Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The 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 that year with one of the more colorful teams ever. The book concentrates more on the players than on the games. It centers around (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 , of manager , and of a handful of the players. The sections are uneven in that the comments on are more in-depth than the comments on . 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 (who apparently hated being called “Daffy”), , Medwick, and 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 . 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, , 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. Site Last Updated: FAQs, Tip & Tricks. Learn about the Wins Above Replacement Formula. All logos are the trademark & property of their owners and not Sports Reference LLC. We present them here for purely educational purposes. Our reasoning for presenting offensive logos. Logos were compiled by the amazing SportsLogos.net. Copyright © 2000-2020 Sports Reference LLC. All rights reserved. Much of the play-by-play, game results, and transaction information both shown and used to create certain data sets was obtained free of charge from and is copyrighted by RetroSheet. Win Expectancy, Expectancy, and Leverage Index calculations provided by Tom Tango of InsideTheBook.com, and co-author of The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball. Total Zone Rating and initial framework for Wins above Replacement calculations provided by Sean Smith. Full-year historical Major League statistics provided by Pete Palmer and Gary Gillette of Hidden Game Sports. 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 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. Very few of the other Cardinals players are so much as mentioned with regular frequency. Pepper Martin gets a little bit of face time, and Leo Durocher is pointed at once or twice. But for the most part, Heidenry rarely changes his angle of Dizzy Dean, Dizzy Dean, Dizzy Dean until the Cardinals begin their final push for the Pennant. Dean still figures prominently into the narrative, but the team is finally moved more into the forefront. The unfortunate addendum is that this is one of those books in which the World Series is really dragged out. The coverage lasts for about 50 pages, okay, so I guess it FEELS more dragged out than it actually is. But it comes as a bit of a shock because we Heidenry starts giving out more details of the games, which he doesn’t do a whole lot of in the rest of the book. I think too many details will slow the book down; there’s a thin, fine line between too many details and too few details, but Heidenry doesn’t write like he’s trying to walk on it. It could be that I’m not remembering correctly because the Dean coverage keeps getting in the way, but I don’t think there was as much effort put into it as warranted. As I said, I really wanted to like The Gashouse Gang, but it was a disappointment. On the upside, if you’re looking for a good biography about a year in the life of Dizzy Dean, you won’t find one better than this. What I’m Reading: “The Gashouse Gang” by John Heidenry. Despite its title, John Heidenry’s “The Gashouse Gang: How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin, and Their Colorful, Come-From-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series – and America’s Heart – During the Great Depression” is mostly a book about the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals’ star pitcher – Dizzy Dean. Of course, the book touches on the other personalities that drove the team, including Frankie Frisch, Paul Dean, Pepper Martin, Ducky Medwick, and Leo Durocher, and even includes an early chapter on Branch Rickey, though he disappears for most of the book. However, most of these characters only discussed in the broadest biographical terms; this is mostly a book about the Deans and the way in which Dizzy took the baseball world by storm in the summer of 1934. Heidenry covers Dizzy Dean’s path to the Major Leagues, the brothers’ confrontation with Cardinals owner Sam Breadon and Rickey over salary in the midst of a pennant race, and the variety of crazy things Dean said and did over the course of the season. Interestingly, Heidenry admits that while the team’s famous nickname did not arrive until 1935, he doesn’t have an explanation for why the 1934 Cardinals were dubbed “the Gashouse Gang,” though he offers a number of suggestions that have been proposed elsewhere. In fact, he spends a not insignificant amount of time describing why the name makes little sense, as the term “gashouse” had been out of vogue for decades, and while New York had a “gashouse district” a generation previous, St. Louis did not. Nonetheless, while Heidenry does not dive into great deal into any of the personalities on display outside of Dizzy Dean, he does provide a sense of how the Gashouse Gang fit into