Brian McDonald

From the Boston Globe:

THIS TRUE STORY FROM THE DIAMOND IS A GEM
By Luke Salisbury, Globe Correspondent

No baseball player with as short a career as Louis Sockalexis is so well remembered. The Penobscot outfielder from Old Town, Maine, played half the 1897 season and fractions of the next two for Cleveland. For part of a summer, Sockalexis electrified the National League.

Those who saw him, like John McGraw and Hughie Jennings, said the Indian could throw and run better than anyone who ever played. Sockalexis hit .337 in his abbreviated season. Drink and injury destroyed his career and his life.
Sockalexis has fascinated me since I read about him in the Fireside Book of Baseball. When a book appears on a subject one knows well, the reaction will undoubtedly be strong. The new claimant is either an unwanted interloper or a welcome guide - nothing in between.
"Indian Summer" deserves a gracious welcome. This book is not only well researched, but the story of Sockalexis is carefully placed in its historical context. Each chapter starts with a page reproduced from a newspaper of the day, along with excellent italicized notes on the historical situation. The newspaper excerpts are a marvelous touch, since the sports journalism of the late 19th century was extravagant, vigorous, and combative in a way our visually dominated era is not.
With wit and savvy, Brian McDonald begins the story of the first player known to be Native American in the Big League, as the National League was called in 1897.
It is a sad story and McDonald understands the nuances. The tale unfolds against the backdrop of the closing frontier, the final destruction of Indian resistance, the removal of Native American children to Indian schools for "civilizing," newspaper chains' circulation wars, and the emergence of baseball as a dominant sport. Sockalexis, first in summer leagues in Maine, then at the College of the Holy Cross, and finally in Cleveland, blazes across the baseball sky as a true, and tragic, supernova.

Sockalexis was the toast of Cleveland nightlife. His downfall came swiftly with an injury sustained leaping from the window of a house of ill repute as well as prodigious drinking. Sockalexis was released by Cleveland, failed in the minor leagues, and was incarcerated for vagrancy. He returned to Maine, where he coached Native American youngsters in Old Town, and continued drinking. He was working as a lumberjack when he died in 1913.
The story is well-documented by McDonald, who is sensitive to the racial climate of the time and to the perils of alcohol. Though the writing sometimes relies on a few too many baseball cliches - this book is very, very good.
The tragedy of Louis Sockalexis is quintessentially American and McDonald has done it justice.

From the NY Times

INDIAN SUMMER
The Forgotten Story of Louis
Sockalexis, the First Native American in Major League Baseball.

Louis Francis Sockalexis was the first American Indian to play major league baseball. He was recruited in 1897 by the Cleveland Spiders as a first baseman. Nearly 6 feet tall, about 200 pounds, 21 years old, "he towered over the other players," Brian McDonald writes in "Indian Summer." As a teenager, Sockalexis had asked members of his college team if he could shag balls during their practice. "The players watched slack-jawed as the lithe youngster darted around the outfield catching, with his bare hands, every drive hit. But what really astounded the collegians was the boy's throwing arm. Years later . . . there was a story of the young Indian throwing a ball across the river from Old Town, Me., to Indian Island -- more than 600 feet." With Sockalexis the Cleveland team went on a winning streak, and he won the praises of the sports press. But he also drank: "His antics in Cleveland saloons were documented from his arrival" McDonald writes. "He flushed his talent away in a river of alcohol." He became the target of the Women's Christian Temperance Union and bigots who resented an Indian's presence on the field; one churchgoing woman declared, "Baseball on Sunday will hasten the opening of saloons on Sunday." Sockalexis drank himself out of the league and to an early death in 1913, at the age of 42. "Indian Summer" movingly tells his story. Peggy Constantine