Baseball. I like it well enough, I suppose, as long as I'm not forced to watch an entire game without a bottle of bourbon next to me and a Gameboy in my hand. Don't get me wrong - I truly appreciate the amount of strategy and athleticism the sport requires, but so much of the time during a game is spent with nobody moving and a good deal of staring and overanalysis on the part of announcers that my ADD-addled, MTV-rotted brain decides that yes, that piece of tin foil is an excellent way to pass some of the downtime. Comics and cinema, however, can compress and expand time at will, letting the audience get past all of the dull standing about and crotch grabbing and focusing on the actual sporting aspects. This is why I like Major League and The Natural more than, you know, the Red Sox winning the World series - I get to the story that lies in the middle of all the minute detritus that appeals to me not one bit.There's not much in the way of sports comics, however - Julie Schwartz got a hair up his ass in the early 70s and Strange Sports Stories was born, but it was a short-lived experiment; even Marvel's Sports Action series of the 50s only lasted 14 issues. Hell, when it comes to just baseball, the pickings are even more slender - not even Will Eisner could make a baseball title sell, so they've laid pretty fallow over the years.
James Sturm, however, isn't a man who's going to let failure on the part of others stop him from trying to make something unique. As the third and most ambitious part in his trilogy of historical works, this story of a Jewish baseball team in the 1920s stands as a parable that illustrates the dangerous stupidity of anti-semitism as well as the love of a sport that's pretty much got our country by the short and curlies now and maybe even moreso then. The Stars Of David, a minor league team managed by our narrator Noah Strauss, travel throughout the country playing against local teams in a circuit that includes gimmicky groups such as the Hoboes and the Zulus. They're paid upfront for their skills, generally barely break even, and have a pretty hard time of it considering the fact that people at the time just plain didn't trust the Jews.
The Stars Of David, however, have a secret weapon in the form of Henry "Hershl Bloom" Bell, a towering black man with an incredible swing who is a little too old for the Negro League but still has plenty of play left in him. It's this man who catches the attention of an agent, Victor Paige, whose Big Inning Promotional Agency promises to double the group's revenue with a clever bit involving Henry being dressed as the mythical Jewish saviour, the Golem. This sets the team's fortunes on a new course and creates a sensation that brings as much trouble as it does success.
There's a very funny bit from one of the early episodes of SportsNight where Jeremy is trying to edit a baseball game down for a highlight reel and he finds a bit of beauty in every moment of the game - he's unwilling to cut anything that builds the struggle in the minds of the viewer but he only has thirty of forty seconds to give the viewer a look at the game where he's created an eight and a half minute short film that would make Ken Burns pause. Sturm's an ambitious cartoonist and manages to create this ideal highlight reel for the readers in a few pages per game, really showing the ebb and flow of the game as well as the individual players' struggles. This talent, combined with his natural interest in American history and ability to fully flesh out characters with a few discrete brush strokes, makes this an easy to read story that rewards the reader on multiple levels: it's a fun story about baseball; it's an interesting study of racial prejudice in the early 20th Century; it's a statement of what can be done with comics without pretension while still being worthy of serious consideration. I highly regret not reading this earlier and urge you to spend some time with this.
