Burleigh Grimes chewed slippery elm tree fibers and then spit on the ball, reducing the friction and the spin and making the ball pop from his fingers “like I was squeezing a watermelon pit.” When it worked, the ball would “break like hell,” making it harder to hit.Footnote ¹ Although the spitball was banned in 1920, ending the “deadball era,” Grimes was one of the pitchers grandfathered into the new regime as a “Legal Spitballer.” He kept throwing spitballs until he retired in 1934. Grimes was a mean, angry, belligerent player, whose cantankerous image was enhanced by his sour expression and stubbly beard. In his 2006 play, Roger Kirby named an evil stock-trader, who ruthlessly deployed dirty tricks to make money, Burleigh Grimes. But as the real Grimes later told an interviewer, he had to keep the elm bark in his mouth for the whole game because it tasted so bad that once out, he could not bear to put it back. He also did not shave when he was pitching because he drooled so much and the saliva irritated his skin. It is possible that he suffered diarrhea from chewing the bark as well. Doubtless, his disagreeable on-field persona owed something to the substance he consumed to win, though even his meticulous biographer cannot help portraying him as a man with a vicious temper.Footnote ²

Was there a real Burleigh Grimes, or was he playing a part? And who created his meanness – the people who perceived him that way or the personality he intentionally presented? Is “intention” the best way to understand self-presentation and, if not, was his meanness a “performance”? Was he simply misunderstood, or did he want to be seen as a bully? These are interesting questions, and their answers provide rich insight into the human condition. But if we do not ask the questions, if we just stop at the level of Grimes’s nastiness, and treat it as an “act,” what insight do we gain?

Travis Stern’s Baseball Players on Stage is about the roles that baseball players assumed on the field and the stage in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unusually, Stern looks not at vaudeville, where baseball players appeared in significant numbers, but at the conventional theater, where only a handful of players were featured. The few baseball players who did appear in the dramatic theater, we learn, appeared in scripted plays, generally in cameo parts. What Stern concludes is that the roles they played in dramas and comedies were remarkably similar to the ones they assumed on the diamond and that a theatrical persona could enhance and popularize a game persona. Stern treats both playing sports and acting as performances and he demonstrates this point by describing the similarities between the players’ sports and stage personae. Stern characterizes each of the ballplayers he discusses as expressing a different persona. Cap Anson was a model of professionalism and self-discipline; Mike Kelly was a nouveau riche social climber; Christy Mathewson was a melodramatic hero; Ty Cobb was an uncomplicated villain; and Rube Waddell was a bumpkin. The athletes acted their parts on the field and the stage, and Stern argues that audiences learned to cheer on positive values and hiss at wickedness in both venues. Although Stern may be right when it comes to the theater, I am not convinced that spectators would have perceived a player like Cobb as a villain when he was batting for the home team. Surely, fan loyalty complicates performance on the baseball diamond in ways it does not in the theater?

Stern’s work focuses on melodrama, the theatrical genre in which the baseball players he treats acted. As Ben Singer brilliantly suggested, melodrama was a spectacular form of theater ideally suited to a modern mode of perception.Footnote ³ Building on this argument, Stern suggests that melodrama defined both baseball and popular theater. Baseball, he points out, grew at a time when melodrama dominated the stage (from the early 1800s to the 1920s) and the sport, he argues, adopted the genre’s spectacle, pathos, and moral dichotomy. It is not an especially convincing argument, because even if there is a temporal coincidence between the rise of most contemporary team sports and the golden age of melodrama, it is hard to show that one influenced the other. In fact, the Palio in Siena has been revolving around powerful melodramatic binaries – winner versus loser; my neighborhood versus the outsider’s; hero versus villain; potency versus impotence; life versus death – since as long ago as the fourteenth century, long before the birth of the modern theatrical form.

Stern follows performance theorists in distinguishing between an individual’s persona (their public image) and the roles they play in different situations. The model here is the movie star, who has an overarching media image but who also plays different characters. As the author points out, however, it is not an especially meaningful difference in his study because the athletes were not good enough actors to play roles different from their public personae. But Stern’s presentation also misses something important in performance theory. Although he pays lip service to the interactive element of performance, he tends to treat the personae themselves as autonomous and somewhat fixed. Performance does not come off here as something perceived, or reciprocally forged, but as a thing projected. Of course, what limits interactive performance theory in this work and as a historical tool generally is the problem of sources. We do not know very much about how audiences experienced baseball games or plays; we know even less about how audience reactions shaped the baseball players’ or the actors’ self-presentations. In the absence of this information, and despite his own interpretive inclinations, Stern is forced to treat audiences as receptors rather than participants. As a result, his baseball players present similarly in all situations. In fact, he postulates that they were prisoners of the monolithic personae they created.

Stern documents the little-known fact that from the 1880s to the 1920s a few professional athletes tried to earn money and enhance their popularity by appearing in plays. The book offers some early examples of how celebrity evolved in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era and of the relationship of gentility to fame. It does not discuss the differences between watching a game where the outcome is in doubt and a stage melodrama where the outcome is predetermined. It does not account for how team loyalty turns one fan’s villain into another’s hero. It does not explore the meaning of persona or its relationship to the self or explain what we gain by adopting a performance-based approach to sports history. Burleigh Grimes does not figure in this book, as he never appeared in a play, but if he had, I do not think Stern would tell whether he was performing nastiness or just plain mean.

The above review was commissioned and edited by Daniel Platt. Brian M. Ingrassia, who contributed a foreword to this book, did not contribute substantially to the production of this review.