The Crackers: The Early Days of Atlanta Baseball

Rating:
Summary: Lots of love, not much attention to detail
Review: Tim Darnell obviously loves the history of minor and Negro league baseball in Atlanta, and has done a great service by pulling together material from interviews, newspaper accounts, and more obscure sources to produce the first attempt at a comprehensive book on the subject.

Being a huge fan of minor league baseball myself, and having lived for a number of years two blocks from the former site of Ponce de Leon Park, I became quite excited when I first heard of the impending publication of this book. I was genuinely expecting to love it. Unfortunately, I found it more frustrating than entertaining, and too riddled with errors to be definitive.

Within a few pages of beginning the book, I began to be dismayed by the all-too-frequent awkwardness and sloppiness of Darnell's writing. Then, I began noticing factual errors and inept turns of phrase that even the most rudimentary efforts at copyediting should have prevented from appearing in print. Names are bungled, including names of players who played in the majors, and thus for whom ample reference sources for cross-checking exist.

One could forgive a certain amount of this, if Darnell didn't also seem too willing to repeat bits of baseball folklore and legend as if they were documented fact, without offering any evidence to support them, or if his account of events were not dominated by a relatively small set of former players, fans, and club employees. One can't fault Darnell for only being able to interview a small number of former Crackers (there aren't many left from the glory days of the franchise), but one can fault him for presenting their recollections as-is, without any evident attempt to verify them or augment them with supporting material. The effect of all this is to make it impossible to trust anything in the book.

Darnell might have been better off presenting his material in the form of an oral history of the Crackers and the Black Crackers, with some brief introductory and interstitial material of his own. At least then readers' expectations would have been different and probably more in line with Darnell actually delivers in this book.

The problem with that approach, of course, is that magnolia trees don't talk, and neither do demolished athletic facilities. Ponce de Leon Park and it's magnolia are as much or more a part of Crackers history as Earl Mann, Country Brown, Whitlow Wyatt, or any of the other persons who helped make that history.

This is a seriously flawed book; one that I read with nearly as much dismay as relish. Nevertheless, it's the only work I'm aware that covers its subject, and thus it's a must-read/must-buy for anyone with anything more than a passing interest in minor league baseball in the South.