The first Sports Illustrated baseball preview issue was modest. Each league got eight pages, spread out over two issues in 1955. There was an introductory column by Red Smith, then brief previews of key players on each of the eight teams in each league. Aside from one of the cover photos—of the actress Laraine Day with arms around Willie Mays and her husband, Leo Durocher, which bigots got mad about—it was nothing memorable.
The next year, though, somebody at SI obviously decided to think much bigger. In 1956, the baseball preview was one huge issue. The magazine promoted it with half-page advertisements in major newspapers, including endorsement blurbs from Ted Williams and commissioner Ford Frick. The issue’s cover had a hand-painted, life-sized baseball produced by the social realistic artist John Langley Howard. Inside, an editor’s note promised big things from “a memorable issue”:
It is an issue that knows one season only: the baseball season. It has been designed to serve the reader from this date until the day when the umpire cries the final “Out!” of the 1956 World Series. Throughout the whole long summer, as the teams work through the ups and downs of their schedules, this issue can enhance the enjoyment of the great American game. It covers players and prospects, managers and matters of moment, teams and temperaments, leagues and laws.
What followed were 78 pages of baseball stuff, featuring ~19 different editorial elements, many of them quite ambitious. Some of the ambition didn’t work—there was a short baseball essay from the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, which was a dud. But much of it worked better than you’d expect. The publisher’s season predictions—preambled with a version of “you can’t predict baseball”—were shockingly accurate.1 There’s a loooooong conversation between reigning MVPs Yogi Berra and Roy Campanella, held in one of Campanella’s wine-and-liquor stores, that is so shaggily unedited that its authenticity is obvious, such as when they get into the finer details of their tax deductions:
“You’re well stocked up,” Berra commented, looking admiringly at the neatly stacked and labeled shelves and the cases of liquor piled around, including some of Campanella’s own brand—Campy’s Old Peg.
“You don’t make a profit on what’s down here. This is all inventory. I have to pay cash for all this.”
“But at least you can deduct this on your income taxes,” Berra said enviously.
“Oh, no, I can’t! Oh, no, I can’t! What Roy Campanella the baseball player earns has nothin to do with this business, except in what I put in here. Miss Mason!” He called abruptly to his secretary. “I got to see that man from the Income Tax Bureau tomorrow. Make an appointment for me, will you?”
There are three beautiful paintings of urban baseball scenes done by a largely unknown, untrained artist named Ralph Fasanella, who’d been blacklisted by art dealers and galleries in the McCarthyite era and was working as a machinist. Two decades later, Fasanella would be “catapulted to national fame” when he was “discovered” by a folk-art dealer and profiled on the cover of New York Magazine.
There were galleries of every team’s hats, jerseys and socks; illustrations of every ballpark’s dimensions; surveys of every team’s broadcasters. There were also up-to-date scouting reports on every team, current to their spring performances. “I feel so strong it scares me,” says Willie Mays in one.
This is no mere collection of information. The season was beginning, and these Sports Illustrated journalists were grappling with the big question of why the feeling meant so much to them. The legendary journalist Robert Creamer describes the start of a baseball season as almost entering a dream state away from reality:
You feel this more in the North than you do in the sun country, but one day late in the winter you hear a voice over the radio. You may be driving a car through slush at the time, with bags of groceries on the floor in front and a bunch of kids in mufflers and galoshes playing Davy Crockett and Mike Fink on the back seat. You don't mind. You're used to your lot. Slush and muddy galoshes are a way of life. Then the car radio, which you have turned on haphazardly, warms up and a familiar voice says, "Two away now. Musial down off third. Cards lead 2-0. The pitch. It's in there. Strike one." It is the somewhat droning, somewhat nasal voice of your favorite baseball announcer, broadcasting a spring training game from Florida. Last summer you cursed him out when he failed for an inning and a half to mention the score of a game you had tuned in on late. But now, in the slush, you love him. His voice is the voice of the turtle, heralding the return of baseball to the land.”
Given the nuclear anxieties of the era, and the constant social anxieties of life since, the best sentence anybody wrote in the issue might be this one:
“A civilization in which 16 separate big league teams can be absolutely committed to playing 154 baseball games has a certain soothing solidity.”
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If you asked me to sincerely draft my favorite baseball things, the Sports Illustrated Baseball Preview would be in the top 10, behind “playing catch” but ahead of “extra innings” and in a dead-heat with “the World Series.” I’ve had several pre-season get-hyped rituals in my life—watching Field of Dreams when I was a kid, drafting fantasy teams in my late teens, binge-weeking the BP Annual in my young adulthood, defending PECOTA’s projection for the Royals in my later-adulthood—but the SI preview issue is the one that spanned them all.
After that 1956 preview, the issue only got bigger. Besides the standard furniture—team previews, a player profile (usually of a star who’d changed teams)—the writers and editors were remarkably creative in generating features that would stand out. One issue had a long visual feature on “the slam-bang of baseball, the crash and the color of the game.” They profiled proto-sabermetricians, they profiled umpires with strange set-ups,
they wrote about the life of the ballplayer wife, of the first-base coach, of the major-league flakes, of the backup catcher. They did photo essays of pitch grips and the biggest biceps, commissioned new art to show how basestealers take their leads or pitchers manipulate the baseball:
The tone of the issue would change as baseball writers turned over—when Peter Gammons was at the top of the pile in the early 1990s, there’d be four features by Gammons and he’d write half the team scouting reports—but, for a kid who had a subscription to Sports Illustrated but interest in only one sport, the preview issue would reliably do what no other issue did: Instead of skipping right to the one (or two) baseball articles in the issue, I could read the whole thing, front to back, over the course of a week, and just in time for the first pitch of the season.
By 2000, the baseball parts of the baseball issue had expended to 114 pages. There was a profile of Pedro Martinez, revealing the secret to his success—the callouses on the end of his fingers, showing how he was able to actually release the pitch later than anybody else, for maximum spin. There was some speculative fiction Bostonians feeling the monkey’s paw if the Red Sox actually won the World Series, a discussion of the nastiest pitch in baseball (the split-fingered fastball), profiles of young Pat Burrell and old Mark McGwire, and, as always, the team scouting reports, which by this point had ballooned to two full pages per team. After those two pages, you’d fully understand the narrative about the team, the strength of their roster up and down. You’d know about each team’s exciting young player—all of whom had been photographed in spring training from clever angles with a fish-eye lens. That last detail shows how remarkable the effort level was for this issue. A less ambitious project would have used team-issued headshots, and nobody would have noticed the lack.
But the best part of the issue was the “rival scout’s take.” These scouts would say anything: Jim Fregosi is worth an extra 10 wins a year, Chuck Knoblauch probably avoids fielding balls because he doesn’t want to throw, Andy Pettitte “loses confidence.” Reading these scouting reports was like hearing how grownups speak after you’ve gone to bed. They were often insightful but unhinged, and way more critical than what you’d read elsewhere. Behold the Bleak House of rival-scout’s takes, from 2000:
"Larry Walker is the (Rockies’) biggest problem. He plays for himself, and he picks his times when he wants to rest. He's a cancer in the clubhouse. He's obviously an impact player, but he's always loafing after balls in the outfield. Until he becomes something of a leader, Colorado will follow his negative example. The one guy on this team I'd want is Neifi Perez.”
I ate this all up.
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