David Jerome. Bill Virdon: A Life in Baseball. Jefferson, NC: McFarland [link], 2023.
Jerome’s biography is an intriguing exploration of Bill Virdon’s baseball leadership qualities. His playing career was not Hall of Fame-caliber, the typical baseline raison d’etre for many a book-length baseball biography. What makes Virdon’s life book-worthy is his status as a baseball lifer – player, coach, and manager for a half-century between 1950 and 2002. The overall Bevis Rating for this biography is L3C3R3.
This book is an unusual combination of memoir (via transcribed interview comments from Virdon and his wife) and third-party biography. Memoir elements are sprinkled throughout the book, but are most salient in the first chapter, where Jerome quotes Virdon extensively about his coming of age in Southwest Missouri, his uncommon route to professional baseball through non-scholastic amateur teams (his high school lacked a baseball program), and his minor-league years in the Yankees organization.
Virdon was an above-average ballplayer, as Rookie of the Year in 1955, World Series champion in 1960 with the Pittsburgh Pirates, and holder of a .267 lifetime batting average during his 11 major-league years. Virdon was also a thinking man’s defensive outfielder. Pirates teammate Dick Groat said that Virdon “had great instincts; he knew exactly what to do when the ball came to him,” due to his constant studying of “exactly how to play each and every player” (48-49).
After retiring as a player, Virdon served an apprenticeship as minor-league manager and major-league coach to prep for his 13-year stint as major-league manager from 1972 to 1984. He managed four teams (Pirates, Yankees, Astros, and Expos), compiling a .519 winning percentage and three appearances in the National League Championship Series. Virdon then worked two more decades as a coach, serving as a baseball educator to young players in both the majors and minors.
Virdon’s playing career is the focus of just three of the book’s twelve chapters and refreshingly unencumbered by excessive game detail, which has clogged the flow of many a baseball biography. Jerome concentrates on Virdon’s years as coach and manager. He examines Virdon’s managerial style and how he coped with the contrasting styles of celebrity-driven ballplayers of the 1970s from the old-school team players of Virdon’s era. Some of the most compelling sections of the book explore Virdon’s relations with ego-centric ball-club owners George Steinbrenner (Yankees) and John McMullen (Astros).
The most bizarre segment of Virdon’s life was his brief tenure as Yankees manager (1974 to mid-1975), where a man constitutionally “never a self-promoter” (113) was hired by publicity-mad Steinbrenner, which Jerome only vaguely rationalizes as Steinbrenner being “immediately taken with Virdon” (117). Virdon was caught in the crossfire as consolation prize to Steinbrenner’s obsession with hiring Dick Williams as manager (then unavailable, under contract with another team), then was summarily fired once the volatile, but news-worthy Billy Martin became available. Jerome, though, disappointingly does not include any Virdon quotations to provide his perspective on the situation.
Jerome relies on observations from Tal Smith, front-office executive with both the Yankees and Astros, to add depth to his review of Virdon’s managerial years. “He was a disciplinarian,” Smith told Jerome, who “commanded the respect of his players,” adding that Virdon “never put himself on a pedestal as some managers do with their egos” (135). Ultimately, public scrutiny by an aggressive media was too much for the “quiet and humble” Virdon, who returned to coaching where he had a “knack for nurturing players” (80) and could better impact the sport in a player- development role.
In his character assessment, Jerome portrays Virdon as a competitive, hard-working, cerebral person, who balanced the vagabond life of professional baseball with the stability needs of his wife Shirley and their three daughters. Shirley’s contributions to the memoir aspect of this book add extraordinary context to both Virdon’s work life as well as the nature of his character. “Sincerity, dependability, honesty, and integrity are Bill’s trademarks,” Tal Smith told Jerome. “Unlike so many in the public eye, Bill has no ego, no phoniness, no desire to make himself look good at the expense of others” (1).
There is a vast trove of primary-source interview material in this book, which Jerome gleaned from numerous baseball colleagues of Virdon in addition to Smith. While Jerome does add some secondary-source material, he intentionally structures the book’s format as “a conversation provided by insightful storytellers who are still with us and who know Bill the best” (6). Arguably, Jerome could improve the biographical narrative about Virdon’s leadership qualities by weaving in just the more-informative portions of the interviews to better build his case about the importance of Virdon’s life.
Jerome has crafted an engaging portrait of Bill Virdon as a life worth understanding, not for the star quality of the book’s subject (which he lacks) but for its exploration of a supremely competent man who devoted his life to enhancing professional baseball.
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