Mike Donlin: A Rough and Rowdy Life by Steve Steinberg
Mike Donlin is remembered along with Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb and the stars of major league baseball’s first decades. He was also an early example of a sports celebrity, hobnobbing with New York’s rich and famous and followed by the press. However, there was more to him than homeruns. Donlin played a small part in one of the greatest film comedies, Buster Keaton’s The General (1927). His supporting role as a Union general was only one among many dozens of movies in which he appeared.
The new Mike Donlin biography covers the entirety of the player’s life. He was a showman on the field, a natural for early Hollywood. Authors Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz describe him as “a good-looking man who combined a slightly sinister look with a winning smile” and quote other writers who called him “a sharp-looking dude, eye candy to the ladies” and “cocksure.” Little wonder he was sought out by the nascent movie industry, first appearing in a primitive attempt at a talking picture, Stealing Home (1908). With his baseball career winding down in the 1910s, just as moviemaking shifted from the East Coast to Hollywood, Donlin was searching for “new income streams.” He starred in a biographical picture, Right Off the Bat (1915), which took liberties with life, adding derring-do melodrama. Right Off the Bat was perhaps the first feature-length baseball film.
Donlin’s drinking buddy, the great actor Lionel Barrymore, found him a role as a professional criminal in Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman (1917). Although usually deemed limited as an actor, he was a welcome figure in Hollywood and often received bit parts. From 1918 through 1925 he was seen in at least 15 movies, most of them lost. As Will Rogers recalled, “Everybody liked him. Everybody used him when they had a chance.” The dawn of sound didn’t slow his pace. Donlin appeared in some 30 pictures from 1930 and 1932, with several posthumously released following his death in 1933. He was never a major figure in film history, bur deserves the cinematic footnote he received in this new biography.
Mike Donlin: A Rough and Rowdy Life from New York Baseball Idol to Stage and Screen is published by University of Nebraska Press.
