Thorn Pricks

First Visit to Citifield

2009-05-01T13:18:00.008-04:00

This account of a day at the Mets' new ballpark on April 29 is by my friend Eric Rolfe Greenberg, celebrated for his novel The Celebrant. Anyone wishing to comment should do so on Eric's Facebook page.

First visit to Citifield yesterday --

I was there two hours before game time, the better to scout the ballpark. Missing from the somewhat remodeled subway station: the black-and-white wall sign near the exit that read, simply, "Baseball" -- and a telling omission, because Citifield, as currently marketed, is not so much a ballpark as a destination. The stadium's outward aspect is a pleasing red brick, to the main entryway behind home plate, the "Rotunda," named for a similar, if more humble, extension at Ebbets Field, which had ticket booths. This rotunda is dedicated to Jackie Robinson, with appropriate heroic pictures and inscriptions. In these and all other tributes to Robinson -- and he deserves this much and more -- I continue to think of two elements of his character and legacy that are overlooked among all the rest.

He was fiercely competitive; Leo Durocher, his first manager and later, when running the Giants, his rowdiest opponent -- once said "He didn't just come to play; he came to beat you. He came to ram the bat up your ass." What Robinson showed was not so much that a black man could play big league ball -- of course one could -- but that a black man, in the early 50s, could LEAD a major league team. They were "the Jackie Robinson Dodgers" in every regard. When Giants pitcher Larry Jansen was intimidating Dodger hitters with high, inside heat, it was Robinson they looked to to deal with the problem -- which he did in classic manner, bunting to the first baseman to force the pitcher to cover first, then running him over at the base. In this instance Jansen opted out, leaving second baseman Davey Williams to take the charge, and Robinson -- a former All-America footballer who played both offense and defense at UCLA -- knocked Williams severely. Williams left the game; Jansen lived to pitch on, but there were fewer inside fastballs. And -- correct me if I’m wrong -- Robinson's 1955 thievery was the last straight steal of home in World Series play. It came late in the second game and narrowed the score of an eventual loss, but it awoke the Dodgers, who won the next three games and then, in the seventh game, the Series. By the way, Yogi Berra to the contrary (to this day) notwithstanding, Robinson was safe. The reason I know he was safe was that a run went up on the scoreboard and the number of outs remained the same. If he'd been out, the reverse would have obtained.

Behind the huge numerals 42 which are set back in the Rotunda is a massive retail operation, which I skipped, under my long resolve never to wear the Met logo on purchased goods, on the grounds that I haven't earn the right to such display by making the club as a player -- in which case I'd get it all for free, anyway. I'd abandon this position only if the Mets staged a promotion I think of as "Jake Pitler Day," a tribute the ancient, gnarled first base coach of the Dodgers whose major contribution to the club, in Roger Kahn's felicitous phrase, was "to absent himself on Jewish holidays," a statement of ethnic solidarity with a hefty slice of Brooklyn's fans. Pitler became irrelevant with Koufax's arrival and stayed home when the club moved to Los Angeles. I somehow envision a Jake Pitler Day at Citifield, with the winner of an essay contest permitted to don the uniform and coach one inning at first base. I'd put on the uniform instanter and, probably, be buried in it.

One rides the escalator to the field level to find oneself in what to all appearances is a food court in a shopping mall, or -- with higher ceilings -- some part of the endless promenade of the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Follow along a wide, curved passageway and one finds, for the first time, that there's a baseball field in the middle of all this! There is it, off to your left, with the food court continuing to your right. It is no doubt a convenience to fans that the field is visible from these bars and grills, but one is robbed of the enduring moment offered by all parks in my prior experience -- that of marching up a narrow ramp under the grandstand to find, suddenly and almost unexpectedly, that great expanse of gold and green stretched out before one's eyes. Another regret.

Two impressions follow from this first look at the totality of the stadium's interior. The first is that no facing is bare of advertising; walls, fronts of the various seating levels, and large ironworks extending skyward all support billboards or electronic running signs that tell you, essentially, to turn around and go give them money. The Pepsi Pavilion sits above Mo's Alley ("Gotta Go to Mo's!"). Only the center field wall, the hitter's backdrop, is clean of these urgings; I was distressed to see that the walls are black and the home run lines a vivid orange -- Giant colors. Booooooooo!

The second impression is the irregularity of the grandstand and thus of the outfield fences. I am bothered by the fact that these irregularities are inorganic. Boston's Fenway has a short left field and high wall because the dimensions of the lot imposed the shape, being rectangular; one could have a grandstand and bleachers in right field but not left, because that's where the block ended. Ebbets Field was a mirror of the same: a grandstand in left, a high wall in right with Bedford Avenue beyond the fence. The Polo Grounds was oblong because the lot was oblong, enforcing short lines and a huge center field (and left-center, and right-center -- someone knew, in the 1880s, that one day there would be a Willie Mays). But these nooks and crannies -- and there are both, nooks being spaces that go outward from the interior, crannies spaces that come inward -- are entirely manufactured. So far there have been more triples at Citifield than home runs, which is a remarkable statistic; I challenge Tim Wiles at the Hall of Fame Library, copied on this, to see how often this has happened over the course of a season, and where, especially since the end of the dead-ball era.

They've given odd names to seating areas and levels, none of them in any way connected to the team or to baseball. There's an Excelsior level (oddly, not the highest level, either) and Caesar's boxes and an Acela club. None of these are reflective of any reality I can connect to the game, the club, or the history of either.

Everywhere, subliminally, there are dollar signs on the seats. Behind home plate, above the field level, is a section for kings, a parterre box, to use the operatic equivalent, removed and isolated and entirely royal, and one's first thought is of what they cost. The average hourly wage in the US is $18.50, the average weekly earnings (pre-tax and deductions) is $616.19. What one can make out of this is a vibrant argument against the concept of the flat tax. It would take some doing, I realize, and it would be denounced as socialism to the extreme, but I have an idea that would democratize the seating entirely. Tickets should cost not a flat sum, but instead a percentage of weekly income. Depending on the opposition and the day of the week, those seats cost $375 on average -- which is to say, sixty percent of the average weekly wage. If this formula was applied to millionaires -- that is to say, people earning $20,000 a week -- they'd cost $12,000 per. Let's call this excessive (I'm in a bipartisan mood) and say that instead, twenty percent would be a fair price. So sell them to millionaires for $4,000, and to average wage-earners for $123, still a hefty expense but not out of line for a superb back-of-home, unobstructed, food-service-to-your-seat location. Minimum wage-earners would pay $66. And apply this throughout the park; seats high in the outfield grandstand are currently priced at an average very nearly equal to the average hourly wage; charge millionaires $500 per for them.

Of course, as Shel Silverstein once pointed out, in an egalitarian society the Cubs would win the World Series once every 30 years, which is over three times better than what they've been dealt under capitalism.

I was encouraged to find that prices for food and necessaries -- scorecard, yearbook, etc. -- are right where they were last year; a Nathan's hot dog (and there are no others) cost $4.75, which is half the price charged at the new mausoleum in the Bronx. But -- no free pencils.

The game began, and it was a fine one with multiple elements one cherishes for their familiarity -- the slumping slugger (David Wright), the gutty ace without his best stuff but snuffing out threat after threat with necessary outs (Santana), the reliever committing the cardinal sin of walking the first two hitters he faces and then either wiggling out of it (Lindstrom) or allowing the tying and winning runs to score (Putz, who will not earn his preferred pronunciation if he does this often again). And it was a weekday afternoon, all sunshine, which remains my favorite ballpark experience. Three triples, one home run (Tim! get to work!) The home team didn't win, and it WAS a shame.

