Veteran Reds fans old enough to have listened to Waite Hoyt broadcast Reds game on radio will really enjoy the new Schoolboy book published 40 years after his death.
Writer Tim Manners totally captures the voice of Hoyt, the Hall of Fame pitcher from Babe Ruth's 1927 Yankees who broadcast Reds games for Burger Beer from 1942 to 1965. Those who remember Hoyt — and listened to Hoyt's two record albums featuring stories he told during Reds' rain delays — will smile when they read passages like: "The mud in the infield grew so deep, gee whiz, it was ankle deep."
Hoyt's son Chris, who was born in 1938, the year Waite's 21-year Major League Baseball ended with a 237-182 record, asked Manners to complete his father's book from eight boxes of his writings, letters, notes and "hundreds of pages of transcripts" with niece Ellen Frell Levy, who was working on a Hoyt biography in the 1980s.
Schoolboy: The Untold Journey of a Yankees Hero is "almost entirely Waite's voice. I'd say 98 percent, and that was possible due to the interview transcripts with Ellen," says Manners, a writer, editor and author based in Westport, Conn.
Hoyt earned the nickname "Schoolboy" after being signed by the New York Giants as a batting practice pitcher in 1915 at age 15, the same age Joe Nuxhall signed with the Reds in 1944. But unlike Nuxhall, Hoyt didn't make his Major League debut for three years, on July 24, 1918. His teammates were not impressed. They cursed him and made fun of him in the Polo Ground clubhouse.
"I was no wonder boy — just a snot-nosed schoolboy who had no right to be on the diamond with grown men," said Hoyt, who was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 9, 1899. Or as Hoyt liked to say, he was born on 9/9/99, according to his third wife, Betty Derie Hoyt, who died in 2016.
After Hoyt's debut with the Giants, he pitched two years for the Boston Red Sox before being traded to the Yankees. Hoyt was the star pitcher in the 1920s Yankees lineup, which featured sluggers Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri and Bob Meusel. He pitched in six World Series for the Yankees (1921-28) and one World Series game for Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics (in 1931). He also played for the Detroit Tigers, Pittsburgh Pirates and Brooklyn Dodgers.
The book is filled with multisyllabic words that made Hoyt unique among ball players. He usually sat in the corner of the clubhouse reading books "while my teammates were gambling, playing poker or bridge." Hoyt, one of the first ex-athletes to move into the broadcast booth, will have readers Googling "obstreperous," "vicissitudes," "sylphlike," "roseate," "joie de vivre" and "peregrinate."
Hoyt was also unique in that he performed in New York's vaudeville theaters in the off-season, where he met everyone from actress Mae West, entertainer George M. Cohan, comedian Jimmy Durante and the Marx Brothers, to gangsters Al Capone, Leg Diamond, Lucky Luciano and FBI director J. Edgar Hoover. He also briefly worked for a funeral home and tells about driving a car carrying a casket to Yankee Stadium, pitching a game, and then delivering the body to a Brooklyn mortuary.
Baseball fans will enjoy reading Hoyt's observations about the Hall of Famers he played with and against, starting with Babe Ruth, "The Big Fella." Ruth "forever reminded me of a powerful shaggy dog … He had no business sense whatsoever." Of the 30,000 letters he got a week, the Bambino only opened ones "that smelled of perfume. Then he tore up the rest." Hoyt and his teammates went through the ripped-up mail and found royalty checks for as much as $3,000.
Of all the baseball heroes Hoyt saw, Stan Musial was second to Ruth, ahead of Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams, according to Hoyt. Batting king Ty Cobb was "a determined fellow without ethics or regard for his fellow man … He was a competitive demon."
Hoyt saw Negro League star Josh Gibson "rocket some record-breaking home runs into the beyond" when Hoyt finished his career pitching for the minor league Brooklyn Bushwicks in 1938 after being released by the Dodgers.
And Hoyt was behind the Burger Beer microphone when Jackie Robinson — "big, alert, daring and fast" — made his Crosley Field debut for the Dodgers in 1947. "It was difficult to re-create the feeling among fans, players, writers, broadcasters and even club owners when the odious color line was broken in baseball … Prejudice, like an iceberg, is something hard to measure until you run into it."
