An Interview with Professor Charles Alexander

1) As a professor of history, why did you turn to baseball biographies?

In the early 1980s, after twenty years of teaching, researching, writing, and publishing in more "traditional" or "orthodox" kinds of U.S. history, mostly 20th century, I undertook to teach a new upper-division course here at Ohio University in American sports history. In putting the course together, I became more interested than ever in Ty Cobb, also became convinced that nothing first-rate had been written on him, and thus decided to attempt my first biographical writing.

Ty Cobb turned out so well that I've mostly continued to work in baseball history, developing out of the sports history course (which I no long teach), a course in American baseball history and, four years ago, splitting that course into two courses, divided at 1930, both of which I teach every year. Of course I followed Ty Cobb with John McGraw, Our Game, and Rogers Hornsby.

2) Why did you choose Cobb and McGraw (and later Hornsby), as opposed to some of the other baseball figures of that period?

Leo Durocher once cracked that nice guys don't win pennants. I would paraphrase that as nice guys don't make compelling biographical subjects--at least not for me. My three biographical figures were anything but nice guys-all tough, intense competitors, contentious, controversial, and in many ways hard people to understand and render to readers. As great as they were as players, such truly nice guys as Walter Johnson, Gehrig, Musial, Banks, or Koufax hold little intrinsic interest for me.

3) Was one more difficult to research and write than the other?

I'd say that by the time I got around to doing baseball history, I'd been a professional historian for so long and had written on such a variety of things that I felt comfortable with just about any kind of research undertaking. But because doing biography was something new for me, probably writing Cobb was somewhat more difficult than was the case with the succeeding biographies. All three were enjoyable to write, though. I actually looked forward to sitting down each day to continue trying to capture their lives in such a way that readers would find them as fascinating as I had.

4) Ty Cobb was I believe, your first baseball biography. Was it difficult finding a publisher for it?

Actually, no. The distinguished historian William E. Leuchtenburg, a longtime acquaintance, made an overture to Oxford University Press in my behalf, I sent Oxford a prospectus, and they gave me a contract and a modest advance.

5) Both of these books were extremely well received. Did it surprise you that baseball biographies would do so well?

I can't say I was necessarily surprised, although I was immensely pleased. I happened to get into writing baseball history just as a remarkable and not at all explicable surge of interest in the sport's past was getting underway. If I've contributed to all that, I've benefited considerably more.

6) It seems that in the past 15 or 20 years there have been more baseball biographies published than ever before What do you think is behind this trend? Do you foresee it continuing into the next century?

I would say it's mostly the above-mentioned booming interest in baseball history generally, which has attracted lots of solid scholars and good writers. In the last few years, though, major publishers seem to have cooled off considerably on baseball history; maybe we've had something of an overkill.

7) Can we look forward to any more baseball books from you in the future? Are you working on a baseball book at this time?

No, I've simply ran out of baseball figures who interest me, who are dead (which one of my prerequisites), or who haven't already been done by somebody else. At the present time I'm at work on a study of baseball in the Depression years, 1930-1941, under contract to Columbia University Press.