Between the lines, it's all the same. The game, the game itself, always rescues itself from its surround. And withal, it's not a bad place to watch a ballgame.

Eric Rolfe Greenberg

30 April ‘09

The Big Picture

2009-04-19T16:44:00.010-04:00

These remarks were delivered at the first annual conference of SABR's 19th Century Baseball Research Committe, at Cooperstown on April 18, 2009:

Thanks to Peter Mancuso and to the previous 19th Century Baseball Research Committee chairmen, some of them gathered here (I see Fred Ivor-Campbell and Bob Tiemann ... but not Mark Rucker, John R. Husman, or Paul Wendt). But for truly making this occasion necessary, my thanks must go to you in the room and all our colleagues in this robust research committee, which has grown from an initial 20-something to now some 550. Such success would have been unimaginable to Mark and I back in 1983.

Within the well-deserved context of self-congratulation that marks this first annual gathering, what I’d like to talk about today is the state of research into early baseball, that former dark side of the side of the moon: how far it has come in the 25 years that coincide with the tenure of this committee, and where it may yet go, for we have only scraped the surface and returned with a few moon rocks.

It may seem incongruous for a gang of mythbusters to be gathering here in the town that, to a significant extent, Abner Doubleday made. And yet the location is apt, for however it may have found its way here in Cooperstown, the Baseball Hall of Fame is a great institution with a legacy all its own and a keen sense of the interplay between myth and what we think of as history—that is, what happened. Legend, which runs alongside fact in such a way as sometimes to undermine it and sometimes to enrich it, offers clues to a history not found in news clips.

For example, while there is no need to recite for this audience the story of how Abner Doubleday came to be anointed Father of Baseball by the Mills Commission, it may come as news to some that Mills never bought the tale of two Abners and pursued the real story even beyond the end of his mandate at the end of December 1907. In the report he issued at that time he wrote:

"I am also much interested in the statement made by Mr. Curry, [first president] of the pioneer Knickerbocker club, and confirmed by Mr. Tassie, of the famous old Atlantic club of Brooklyn, that a diagram, showing the ball field laid out substantially as it is to-day, was brought to the field one afternoon by a Mr. Wadsworth. Mr. Curry says ‘the plan caused a great deal of talk, but, finally, we agreed to try it.’"

It is possible, he continued, "that a connection more or less direct can be traced between the diagram drawn by Doubleday in 1839 and that presented to the Knickerbocker club by Wadsworth in 1845, or thereabouts, and I wrote several days ago for certain data bearing on this point, but as it has not yet come to hand I have decided to delay no longer sending in the kind of paper your letter calls for, promising to furnish you the indicated data when I obtain it, whatever it may be."

Mills was wondering whether an upstate Wadsworth, perhaps one of the Geneseo clan, might somehow have brought the Doubleday diagram to New York. The requested data about the mysterious Mr. Wadsworth never emerged, and the Wadsworth connection was not again the subject of published curiosity, though Louis F. Wadsworth has been a more or less constant preoccupation of mine since the time we launched the 19th Century Baseball Research Committee. Only in very recent years has his story, with all its implications for baseball history, unfolded. (No, he did not carry a diagram from Cooperstown to New York City, but I will not say more at this time.)

Today we dismiss the Cooperstown myth—that baseball was played here before the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club played it in New York City. After the Doubleday myth was thoroughly exploded, serially, by Will Irwin and then Robert Henderson and then Harold Peterson, journalists and even serious students of the game could be relied upon to say, “Baseball grew up in the city, not in the country.” That is in my view untrue-- even if baseball as a game for grownups evolved in the city as a nostalgic reenactment of the joys of youth, those joys were rightly understood to be agrarian. My best guess—and I assure you it is not mere guesswork—is that the American game of baseball grew up, if not exactly here in Cooperstown, then in multiple variants and locales in the Housatonic Valley triangle of Western Massachusetts, Eastern New York State, and New York City. Future General Abner Doubleday had nothing to do with it, but then again Alexander Cartwright had little to do with “inventing” the New York Game.

***

Questions about baseball’s evolutionary tree (or as better conceived, bramble bush) have tended to dominate the listserv activity of this committee, as some of our most active researchers have taken up mental residence in the antebellum period. But when Mark Rucker and I first believed that such a group would be valuable, our concerns were quite different. On September 30, 1982, we sent out a letter to some 30 individuals—mostly collectors, which will explain some of the language below—known to have an interest in early baseball, especially its visual record. That letter read, in part:

"To whom it may concern: Knowledge of baseball from the 1860s to the 1890s, the era of earliest organization, has till now been restricted to a very few. With more information continually appearing, the opportunity for research is expanding, as is interest in the earliest known teams and players. To accommodate this growing fascination, and to widen the possibilities for gathering information, we propose a new S.A.B.R. committee dedicated to the Nineteenth Century game."

The committee will compile photographic and factual records of individuals and clubs from the New York Knickerbockers to the end of the century. Considerable attention will be focused on the late 1850s, the 1860s, and 1870s, where it is most needed. A particular goal will be to assemble a photo file (copied from original sources) of all major teams and players, a virtually unattainable task, but one which should give the committee long life. The committee’s job must be pure research, and will not be a vehicle for the selling and trading of documents."

Among the concerns of the new committee, approved by SABR in 1983, was the relative absence of this century’s players from the Hall of Fame. This continues as something of a preoccupation. In a letter from Rucker and myself to research committee members in October of that year we wrote:

"We hope the [accompanying table, with interests of members accompanying their names] will help communication among us. The way to exploit the talents in this committee is through continual exchange of information and advice. We hope someday to have a large group of us assembled in one place where a close rapport can develop. Until then, however, consistent contact through the mail is our best way to learn from one another."

Our 19cbb list has served this function far better than anyone might have imagined in 1983. Email and the internet had in fact already been invented but would not come into widespread use for another decade. This gathering today is the first meeting as Mark and I envisioned it (the SABR annual get-together is dedicated almost exclusively to structural review of committee activity).

***

Long before 1983 there were historians and researchers and aficionados of early baseball whose accomplishments are singular because they were, in one respect or another, first. We don’t have time to discuss each of them in detail, but let’s at least call the roll of pre-committee notables. Some were shoebox and scrapbook fillers like Frank Marcellus, John Tattersall, Tom Shea, and Mike Stagno, not storytellers but vital to the statistical annals. Others had a highly personal stake in how the game’s history would be told—Henry Chadwick, Albert Spalding, Al Spink, Will Rankin, Will Irwin. There were the revisionists—Robert Henderson, John Rickard Betts, Harold Peterson. There were the academically trained historians—Harold Seymour, Foster Rhea Dulles, David Voigt, Melvin Adelman, Steve Riess. And there were the campfire writers, who stoked the flame of memory—the great Lee Allen and the unfairly neglected Robert Smith. There were the one-book wonders like Seymour Church, Irving Leitner, or Preston Orem. And you will tell me later, I hope, to which giant I have forgotten to give props.

