Book Expo America begins in a few hours, and the University of Nebraska Press will be there (booth 3733, if you're interested). Stop by our booth for a sneak peek at our fall season, for freebie titles (numbers are limited, so stop by soon) of forthcoming books, and to meet the UNP marketing department.

Tomorrow,  two of our authors, Sue Resnick of Goodbye Wifes and Daughters, and Steve Steinberg of 1921, will sign copies of their books. Steve's signing will be from 10 to 10:30 a.m., and Sue's will run from noon to 12:30.

We'll be posting updates and stopping back by periodically throughout BEA. In the meantime, here's an interview with the authors of 1921 — a title rich in New York history, which is fitting, as BEA is in New York:

How did this book come about?

Lyle

I’d written a couple of books on Yankee history, and I
had it in the back of my mind to write one on the 1921 Yanks winning their
first pennant. My memory gets a bit hazy there, but I remember casually
mentioning it to Steve about five years ago. I knew Steve was a Yankee
historian. A year or so later at a Society for American Baseball Research
(SABR) convention, I think it was Toronto in 2005, Steve asked me if I was
working on the ’21 Yankees book. He said he was thinking of doing one, but if I
was doing it, he would move on to something else. I said I really hadn’t done
anything on it, and if he had started researching it then he should go ahead
and write the book. I’m not sure who suggested we work on it together and
expand it to include the Giants, but we both agreed that would make a much
better book.

 

Steve

I had done a number of articles on the Yankees of this
era, inc. the 1922 and 1926 pennant races, but not ’21. I was puzzled that—with
all the baseball books written on seasons-no one had done one on 1921. I recall
joking with Lyle at a couple of SABR conventions, as we graciously went back
and forth: “You should do the book on the ’21 Yankees,” and “No, you do it.” In
the meantime, neither of us jumped on it, and I became concerned someone else
would run with it. At some point I recall looking closely at the National
League race of that year and realizing that the pennant race there was as
dramatic as that of the American League. If we would combine our efforts on the
book, we’d have the time and resources to do justice to the entire 1921 season
and both pennant races.

 

Why 1921?

Steve For
a number of reasons. First, it was the Yankees’ first pennant. Now it’s hard to
realize that going into the ’21 season, they had a sorry history of losing.
They were even considered jinxed. Second, a key element of a good story is conflict,
and 1921 had it in a big way. John McGraw and his Giants personified the
low-scoring Deadball Era; the Yankees, led by Babe Ruth, were fostering an
entirely different approach to winning, with the home run. And these men were
two of the most colorful personalities in the history of the game. Top it off
with the first all-New York World Series. The big city that McGraw had “owned”
for so many years was finally “in play.” New York fans now had two winners to
choose from.

 

Lyle

Both of us, independently, had planned a book on the
Yankees winning their first pennant and Babe Ruth having perhaps the greatest
offensive season ever. But once we agreed to collaborate and add the Giants, we
decided to build the book around two major themes: 1) the Yankees and Giants battling
for supremacy in New York, and 2) the way the game was changing from dominance
by one major character—John McGraw—to another—Babe Ruth. This was a very
pivotal year for baseball, and when Steve pointed out that no books had been
written on the 1921 season, we decided we would fill that gap.

 

 

How did you decide to split
the writing? Was it by team, by month, or some other way?

Lyle: This
was an easy decision. Steve had written extensively on this era in Yankee
history before, and I was the one more familiar with the National League. So we
decided in the first minutes of our chat, that Steve would cover the Yankees
and the American League race and I would cover the Giants and the National
League race. Steve was more conversant with some topics, like Judge Landis and
the Black Sox scandal, while I was a bit more familiar with others, like New
York City history and geography. Other areas that cut across both leagues, like
the run-up to and the playing of the World Series, we covered together.

Steve: Lyle
was so gracious to let me focus on the Yankees and the AL. Heck, he had written
two books on the Yankees; I had done some articles on them. I’ve
done a lot of work on Yankees’ manager Miller Huggins and former and future
Yankee pitcher Urban Shocker—a star with the AL’s St. Louis Browns in 1921. So
I really appreciated being able to focus on that New York team and that league.
As we got into the book, I found the Giants and National League race exciting
and refreshing. So much was new to me, and there were so many compelling
stories over there.

