‘Outsider Baseball’ unearths sport’s oddities, misfits

By David L. ULIN

Los Angeles Times

What I love most about baseball is its weird history, the oddities and misfits who give flavor to the sport. When I was a kid, I used to pore through “The Baseball Encyclopedia” looking for the one-line careers, those players who only made it to the majors for a single year, or even a single game.

Some of these figures linger with us now for other reasons: Sparky Anderson, for instance, who played the full 1959 season at second base for the Philadelphia Phillies and then disappeared for a decade before emerging as a Hall of Fame manager in Cincinnati and Detroit. My favorite of them remains Moonlight Graham, who threw one inning for the 1905 New York Giants and was never heard from again.

Graham resonates for another reason: I first heard about him in the pages of W.P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel “Shoeless Joe,” which imagines a baseball afterlife for him, tracing his life as a small-town physician called back to the field of dreams.

Now, Graham has shown up again, in the pages of Gary Cierdkowski’s “The League of Outsider Baseball: An Illustrated History of Baseball’s Forgotten Heroes” (Touchstone; 234 pages, $25). The book, which grew out of the author’s blog, the Infinite Baseball Card Set, offers a lavishly illustrated, deeply researched collection of portraits of the unexpected and the obscure.

Did you know about Jack Kerouac’s fantasy baseball league? You’ll find that story in these pages. The nine-game minor league career of Dwight D. Eisenhower? It’s here as well.

From George H.W. Bush to the House of David, Fidel Castro (who threw two innings in a 1959 exhibition game) to Kitty Burke (who batted once, against Paul Dean, in a 1935 game between the Reds and the Cardinals), Cierdkowski takes ephemera and spins it into baseball lore.

“The League of Outsider Baseball,” though, is not interested in myth, but rather in the underpinnings, the lost history.

Sometimes, that means reading about names we recognize, albeit in a different context, such as Roberto Clemente’s lost 1954 season with the Brooklyn Dodgers’ Montreal farm club.