Book Review- Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants and Stars

[bedsitter23]

Ruling Over Monarchs, Giants & Stars: Umpiring in the Negro Leagues & Beyond by Bob Motley

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


This book seems fairly obscure, but it boasts of cover quotes by Ken Burns and Walter Cronkite, as well as some of the biggest experts on Negro Leagues baseball, as well as a foreword by Dionne Warwick.

It shouldn't be. I found this book fascinating. Bob Motley is the last living umpire from the Negro Leagues.

Negro League baseball is still a bit of 'hidden history'. I grew up in the 80s, so I knew Josh Gibson had hit more home runs than Babe Ruth but not much more. Ken Burns's Baseball series is probably the biggest thing to date to illuminate that time, which brought attention to Buck O'Neill and others.

I found this book at the Negro Leagues Museum in Kansas City and found it interesting, and it was. Motley's story is interesting because it's ordinary and extraordinary. He was a southerner who had a tough childhood, terrorized by the Klan. He moved to the Midwest and experienced a different breed of racism towards blacks in 1940s Ohio. He joined the military, and has some tales to tell there as well. In many ways, a life like no other, but also a life like many others that has gone undocumented.

He gets a job at General Motors, but his real love is baseball. He gets a job as a Negro Leagues Umpire, but only after much determination and being turned around.

Motley is an umpire in the Negro Leagues, through post-integration baseball and towards the league's very end. He wants to umpire in the Major Leagues, but even though he graduated top of his class in umpire school, he gets denied due to racism. He eventually goes to umpire in the pre-Los Angeles Dodgers/SF Giants Pacific Coast League, which was filled with a lot of talented players prior to West Coast MLB.

The book is one I couldn't put down. It's very conversational, but it is also professionally put together, for those who worry about that kind of stuff.

The stories he tells are fascinating. You also get the story of players that he saw first hand and listen to him describe them- some you know (Hank Aaron, Ernie Banks, the incomparable Satchell Paige) and some who have been lost to time. When talking negro league baseball, when Jackie Robinson broke into the majors in 1947, many of the great stars were either in their prime or older, so they didn't get that chance. Baseball teams wanting to make that investment wanted players who still had many years left. For example, if you were building a football team for the next decade, you would not invest in Tom Brady or Peyton Manning to be your star players, even if their performance is legendary.

It's cliche, but this would make a great movie. There is so much here- the struggle to survive as a young man, traveling in cramped conditions, often in hostile towns, the legendary play happening in front of Motley, and lastly, Motley himself, who was a showman in his own right. The kind we rarely see.

I recommend this book to all fans of baseball, but I also highly recommend to those who aren't fans of baseball, too. Simply, because it is such a great story.



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