An Interview With Robert Creamer

Robert Creamer began following baseball in 1931. He saw Babe Ruth hit home runs. He wrote for Sports Illustrated when it debuted in the mid-1950s. And he has written many baseball books, most notably biographies of both Babe Ruth and Casey Stengel. (N.B.: He also said some extremely nice things about my book on the 1918 Red Sox.)

Graham Womack of Baseball Past And Present interviewed Creamer recently. And the entire interview is a must-read. (Thanks to Dave Pinto of Baseball Musings for the tip).

Some snips:

What still excites you about baseball?

That's easy – the wonder of "What happens next?" When I'm watching a game between teams I'm interested in, sometimes that wonder — and the fulfillment of it, as in the sixth game of the 2011 World Series — can be excruciatingly exciting, and its fulfillment as you watch and wait can be almost literally incredible. ... I have occasionally quoted my long-ago family doctor who once said to me, "Baseball is a game of limitless dramatic possibility." We've come close to the limit — Bobby Thomson's home run 60 years ago, the Cardinals last fall — but we haven't reached it yet.

Who's the greatest baseball player you covered?

Willie Mays. Period.

If steroids had been a part of the game when Stengel and Ruth were players, do you think they would have used?

Sure. Yes. Absolutely. Hell, for decades before the big scandal about steroids in baseball, clubhouses used to have plates or dishes filled with little candy-like pills players gulped or chewed on routinely. My mind is gone – I forget what they were called ... Uppers? Bennies? I can't recall. But that was standard. Athletes are always looking for an edge and that was a way to get them fired up. I have never been as upset by steroid use as the moralistic holier-than-thou baseball writers who vote on the Hall of Fame. What a bunch of self-important phonies!

I mean, you'd think all an ordinary player would have to do is take steroids to hit 70 home runs or bat .350. But I think McGwire was telling the truth — he took steroids to hold back distress, to make him physically able to play the game. Steroids don't make a player good. Think of the hundreds, even thousands of players who have been in and out of the major leagues and who may have dabbled in steroids and think how few have hit 50, let alone 60 or 70 homers. Sure, every two-bit hitter in the lineup seems able to drive the ball over the outfield fences, but that has as much to do with the dimensions of the fields and the dimensions of the players, even without steroids. ...