Paths to Glory

Foreword by Rob Neyer

Rob Neyer is a Senior Writer and baseball columnist for ESPN.com.  His latest book, Rob Neyer's Big Book of Baseball Lineups, was published by Fireside in the spring of 2003.

I’ve read a lot of books about baseball teams. Not as many as some, but more than most. Comes with the job, I guess.

But I’ve read all sorts of other books, too (I’d rather read a book than write one, but I haven’t been able to figure out a way to make reading pay like writing can). I’ve read books about great men, I’ve read books about great bridges, I’ve read books about great documents, I’ve read books about ... well, you get the idea. And if there’s one question that all of these books strive to answer, it’s how was this man – or this bridge, or this document – built. That’s what we really want to know, right? After all, most of us know the big stuff, the famous stuff. What we really want to know is how this thing went from nothing to something.

Yet for some reason, when we read a book about a baseball team, we rarely learn much about what happened before the team became famous. It’s almost as if the ’27 Yankees and the ’29 Athletics and the ’55 Dodgers and the ’75 Reds just ... appeared on the scene fully formed from nothing, just as Athena leapt from the brow of Zeus. There are even books about what happened to the team years later.

And you know, I’m nearly as guilty as anybody. A few years ago, I wrote a book called Baseball Dynasties with Eddie Epstein, with a chapter on each of the fifteen teams we considered the greatest of the 20^th century. And though we didn’t completely ignore what came before – each chapter contained a small section on how the team was built – it now occurs to me that we probably should have written twice as much as we did, and it also occurs to me that we rarely even mentioned the names of the men who put those teams together.

Which reminds me, there’s another reason that I’m excited about this book, which is that it should get people thinking about a group of men who are sadly neglected when people talk about the game.

No, not scouts. You may think that they belong in the Hall of Fame, and I won’t bother arguing with you. But the fact that there is a debate about scouts means they’re not really that unappreciated. On the other hand, when was the last time somebody got a plaque in Cooperstown because he built a great baseball team? I don’t know, either, so let me consult Total Baseball ... Well, it looks to me like it’s been about twenty-five years, as Larry McPhail was elected to the Hall in 1978 (MacPhail, as you probably know, put together the early-‘40s Dodgers and the late-‘40s Yankees, though he may have been enshrined for introducing night ball to the majors as much as for anything else).

That’s not to say this book is about who belongs in the Hall of Fame, and who doesn’t. We’ve got plenty of those books already. No, this book is about something far more interesting, far more fundamental. This book is about how the teams that still live in our memories reached the point at which they could do enough to live in our memories. Some of them were great and some of them weren’t so great, but all of them were built, and it’s the building that can tell us some fundamental things about the sport.

I’ve already read this book, which makes me a lucky guy. And you know what? I can’t wait for the sequel. Because I’ve already come up with thirteen more teams whose stories should be told.