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Page 12, PHOENIX, May 16, 1974Quick,THE GREATEST OF ALL: The1927 New York Yankees by JohnMosedale, Illustrated. The DialPress. 220 pp. $7.95Reviewed by Ray Robinson%u201cThere were mighty men in the good old days,When you and I were young. ..Yes, the Cubs were great in Chance%u2019s time And the Pirates great in Wagner%u2019s prime But I%u2019ll lay five bucks to one thin dime There was never a team came* crashing throughLike Ruth and the rest of the Yankee crew...\%u2014John Kieran of the New York Times, after the Yankees won the American League pennant in 1927 by 19 games%u2014and before they massacred Pittsburgh four straight in the World Series.The creeping national nostalgia for peckerwood bank robbers, phased-out depressions and oncediscredited Republican presidential candidates (don't forget Alf, as well as Barry), seems to march hand-in-glove these days with the acceptance of the notion that ancient baseball teams were purer, more talented and nobler than conglomerates of more recent vintage.Were Roger Kahn's celebrated Boys of Summer (Brooklyn%u2019s Dodgers of the early fifties) really better than the Los Angeles Dodgers of Sandy Koufax%u2019s splendid years?who was George Fipgras?Ray Robinson is managing editor ofSeventeen Magazine and the author of ahalf-dozen books on baseball. As a kid, hedelivered booze to Babe Ruth's apartmenton the Drive.Were St. Louis%u2019 Gashouse Gangsters of the 1930%u2019s really more boisterous and colorful than the hirsute world champ Oakland A%u2019s of 1972-73?Were the New York Yankees of 1927 really better than all of %u2019em%u2014including those that have assembled in the near half-century since M urderer%u2019s f Row disbanded? Well, so insists John %u2019 Mosedale, in this diligently researched mash note to Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig & Company.Mosedale, who started out life as a Milwaukee Brewer fan, then, as a little boy, switched his affections to the Gashouse Gang, has since become a %u201cretroactive 1927 Yankee fan.%u201d In this book he prepares an effective, punchy brief in behalf of his favorite team.In the course of detailing just how good Ruth, who hit his sacrosanct sixty homers in '27, was, and how good Gehrig was, with his .373 average and 175 runs batted in, Mosedale also reminds us this was the team that mightily influenced the use of language for years to come. The sports pages that season, for the first time,ballyhooed the message, %u201cBreak Up the Yankees!%u201d and the Yanks were also known as the producers of %u201cFive O%u2019Clock Lightning%u201d (games started at three o%u2019clock in those days and Yank barrages generally got going at sundown).Though it%u2019s hard to imagine remaining interested in capsule descriptions of the 154 games the Yankees played that year (they won 110, lost 44 and grabbed one season%u2019s series from the St. Louis Browns by 21-1!), Mosedale succeeds in riveting our attention by weaving into his narrative some of the frenetic social and political events of that yardstick year. Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic in 1927 (we are also dutifully reminded that 60 trans-Atlantic flights by plane and dirigible had preceded Lucky Lindy, a nickname he hated; but he was the first to do it alone). However, Cleveland beat the Yanks that Lindberghian mid-May afternoon (they won more games from the New Yorkers in %u201927%u2014ten%u2014than any other club in the then-eight team league).7 When shoemaker Sacco and fishpeddler Vanzetti finally went to their deaths in the Massachusetts electric chair on August 23, the Yankees held a 15-game lead.When that other almost equally famed Ruth of 1927%u2014Ruth Snyder, the frostyeyed blonde%u2014was sentenced to die on Friday, May 13, for the brutal dumbbell murder of her art editor husband, the Babe and Gehrig were in the secondmonth of their season-long Home Run Derby. (Lou was way behind at the end, with %u201conly\On the afternoon of the night%u2014Sept. 22%u2014when Gene Tunney decisioned Jack Dempsey in the storied Battle of the Long Count at Chicago, the Yanks whomped Detroit, 8-7, via a Bambino round-tripper, with Mark Koenig on base, in the bottom of the ninth inning.And so it goes in this fascinating odyssey of the %u201927 Yankees.If we are not necessarily convinced, after 220 Mosedale pages of praise and anecdotes, that those Yanks were truly the %u201cgreatest of all,%u201d we do