Since 1983 we have seen many dramatic finds and studies, many of which attach to this group, individually or collectively. Some of us have used up our lifetime allotment of 15 minutes of media fame, including George Thompson, Ted Widmer, and yours truly. Some have produced ground-breaking larger works that continue to inspire researchers—David Block, Peter Morris, Paul Dickson, Dean Sullivan, Larry McCray, Bob Tiemann, just to name a few. Others have published articles that have transformed prior understandings of well-worn topics—Richard Hershberger, David Ball, Fred Ivor-Campbell, Randall Brown. Everyone in this room today has heard of Doc Adams and Jim Creighton.

Oh, I could go on. But it’s time to wrap up with the matter that even for antiquarians is of the highest interest: what to do next. Not all of the baseball myths are hundreds of years in the making. Some are rather modern, and are worthy of reexamination. I offer these falsehoods as but five of twenty that might be rattled off without much head-scratching:

1. William Hulbert founded the National League because the National Association was drowning in drink, corruption, and scheduling nightmares related to weak co-op nines.

2. When the pitching distance moved back 10 feet in 1893—truly 5 feet, but that’s another story—many pitching careers were ruined (like those of actors from the silent era after The Jazz Singer).

3. Albert Spalding was a ruthless capitalist rather than a sentimental idealist and mama’s boy.

4. Professional baseball play began with the Cincinnati Reds of 1869.

5. The reserve clause was an evil mechanism designed to assert owner rights over those of the players.

Just as holding this meeting in Cooperstown may be seen as paradoxical, so may the success of our committee members in discovering new details, especially amid the newly digitized historical newspapers. For decades, writers on early baseball were given to grand pronouncements supported by highly selective if any evidence. Today we have reams of evidence which appear to contradict many bits of received wisdom and general understanding ... but we seem a little short on synthesis. We need to knit together the diverse findings and make sense of the larger vista now afforded to us.

I have a friend, Dan Diamond, who knows more about hockey than any of us knows about baseball. His favorite term of derision for a marketing type or corporate suit was, “He’s a big-picture guy”—by which he could have said, “he doesn’t really know much about anything.”

As I wrote in the current number of Base Ball, just off press, we would do well to contextualize the game in a way that expands our understanding not only of baseball but also of the nation whose pastime it is. But because both the devil and the angels are in the detail, we still need to find that first name for the “Sullivan” who played two games for New Haven in 1875. I am pleased to think of myself, like each of my colleagues in the 19th century baseball research committee, as a small-picture guy.

--John Thorn

Oh, Plaxico!

2009-01-28T19:11:00.005-05:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, January 29, 2009:

Fans of the New York Giants can only grind their teeth and shut up as they watch the Arizona Cardinals (nine wins, seven losses in the regular season) represent the NFC in the Super Bowl. First, the Giants snuck into the finale last year, so mazel tov to Kurt Warner, Larry Fitzgerald, and supporting cast; if the Cinderella slipper fits, wear it. Second, the Giants didn’t deserve to wear the slipper this year because (a) they were returning champs and started their season 11-1 and (b) they shot themselves in the foot — or rather, Plaxico Burress shot himself in the thigh, with an unregistered handgun in a public venue, leaving the Giants to limp home with a 1-4 record in their final five games.

Coach Tom Coughlin, quarterback Eli Manning, and the rest of the crew said all the right words about concentrating on the players on the field rather than those who took themselves off it. But the absence of their star wide-out proved fatal to their chances, because opponents no longer had to double-cover any Giants receiver and safeties could creep up to assist in defending against the run. Taking Plaxico out meant, in effect, giving defensive opponents an additional player.

I’ll admit to having disliked Plaxico in the years before he gamely led the Giants to the Super Bowl despite an ankle that at any point in the season would have justified his shutting down for the year. Until then he had seemed as pouty and narcissistic as Terrell Owens without his dedication to running crisp routes or blocking. Often Plax would jog through his routes if he was not the primary receiver, or maddeningly he would break off a slant pattern or a post, hanging his quarterback out to dry for a seemingly inexplicable interception.

Because he could make Eli look awful, Plax could also make him look great. He was the Most Important Person on the team, he knew it, and his successful preseason holdout for a contract commensurate with his status proved it. By his self-indulgent and uniquely idiotic exit from the season and almost certainly from the Giants (if not the NFL altogether), the heroconfirmed his feet of clay. But in his absence, while Joe Torre made headlines by blasting Alex Rodriguez in his new book with Tom Verducci, we are left to ponder whether superstardom is good for anything, in any sport.

Is an all-star aggregation the way to go, like those the Yankees have attempted to field in recent years? Or is that like a ten-course meal of all desserts?

Is a no-name team like the 17-0 Miami Dolphins of 1972 the ideal, because no one will stumble over an ego, his own or a teammate’s? Or is that formula for victory too fragile because significant burdens are dispersed among teammates of varying abilities, all of whom must perform to expectation if they are to achieve victory?

It’s easy to go down the middle here and say that a mix of stars and spear carriers is the way to construct a club, that developing a team via the draft and the farm system is the key. In this scenario free agency is useful only when adding a missing ingredient that will provide a middle-of-the-pack team with a championship run. But teams have spent their way to the top, ever since Harry Wright’s Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869, a team of imported salaried players, went undefeated against a nationwide opposition drawn from local ranks.

“Thou shalt not covet” is a commandment that does not apply in sports, especially in New York, where having a fat wallet is supposed to be good for something. Even as the Cardinals line up to play against the Steelers on Sunday, Giant fans are already blogging about throwing money at Arizona’s second star receiver, the evidently disgruntled Anquan Boldin, to replace the perpetually disgruntled Plaxico.

Horrible free-agent signings (Mo Vaughn, Bobby Bonilla, Carl Pavano, Kevin Brown, ... one could go on) have not daunted the city’s baseball owners from going after the next new star, even if it turns out they have only bought someone else’s former star. In some seasons the Yankees have made a brief show of fiscal responsibility and trust in the youngsters, as when they declined to pursue Johan Santana and gave a chance to the kids from Triple-A. Were they wrong then, and right now, as they bring on board at hefty salaries C.C. Sabathia and Mark Teixeira? Were they right to rely upon Scott Brosius and Chuck Knoblauch and Paul O’Neill in their glory years, and wrong to bring in Alex Rodriguez and then re-up him?

What does having a star do for a franchise? (For obvious reasons we must set aside golf and tennis and other mano a mano sports.) Let’s leave aside the clear benefits of having a gate attraction, building credibility with fans and confirming their faith, the flow of free advertising via slow-news-day coverage — all of that is well understood. But what is the effect on the field? How does it differ in each of the major team sports?

In baseball the starting pitcher, and increasingly the reliever, is disproportionately important in any given game, but he will appear in only a quarter to a half of the scheduled contests, so a star at an everyday position would seem more valuable. Yet modern statistical measures indicate that even the greatest players in the game’s history—Ruth, Williams, Bonds, et al.—might contribute only six to eight wins over the course of a season beyond what an average player might have contributed in their stead. This is enough to make a pennant winner of an otherwise second-place club, but by itself is not likely to be enough. A .500-level club (81-81) would advance, after buying a Ruthian figure like Manny Ramirez as a free agent, to perhaps 88-74. Pick up more stars and you may, like an overzealous weightlifter, get too musclebound to comb your hair.

