Inventing Baseball Heroes

Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and the Sporting Press in America

By: Amber Roessner

Narrated by: Pam Rossi

In Inventing Baseball Heroes, Amber Roessner examines "herocrafting" in sports journalism through an incisive analysis of the work surrounding two of baseball's most enduring personalities - Detroit Tigers outfielder Ty Cobb and New York Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson. While other scholars have demonstrated that the mythmakers of the Golden Age of Sports Writing (1920-1930) manufactured heroes out of baseball players for the mainstream media, Roessner probes further, with a penetrating look at how sportswriters compromised emerging professional standards of journalism as they crafted heroic tales that sought to teach American boys how to be successful players in the game of life.

Cobb and Mathewson, respectively stereotyped as the game's sinner and saint, helped shape their public images in the mainstream press through their relationship with four of the most prominent sports journalists of the time: Grantland Rice, FC Lane, Ring Lardner, and John N. Wheeler. Roessner traces the interactions between the athletes and the reporters, delving into newsgathering strategies as well as rapport-building techniques, and ultimately revealing an inherent tension in objective sports reporting in the era.

Inventing Baseball Heroes will be of interest to scholars of American history, sports history, cultural studies, and communication. Its interdisciplinary approach provides a broad understanding of the role sports journalists played in the production of American heroes.

The book is published by Louisiana State University Press.

©2014 Louisiana State University Press (P)2017 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"A wonderful book for anyone interested in the histories of the national pastime." ( Journalism History)

Reflection on the ungodly union

In "Inventing Baseball Heroes," author Amber Roessner reflects on what was once referred to as the ungodly union between the sports world and the media. Roessner spotlights the media;s mythical, and often exaggerated, portrayals of two of baseball's dead ball era stars - Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson. Both future hall of famer's benefited greatly from their relationship with writers such as John Lardner and Grantland Rice. Media figures would often shape popular opinion of celebrity figures by shining a positive light, whether warranted or not, and in exchange, would be granted access to the stars. In the case of Cobb, the "Georgia Peach" would even plant ideas for writer's to paint him as a national hero - despite his scrapes with the law. As a result, Cobb would be aided financially by signing endorsement deals. Additionally, the media would write stories attributed to baseball stars, but were in reality just ghostly written. In the era long before social media, the author demonstrates how baseball figures enjoyed stellar public relations due to the writer's "creative freedoms" of the time.

Avoid the Audiobook

When I pay good money for a book, which I did for this, I expect at least a minimum level of professionalism from the writer and the narrator. Presumably they got paid for their work. But the narrator especially fell well short of this expectation. Had I still been able to return this for a refund, I would have after the first hour. As it is, I slogged through the entire thing since I was stuck with it anyway, and boy am I glad it’s over.

The major issue is with the narrator. She speaks clearly and distinctly, which is good. However, she mispronounces many, many common everyday words, to the point of distraction. In just the first hour she had already mispronounced the words "adulation," "context," "construct," "comparable," "Augusta," “fledgling,” and "forsook." Many, many more mispronunciations followed for the rest of the book (including saying “antidote” when what was clearly meant was “anecdote” many times). For some of these mispronunciations, she pronounces them correctly other places, so I can only assume that no one cared enough to have her stop and correct the mistakes. Adding to the frustration is the mispronunciation of various player names (although she got "Honus" right, which many people miss).

A truly baffling error came when the narrator said that New York Giants owner Freedman was a "real estate spectacular." Clearly "speculator" was meant. A glaring example of the carelessness with which the narrator and producer created the recording.

Another issue is the narrator’s inflection. She reads stiltedly, like a school kid called on to read from the textbook in class. She says the words, but it's clear she doesn't understand or isn't paying attention to what the sentence is actually saying, resulting in odd inflections that sometimes changed the meaning of the sentence, or creating sentence fragments such as consistently using periods thinking a sentence is over when it's actually just a comma. These misunderstandings and sentence fragments caused me to have to consistently rewind to try to figure out what the author was really trying to say.

It seemed as if nearly every paragraph suffered from at least one of the above issues. It's baffling to me that anyone has rated her performance as "5" or "4." Had the time and care been taken to correct mistakes, I'd have said the narrator did fine. She has a nice enough voice and she did try.

The author herself is not off the hook, however. I give her kudos for correctly identifying team names used in the early 1900's that differ from the names used today such as the Boston Doves and Brooklyn Superbas, but when the author asserted that Christy Matthewson won a game at Wrigley Field in 1905, I had to begin questioning the author's credibility. The stadium now known as Wrigley Field did not exist until 1914.

The author also falls into the inexperienced writer’s trap of trying to vary the selection of words used and winding up using some near-synonyms incorrectly; for example, stating that a writer “argued” when “stated” or “reported” would fit the context better because the topic was simply a statement of fact and no one was presenting an opposing viewpoint. A minor annoyance, but just another straw on the camel’s back. She also misused the word “infamous” to mean “very famous,” which it doesn’t really mean (please look it up).

She also consistently referred to “gee whiz” and “aw nuts” styles of sportswriting. She defined “gee whiz” but never clearly defined what she meant by “aw nuts,” unless maybe that explanation got lost in the narrator’s reading. As that term was used throughout the book, it was annoying that it had never been properly defined.

Additionally, the author needlessly padded a book that was supposed to be about how sportswriters created the images of Matthewson and Cobb, with unnecessary in-depth details of how various games, especially of the World Series, played out. These recaps weren’t unwelcome or uninteresting, but they were well-known stories that sometimes didn’t add anything to the point she was trying to make about the players’ images being created, and seemed to be added merely to achieve a word count. Or if they did matter, the author failed to make the connection (or the connection was lost by the narrator).

All in all, there was some interesting information about sportswriters and sportswriting during the deadball era, but not a lot of new ground seemed to be covered here. It was as much a biography of Matthewson, Cobb, and sportswriters such as Grantland Rice as it was an analysis of the formation of the players' images. If you’re really interested in the topic, it might be worth picking up the Kindle or printed version. But do yourself a favor and avoid this as an audiobook.