BLUE RUIN CL

In a fictional recreation of the early years of baseball, Boston numbers runner Joseph "Sport" Sullivan convinces players on the White Sox to throw the 1919 World Series

Sportswriter Boyd (The Great American Baseball Card Book, etc.) recounts the story of how professional gamblers fixed the Black Sox series. Boyd's twist on this familiar material is to make the players peripheral to the gamblers. His narrator, Joseph ``Sport'' Sullivan, a small-time chiseler with dreams he's never acted on, spends a hundred pages peddling the fix to gambling kingpin Arnold Rothstein, who'll supply the payoff money, and to eight of the players, who'll throw the games. In effect, then, Sport is nobody, just a man with an idea that takes on a life of its own. In tracking the fate of Sport's dream of the perfect scam, Boyd shoves everything and everyone else offstage- -the intrigues and double-crosses that drive down the odds on Cincinnati before Sport can get his money down, the obligatory historical cameos (Ring Lardner, George M. Cohan, Jack Dempsey, Babe Ruth, etc.), and the Series itself (which flashes by in a blur as Sport, accompanied by a distant pickup named Rose, scurries to compound his wagers after each game). The payoff comes in the long, memorably dreary epilogue, as Sport, rich but terminally aimless, drifts from Chicago to California to New York and Boston trying to spend his money and set up another score on his own: a Hollywood picture, a bicycle race, a prizefight, another Series. But the price for these powerfully depressive chapters is high: everybody but sententious Sport (who warns aptly of moments ``so ripe with contrary significance that I might easily allegorize them out of existence'') passes by shrouded in fog. Boyd is no E. L. Doctorow or F. Scott Fitzgerald; he may remind you more of your garrulous Uncle Bill. Even so, this is a genuinely original retake on one of the most compelling American fables. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Just in time for the fall classic comes this story of gamblers who bought the 1919 World Series. Told by Sport Sullivan, the small-time gambler who set the scam in motion, the story reveals the pervasive corruption and greed afflicting baseball and society in that era. Charles Comiskey cheats his players, who sell out cheap but still get cheated by the gamblers, who are busy cheating each other as well. Left unchecked, the players become ever more blatant until even the blindest and most loyal supporters are driven to cleaning up the game. Sullivan, a small-timer and a born loser, epitomizes the era of the Black Sox, Teapot Dome, and the skyrocketing stock market. Unfortunately, the book is neither as engaging a chronicle of its time as Ragtime , nor as revealing a novel about the Black Sox as Harry Stein's Hoopla! ( LJ 10/1/83). However, it is well researched--the author must have memorized Eliot Asinof's Eight Men Out (1963)--timely, and well worth buying for baseball fans.
- Marylaine Block, St. Ambrose Univ. Lib., Davenport, Ia.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.