In basketball, when the Boston Celtics added proven stars Kevin Garnett and Ray Allen to their own Paul Pierce, the betting was that the team would need three basketballs. (Back in the day, when the Knicks added Earl Monroe to Walt Frazier in the backcourt, the requirement was thought to be two balls.) But because none of the three had ever won an NBA title, they sublimated their egos to the team cause and became champions. In this sport a star like Kobe or Lebron will have a profound effect on every game because the opponent must use two players to hound the star, or just write off his 30 points and seek to contain the others. In either case, average players on the Lakers or Cavaliers may look like world-beaters, as journeymen on the Chicago Bulls did during the Jordan era.

Why in soccer or hockey, games that produce so few goals, is a Beckham or a Gretzky so highly prized? Maybe these sports help to provide an answer as to why in some sports a star seems to provide a better path to victory than a system. Not only does the star have an effect on how open teammates may be, as in basketball, but their own ability to score through sheer individual talent will have a disproportionate effect on the outcome of the game.

Which brings us back to pro football, and Plaxico. In a game that is at every point eleven against eleven (in baseball it is most often one against nine), no one man should make the difference between victory and defeat, not even the quarterback. Each player’s purview of responsibility is interlaced with another’s. In this sport more than any other one ought to be able say “There is no ‘I’ in team” without prompting a snicker. The Miami Dolphins of 1972 — with their “no-name” defense and an offense built around lunch-pail guys like Larry Csonka, Jim Kiick, Bob Griese and Paul Warfield (and like the Giants, an adroit offensive line)—remain, despite the challenge by the New England Patriots last season, the best team ever.

Plaxico, you done us wrong. Your disregard for your teammates and your fans will make your return impossible, no matter your contrition. But we need a stud at wide receiver or Giants fans will seek to trade Eli Manning for the man he replaced, Kurt Warner.

This is New York. Let’s get Boldin.

--John Thorn

Poster Girl

2008-12-25T12:21:00.002-05:00

The current essay--"Poster Girl," about Ethel Reed--may be found at my blog more typically associated with arts and letters:
http://hudsonriverbracketed.blogspot.com/

--John Thorn

Change We Need

2008-11-05T15:10:00.000-05:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, November 6, 2008:
On Tuesday night America got the change it needed and wanted. All of us, Republican and Democrat, can now forget Ashley Todd, Joe the Plumber, Sarah Palin, and other campaign pranks. Barack Obama will be our new leader, which is both gratifying and astonishing to most of us over the age of 60 — which is to say anyone with recall of the civil rights struggle of the 1950s and ’60s. Over nearly two years of campaigning we might have anticipated the outcome, if not how emotional we would feel about it: as autumn came to John McCain’s candidacy, an Obama victory was hardly an upset. Yet that scene in Chicago’s Grant Park at 11:02, when the Western polls closed and the clear outcome could be officially declared, well, that was a moment that every American will install in his scrapbook of indelible memories. Where were you when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon? When John F. Kennedy was shot? When Bobby Thomson hit the home run that turned an entire baseball season upside down? Or when the nation turned its helm over to an African-American?

Regardless of policy successes and failures to come, a new America begins now.

It has been said with some justice that without Jackie Robinson there might have been no Martin Luther King. (Yes, I know that without A. Philip Randolph, or Marcus Garvey, or Frederick Douglass, Robinson’s path might have been different.) Is it too much to say that without Derek Jeter and Tiger Woods, beginning with their onset to professional sports in the mid-1990s, there might have been no Barack Obama, at least not now? Like our President-Elect, Jeter is biracial (ambi-ethnic, Halfrican-American, pick the term you prefer). Woods is multiracial, or as he likes to say, “Cablinasian” — short for Caucasian, Black, Indian, and Asian. However, both athletes are termed black in common parlance because of America’s pernicious tradition that one drop of African blood makes one black.

Voters have accepted Obama as a black man of high merit not because they think him half white but because who, in this day and age, wants to be white anymore? Non-Hispanic whites are projected the Census Bureau to be than 50 percent of the total population by 2050 and America will look like Brazil by century’s end. “There may have been a sense that [for minorities] being white was part of the process of being assimilated,” said John R. Logan, director of the Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research at the State University of New York at Albany, in a 2003 article in the New York Times. “There's a trend toward rejecting whiteness as a way of expressing success.” This was said in the context of emerging patterns in marketing and advertising, and may go some way toward explaining the broad appeal of racially blended pop stars Mariah Carey, Jessica Alba, Halle Berry, Lenny Kravitz, Alicia Keys, et al.

But unscripted sport, particularly baseball, is more culturally transformative than staged entertainment, more intricately linked with national memory. As the oldest and most hidebound of our major sports, baseball has, paradoxically, the capacity to ease in the most revolutionary change. It shocked no one when, in 2003, the Yankees named Jeter their captain. As Monte Irvin said, “Baseball has done more to move America in the right direction than all the professional patriots with their billions of cheap words.” On Election Night 2008, it would not have been amiss for baseball to take a bow.

But you come to this column not to read about politics. So let’s look at another national dilemma. The World Series, born in the 19th century, needs an overhaul if it will endure through the 21st. The most recently concluded example was a dud, but it fell in line with those that came before. We have not had a World Series extend to a seventh game since 2002. We haven’t even had one go to Game 6 since 2003. In the most recent instances (2004-08), the five losing teams COMBINED for two wins.

In the 2008 “Fall Classic” the Philadelphia Phillies vanquished the Tampa Bay Rays in a fifth game that commenced with five and half drizzly innings on a Monday (following upon a 90-minute rain delay) and concluded with three additional innings on Wednesday. The fifth game was the least watched in recorded Series history (since 1968), and the average viewership of 13.6 million for the whole Series was a staggering 4 percent decline from the previous low of 15.8 million for the Cardinals’ five-game victory over the Tigers in 2006.

Once upon a time, the glory of our national game was the length of its season, which rewarded tortoises, foiled hares and culminated in a climactic contest between two clubs that had not faced each other (or any team in the opponent’s league) all year. Today, however, with interleague play, a wild-card system, and a three-tiered postseason competition, the season may run from the end of March to the beginning of November. (For 2009, Opening Day is delayed to Monday, April 6 because the triennial World Baseball Classic runs to March 23, impinging upon conventional spring training regimens.)

I have written previously about my opposition to interleague play and the wild-card (“Baseball’s Silly Season,” New York Times Op Ed, October 22, 2005). But this time let’s focus on the weather, about which everyone talks but does nothing.

Baseball began as the sport that tracked the pageant of the seasons from planting to harvest, and perhaps to this day we still feel its archaic rhythms. The long season has been the game’s glory, but now it has bled beyond its seasonal bounds. The problem has been not only that the season ends too late but also that it opens too soon. Moreover, America is no longer agrarian, and baseball is a game whose future will be increasingly on TV, the internet and other emerging technologies; the venue is decoupling from the revenue. All the same, we’ve got to play the damned games or there won’t be anything to broadcast.

So how do we eliminate freezing and/or gale conditions for games played in the Northeast prior to mid-April and after the third week in October? I have a plan, and for part of it baseball will need to go back to the future.

1. At the turn of the last century, when Major League Baseball consisted of 16 franchises in 11 cities, none west of St. Louis or south of the nation’s capital, clubs would abandon their spring training grounds and embark upon a lucrative barnstorming tour of locales where no top-rank ball was played — in the Carolinas, for example. They would wend their way north for a mid-April Opening Day, “bringing the news,” as Buck O’Neill liked to say, and making money and new customers. We could do this again—opening the regular season not in Japan but in the spring camps and Southern states, at collegiate and minor-league baseball parks.

