Just finished reading Frank Thomas's autobiography, so here's a few thoughts.First, it's a very long book for a baseball player autobiography. It just has to be a record. What player autobiography was ever over 500 pages? Thomas either had the world's greatest memory, or he kept fantastic scrap books, or he did a lot of research, because he goes into minute detail on his entire career, going back to the lowest minor leagues. He literally describes every home run he ever hit in professional baseball, going back to rookie league ball in 1948 with the Tallahassee Pirates. He'll say something like, "I hit one out against the Valdosta Dodgers in the 7th inning off Joe Blow with our team down by two runs. It was a high, inside fastball and the wind was blowing in that day so it barely cleared the wall over the Seiberling Tires sign in left-center and bounced off the roof of a 1946 Dodge in the parking lot behind the fence." He hit a lot of home runs, both in the minors and majors, so you get a lot of that type of stuff.
He comes across sometimes as a strange guy, but I think it's more the fact that he came from a very recent immigrant family, his father having emigrated from Lithuania, and they were not completely assimilated to American ways, so what was a normal way of looking at life in a dangerous part of the world might seem eccentric here in the US. He was extremely stubborn in sticking up for his rights, leading to many disputes with management and some with managers. His hatred of that phony, hypocritical plaster saint of Baseball, Branch Rickey, may surprise some readers, but it is refreshing and from what I've read and heard from other people (including Ralph Kiner) probably much closer to the truth than the myths we're usually fed. He doesn't hesitate to speak his mind about others, and he doesn't mind telling unflattering details about himself, and will admit when he felt he was wrong. He was a very devout Roman Catholic and there is much confession in this book.
Everyone wants to know about the Richie Allen thing. He goes into deep details on this (as on everything else) and is willing to take a lot of the blame, but not all of it. I think the key to the incident comes from another player on another team (in a different book)--Jim O'Toole, a pitcher who was briefly a star with Cincinnati and briefly a teammate of Thomas's with the Reds. O'Toole, who was kind of a hot head, clearly didn't like Thomas and didn't hide his dislike when talking about him in the book "We Played The Game". O'Toole said that Thomas was one of those guys who liked to needle teammates (which Thomas admits in his book), but unlike most players, Thomas never knew when to stop and would keep going until he incited a fight or near fight. And O'Toole ended up in a couple of scraps of his own with Thomas. In other words, Thomas was a pain in the ass to be around.
This is what caused the fight with Richie Allen. Thing is, when Thomas got in a fight with O'Toole, no big deal because O'Toole was white and there was no racial aspect to give outsiders a soap box to climb up on. I grew up a White Sox fan, precisely at the time Allen was playing for them and unlike others I don't see him as any pure, innocent angel. I remember Chuck Tanner doing everything possible as White Sox manager to appease and pander to Allen's many childish whims and Allen still quitting on the team and walking away in the middle of a season when the Sox were considered to be pennant contenders. My take is you had these two guys who were not easy to get along with and as long as they were on the same team, a fight between them was almost inevitable. Thomas became the goat not because he was white but because Allen, at that point in time, was a younger, better, more valuable player, and also because Thomas and Phillies manager Gene Mauch did not like each other. Thomas infers that even before the fight, Mauch was looking to get rid of him and the fight was a perfect excuse.
Of course there's a lot about his time with the Mets, but that seemed to be a peaceful time in his career with no obvious disputes with teammates, most of whom were just passing through as that was a bad team with constant personnel changes. He liked Casey, disliked George Weiss (no surprise, as with one exception, John Holland of the Cubs, he disliked every GM he ever dealt with) and loved playing in NY. He was right in the middle of some famous on-the-field incidents, so we get the details on those. For example, two famous early 60's brawls: the Willie Mays-Elio Chacon fight at Candlestick Park, and Billy Martin's sucker punch incident with Jim Brewer when Thomas was a member of the Cubs. Also while with the Cubs he played the no-hitter Don Cardwell pitched in his Cubs debut. There were a few other famous games, but those are the ones to come to mind first.
It's worth getting the book, if you can find it. I think it was privately printed as I don't believe any major publishing house would have published a book that long by a player who, 50+ years after his career ended, has become fairly obscure. Some parts of it get to be a slog, as he goes into sometimes mind-numbing minutiae about meaningless games (and he played on a lot of bad teams, so there were many meaningless, late-season games), but you won't get a better day-by-day account of baseball in the 50's and 60's, and especially how players were treated by management in the days when players had no say over their careers. Also the book has many illustrations and they are very nicely printed, which is rare nowadays. You can actually make out what the pictures are supposed to show.
One bonus, if you collect autographs, is that it seems he personally autographed every copy of the book, so if you want a Frank Thomas autograph for your Mets collection, buying this book is a quick way of getting one.
