Opening Day is upon us, and the new baseball book 'Justice Batted Last' hits a homer

Rick Kogan, Chicago Tribune on Mar 6, 2025

Published in Baseball

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Another baseball season, heavy with hope, begins on March 17 with the first of two games between the Chicago Cubs and the Los Angeles Dodgers in, of all the “we are the world” places, Tokyo.

What is being called “traditional” Opening Day is set to take on March 27, with one Opening Day game moved to March 28 so that George M. Steinbrenner Field in Tampa, Florida, can be fully mended from the damage caused by Hurricane Milton.

As a member of the last generation to come of age before baseball was overwhelmed by money, steroids and television contracts, I have to admit my excitement for opening days, for baseball in general, has waned. I don’t have a mitt in my closet and I couldn’t tell you who plays shortstop for the Milwaukee Brewers.

Still, reflexively at the beginning of each new season, I try to find and read baseball books in an attempt to recapture a piece of my youth.

I have the advantage of a pile of baseball books that have come my way over the last decades and I can dip in return to favorites if need be.

I almost always read what I think is the best non-fiction baseball story, that being by John Updike in The New Yorker in 1960, writing about Ted Williams hitting a home run in his last at-bat in Boston’s Fenway Park. It’s titled “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” and contains this type of spectacular writing:

“Like a feather caught in a vortex, Williams ran around the square of bases at the center of our beseeching screaming. He ran as he always ran out home runs — hurriedly, unsmiling, head down, as if our praise were a storm of rain to get out of. He didn’t tip his cap. Though we thumped, wept, and chanted “We want Ted” for minutes after he hid in the dugout, he did not come back. Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a wailing, a cry to be saved. But immortality is nontransferable. The papers said that the other players, and even the umpires on the field, begged him to come out and acknowledge us in some way, but he never had and did not now. Gods do not answer letters.”

Fiction? I’ll reach for Bernard Malamud’s 1952’s “The Natural.” It’s better than the 1984 Robert Redford movie, though I like that too.

In the book, you’ll read: “He remembered how satisfied he had been as a youngster, and that with the little he had had — a dog, a stick, an aloneness he loved (which did not bleed him like his later loneliness), and he wished he could have lived longer in his boyhood. This was an old thought with him.”

My most recent new baseball book is “Justice Batted Last: Ernie Banks, Minnie Miñoso, and the Unheralded Players Who Integrated Chicago’s Major League Teams” (3 Field Books). Deeply researched and written by Don Zminda, a smart and passionate guy, it is a winner.

Zminda is a former director of STATS LLC, the Loop-based provider of sports information and statistics, and the author of the books, one about Harry Caray and, showing his (or his publisher’s) affinity for long titles, another called “Double Plays and Double Crosses: The Black Sox and Baseball in 1920.”

He writes that long before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, “Chicago was a major hub of Black baseball,” and proceeds to give the reader reasons why. None of them are pretty.

But he makes Ernie Banks, who was Black, and Minnie Miñoso (full name Saturnino Orestes Armas Arrieta Miñoso, and Cuban), come to life along with dozens of deserving others, such as pitcher Robert Luther Burns. Less formally known as “Blood” Burns, he expressed a charmingly laid back attitude in salary negotiating: “People would say, how much bread do you want? I’d say, let me talk to the man … and sometimes I would say, that’s not enough for me … but I got on with them. I made money, I spent money and I had a hell of a good time. I don’t regret a bit.”

Banks (of the Cubs) and Miñoso (White Sox) are the “stars” of this book. But we also learn of the many others who deserved to play in the majors and why they didn’t. Famously, the Tribune’s Mike Royko, a lifelong passionate Cubs, focused on this in what would be his final column, printed only a week before his death on April 29, 1997. The headline says it all: “It was Wrigley, not some goat, who cursed the Cubs.”

OK then, Opening Day … Enjoy, watch, cheer, boo, or read. Baseball can still bring out the best in some people and allow you to touch your childhood, a simpler time.

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