book is available for no charge in various formats
at the Gutenberg project (which is how I got it):
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/19652
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews