Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Gashouse Gang by John Heidenry Verdun2's Blog. Well, I’m back from high school graduation. She made it through. We made it there and back. Along the way I picked up a book to read in down time. It’s called “The Gashouse Gang”, it’s by John Heidenry, and here’s a quick review of it. The book is a look at the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals, who won the World Series that year with one of the more colorful teams ever. The book concentrates more on the players than on the games. It centers around Dizzy Dean (naturally) and occasionally you forget that there were other players on the team. Heidenry sees Dean as intelligent and manipulative, a classic con man who can pitch. There are a dozen or so episodes in the book centering on Dean that make him come alive as a person. There are also sketches of general manager Branch Rickey, of manager Frankie Frisch, and of a handful of the players. The sections are uneven in that the comments on Joe Medwick are more in-depth than the comments on Ernie Orsatti. The same is true of other players. The players Heidenry finds most fascinating (or maybe that he can find the most info on) range over several pages. These include players like Paul Dean (who apparently hated being called “Daffy”), Pepper Martin, Medwick, and Leo Durocher while other players like Rip Collins, Spud Chandler, and the non-Dean pitchers get only passing reference. Jack Rothrock is almost invisible. There is also a nice, but short, sketch on Sam Breaden, the owner. Heidenry spends the better part of a chapter trying to determine where the moniker “Gashouse Gang” came from. He finally decides that the New York papers came up with it in 1935, the year after the Cards won the Series. He also spends a couple of chapters on the 1934 World Series (against Detroit) with a nice character sketch of Mickey Cochrane thrown in as a welcome bonus. All in all it’s a good book and worth the read if you’re a fan of 1930s baseball. It’s even better if you’re a fan of the Cardinals. The book was published in 2007 and is available in paperback at Barnes and Noble. It retails for $17.99. Share this: Like this: Related. This entry was posted on June 6, 2013 at 8:30 am and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Gas House Gang. The Gas House Gang was a term given to the St. Louis Cardinals teams of the early 1930s, especially the championship 1934 World Series victors. The nickname was given to them as a way of describing the enjoyment with which they seemed to play the game, along with the aggressive attitude they took that always seemed to give them dirty uniforms, making them resemble the grease-stained clothing worn by car mechanics. Prominent members of the Gas House Gang included Frankie Frisch, Joe Medwick, brothers Dizzy Dean and Paul Dean, Ripper Collins, Leo Durocher and Pepper Martin. The last surviving member of the team, Don Gutteridge, died in 2008. Further Reading [ edit ] Charles F. Faber, ed.: The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals: The World Champion Gas House Gang , SABR, Phoenix, AZ, 2014. ISBN 978-1- 933599-731 Doug Feldmann: Dizzy and the Gas House Gang: The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals and Depression-Era Baseball , McFarland, Jefferson, NC, 2000. ISBN 978-0-7864-0858-0 G.H. Fleming: The Dizziest Season: The Gashouse Gang Chases the Pennant , William Morrow & Co, New York, NY, 1984. ISBN 0688030971 John Heidenry: The Gashouse Gang , PublicAffairs Books, New York, NY, 2007. This page was last edited on 6 March 2018, at 21:43. Content is available under GNU Free Documentation License unless otherwise noted. Welcome · Your Account. Full Site Menu. We're Social. for Statheads. 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Some defensive statistics Copyright © Baseball Info Solutions, 2010-2020. Some high school data is courtesy David McWater. Many historical player head shots courtesy of David Davis. Many thanks to him. All images are property the copyright holder and are displayed here for informational purposes only. Lit Bases. The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals are considered one of the greatest teams to ever go onto a baseball diamond. It took 73 years before an author, John Heidenry, finally gave the team known as The Gashouse Gang the immortalization it deserves. The Gashouse Gang had some legendary characters: Pepper Martin, Leo Durocher, and Dizzy Dean. You learn a little bit about Martin and Durocher in The Gashouse Gang. You’ll be learning a lot about the last one, because The Gashouse Gang is so centered around Dizzy Dean that it might as well be a biography of him. That and his brother, Paul. Branch Rickey shows up in The Gashouse Gang a lot too, but he is of course relegated into the background, which I guess is an understandable move. After all, Rickey is only the guy who forever changed the face of the entire damn sport two separate times! Okay, maybe that observation about Rickey in Heidenry’s book is a little bit unfair. He was the owner of the team, after all, and Heindenry and an essential part of any Magic Season chronicle is the buildup explanation – the culmination of conditions which resulted in the season at hand. And the St. Louis Cardinals, despite their legions of fervent worshippers, have always been a rather low-budget operation. At least, they’ve been comparatively low-budget when compared to the big-spending powerhouses, but one way or the other they’ve always been a model franchise. They’ve been successful in every aspect of baseball. On the field, only the New York Yankees have ever won more titles than the ten possessed by the Redbirds, and their 17 Pennants place them among baseball’s most dominant teams of all time. If they had a top five – or maybe even a top ten – budget, it’s scary to think of just how powerful the Cardinals could have been. As far as the Magic Season trope goes, The Gashouse Gang is pretty generic. Even with the presence of Dizzy and Paul Dean – Diz being one of the funniest and most colorful characters to ever stand atop a pitcher’s mound – The Gashouse Gang is really, really played down. It doesn’t present us with any of the small-time incidents that would make the team come off as fun, loose, or rowdy as baseball mythos leads us to believe, and that is a massive strike against The Gashouse Gang. The Gashouse Gang should have been a better – or at least a more fun – book than it is. I can’t think of a lot of other baseball books that I wanted to like as much as I did this one. The Cardinals are one of my favorite National League teams, and so I’m pretty steeped in their legacy and was looking forward to being regaled with anecdotes unique to this amazing powerhouse. But the execution of The Gashouse Gang, aside from revolving almost solely around one player, is blase. It’s like one of those summer popcorn movies that you don’t remember ten seconds after stepping out of the theater. During the initial buildup to the 1934 season, The Gashouse Gang reads like a good overview. Heidenry writes brief biographies of a handful of the important players on the team, and more in-depth biographies about Rickey and the Dean brothers. After Around the third or fourth chapter, the team overview takes a holiday as the zoom lens focuses in on the brothers Dean. The REAL shame of The Gashouse Gang is that you don’t learn very much about them, either. Heidenry leaves you with the unfailing fact that Dizzy was the definite star of the team. But as far as the descriptions of Dizzy’s on-field antics go, Bill Lee’s book Baseball Eccentrics contains more details about the Dizzy Dean we all know and love. We get a glimpse of the Dizzy Dean who wittily claimed he was marrying a woman who had slept with half the city because he was one of the people she slept with (the marriage, by the way, lasted for 43 years despite her reputation) and the Dizzy Dean who rebelled halfway through the season, trying to go on strike because he felt like he wasn’t being paid enough. Heidenry writes at one point that his teammates saw him as a good guy with a penchant for mischief, and that’s how he comes off, even in spite of his apparently constant feuding with Branch Rickey.