Eyes on the Past

BY KEVIN CZERWINSKI

The old appeals to Tim Zarley much more than the new, at least where baseball is concerned.

The Iowa native – he still lives in the Hawkeye State – is a semi-retired patent attorney whose love of baseball history dates back to his childhood when he learned of the Roberto Clemente-led Pittsburgh Pirates. The Hall-of-Famer captivated the young Zarley and watching fellow Pirate Bob Robertson smash homeruns during the 1971 postseason helped cement his infatuation with what was, at the time, one of baseball’s most powerful teams.

“I can remember when they had afternoon World Series games,” Zarley, 64, said. “The Pirates first baseman was Bob Robertson, he hit a home run and it was a day World Series game that I came home from school to watch. There is something about that feeling that you don’t get anymore.”

Though Zarley has lost his passion for the modern game, citing factors like expansion and the mercenary aspects of free agency as some of the reasons why he prefers to focus on the past, the excitement he feels about the game’s history led him to becoming an author. His debut work, 1901: The War of the Baseball Magnates, chronicles the 1901 season, the birth of the American League and the junior circuit’s struggles to establish itself in the shadow of the powerful National League.

Follow-up books chronicling the 1902 and 1903 seasons are due out in November and January, respectively.

“It’s a trilogy that documents the war between the American and National Leagues and the evolution of the game that was the beginning of a lot of modern baseball,” Zarley said. “Once I decided to write, I didn’t doubt I would do something. It still doesn’t feel like work. It’s just something I enjoy. The only limitations are time and energy. I usually spend a few hours in the morning, in the afternoon and the evening.

“It just doesn’t seem like work, especially when you find things that really catch your interest. I’ve been working on 1903 and the whole story about the trouble the American League had to get into New York. Little things like that can hold my interest for quite a while.”

Zarley, like many other creative types, found himself with a great deal of time on his hands during the pandemic. He spent hours researching topics in which he was interested, and it was during this research that he continued to find out tidbits about turn of the 20^th-century baseball. Zarley began writing about those bits and pieces and before he knew it, he had a book.

One of the things that has driven Zarley, who is an avid reader, is the fact that many books on baseball history seem to regurgitate the same stories over and over, never shedding any new light on players, teams and leagues of the past. He is looking to tell stories that have yet to be told or, at the very least, haven’t been told often.

“I read quite a bit, but I didn’t know there was a third league in 1901 that was trying to be a rival league,” said Zarley, who went to Drake University for both his undergraduate and law degrees. “There was also a lot of rowdyism at the time, too. There was one scene in a small town where an umpire gets hit in the head with a bat and dies; things like that. I find the deadball era to be much more colorful than other periods.

“A lot of books just tell the same stories and there was a lot more there with the stories I found that was more interesting than the stories that get retold a lot.”

Zarley says the reception to his book has been good among casual baseball fans though the purists have taken issue with the fact that he didn’t follow proper formatting, citations, style etc. So, he picked up a copy of the Chicago Manual of Style and will be incorporating all the proper credits moving forward.

“The baseball purists are nitpicky about the technicalities,” he said.

While Zarley spends a great deal of time doing research – he likens it to the research and writing he did as a lawyer – he is also an artist who has been working on creating a series of portraits depicting many of the players about whom he has written. He has currently made 10 portraits featuring Bobby Wallace, Christy Mathewson, Clark Griffith, Cy Young, Ed Delahanty, Honus Wagner, Jimmy Collins, Rube Waddell, Willie Keeler and Nap Lajoie.

Griffith was the long-time owner of the Washington Senators in addition to being a player, manager and front office executive. Many consider him to be the ‘father of the American League’.

Zarley is currently working on ideas to market the portraits – most of the work is digital – with two sizes of each portrait in the works. The portraits come from photographs that Zarley has found in the public domain. It takes a week or so to make one and he expects to release a few to the public in the coming months.

“I’m looking at different ways of selling them and giving people the option to buy one or two as part of a package along with the book,” he said. “I may also try marketing them separately as higher-end art pieces. I’ve always looked at artwork as kind of a hobby. I had this picture in my head of using old photographs and trying to create these larger prints that looked like old baseball cards but that wasn’t working.

“One of my clients had large prints of former presidents in his lobby like Lincoln and Washington. They were made with the crosshatch method [a technique that adds shadow and dimension to drawn objects]. I had never done much with crosshatching but I’ve seen examples that I like and I thought maybe it would work with these images.”

Zarley ran a test on Facebook to get some feedback on the prints and though he figured that Wagner and Lajoie would get the best feedback it was Delahanty, the former Phillies star and Hall-of-Famer, who tested the best.

The public also seems to have run a test on Zarley and based on the reception he has gotten, his storytelling about the history he so cherishes is a hit.