   

And Lyle is far too modest to say he was “a bit more
familiar” with New York history and geography” than I was. He’s so well
grounded in the primary setting of our story, both the physical location (New
York City) and the history of that place and its baseball. He also took the
lead on the statistical tables in the book’s Appendix. As the Chair of SABR’s
Baseball Records Committee and a recognized authority on those numbers, Lyle
was the logical one to do this.

   

Another thing I took the lead on was the selection of
photos, a particular passion of mine. I wanted the images to be as special as
the story itself. We ended up with more than fifty photos from more than a
dozen sources, from private collectors to little-known archives. Many of these
pictures have not been published since they appeared in Baseball Magazine
or New York dailies almost ninety years ago, if ever. I also want to thank our
editor at the University of Nebraska Press, Rob Taylor, for letting us include
so many images. I know they add to the cost of a book. I kept on nudging that
number up, from thirty to forty and then above fifty images, which Rod
graciously agreed to.

 

What were some of the
challenges of the collaboration?

Steve: At
first I thought our geographic separation of 3,000 miles would be a problem.
But we quickly realized that with PC’s, e-mails and file attachments, distances
would not be a problem. We did discuss the book face-to-face, but only at a
couple of SABR conventions. We really had to work through a different issue
that had nothing to do with geography, and everything to do with the number of
authors—one more than one. We wanted to have a real collaboration, a synthesis
rather than just dividing up the book into what would be Lyle and Steve
sections. That required rewrites of early chapters and slow going and at first,
until we figured it out—with the help of a Seattle writing consultant I’ve
known and worked with for a number of years, Jennifer McCord.

   

Finally, Lyle and I bring different approaches to
research and writing. At times I probably exasperated him with my desire to
keep digging into stories and issues that we had a pretty good handle on. Lyle’s
level-headedness was great in keeping me grounded. And he’s so good at the
craft of writing, the nitty-gritty of how to shape a sentence. I think the keys
to this collaboration working—as with any relationship—is mutual respect and
flexibility. We challenged each other, sometimes quite forcefully, but we
couched such questioning with “Consider this because . . .” and “of course, the
final decision is yours.” We were able to sense if and when it was appropriate
to drop a challenge.

Lyle: No
matter what Steve wrote or I wrote, the copy went back and forth between us
many, many times until we were satisfied. Steve lives in the Northwest corner
of the country and I live in the Southeast corner, but we were able to email
our drafts across this vast distance just as if we lived next door. Well, not
exactly. It would have been nice to take some physical copy and be able to
discuss it over a cup of coffee.

   

In the early days of our collaboration we floundered a
bit on logistics and were aided greatly by Steve’s friend, Jennifer McCord, a
Seattle-based publishing consultant. After looking at some preliminary
chapters, Jennifer convinced us that we could indeed “speak in one voice,” a
goal we very much wanted to accomplish. She continued to provide guidance and
encouragement throughout and we are very grateful to her.

   

Collaborating on a book with someone you see maybe
once a year presents some interesting challenges. In addition to the three-hour
time difference, we have much different body clocks. Steve is a night-owl, and
I’m an early riser. I believe many days he is going to bed shortly before I am
waking up. Although this often caused lag time in our communications, it was
not a serious problem.

   

We also have different personalities. Steve is a Type
A and I’m a Type B. This is not a bad thing. Many tasks got done by Steve’s
dogged persistence that I’d still be ruminating on. Conversely, I hope that
from time to time I served as a calming influence. Moreover, we never had a
serious disagreement on any phase of the project. We began as acquaintances and
ended as friends, something Jennifer has told us doesn’t happen very often.

 

What are some of the book’s
sub-stories?

 

Lyle: In
1921, the Giants were baseball’s flagship franchise. They were the most
valuable franchise in the game, and also the most hated. Much like the Yankees
of today, who, ironically, were in the process of replacing the Giants in both
those categories. Hatred for the Giants back then, and to a lesser extent the
Yankees, went beyond their success on the field. As the country moved from a
mostly rural one to a mostly urban one, New York, America’s biggest city, was
viewed as the devil incarnate in many Midwestern locales. Both teams were
accused of using their wealth and influence with their respective leagues and
the commissioner to “buy the pennant.”

   

Another theme that weaves through the book is
gambling. Baseball was still in the beginning stages of dealing with the Black
Sox scandal. Judge Landis had banned several players from the game, including
some who had played for McGraw’s Giants. Moreover, the Giants were owned by an
unsavory character named Charles Stoneham, a glorified bookmaker, who along
with his manager had ties to Arnold Rothstein, the nation’s most notorious
gambler. Like prohibition, gambling was banned in New York, with about the same
amount of successful enforcement.