To my surprise, Schoolboy reveals that Hoyt didn't get along with Ruth, with the men not speaking for nearly two years, and that most of the Yankees didn't like Lou Gehrig, the college-educated slugger who won the 1927 Most Valuable Player award hitting .373 with 173 runs batted in and 47 home runs.
"I feel ashamed about the way my teammates and I sized him (Gehrig) up at the beginning and how we ridiculed him," said Hoyt, who was inducted into the Cooperstown Ball Hall of Fame in 1969. His wife Ellen was elated, telling people that her husband was going into the "House of Fame."
Another surprise is how Hoyt was constantly in conflict with himself over his first wife's family versus his parents; baseball versus vaudeville, undertaker, painter, writer or other possible careers; and drinking versus sobriety.
When he entered the Hall of Fame with Stan Musial, Roy Campanella and Stan Coveleski in 1969, he told the Cooperstown audience that he could have been a journalist instead of a baseball player.
"My jaw dropped when I read his speech," Manners said. "What journalist wouldn't kill to have been Waite Hoyt? And somehow he felt like he hadn't fulfilled his potential, or had not been what he meant to be, even though he achieved such tremendous success.
"I think that on some level that's a notion which will resonate with a lot of people, whether they're baseball fans or not. I think we all have a little bit of 'Gee, what if I would have done this or that instead?' But what makes it so striking is that he's in the Baseball Hall of Fame, which has like only 1 percent of anybody who has ever played the game honored there — and still feel like he let himself down."
Hoyt admits he had grave doubts about moving to Cincinnati in 1942 for his first radio play-by-play job for Burger Beer.
"Believe me, I did not leave for Cincinnati with a heart full of joy. I knew well enough that the move this time had to be for good, and I was not at all certain that I was going to take root and flourish so far away from Broadway and Yankee Stadium ... Would the locals put up with me? Would I ever really feel at home?"
Some readers also will relate to Hoyt's battle with alcoholism. He hit rock bottom in July 1945. After drinking for three days he checked himself into Good Samaritan Hospital. He became active in Alcoholics Anonymous with the help of his sponsor, Herb Heeken, and was forever grateful that Burger Beer didn't fire him for his absence or his loyal support for AA members off the air. Hoyt also was loyal to Burger: When Burger lost the Reds radio rights in 1965 he retired rather than work for competitor Wiedemann in 1966.
Longtime broadcaster Bob Costas, who wrote the foreword, has long been perplexed that Hoyt was possibly the only baseball announcer to call games in the past tense instead of the active voice. Hoyt explains in the book that he chose that style when doing "re-creations" of road games from a studio, where he described the action based on play-by-play accounts provided by Western Union telegraph operators. The past tense provided "accuracy because I was always behind the action" by several seconds.
I found it curious that Schoolboy writes off the Yankees' extraordinary 1927 season (110-44-1) in which Ruth hit a record 60 home runs, in only three pages. Manners explains that he "took guidance from Waite" and the material in the eight boxes provided by Hoyt's son. He did not use sources beyond that, including Hoyt's book, Babe Ruth: As I Knew Him, published in 1948, the year Ruth died.
"He didn't talk that much about the '27 Yankees, and I actually suspect that was by design, because he does mention elsewhere that he doesn't like talking about certain parts of his career because it sounds like he's bragging. And maybe he could have provided some insights to those games, but a lot of that has been covered elsewhere I think," he said.
Schoolboy lumps most of Hoyt's Ruth stories in a chapter called "Me and The Babe." He also didn't use any Ruth stories from Hoyt's two Burger Beer record albums filled with stories told during Reds' rain delays. You can hear some of the Burger albums here:
"I really was determined to be true to what I essentially felt that Waite wanted to talk about, and I got the impression that (Ruth and the '27 Yankees) was something he really didn't want to spend much time on," Manners says.
Schoolboy, published by the University of Nebraska Press, has been promoted heavily on Facebook and X (formerly Twitter) for two months. It's available on Amazon and should be in bookstores by April 1.
"The response has been terrific, but mostly because of the people in Cincinnati," Manners says. "I've been amazed by how many people remember Waite, especially those who listened to him. They have such fond memories. It's really remarkable."