learn, in the bargain, some fascinating sidebar information. Gehrig, for example, baseball's endurance champ with his 2,130 consecutive games, suffered throughout his ill-starred life, from a terrible anxiety about his inadequacies. He %u201cfeared all his career that his ability to hit a ball would leave him over night,%u201d the veteran sportswriter Dan Daniel told the author.Mosedale also reels off the salaries that Colonel Jacob R uppert and General Manager Ed Barrow paid to those omnipotents and we have to refrain from gasping. Yes, the Babe made his 70 Gs in '27%u2014and ultimately bargained it up to $80,000 a few years later. But Gehrig earned just $8,000. Bob Meusel, in left field, with a .337 batting average and 103 RBIs, as well as a rifle arm that some insist was the best of all time, made $13,000; Earle Combs (we're grateful to Mosedale for not giving him to us as Coombs), the silver-haired center-fielder who was baseball%u2019s most dependable leadoff man, made $10,500. Poosh %u2019em Up Tony Lazzeri, the ^brilliant and epileptic second baseman, was getting $8,000. His sidekick at short, Koenig, got $7,000. Herb Pennock, the left-hander with 19 wins, earned a top for the staff of $17,000.I%u2019d like to have heard more from some of those surviving members of the '27 club%u2014 Koenig; Joe Dugan; Combs; the articulate and handsome Waite Hoyt, who was a mortician when he wasn't pitching. So many of them, of course, are gone, due to a high level of premature death. But I would have been happy with more direct quotes from the lingering members of the old troupe and fewer newspaper clippings.Also, Mosedale should be reminded that Joey Sewell was not a catcher on the Indians. His brother, Luke, was. And I'd hope the future editions of this useful spring book will straighten out Washington second baseman Buddy Myer%u2019s name (it%u2019s not Myers) and Philadelphia pitcher Ed Rommel%u2019s name (it%u2019s not Rommels).Lou Gehrig, of course, died at 38, on June 2, 1941%u2014not 1940, as Mosedale reports. I%u2019ll never forget that day: I took my leave from Columbia the next afternoon%u2014and that%u2019s the same campus where it had all started for this largemuscled and painfully shy young man, who was so much a part of the %u201cgreatest of all.%u201d %u25a0PAPERBACKSTo a whole generation of readers, paperback books are as much a part of their natural (!) environment as television, plastics, frozen pizza and the promise of permanent ear damage from loud noise. But it%u2019s less than thirty years ago that a paperback book was something you hid between the covers of your notebook, if you were in school, or in your pocket or purse if you were a grown-up with sneaky reading habits. And it wasn%u2019t the contents, at all%u2014no porno on the newsstands in those days, but reprints of legit bestsellers, classical works in the public domain, and lots of good science fiction. You could buy them for a quarter. The thing was, all the covers had buxomyEileen Lottman writes a column on bookpublishing for The Village Voice, freelances and does gothic novels. Shelives in a westside apartment with a nicehusband, two spoiled cats, and a daughteraway at college.IN THIS ISSUEBooks p ageCruel and Unusual Justice by Jack Newfiuld uThe Greatest of All: The 1927 New York Yankees by John Mosedale nTrain Whistle Guitar bv Albert MurrayFeaturesTaking a Leaf PaperbacksEDITOR: Marvin Gelfand Associate Editor: Leonora FleischerAddress all editorial correspondence to280 Riverside Drive, Neu- York N Y10025.women about to pop their tops, no matter the contents of the book. There was something racy about a cheaply printed book, in the days when \synonymous with %u201cdirty%u201d. Both words have, of course, become totally obsolete in our time.Paperbacks are not only legitimate, they are the only books that increasingly large numbers of readers ever buy. They called it a paperback revolution in the early days, when they started to outsell hardcovers. Now that paperbacks cost as much as hardcovers used to, and the only time anybody buys a hardcover is if someone is sick in the hospital, or it%u2019s Christmas, or%u2014well, when%u2019s the last time you bought a hardcover book? The real revolution is inside the publishing business. Not only is the tail wagging the dog, it%u2019s deciding which direction to go, doing all the sniffing and scoffing up all the yummies. I mean that paperback publishers sign authors directly, not waiting for the