As most team sports are now well into their second century of existence, it is natural that some of the great players of years gone by have now faded from the collective memory. “CY” WILLIAMS: BASEBALL’S MOST UNIQUE STAR SLUGGER seeks to return one of them to that memory. Written by Williams’s grandson, Gary Williams, the book offers a fascinating, if choppy, glimpse into the career of one of the dead-ball era’s most recognizable faces.
An Indiana man who tried his hand at football and athletics while at Notre Dame, Williams’s baseball career spanned most of the 1910s and 20s. In his day, he was one of baseball’s most accomplished players, competing in terms of statistics with the likes of Babe Ruth. He had no notable team successes, however, a result of a poor trade in 1917 from the Chicago Cubs to the Philadelphia Phillies, then about to embark on a lean spell that would last for over 30 years. Gary Williams makes copious use of newspaper reports, reproducing many in the original. The book is also richly illustrated with fine photographs of Williams and other players that bring the era to life, as well as photographs from the family archive. The presentation is generally good, though there are more than a few missing periods and an orphaned parenthesis. We also get a reference to Williams’s “Welch [sic] ancestry” at one point.
The written register is fairly colloquial, sentence fragments of the sort one habitually uses in conversation being an integral part of the writing style. The rhetorical device of regularly referring to Williams’s uniqueness becomes tiresome after a while, however; given his career, it is surely sufficient to let his exploits speak for themselves. One senses the lack of an editor’s hand at times; such trivialities as a list of funny pitchers’ names included “just for fun” could have been usefully excised from a book that already tips the scales at 473 pages.
Gary Williams writes that the book is meant “for the common fan and aficionados,” and many of the book’s shortcomings derive from this dual purpose. The author is obliged to walk the casual reader through the various developments that characterized baseball during Williams’s career: the introduction of “juiced” balls in 1920 that supposedly heralded, almost overnight, the end of the dead-ball era; the appointment of a Major League Commissioner to oversee the sport’s governance following the laissez faire approach of previous decades; and so on. The result is a book that is in many ways just as much about baseball’s history as it is about Williams himself. The author is somewhat aware of the choppiness this introduces into the narrative, suggesting that it is “easy to read some, set [the book] down, and pick it up again later.” That’s good advice. For those looking for anecdotes about Williams and his career, or those simply seeking to learn a little about what baseball was like in the days of Ruth and Gehrig, there is much of interest here.
“CY” WILLIAMS: BASEBALL’S MOST UNIQUE STAR SLUGGER by Gary Williams offers a comprehensive overview of Williams’s 18-year baseball career, as well as his life and exploits.
~Craig Jones for IndieReader