![]() Plenty opined that Helyar had gotten much right. “Nobody ever screamed that I got something all wrong,” Helyar says (although then-Mets co-owner Nelson Doubleday did deny having uttered an anti-Semitic remark the book attributed to him). ![]() The New York Times called it “the ultimate chronicle of the games behind the game,” praising both the vividness of Helyar’s characters and the quality of his facts and figures. Helyar’s exhaustively reported, richly detailed, and improbably readable account of how baseball became the province of billionaires and multimillionaires-with an emphasis on the string of labor battles that went the way of the MLB Players Association under Marvin Miller’s stewardship, which started in the mid-1960s-won the 1994 Casey Award, an honor bestowed on the best baseball book of the year. After reading Lords of the Realm, it’s impossible to view baseball, beloved as it is, as anything less than a big business, and one that for much of its history was an exploitative enterprise governed by greed, dishonesty, and incompetence. But the behind-the-scenes book he produced complicated the consumption of sports even for regular readers. The ambivalence he felt about the Braves’ win was partly the product of the uncomfortable clash between childhood hobby and professional life that any sportswriter experiences. “It was one of the better and more insightful and more accurate treatments of the relationship.” -Gene Orza, longtime MLBPA officialīoth Danforth and Simmons had been useful sources for Helyar as he worked on the book that would become Lords of the Realm, the seminal chronicle of MLB ownership and labor relations that turned 25 last week. “This was, I felt, the very definition of mixed feelings.” ![]() “This was their last chance to win anything before the club was to be broken up by free agency,” Helyar recalls. But amid the euphoria of the Braves’ big moment, he pulled out a pair of binoculars and trained them on the Pirates’ private box, where he spied owner Doug Danforth and GM Ted Simmons looking “slumped and devastated.” Bonds had just played his last game for Pittsburgh, and although Danforth didn’t know it, his defeated franchise was about to embark on a streak of 20 consecutive losing seasons. Helyar, a lifelong Red Sox fan, had also adopted the Braves after the Wall Street Journal transferred him to Atlanta in the mid-1980s, and he celebrated their historic comeback from a spot deep in the left-center-field stands. A crowd of almost 52,000 fans made Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium shake, causing visible tremors on the broadcast when the camera zoomed in on the happy pileup at home plate. It was October 14, 1992, and the obscenely slow Sid Bream had just beaten Barry Bonds’s throw home to seal a walk-off win for the Braves in NLCS Game 7. John Helyar remembers the moment he realized that writing about the business of baseball had changed the way he watched the game. And the fans, ever forgiving, were still there.” -John Helyar, Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball ![]() The money poured into the game and men gorged and gouged over it-made damned fools of themselves over it. They wallowed in dubious battle, locked in ugly trench warfare for dominion over the green fields. Men fought to control it as if they could own it. They were, perhaps, blinded by the light of what it represented-a glowing distillate of America. “There was something about the national pastime that made the people in it behave badly. ![]()
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