chance to reprint but actively seeking out new projects, experimenting with new ways to present material, selling the hardcover rights for library editions and bookclub selections, and in general, taking over the publishing business.For a long time, the gentlemen of the hardcover establishment were caught in an economic bind, so that sellingn a n e r h n r k r e p r in t ricrh ts h e r n m e th e irbasic source of profit%u2014you simply couldn%u2019t sell enough copies of a book to stay in business, so the price of paperback rights went up, and up and up%u2014now it%u2019s not uncommon to read about rights being auctioned off for close to a million dollars. But only a handful of conglomerate-owned paperback houses can afford those auctions, and the alternative is original publishing. That%u2019s what makes the book business exciting now, and that%u2019s whereits heading for the future. Agents no longer. sell their authors%u2019 books to a hardcover house and wait for their half of the paperback rights to come in; more and more, they make separate and simultaneous deals%u2014selling to hardcover for a few thousand dollars (the hardcover house will make its profit, hopefully, in library and bookclub sales) and conducting the paperback auction without benefit of a middleman.Then there are the genius editors who come up with new ideas all the time, ideas for books which can be published relatively cheaply (relative to the cost of producing a hardcover book, not relative to what it used to cost) in paperback. Graphics have taken a giant step, from the look-alike booby ladies to an authentic American art form; paperback covers are wondrously inventive, original signals of the infinitely expanding possibilities inside.Much of the little world that hops and panders around the fringes of the publishing business has not yet caught up with the exciting innovations and the millions of readers who buy original paperbacks. Most of the book review media still cover hardcover books exclusively, although this is slowly changing. Recent attempts to syndicate a column such as this through a major national feature syndicate met withrocictanoa Ponnlo mio-hl Kr> Umrintr - - \- %u201c o - ~~paperbacks exclusively, but the little old ladies who%u2019ve been reviewing books for the local papers are firmly entrenched; there is no advertising income in the book pages (still called %u201cwomen's pages\surprising number of newspapers); and the mass market' which buys paperback books in drugstores and newsstands wouldn%u2019t read book reviews, which are for th e in te lle c tu a ls n o t th e folks who read for pleasure.But I didn%u2019t mean to talk about the culture gap. In New York, and maybe mostly on the west side (we chauvinists believe), there are scores of bookshops where you can casually browse through books that will never see the clearer air in Drake, North Dakota (where they are burning the works of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and John Steinbeck even as you read this). For only one example, we have available to us this month THE MAXFIELD PARRISH POSTER BOOK, from Harmony Books/Crown, being published simultaneously in paperback ($5.95) and hardcover ($9.95). It is a magnificently reproduced set of full-color reproductions, sized ll\whose work is probably best described as part of the art deco period, but it really is much more durable than faddish.What%u2019s remarkable is the loving care with which the paperback is produced. The introduction by Maurice Sendak and a biographical/bibliographical listing of Parrish%u2019s life and work make up the whole text in three large-type pages; the rest is twenty glorious posters, printed on hea'w glossy paper on a single side of each sheet, plus a bonus of a full-size bookplate and an endplate. Each is not only suitable, but cries out for framing, and at this price you can decorate your entire apartment. The timing of this publication is right-on, of course, with the current interest in Parrish and his special kind of nost.er art%u2014a forerunner of pop, there%u2019s a delightful ad for Jello, as well as some early covers for Life and Collier's%u2014but the fact that such a book can be published, and purchased without much ado or even much money, is one of the blessings we can count while we look away from the television, plug our ears against the transistors, and wait for the plastic pizza to thaw. The brave new world has some good things in it after all%u2014Eileen Lottman