The Short Life of Hughie McLoon: A True Story of Baseball, Magic, and Murder

Sportswriter Abel (Flatbush Odyssey) offers an animated look at the carnivalesque early days of professional baseball. Faced with “the maddening difficulty of hitting a speeding, spinning sphere with a hickory bat,” players and managers cultivated a faith in superstitions, according to Abel. In the 19th century, sports teams began adopting human mascots (“preferably hunchbacked, dark-skinned, or at least unusually miniature”) as good luck charms. Deformed by a horrid fall at the age of three, Hughie McLoon (1902–1928) became one of the era’s best known mascots when he walked into the office of Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack in 1916 and offered to help the last-place team break its losing streak. Mack hired McLoon on the spot, and the A’s won the second game of that afternoon’s double-header. McLoon was with the team for three years before moving into the world of boxing, where he brought good luck to Tommy Loughran, Benny Leonard, and Jack Dempsey. He eventually became a respected boxing manager and ran his own bar at the age of 26, before he was struck down in a drive-by shooting. Abel’s hypercaffeinated prose occasionally feels ill-suited to the sad aspects of the story, but his research is solid. Sports fans will savor this one. (Mar.)