2. Return to the best-of-nine World Series format frequently employed in the first two decades of the last century — only this time with the first four games split between the contestants, and anywhere from one to five games slated for a warm-weather or retractable domed site, selected well in advance, as is done for the Super Bowl. If this “Super Series” of one to five games runs into November, so what? The last weather-threatened games will have been played by the end of the third week in October, and the hometown crowds will have been assured two games apiece, which is what they’ve been getting lately anyway. This system has the additional benefit of eliminating the home-field advantage for an ultimate game, which preposterously has been awarded to the league winning the All-Star Game. The first four games of the Super Series can be played on Tuesday through Friday, with a finale, if necessary, on Sunday night so as to bump up against college or pro football minimally.

3. Expand from the current 30 clubs to 32 and realign them into four divisions for each league. With this new league structure, every one of the eight teams contending in the postseason will have won a divisional title in the regular season—no more wild card gatecrashers. However, until the expansion takes effect, remodel the playoff structure to reward winning in the long season. Penalize late-awakening wild cards by giving them only one home date, and that in the middle of the best-of-five opening series.

Change We Need.

--John Thorn

2008-10-01T15:36:00.000-04:00

Forty-five years of mixed memories.

Let's Go Mets

2008-10-01T15:28:00.001-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, October 2, 2008:
This year was hard, but last year was harder. Such are the crumbs on which Mets fans, bred for heartbreak by their National League ancestors in this town, must feed.

Yankee fans, accustomed to greatness, were stunned once it became clear they would have to yield their playoff seat, assured for 13 consecutive years, to the upstarts from Tampa Bay. But philosophically they chalked up the outcome to a rash of injuries, over-reliance upon unproven pitchers, and a new field manager. Next year, in a new stadium, with C.C. Sabathia every fifth (or fourth) day will be different, they tell themselves

The same might be said for the Mets, who stumbled into an odd symmetry with their rivals. In their final year at their doomed ballparks, each club finished with a record of 89-73, more or less on merit. Statistical analysts rely upon baseball’s “Pythagorean Theorem,” a formula that estimates a team’s winning percentage given their runs scored and runs allowed. (Tracked historically over all of baseball history, trust me, it works.) In its rough form, precise enough for this discussion, it awards an extra win beyond the breakeven point (81-81 over a full season) for every ten runs scored beyond those given up. The 2008 Mets scored 799 runs and allowed 715, yielding a predicted record of ... 89 wins and 73 losses.

The Yankees’ run differential (789 scored, 727 allowed) predicts a mark of 87-75 ... so they marginally outperformed their talent level. A thorough review of the Yankees’ season and their objectives for 2009 awaits another day. Suffice it to say here that their problem is NOT, despite what you may read elsewhere, pitching. In 2008 they allowed 50 fewer runs than in 2007 but scored an amazing 179 fewer.

Perhaps surprisingly, the Mets pitchers yielded 35 fewer runs this year than last while scoring about the same (804 to 799). The earth shuddered whenever manager Jerry Manuel waved to the bullpen, but once Billy Wagner went down with injury, there really was no choice but to play an out-by-out matchup game for the last three innings of any game that John Santana didn’t start. Even pitchers of previously demonstrated ability like Pedro Feliciano, Aaron Heilman, Joe Smith, Luis Ayala, Scott Schoenweis, and Duaner Sanchez blew up from overuse. Of those just named, the first four finished among the top seven in the league in appearances, with Feliciano heading the list at an absurd 86 games.

Santana led the league in ERA, and with adequate bullpen support would easily have won 20 and perhaps the Cy Young Award, rather than finishing 16-7, 2.53. But the other starters must shoulder their share of the blame for not going deep enough into the game to lessen the late-inning pressure.

The Yankees’ Mike Mussina, who at age 39 became the oldest man in baseball history to win 20 games, has an interesting theory as to what is expected of a pitcher in the high-scoring post-expansion era, when complete games have become rare and a notional “quality start” (six runs pitched with three or fewer runs scored) has become a reasonable management goal. Mussina told Tyler Kepner of the Times this week that good pitchers win half their starts, i.e., that the combination of their losses and no-decision games do not exceed their victories. “He has done that almost precisely,” Kepner wrote, “going 270-153 in 536 career starts.” In 2008 Moose won 20 of his 34 starts while losing only nine.

By that measure of success, Santana came close with 16 victories in 34 starts (the bullpen blew nine games in which he departed with a lead). But look at the record of the Mets’ other principal starters:

Oliver Perez won 10 of his 34 starts
Mike Pelfrey won 13 of his 32
John Maine won 10 of his 25
Pedro Martinez won 5 of his 20

And yet ... for all the pitching failures, the Mets allowed fewer runs than all but five other NL clubs, and four of those made it into the playoffs. General Manager Omar Minaya should welcome help from faraway places (like Kansas City), especially in the closer role (KC’s Joakim Soria is a stud; try not to grind your teeth about Ambiorix Burgos), but don’t blow up this staff.

A further recommendation: rehire Jerry Manuel to manage. In the games after Willie Randolph was shown the door, the Mets went 55-38, a .591 clip that translates to a full season record of 96-62 (the Phils finished at 92-70).

Patient readers may be scratching their heads by now — so how did this team, with three players who scored 110 or more runs (Jose Reyes, Carlos Beltran, David Wright) and three who drove in 110 or more (Beltran, Wright, Carlos Delgado) — ever lose a game, especially in the months when Wagner was around? Here comes the distressing part: after them, no Met drove in as many as 50, and only Church (with 54) scored that many. The Mets could be pitched to in the late innings. The catching platoon of Brian Schneider and Ramon Castro did not hit. Second base was a black hole, with 38-year-old reserve Damion Easley and Argenis Reyes combining with creaky Luis Castillo to create the weakest output at this position in the majors (the endearingly energetic but hopeless Reyes, in 110 at bats, had neither a double nor a triple while batting .218). In the final four games of the season, the Mets’ starting second baseman was 35-year-old September callup Ramon Martinez, who had been in the minors all year long. The Phils, meanwhile, put Chase Utley in their lineup every day.

Reyes, Wright, Beltran, and Carlos Delgado gave the Mets a “big four” arguably unmatched in baseball in 2008. But in their wish to depart Shea Stadium with a bang rather than a whimper, Minaya bet big on experience, notably with Moises Alou, Pedro Martinez, Oliver Hernandez, Easley and Castillo. The unexpectedly rapid development of Mike Pelfrey eased the pitching miscalculation while the out-of-left-field arrival of Fernando Tatis addressed the lefthanded tilt of the Met lineup that Alou’s re-signing had been intendeded to offset. But Tatis’s late-season injury, when added to the ineffectiveness of Ryan Church after his return from post-concussion syndrome, furthered by the season-long deterioration of the prematurely aged Castillo, led to a further reliance upon rookies and retreads.

Not to knock the contributions of Daniel Murphy, Nick Evans, Robinson Cancel, Brian Stokes, et al. — but with the possible exception of Murphy, who will work this fall in Arizona to smooth his play at second base, the future fortunes of the club will not depend on any of them. Minaya needs for 2009 the same thing he needed at the beginning of this season — a righthanded bat in left field, and it would be naive to look to Tatis or Evans for that. In 2008 twelve men started at least one game in left. (Remember Andy Phillips? Chris Aguila? Brian Clark? Angel Pagan? Trot Nixon?) This cannot be repeated.