 

Steve: This
book is what I call “New York-centric” because the two winning teams were from
the big city. But we look at the season as a whole and how the game and its
stars fit into American society in 1921. In the AL, the story of Tris Speaker’s
Cleveland Indians and how those defending world champions challenged the
Yankees for the pennant until the last week of the season despite a wave of
injuries. They were in first place for much of the season. Then there’s the
story of Miller Huggins, the little manager of the Yankees. He had few friends
in the Yankees’ clubhouse and the city’s newsrooms. For much of the season, he
was facing an insurrection from a number of his players. Another story involves
Brooklyn, whose Dodgers (known as the Robins back then) were the defending NL
champions. They weave in and out of the story, but they are not on center stage
of this book. In part that’s because they were not in the pennant race for most
of the season (they would finish fifth) and were at the beginning of two
decades of lean, losing years. But it’s also because of the complicated
relationship between Brooklyn and New York City. Brooklyn has always been a
separate entity, a world of it own and not part of New York City, despite the
fact that—technically and legally—it was part of the city. Finally there’s the
controversy over Yankee pitcher Carl Mays’s World Series performance, one that
has been debated in baseball circles for decades.

 

In the more than three years
you worked on the book, did it evolve or change? If so, how?

 

Lyle: I think evolved would be the more accurate
description. And it did so as the result of three major shifts in our approach.
The first was our decision to move back and forth between the teams in
separate, smaller chapters. Our original approach had been to merge the doings
of the two teams in fewer, larger chapters. Our second shift in approach was
going into more detail on key players at various stages of the season, rather
than when we first encountered them. Finally, as the result of advice we
received from several of our readers, we greatly reduced much of the
superfluous details related to individual games.

 

Steve: It
sure did evolve, in large part because of the feedback that we had from our
editor, Rob Taylor. Rob knows baseball, but he also knows writing. For example,
he suggested ways we could improve the pace of the story—by paraphrasing quotes
that were not especially vivid and by suggesting that we bring the reader into
the 1921 season earlier in the book. The first section of the book, The
Preseason, was probably a hundred pages long, mainly because we fleshed out
many of the story’s leading characters before the start of the season. Then I
took a close look at a couple of David Halberstam’s baseball books, Summer
of ’49 and October 1964. I realized that he developed
personalities throughout the books, spreading their emergence throughout the
stories and really providing a nice pace. Making that change in 1921
required a major rewrite.

   

A number of our colleagues also reviewed the
manuscript and gave us invaluable feedback, both factual corrections and
big-picture comments that we took to heart.

 

What are you proudest of
about this book?

Steve: First,
the fact that we were able to speak with one voice. After reading the
manuscript, one of our colleagues gave the ultimate compliment: he couldn’t
recognize which chapters were written by whom. Then, we draw upon many
newspapers, about a dozen from New York City alone. Why is that significant?
For a couple of reasons. Before radio and TV, newspapers were “it.” Each one
had its own reporters who had their own contacts and sources. Some of the book’s
most dramatic revelations come from what I’d call secondary papers. Moreover,
those writers were so vivid in their columns. One gets a good sense of sports
coverage of that bygone era from our quotes of craftsmen such as Damon Runyon,
Grantland Rice, Heywood Broun, Hugh Fullerton, and Fred Lieb (to name a few),
each writing for a different newspaper.

   

Also, while this is a baseball book, we have tried to
convey a sense of what America in general and New York City in particular were
like in 1921. I recall baseball historian John Thorn telling me that a good
baseball book about 1921 had to be about more than just baseball to be really
interesting. As the U.S. emerged from the Great War, different forces were at
work in society, some moving in different directions. For example, as Sunday
baseball was legalized, Prohibition took hold across the country. Finally, I’m
proud that we present many of the story’s overlooked personalities and,
hopefully, make them come alive. At its most basic level, I am a story teller,
and I see my purpose as a writer is to bring back those who have been
forgotten. These men were far more than a group of numbers.

 

Lyle: Our
goal was to produce a book that would bring to life a season that has been
overlooked by historians, yet one that has proved to be a turning point in
baseball history. But as we delved into the research, our goal expanded. Very
few people with clear memories of 1921 remain. Using the baseball season as a
focal point, we wanted the book to give the reader a look at life as it was in
America that year. Given that framework, I believe we have done so.