the culture of 1930s America, and the way that baseball was in many respects an entirely different atmosphere in those days. Heidenry provides a steady stream of entertaining anecdotes – most centered on Dean, but a few that don’t. He includes the day that Dean famously provided interviews to three different journalists from New York City and helpfully gave them each a different birth date so they each would have a scoop for their readers. Among my favorites: When player-manager Frisch went to the mound to pull from the game and the pitcher objected. “Well, you may feel all right, but I feel terrible,” Frisch responded. “Please go away from here.” After striking Dizzy Dean in the head with a thrown ball in the 1934 World Series, knocking the young superstar unconscious, shortstop told reporters, “If I’d known his head was there, I would have thrown the ball harder.” After Dizzy Dean’s playing days ended prematurely due to injury, he began a successful broadcasting career and was paired with Pee Wee Reese on CBS’s game of the week. “Look-a-there, Pee Wee,” Dean reportedly said once. “Those young folks are smooching after every pitch. He’s kissing her on the strikes and she’s kissing him on the balls.” Though it wasn’t directly related to the Cardinals, I also appreciated this quote from Casey Stengel, whose Brooklyn Dodgers defeated the New York Giants on the final day of the season to help cement New York’s fall from the top of the National League and the Cardinals to capture the pennant: “Farewell, my bonny men,” he told his players now that the season was over. “Some of you are off to maim the gentle rabbit. Some of you will shoot the carefree deer. I bid you Godspeed, my lamby-pambies, my brave young soldiers. Go with Casey’s blessing on your sweet heads.” That, my friends, is poetry far superior to most anything I was forced to read in my English literature classes. As for “The Gashouse Gang,” it’s a book that recounts a time in baseball history when the personalities were bigger and the game was far less polished. For fans of the St. Louis Cardinals, it’s a comprehensive look at the 1934 season and a team that will forever be remembered in Redbirds lore. The Gashouse Gang. How Dizzy Dean, Leo Durocher, Branch Rickey, Pepper Martin, and Their Colorful, Come-from-Behind Ball Club Won the World Series-and America’s Heart-During the Great Depression. 4.5 • 2 Ratings $2.99. $2.99. Publisher Description. With The Gashouse Gang , John Heidenry delivers the definitive account of one the greatest and most colorful baseball teams of all times, the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals, filled with larger-than-life baseball personalities like Branch Rickey, Leo Durocher, Pepper Martin, Casey Stengel, Satchel Paige, Frankie Frisch, and -- especially -- the eccentric good ol' boy and great pitcher Dizzy Dean and his brother Paul. The year 1934 marked the lowest point of the Great Depression, when the U.S. went off the gold standard, banks collapsed by the score, and millions of Americans were out of work. Epic baseball feats offered welcome relief from the hardships of daily life. The Gashouse Gang , the brilliant culmination of a dream by its general manager, Branch Rickey, the first to envision a farm system that would acquire and "educate" young players in the art of baseball, was adored by the nation, who saw itself -- scruffy, proud, and unbeatable -- in the Gang. Based on original research and told in entertaining narrative style, The Gashouse Gang brings a bygone era and a cast full of vivid personalities to life and unearths a treasure trove of baseball lore that will delight any fan of the great American pastime. PUBLISHERS WEEKLY JAN 1, 2007. Heidenry (The Boys Who Were Left Behind) offers a thorough if occasionally dry account of the "immortal, implausible, impossible gang of ballplayers known officially as the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals." The author draws on a wealth of books and publications to tell how a visionary named Branch Rickey invented the idea of using a farm system of clubs to develop talent, and then forged an unlikely, low- budget contender in a city far from the sport's Eastern power base. Rickey's team became known as the Gashouse Gang, owing to its role as a ragamuffin bunch with an indomitable spirit to whom Americans in the Depression could relate. The straightforward, detailed storytelling can make for some dull reading, particularly in the beginning, when Heidenry meticulously lays out the background of Rickey and the club. But anecdotes about the Cardinals' memorable characters, who included Leo "the Lip" Durocher, Casey Stengel, Pepper Martin and brothers Dizzy and Paul Dean, liven things up considerably. Dizzy takes center stage in the book, whether scheming new ways to get more money from management or mouthing off to the press. Baseball fans will appreciate this comprehensive look at the oddball pitcher and the team he led to glory.