Description
The Cleveland Indian by Luke Salisbury
ISBN 978-0930773823
It’s the end of the 19th century and the basepaths are alive with legendary players such as John McGraw and Honus Wagner. Cy Young is on the mound and King Saturday (the Cleveland Indian) is at bat. The kranks, or fans, are rooting for action. The Cleveland Indian brings to life the bawdy, often sinister, final days of the Gay Nineties. Against this panorama, the author fields an authentic 1897 Cleveland Spiders lineup, a team as colorful as its era. King Saturday, modeled on real-life baseball legend Sockalexis, the Indian outfielder who gave the Cleveland ball club its name, is a con man, a drunk, a brawler, a hero, a schemer, a murderer, and possessor of the most talent any baseball man ever saw.
Reviews
The 1897 Cleveland Spiders were a talented baseball team, and Salisbury’s vividly rendered first novel captures the players, the memories surrounding them and the American public’s burgeoning obsession with baseball at the turn of the century. Salisbury focuses on the fictional relationship between narrator Henry Harrison–the team’s lawyer and a self-described “Krank,” as fans were called in those days–and the charismatic King Saturday, the club’s raucous, unpredictable and doomed American Indian superstar. Modeled after Lou Sockalexis–considered the first Native American major-leaguer and a real star for the Spiders in 1897 (you can look it up)–Saturday is rendered as a magisterial but unknowable figure of tremendous physical skills and enigmatic motivations. The character of 19th-century baseball–the aggressive tactics, hard-drinking players and pervasive gambling–is wonderfully depicted, as are the political tensions and social strictures of the period. Harrison’s earnest, crisp narrative voice is appealing. There are some flaws: certain sections–Harrison following Saturday to the steaming jungles of Cuba, for example–seem almost a parody of the adventure novel. It’s also unfortunate that we get to know the extraordinary King Saturday only through his schemes and his awesome deeds, and never through the articulation of his inner life.
—Publishers Weekly, Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
A Penobscot Indian with a terrific arm and flexible morality takes Cleveland’s baseball team briefly to the top of the league in the 1890’s. The salaries were a tiny fraction of today’s, and Cleveland was in the National League, but even then there were gifted players who gambled and lawyers who would rather sit in the grandstands than in a courtroom. Henry Harrison is among the latter, a well- born but impoverished Ivy League graduate dazzled by the throwing arm, hitting skills, and romantic talents of Louis King Phillip Saturday, a half-ugly half-Indian from Maine. Saturday is signed by the Cleveland Spiders, who also hire Harrison as their lawyer. Harrison’s primary duty is to keep an eye on his wild friend–an assignment that introduces him to the seamier side of the Cuyahoga River. It does not take Harrison very long to discover that Saturday sees nothing wrong with betting on baseball, including his own games, and Henry finds himself willingly holding the bag and becoming Saturday’s business partner. Saturday’s such a good player and such a good gambler that the bag begins to fill up fast, and Harrison’s ambition to own his very own professional team begins to seem possible. Another similarity to today’s sport: worshipful women. In addition to managing the money, Harrison must keep Saturday’s admirers in order. Alas, Harrison himself fancies at least one of the ladies. When the glorious season with the Spiders spectacularly ends, Saturday, whose gambling has become an open secret, must take it on the lam to Cuba, Mexico, and Colorado. Standard Oil, of all things, figures into the action at every turn. Salisbury (the nonfictional The Answer is Baseball, 1989) offers brisk fun for the Bart Giamattis of this world.
—Kirkus Reviews, Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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