While you’re at it, Omar, get another starting pitcher — or two, if some team is willing to overpay for Perez, whose chronic midgame wildness renders him at best a Number Four man in a rotation. Get a hitter to play second base or catcher — simply decide where defense is more important. Typically the greater need for defense is behind the plate, so it might be prudent to retain Schneider. Will Murphy play second base deficiently? Yes. But limited range at that position is a Met tradition, with Ken Boswell, Wally Backman, Tim Teufel, Carlos Baerga, and Edgardo Alfonzo in his later years.

Should you pick up Delgado’s option? Of course. It will cost $12 million, but a buyout will set you back a third of that, so his effective cost in 2009 will be $8 million, a price at which no free-agent alternative will be found. If Pedro wishes to come back on a one-year deal for that amount, roll the dice and re-up, hoping that the models of Jamie Moyer and Mussina will inspire Pedro to remake himself yet again.

As I said, on to the Yankees next time. But Omar, if you want to talk about any of this, give me a call.

--John Thorn

2008-09-03T17:59:00.000-04:00

Spornography

Yankee Doodle Metrosexual

2008-09-03T17:46:00.016-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, September 4, 2008:

Tom Brady and the New England Patriots open their NFL season at home on Sunday against the Kansas City Chiefs. Good thing, too, because I have been worried about him. A nagging injury, cloaked in mystery in the typical Belichick style, had kept him out of all four preseason games. Leaks to the press had localized the problem in his right foot but I had come to suspect that Brady hurt himself at a midsummer photo shoot for this month’s Esquire magazine, when the play calling may have stretched the quarterback beyond his preferred practice.

For the cover of the magazine poor Tom was poured into a wasp-waisted wool suit by Gucci which forced him to hold his breath dangerously. The tightness of the two-button jacket was rakishly offset by an unbuttoned collar and a tie positioned strategically askew. His shoes were credited—and I’m not making this up—to a cobbler named A. Testoni. Brady’s raging five o’clock shadow was not credited to Richard Nixon, but his close-cropped hair was ascribed to “Pini Swissa for Pini Swissa Salon.” (This was clearly the head guy at the shop on Newbury Street in Boston—he even traveled with Brady to the Super Bowl and, ignoring Delilah’s cautionary model, cut his locks the night before the game. The Giants are properly grateful.)

Two crotch-focused shots offset the crotch-focused prose of the story inside, ostensibly the inside story about Tom Brady, superstar. “A big man. Taller, thinner, slower, quieter, and—it must be said—a little more milky white than one might expect. In the glinting angle of a limousine-crafted profile, he brings to mind someone beautiful and iconically male—Tyrone Power, perhaps.” Really.

Further into the story the writer, Tom Chiarella, quotes Tom as saying, “I like home magazines.” ... “It’s hard,” he smarmily continues, “to think of the Brady all squoogie at the sight of a duvet cover or a teak spice rack.”

What is going on here? Have our sports heroes and our media culture gone metrosexual? Is this male impersonator in Esquire the stoic quarterback whom sports fans had cast in the mold of Gary Cooper in Pride of the Yankees? Or is he truly a Yankee Doodle Dandy, a mincing cartoon? Before we hit the table of contents of the September issue we are made to run a gauntlet of 34 pages of soft-porn ads, from the glowering ambisexual models promoting Hugo Boss or Prada to the glistening torso of David Beckham to the artfully moussed Roger Federer.

The unexpectedly high viewership of the Summer Olympics on NBC owed much to the record performances of swimmer Michael Phelps, but maybe even more, in this new age of spornography, to his preposterously low-slung Speedo, awarded a gold medal by viewers of varying sexual proclivities.

Oh, why should I grumble? Has it not been ever thus? In the years before the Revolution made it America’s patriotic anthem, Yankee Doodle was a song of derision that the British heaped upon the ignorant colonialists, calling them so stupid that they could only hope to attain a foppish stature. The first verse and refrain, as generally sung by children today, run thus:

Yankee Doodle went to town
A-riding on a pony
He stuck a feather in his hat
And called it macaroni.
Yankee Doodle, keep it up
Yankee Doodle dandy
Yankee Doodle round the world
As sweet as sugar candy.

This seems a mild enough if not fully fathomable jest—hardly a slander. How then to account for the eponymous hero’s enduring power as a figure of fun? What precisely was a Yankee, or a Doodle or, most intriguingly, a macaroni (surely it was not just pasta)?

Some savants trace the history of Yankee Doodle back to a harvesting song of 15th century Holland, Yanker dudel doodle down, sung by laborers who were paid with a tenth of the grain and all the buttermilk they could drink. Others find echoes of the melody in the equally old English rhyme Lucy Locket (“Lucy Locket lost her pocket, Kitty Fisher found it; Nothing in it, Nothing in it, But the binding round it.”) In the days of Cromwell, one of the nicknames which the Cavaliers bestowed upon the Puritans was “Nankee Doodle.” An Albany-area tradition attributes a 1758 incarnation of Yankee Doodle to Dr. Richard Shuckburgh, a British army surgeon, wit, and musician who is said to have written it while at Fort Crailo, to mock the ragtag New England militia serving alongside the redcoats.

No matter; the essence is that it is a song of insult. For our current investigation we need look no further back than 1775, when after the battle of Bunker Hill, the Continental army, under General Washington’s command, was encamped in the vicinity of Boston. The Tories were then singing to the old tune of Lucy Locket these lines:

Yankee Doodle came to town

For to buy a firelock;

We will tar and feather him,

And so we will John Hancock.

Thomas Ditson, of Billerica, Massachusetts, was the one tarred and feathered for attempting to buy a musket in Boston in March 1775. The Battle of Bunker Hill in June turned the tables, as Yankee Doodle came to be sung by the patriots. The complete Americanization of the song followed as Harvard student Edward Bangs penned the following during George Washington’s presence at the Provincial Camp in Cambridge in 1775.

Father and I went down to camp,

Along with Captain Gooding,

And there we seed the men and boys

As thick as hasty pudding.

Yankee Doodle, keep it up,

Yankee Doodle Dandy;

Mind the music and the step,

And with the girls be handy.

etc.

Following General Burgoyne’s surrender of British troops to the Continental Army on October 17, 1777, British officer Thomas Anburey wrote:

…the name [of Yankee] has been more prevalent since the commencement of hostilities…The soldiers at Boston used it as a term of reproach, but after the affair at Bunker’s Hill, the Americans gloried in it. Yankee Doodle is now their paean, a favorite of favorites, played in their army, esteemed as warlike as the Genadier’s March — it is the lover’s spell, the nurse’s lullaby…it was not a little mortifying to hear them play this tune, when their army marched down to our surrender.

Although musicologists have not found an 18th-century version of Yankee Doodle with the immortal line “He stuck a feather in his hat and called it macaroni,” the jibe may well have originated about the time of the Macaroni Club, established in London in the 1760s for men of polymorphous sexuality. By 1772 the macaroni was a national infatuation, even spawning a magazine not unlike the current Esquire. According to contemporary Thomas Wright, “the macaronis were distinguished especially by an immense knot of artificial hair behind, by a very small cock-hat, by an enormous walking-stick, with long tassels, and by jacket, waistcoat, and breeches of very close cut.... Macaronis were the most attractive objects in the ball, or at the theatre. Macaronis abounded everywhere. There were macaroni songs; the most popular of these latter was the following: —

“Ye belles and beaux of London town,

Come listen to my ditty;

The muse, in prancing up and down,

Has found out something pretty;

With little hat, and hair dressed high,

And whip to ride a pony,

If you but take a right survey,

Denotes a macaroni.”

