There have been many holy books, but the holiest might be under a tent on McKinley High School’s campus.
The Friends of the Library of Hawaii is holding its annual book sale as you read this, an event returned to the McKinley cafeteria for the first time since the pandemic hit. I was there about 30 minutes after it opened on Saturday.
Everything is in the same place it was the last time it was held there, allowing my wife to walk straight to the Japanese paperbacks and start picking through selections she will devour as soon as she gets home. As much as I like watching my bride shop (said no man, ever), I had some time to kill.
So I took a few steps out of the back door, where I ambled past the school’s buried time capsule that is scheduled to be dug up some time around 2036 and made a right to a tent housing even more books. The first ones that caught my eye were about golf, a collection of works by masters such as John Feinstein, P.G. Wodehouse and Michael Murphy. After reading a little bit of “Golf in the Kingdom” for the hundredth time, I moved past the books about football and basketball. I have read plenty on those fine sports, but I adhere to George Plimpton’s belief that “The smaller the ball, the better the book.”
As quickly as my momentum picked up, it stopped just as suddenly. There, between one of Willie Stargell’s biographies and an excellent book about the 1981 Los Angeles Dodgers, sat the behemoth: “The Baseball Encyclopedia.”
It wasn’t the original, which was born in 1969 about six months after I was, but it was the one I loved the most.
This proud tome weighs in at more than 6 pounds and can count the excellent baseball-reference.com as its most successful progeny, ahead of the “Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract” and whatever The Sporting News has become. No matter how much sabermetricians hate traditional statistics, there would be none of today’s analytics without David Neft’s gift to humanity.
I think McKinley has the ninth edition, the first not endorsed by Major League Baseball, and I count that as a good thing. Its statistical record only goes to 1993, which makes it even more perfect because it came out before greed begat the 1994 strike, which led to wild cards, interleague play and the overhaul of the rule book.
I don’t remember ever not having a “Baseball Encyclopedia” with me, and you better believe that one of them made the trip to Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War because I was in charge of embarkation for my unit back then. Now that I wrote that I don’t remember not having one, I looked around the house and don’t remember where it is.
It has everything. Honolulu Johnnie Williams is in there along with Joey DeSa and 19 other big leaguers who were born in Hawaii. There are few words, way fewer than the biggest telephone book (remember those?), but every one of the millions of digits tells a story. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham’s entry turned one game with no chance to bat into an excellent book and popular movie.
Bob Walk, my favorite broadcaster after being one of my favorite pitchers, told a story the other day that the real difference between veteran and rookie in the big leagues could be found in the big book that occupied a corner of every clubhouse. Unless you are in “Big Mac” — it was called that because it was published by Macmillan — your role is to keep your ears open and your mouth shut. Even Lou Proctor had some swagger for a time. Proctor, a telegraph operator in 1912, entered his name into a St. Louis Browns box score that year as a lark and was listed in at least six editions before the error was caught.
Other than a note on the first page reading “happy two month anniversary” in a woman’s handwriting, its 3,048 onionskin pages in perfect condition. Don’t worry, mysterious stranger, he wasn’t good enough for you. He barely opened the book.
The sale runs through June 23. There is almost no chance that baseball’s ultimate book will still be there.
I should have bought it, but I didn’t. I can find all of the information it contains on the internet, but when the end times come I will wish I had a copy to bring me a smile on the dark days.
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