SSTN Interviews J.B. Manheim

February 13, 2025

***

This is my interview with author Jerry (J.B.) Manhaim.

Please tell our readers a little about yourself and, of course, your books.

In a prior life I was a political scientist specializing in information and influence campaigns, propaganda and persuasion, media and politics, and the like. Over the years I taught at CCNY, Va Tech, and the last 25 years at George Washington U where I developed the world’s first degree granting program in political communication and was then founding director of the School of Media and Public Affairs. I had the honor being named Professor of the Year for the District of Columbia back in 1995.

I was enjoying a pleasant, work-free retirement when, in 2018, I happened to be watching one of those Antiques Roadshow reruns where they flash back to a program from 15 years earlier. Among the items from back in 2003 were some military papers dated in June 1918 from Camp Hancock, a WWI training camp in Georgia, that showed Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, and a half-dozen others who would be named to the Baseball Hall of Fame once it opened some twenty years later. The papers showed Mathewson as a second lieutenant and Cobb as a corporal in the company, which was training on ordnance, e.g., chemical weapons. It took me a while to realize that these papers, which seemed entirely authentic, told a story that was very different from the one that has been handed down to us in baseball history. According to that story, Mathewson and Cobb did join the Chemical Weapons Service in WWI, but not until the fall of 1918. Then, supposedly, Mathewson was exposed to poison gas that ruined his lungs and led to his premature death from tuberculosis in 1925.

What the Hancock papers suggested to me, however, was not only that the duo had served much earlier in the year, but that they had been part of what looked for all the world to be a “show unit” filled with prominent baseball players the purpose of which was to generate recruits for the CWS. Some basic research I did seemed to point in the same direction, and that led to a question: Why did the Army (and baseball) invest so much effort to put together a show unit, a propaganda unit, with so many prominent players that then disappeared from history without leaving a hint of its existence until these truly obscure papers turned up?

At that point, the vacation aspect of my retirement was over. I had to explain this anomaly, at least to my own satisfaction. And it turned out that the best tool I had at hand for that was historically grounded fiction shaped by my earlier professional expertise. The result was my first novel, This Never Happened. And writing that turned out to be so much fun – and so educational as I poked into some dark corners of baseball history – that I kept going, creating a series of six books, The Deadball Files, each of which offers a present day mystery or legal thriller that is grounded in real events from the so-called Deadball Era, the first twenty years of the 20th  century. One of these, The Federal Case, was selected as the best legal thriller of the year in the 2024 American Fiction Awards.

Two of those books have had their own nonfiction offshoots. While researching Thomas Edison for Book 5 of the series, The Keystone Corner, I came across some baseball-related files in the archive of the Thomas Edison National Historical Park in New Jersey that had never seen the light of day. One of those was a set of T206 baseball cards from around 1909 that had been collected by Edison’s youngest son Teddy and stored for more than a century in a ratty old wallet. That led to a book that I did together with my friend and publisher, Lawrence Knorr, What’s in Ted’s Wallet?, that shared the discovery with the general public. That book and the Edison novel were featured at the annual Edison Day celebration at the park in June 2024.

The last book in the series, Field of Schemes, which is set for publication, led me to explore the origins, again in 1909, of the Congressional Baseball Game, an annual charity event in Washington that pits the two parties against one another. In the process I discovered a wonderful collection of little-known facts, whimsical accounts of the very first such game and its aftermath, and some classic old photos and headlines – so much material that I just had to do a nonfiction book on the subject as well. The House Divided: The Story of the First Congressional Baseball Game, will be out in spring 2025, just a few weeks before the next contest.

What do you most enjoy about writing?

Just doing it. It’s something that has always come easily to me, and I guess there is something about organizing a plot or an argument in a cogent manner and then finding just the right words to express it that I find rewarding.

Do you have any current writing projects you are working on?  Can you tell us about them?

I have already mentioned two books that are in press as I write this, Field of Schemes and The House Divided. It is an interesting pairing because both books focus in some measure on that first congressional game. But one is a factual account where I have been very careful to document and stay within the established facts, while the other is in part fictional. There I have had some fun playing around with the facts, doing some mixing and matching and some general hocus pocus, all in the interests of telling a good story.

Why are people so drawn to baseball and its stories, legends, and people?

I love the question but I fear the answer. I am in the middle of re-watching the old Ken Burns documentary series on baseball, which came out around 1994 or so. The series is filled with baseball writers, retired players, and of course Doris Kearns Goodwin, Burns’ go-to expert on every subject, waxing profound on the universal love for the game.

But so much has changed since then – the physicality of the players, the financial scale and structure of the game (Can you say, “Juan Soto?”) including costs for the fans, the traditions (designated hitters in both leagues now, ghost runners, and heaven forbid, the threatened golden at-bat), the loss of future players and fans to basketball and soccer – that I am coming to see that set of views as anachronisms today.

Yes, the stories and the legends and the big personalities are still there, but so are the agents, the unlimited free agency that erodes player and fan loyalty, the ubiquity of access that eliminates the aura of exceptionalism so vital to creating myths, and even the return of big-time gambling. It all leaves me doubting the premise of the question.