Named for the vermicelli-based pasta enjoyed by cultivated young Englishmen on their 1760s tours of Italy (thought by the English to be a particular den of perversion, even more so than France or Spain), the macaroni came to embody the consumption of continental fare in intellectual and moral spheres as well. Old-fashioned Englishmen came to identify macaroni culture with all that was effeminate and outlandish. As The Macaroni; A New Song put it in 1772:

His taper waist, so strait and long,
His spindle shanks, like pitchfork prong,
To what sex does the thing belong?
‘Tis call’d a Macaroni.

Between yesterday’s macaroni and today’s metrosexual there may not be much to choose. In a 1994 article in The Independent titled “Here Come the Mirror Men,” Mark Simpson coined the term.

Metrosexual man: the single young man with a high disposable income, living or working in the city (because that’s where all the best shops are), is perhaps the most promising consumer market of the decade. In the Eighties he was only to be found inside fashion magazines such as GQ, in television advertisements for Levis jeans or in gay bars. In the Nineties, he’s everywhere and he’s going shopping.

In Salon eight years later he added:

For some time now, old-fashioned (re)productive, repressed, unmoisturized heterosexuality has been given the pink slip by consumer capitalism. The stoic, self-denying, modest straight male didn’t shop enough (his role was to earn money for his wife to spend), and so he had to be replaced by a new kind of man, one less certain of his identity and much more interested in his image – that’s to say, one who was much more interested in being looked at (because that’s the only way you can be certain you actually exist). A man, in other words, who is an advertiser’s walking wet dream.

Call me retrosexual.

--John Thorn

2008-07-29T17:50:00.000-04:00

Cheers from the pressbox to Jerome Holtzman (1926-2008)

The Closer

2008-07-29T17:45:00.002-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, July 31, 2008:
For baseball fans and, particularly, knights of the keyboard and bullpen, last week was book-ended with sorrow and joy. On Saturday July 19 at age 81, the venerated baseball writer Jerome Holtzman met his Maker while eight days later pitcher Goose Gossage entered the game’s Valhalla with induction into the Hall of Fame, capping a 22-year career as a relief pitcher of the old school. By that last phrase I mean a reliever who was called in to put out the fire whenever it happened to erupt, not merely a closer in the current style, one who enters the game in the ninth inning with no one on base, succeeds at a rate of 90 percent or higher and, for a winning club, amasses 40 or more saves in a season.

Gossage owed no small measure of his success to Holtzman, who in addition to being “the dean of baseball writers,” may fairly be said to have invented the very thing that measured a reliever’s success: the save. Certainly “inventing” is a term that is fraught with peril for the history of any field of innovation, more so for a game that long embraced Abner Doubleday as its Edison (or Tesla). And it is true that Pat McDonough — who oddly enough went on to become “the dean of bowling writers” — developed a similar stat in 1924 which he called “games finished by relief hurlers”; its first appearance in print came in the New York Telegram three years later.

At about this time the game’s first great reliever, Fred “Firpo” Marberry, had complained that “if the relief pitcher holds the opposing club in check, he gets no credit. The pitcher who preceded him and couldn't stand the pace wins the game.” As the decades progressed, a little-noticed trend was taking shape: fewer complete games, and more clubs employing relief specialists. From 1876 to 1904, 90.5 per cent of all games were finished by the pitchers who had started them. In 1924 to 1946, that figure was nearly halved (45.9), in then in 1959 to 1978, nearly halved again (25.7). By last year the percentage of games had nosedived to 2.3 per cent.

Holtzman recognized in 1959-60 that something dramatic was happening on the field that was invisible in the box score and, by extension, at the bargaining table when relievers came to negotiate their salaries for the next season. As he told Darrell Horwitz in an interview in 2005: “Elroy Face was 18-1 with Pittsburgh in 1959. I was traveling with the Cubs. The Cubs had two relief pitchers: right-hander Don Elston and left-hander Bill Henry. They were constantly protecting leads and no one even knew about it.” It burned him that Face was piling up wins by blowing saves and then having the Pirates rally for him.

Holtzman, then with the Chicago Sun-Times, came up with fairly rigorous rules for crediting saves, and The Sporting News began listing the league leaders during the 1960 season. In Holtzman’s rules, to gain a save a reliever needed to face the potential tying or winning run and his team had to win the game. Interestingly, a pitcher did not have to finish the game to earn the save, but only one save could be awarded per contest. Think how this definition, were it in force today, might impact managers’ use of their best bullpen pitchers.

By 1969, the year in which Major League Baseball made the save an official statistic, Holtzman’s original definition was simplified to credit only a reliever who finished a game that his team won. In 1973 the save was redefined again so that a reliever had not only to finish the game but also to find the potential tying or winning run on base or at the plate, or, alternately, to pitch the final three innings of a victorious contest (whatever the score when he entered the game). In 1975 the rule was liberalized to include a reliever’s game-ending appearance of one inning or more in which he protects a lead of three runs or less; or his entrance into and ultimate completion of the game with the tying or winning run on base, at bat, or on deck; or his pitching three innings to the game’s conclusion.

Now that the complete game has become a near anachronism — this past week also provided the Mets, courtesy of Johan Santana, with their first of the season, matching the Yanks’ season total via Chien-Ming Wang — interest focuses increasingly on the closer and his motley band of setup men. In 1979 I wrote a book now quaintly titled The Relief Pitcher: Baseball’s New Hero. Apart from a painfully thorough review of bullpen history from the 1860s to 1978, which I closed with a profile of the Yankees’ new star Goose Gossage, I also made bold to predict bullpen trends.

“Gossage represents the future of relief pitching,” I wrote, “which rests in the hands of the power pitchers. This trend, slowly developing since the introduction of artificial turf a decade ago, repudiates the wisdom of the past 75 years, that in the pinch what was needed was a sinkerballer who could ‘throw those grounders’ and get those double plays....” One day soon, I concluded, “it will be meaningless to think of the starting pitcher as primary and the finishing pitcher as secondary; they will be equally important. We are not really far at all from that being the truth.” If my crystal ball has proved cloudy, I point out in defense that I wrote the book at a time when smaller ballparks were being phased out for larger ones, astroturf was supplanting grass, and a ball hit in the air was a better outcome than one hit on the ground.

Now that we are deep into the age of the closer, who piles up saves and thereby adulation, not to mention dollars, it may be instructive to contemplate both Gossage’s career, in which he compiled more than 50 saves of two innings or greater duration, and Holtzman’s original definition of a save — which supposed that the crisis in a game could come at any time, not only in the ninth. Any Mets fan who has witnessed the bullpen blow up in the eighth while Billy Wagner awaited his star turn may testify to the truth of that.

Not all runs are created equal — that is the presumption in MLB today. A run allowed or prevented in the ninth is more valuable because either your team or your opponent will be unlikely to respond. But this is the same thinking that has yielded the illusion of clutch hitting — that a .220 hitter who bats .320 with men on base in late innings, is a star rather than a game-long slug and drag on the offense. It has turned out that clutch hitting by lesser players is not a repeatable skill but the product of chance, and the best hitters in the clutch over a career (a stretch long enough to reach a statistically meaningful conclusion) tend to be the best hitters in your lineup ... the ones you bat in the middle of the order.

