The Veracruz Blues

"This book came out in 1997 and isn’t particularly well known. But I like it a lot, and wanted to include it ahead of some of the better known books. This is the story of the Mexican League, which was started by a couple of brothers in 1946. The one in charge was Jorge Pasquel, an industrialist in Mexico who wanted to start a competitor to Major League Baseball, which they stole players away from. Yes, it was for status and baseball is a big sport in Mexico – not to the level of soccer but still big. Winter leagues in Mexico had always attracted Major League players, so they decided to create a Mexican League. What’s interesting from Winegardner’s point of view is that the league had black players coming down from the States who were Major League calibre but barred by the apartheid pre-Jackie Robinson. And then the white players who jump to the Mexican league get barred from going back to Major League Baseball, for violating the reserve clause in their contracts. One of them, Danny Gardella, filed a lawsuit against the League which was a precursor to all the antitrust suits of the last 30 years or so. He lost. Yes – Gardella is a character in the book, and so is Pasquel. It’s based on real events, but narrated by a fictional sports writer named Frank Bullinger, and through him we meet other real people including Ernest Hemingway – down in Mexico for the bullfights or the fishing, I forget which. Hemingway pops up in a lot of fiction these days! Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Winegardner is really exploring issues of racism and capitalism, or the issue of forced servitude that baseball players were faced with in the 1940s. You see their effort to get a better deal for themselves using these crazy Mexican tycoons. Mark Winegardner is an interesting writer. Recently he has been doing Godfather sequels, which is a hiding to nothing but he does them well. They realised it would probably happen, but they thought they would be able to get back into the Major League again. The most famous of them was Sal Maglie, who was known as “the barber”. He was a pitcher for the Giants. I was talking about the “reserve clause”, which meant that if they didn’t sign a new contract the old one would be extended for one more year. The legal issue which eventually got resolved was that the new contract included a reserve clause as well, so in effect they were perpetually bound to their teams. That was an issue and made it difficult for them to move about. But finally courts ruled in favour of the players, so they had more flexibility."