What is your favorite baseball book?

For those old enough to remember, this is the Lays Potato Chip question – nobody can pick just one.

Fave # 1. Michael Lewis, Money Ball. The critics notwithstanding, he nailed it. Lewis changed the way we understand the game.

Fave # 2. Ron Shelton, The Church of Baseball. This one is more about the movie – Bull Durham, which Shelton wrote and directed – than the game, but it is so much fun to read, even if you’ve never been to Durham and seen the ballpark, and you can’t get very far before you start gaining fresh insights into life in the minors.

Fave # 3. Here’s one no one else will pick: Edmund Wehrle, Breaking Babe Ruth. Wehrle tells the fascinating tale of the efforts by baseball’s magnate class, never really successful, to control the irrepressible Bambino. It was quite literally a campaign, and from my perspective as a lifelong student of such things he did a great job. This is a serious work and by no means a light read, but I recommend it to any Yankee fan who is interested in the business side of the game, or just in truly understanding Ruth and his career.

Outside of baseball, what is your favorite book and/or who is your favorite author?  (You can list as many as you wish.)

I grew up in flyover country in the Southwest, and I have always had an interest in the landscapes and cultures of that region. No surprise, then, that my favorite author was the late Tony Hillerman, and my favorite books are any in his Joe Leaphorn and Jim Chee mystery series. Leaphorn and Chee were Navajo Tribal Policemen who solved a variety of cases, in the process of which they revealed to readers the culture, perspectives, and history of the Navajo people. Various Navajo traditions were the keys to solving the problems de jour. This is the very model I have tried to adopt in my Deadball Files series, where the contemporary mystery or legal challenge central to each plot is shaped by and derived from some real event that occurred in baseball history during the Deadball Era. As one confronts the puzzle presented in each book, one cannot help but learn some of that fascinating history. Or at least I hope so.

There's a lot of talk about baseball needing to be "fixed."  Is baseball broken?  If you were the Commissioner of Baseball what change(s) (if any) would you make to the current game?

If I were the Commissioner, I would STOP fixing the game. I’ll give you the pitching clock, but the rest of the Manfred-era improvements and threatened improvements (see above) – are in my view generally detrimental to the game.

I love to talk about the Baseball Hall of Fame.  Which former Yankee most deserves to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame?

Here’s where I lose readers of this blog. I was raised by a die-hard Cleveland Indians family and stuck with the Tribe through its entire four decades in The Wilderness. The Yankees were the Great Oppressors. Do you realize that of the 348 members of the Hall of Fame, 55 are former Yankees, including 44 players and 11 managers. That’s about 16 percent, or one of every 6.3 honorees. And Yankee Stadium (probably not by accident, as you will learn in one of my books) is the closest MLB ballpark to Cooperstown. My goodness, isn’t that enough?

Let me guess your answer...

That said, I will tell you a story about one Yankee Hall of Famer – Mickey Mantle. I remember as a young boy attending an Indians-Yankees game at the Mistake by the Lake. This had to be in the mid-fifties or so, and Mantle was already having problems with his knees. Now as a kid playing ball, I was taught that you run out every hit ball. But in that game Mantle kept punching routine ground balls to short, after which he would take a few steps toward first then stop and head for the dugout. This, I thought, is the great Mickey Mantle? Can’t even run out a grounder? I remember my grandfather trying to explain to me that he was playing through pain and saving his energy, but I wasn’t having any of it. That is still my mental image of Mantle except for one thing: Now I get it.

What is the greatest baseball movie of all time?  (Yes, you can list a few!)

Along with a list of many more favorite baseball books on my website is a list of my Top Ten Baseball Movies, of which there are eleven.  Special favorites include Bull Durham and Moneyball, of course, but also Major League (once an Indians fan, remember?) and one Yankees movie, The Scout (mainly for the ballpark fare and the greatest single sentence ever uttered in a baseball movie.) Credit, too, to the recent documentary on Yogi, It Ain’t Over.

What is your favorite baseball memory?

So many memories, so little time. Could it be the foul balls smashing windshields in the stadium parking lot just behind the left field line at Dudley Field, an old Texas League ballpark? Or the game at RFK Stadium in DC – a grisly pit if ever there was one – when several thousand bees formed a massive swarm at the front of one section in the upper deck? (We moved away! I have to assume the rats eventually ate them.) Or the very first Stephen Strasburg game at Nats Park, which was the first baseball game in Washington to have a playoff vibe since... 1924? We still miss Walter Johnson around here. But the winner is probably any of the freezing July nights spent with my grandfather a few rows behind the 1B dugout at the aforementioned Municipal Stadium in Cleveland. He knew everybody who worked for the ballclub, and they always stopped by to say hello. Of course, that was easy since there were so few people in the stands at most of those games. Like I said, The Wilderness.

Please share anything else you'd like with our audience.

Please accept this invitation to visit my website at www.jbmanheimbooks.com where you will find lots of information about my books, links to some of my baseball essays and some interviews you might find interesting, and some thoughts on writing about the game we all love. I hope to see you there. Thanks!