Book Review: Split Season: 1981, by Jeff Katz (2015)

Cover of Split Season: 1981, by Jeff Katz, 2015.

Mark Belanger's 1981 Fleer Star Sticker card. Belanger was a union representative and very involved in the protracted negotiations during the strike. He was also one of the best fielding, and worst hitting, shortstops of all time.

My favorite baseball player, Steve Carlton, had an excellent year in 1981, going 13-4 with a 2.42 ERA and winning his only Gold Glove.

1981 was a difficult year for baseball, as a strike by the players wiped out almost two months of the season. As someone who was born in 1981, it’s always annoyed me that because most teams played around 107 games that year, the stats from my birth year look so paltry. Mike Schmidt led the majors in RBIs with 91—no pitcher won more than 14 games. As a kid flipping through my baseball cards, I would compare players’ stats from 1981 to what they did in other years and inevitably I’d end up disappointed. No one had their best season in 1981. I suppose the silver lining is that the strike was settled in time for the postseason, so there was actually a World Series the year I was born.

Jeff Katz’s 2015 book Split Season: 1981—Fernandomania, the Bronx Zoo, and the Strike that Saved Baseball examines the year in question in great detail. Katz does a fine job recapping the highlights and lowlights of the season. A limitation of the book is that the details of the strike are very complicated and not that interesting. And that’s coming from a baseball fan, so I can’t imagine that many people who aren’t hardcore baseball fans would read this book. Basically, the key issue was that the owners wanted compensation for teams who lost players who signed as free agents with other teams. The players’ union saw that as an attempt to fundamentally weaken the free agent system. The strike was ultimately settled with the owners winning a small concession from the players as a complicated compensation system was adopted. 

When the strike was settled and the 1981 season continued, the dubious decision was made to split the season in two halves: before the strike and after the strike. The teams who were leading their divisions when the strike began were guaranteed a playoff spot, and they would play the winner of the second half of the season. Not surprisingly, with nothing to play for, none of the first half winners also won the second half. This harebrained scheme also ensured that the two teams in the National League with the best records, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds, didn’t make the playoffs, because they didn’t win either half of the season. 

Katz is insightful when writing about the four players who were deeply involved in the ongoing negotiations between the players and the owners: catcher Bob Boone, pitcher Steve Rogers, third baseman Doug DeCinces, and shortstop Mark Belanger. Katz interviewed Rogers and DeCinces for his book, and he paints interesting portraits of these four athletes. 

Mark Belanger in particular comes off as a really interesting person. As a baseball player, Belanger is famous for being perhaps the ne plus ultra of a “good field, no hit” shortstop. Belanger played in more than 2,000 games over 18 years, and ended up with a batting average of just .228. However, Belanger won 8 Gold Gloves for fielding excellence, and sabermetric stats paint a picture of him as one of the finest defensive shortstops ever. Baseball-Reference ranks Belanger second all-time in defensive WAR, just ahead of his longtime infield mate, third baseman Brooks Robinson. In a statistic called Total Zone Runs, which I’m not smart enough to attempt to explain, Belanger ranks as the second best defensive shortstop since 1953, behind Ozzie Smith. 

Belanger’s playing career ended after the 1982 season, and after he retired he worked for the players’ union. He died from lung cancer in 1998, at the age of 54. In the 2001 edition of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, James writes of Belanger’s time working for the union: “He had three books on his desk: a baseball encyclopedia, Marvin Miller’s autobiography, and Don Baylor, by Don Baylor.” (p.624) I don’t know how Bill James knew this, but it’s a fun fact. The first two books make sense to me, but Don Baylor’s autobiography? It seems like a very random choice. However, Belanger and Baylor were teammates on the Orioles from 1970 to 1975, so maybe Belanger enjoyed revisiting his own glory days with the Orioles. I read Don Baylor’s autobiography when I was a little kid and I remember enjoying it, although I couldn’t tell you anything specific about it. It’s never been one of the top three books on my desk.

Katz presents the strike as something of a black and white struggle. It’s very clear he’s on the player’s side, rather than the owners. There’s nothing really wrong with that, but for Katz there cannot be a greedy player or a sympathetic owner, which robs the book of complexity. 

Katz’s book would have improved with stronger editing. Some examples of awkward phrasing and sloppy writing are the following:

“{Bowie} Kuhn came from an immigrant background. Alice Waring Roberts’s family arrived in 1634, sailing from England to Maryland.” (p.23) Well, yes, we’re all immigrants, unless you’re Native American, but did Alice Waring Roberts’s arrival 292 years before Bowie Kuhn’s birth really have much of an impact on how he saw himself?

Katz describes Ted Simmons’ status as a “ten and five” man, meaning that he had been in the majors for ten years, and spent the last five years with the same team. As the St. Louis Cardinals wanted to trade Simmons to the Milwaukee Brewers, Katz writes that Simmons “had control of the situation.” (p.39) What Katz doesn’t tell us is that as a “ten and five” man, Simmons had the right to veto any attempt by the Cardinals to trade him. To understand the control Simmons had in that situation, you need to know that fact, which Katz doesn’t provide. 

There are other passages that are much sharper, such as Katz writing that Cliff Johnson “looked like a giant walrus in cleats.” (p.59) Katz also does well chronicling the larger-than-life personalities of Billy Martin and George Steinbrenner: “Like Steinbrenner, Martin was unaware of irony.” (p.80) So true!

Unfortunately, Split Season: 1981 commits what I consider to be a fundamental error for a non-fiction book: there are no footnotes or endnotes. There’s a bibliography, but there’s no way to tell where quoted material comes from. I really don’t understand why major publishers allow non-fiction books to be published without footnotes or endnotes. I know, the majority of people don’t care, but the omission severely limits the usefulness of a book as a historical document.