‘Baseball in Long Beach’ full of wonderfully hazy memories

There’s a scrapbookishness to Baseball in Long Beach, the recently released retrospective of this city’s contributions to America’s grandest old game. Author Tom Meigs has assembled a lot of mostly old photographs of once-young ballplayers—faces both familiar and forgotten—who either claimed their fame in Long Beach or cashed in on it here. Each shot is accompanied by as much supporting data as Meigs believes is pertinent, or perhaps was available. It’s an overarching and incomplete history. It ain’t poetry, either.

Well, not the self-conscious kind of poetry, anyway, and thank God for that. Anybody else done with baseball-as-metaphor? Okay, so me neither—love that field of dreams stuff, in which baseball bonds us with a lost-and-longed-for simpler time.

But it’s clear Meigs is neither the kind of writer to pull that off, nor the kind of historian to connect all the dots. Instead, he wisely goes with what he knows: the pictures, descriptions and accounts of the games, as the announcers always say in those broadcast copyright warnings.

The pleasant surprise, as we turn the pages of Baseball in Long Beach, is the way the book’s stripped-down simplicity and haphazard components become strengths. The lack of a narrative matters less and less as you scan fuzzy panoramic pictures of Shell Field, Long Beach’s first significant baseball venue, located at the northern foot of Signal Hill where the National Guard station sits now. It’s amazing to consider the big World Series scoreboard that was erected downtown every October so that passersby could follow the game—baserunners moving around the diamond as it was reconstructed from telegraph reports.

The back-in-time machine that Meigs wires together out of historical bric-a-brac produces a kind of found-art poetry that feels a lot like the way our minds remember things. Small events and insignificant people may loom large. Big moments and oversized characters may still be hard to fully absorb. And in the end, it’s all just baseball, anyway.

BASEBALL IN LONG BEACH BY TOM MEIGS | SOFTCOVER | 128 PGS | ARCADIA PUBLISHING | ARCADIAPUBLISHING.COM | $19.99

Tags: arcadia publishing, baseball, Books, history, Long Beach