What if “saving” a game by marching on the field in the ninth, accompanied by the blare of your designated song, were as much an illusion as clutch hitting? Bill Felber did an ingenious study of this question for Total Baseball in the mid-1990s. After reviewing all closely contested games in each of three years (1952, 1972, and 1992) he concluded: “Although the styles managers employ to wrap up victories have changed over the decades — and although the salaries paid to relief pitchers have changed even more — the results have not. Major league teams today blow late-inning leads at almost precisely the same frequency they did twenty and even forty years ago, when there was no such thing as a closer or set-up man, bullpens were commonly refuges for failed starters, and managers signaled for relief help only at the moment of absolute peril.”

When Holtzman came up with the save, those pitchers who were not starters breathed a sigh of relief. Gossage made a Hall of Fame career with hard-earned saves; he was not a “designated hero” like Dennis Eckersley, who in 1992 won the Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards for garnering 51 saves, only 10 of which reflected his protection of a one-run lead. The system developed by his manager, Tony La Russa, so widely emulated today, disproportionately rewards one reliever in the same way that in football place-kickers seem to win or lose football games in the final minute, minimizing the efforts of real players who spilled their blood over the previous 59 minutes.

The former plight of the unrecognized relief pitcher led to the creation of the save. The creation of the save has now in turn yielded the over-recognized closer. And fans are the worse for it, enduring games that are a half hour longer because of bullpen machinations productive of largely nothing. The beauty of baseball has been that it is a players’ game not, like football, one micromanaged at every stage by coaches.

The predictable end of the relentless advance of specialization in baseball was envisioned by John McGraw in the 1920s, who when asked what he thought about the idea of having a designated hitter, replied that “one might as well go all the way and let a club play nine defensive players in the field and then have nine sluggers do all the hitting.”

--John Thorn

2008-07-15T21:16:00.000-04:00

It's a book ... no, it's a reader... no ... it's radiovision.

People of the Book

2008-07-15T21:11:00.002-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, July 17, 2008:
I work at a computer. I prowl databases for late-night fun. I don’t leave home without a mobile phone. I shop online. I maintain a blog. I have been an early adopter of electronic gizmos from Bowmar Brain to Kaypro to Kindle, with many white elephants in between (Sony Data Discman, Psion handheld, Silver Reed palm-sized copier ... I could go on).

All the devices named above do one thing or another better or faster than a book, but none does so well what a book does. The book embodies tradition. It provides escape, and it makes connection. It transports us to other times and places and states of being.

I am a book person. I love the heft of a book, its smell, its design, its perfect marriage of form and function. I love running my fingers over the raised ink in a book set by letterpress.

People of the book may be not only voracious readers but also driven collectors. From the old and rare to the second-hand and remainder, the books with which we surround ourselves in our homes signal to visitors who we are, at a deep level. They also remind us, as we occasionally peruse our collections of well worn or guiltily unread tomes, of who we once were and still hope to become. Books furnish a home and burnish our souls.

Book people will shop in a chain store but will prefer a privately held one. Book people will buy a new or a used book at Amazon or Alibris when they know what they want to find ... but they will look for a used or antiquarian dealer when they want a book to find them.

And here we have a dilemma: not only is the number of such shops shrinking but, of those that remain, an increasing number regard their brick-and-mortar presence as a sideline and online sales as their bread-and-butter. Walk into a second-hand bookstore and try to haggle good-naturedly in the time-honored way and the proprietor will look up the volume on his computer and assert that the price is fair, and let that be an end to the discussion. No matter that the book cited online is a first edition in fine condition and his volume is a tattered fourth, with unsubtle traces of a library pocket. The thrill of the hunt — the chance of finding a rarity in the dollar stall outside the shop — is gone, unless one treks north to the book barns of New England.

But that is the lament of a foiled antiquarian, worthy of derision. Why not simply shift focus: find good books at great prices in places where they ought not to be — in antique shops, flea markets, library sales. To people of the book, such advice is as if Howard Carter had been told to look for Tut’s tomb in Kansas.

If the collecting of books is an only slightly diminished hobby, and the making of books projects no end (never have so many bound things been published, though one hesitates to call them all books), then one wonders if the reading of them is an endangered activity.

I read online A LOT, starting with the New York Times over morning coffee and extending into the night with vintage newspapers from paid database services, or public domain works from free sites such as Google Books or Project Gutenberg, or contemporary works from Questia, a paid service but well worth the money for its ease of search and clipping and shelving features. All of these combined to make me, in the estimation of my lady friend, an ideal candidate for Amazon’s venture into electronic books, the Kindle, which she purchased for me at Christmas.

The Kindle is a Jetson-inspired object that provides a satisfactory reading experience on a train or plane, with a black-on-gray display that is easy on the eyes and on battery life. But you’d never pick up a Kindle at home in preference to a printed product, or even read the morning’s Times on it rather than on the web. Its operating system is pleasingly invisible — one learns how to use the device in just a few minutes—but the amazing thing about the Kindle is its always-on Sprint wireless connection, permitting a lightning-fast shopping experience. Get an itch, order a book from the Amazon store, and it downloads to your device almost instantly. This is one interesting gizmo, and it can even be used, imperfectly, to surf the web and fetch email.

But as an electronic book the Kindle is, like its predecessor Rocketbook, either an oxymoron, like jumbo shrimp or adult male; or an attempt to smooth over the gap between one technology and its successor, like radiovision (the name Charles Jenkins preferred for his 1928 invention of a mechanical television system). Or the electronic book may simply be a mightily unappealing prospect, like an electronic hug. And yet, our captains of industry think that this is the way we will all read one day.

The move from print to pixels replaces a highly successful technology (movable type, sturdy paper, etc.) with a less satisfactory one. It is an answer to a problem no one perceives, except for the proverbial literary traveler on a slow boat to China who would rather schlep a Kindle than a dozen books. Ah, you say, but moguls cut from this same cloth made a craze of the bottled-water business, so why not the Kindle and its kin?

Recent history provides illumination. The calculator replaced the slide rule overnight in the 1970s because it was smaller, faster, more accurate and, quickly, cheaper. I paid $80 in 1971 (the CPI-adjusted $428 of today) for a Bowmar Brain whose equivalent may today be found at the dollar store. In 1971 dollars, $80 was not far from the cost of the Kindle, whose onset will not hurtle the book into oblivion alongside the slide rule.

Why do even those of my vintage only barely recall Bowmar’s name? Because it was an assembler of its products, buying semiconductor chips from such companies as Texas Instruments. Envious of Bowmar’s profits in the early 1970s, the latter (along with other semiconductor manufacturers), entered the calculator business, conducted a ruthless price war, and drove Bowmar into bankruptcy by 1975. Texas Instruments was vertically integrated, as Bowmar tried to become too late in the game.

Reflect upon Amazon’s ambitions for vertical integration. Before creating the Kindle they almost squashed ebook sales when they bought Mobipocket and barred other formats from their retail site. Print-on-demand titles now have to go through Amazon’s supplier, putting the squeeze on that industry. Amazon shoppers love the “Search Inside This Book” feature, but the online giant had Trojan Horse motivations for offering it. Several publishers who gave Amazon the green light to use its PDF files in the Search feature subsequently authorized the conversion of those files into its proprietary ebook format.

But do not fret about the Kindle. Despite the ebook reader’s several virtues, Amazon has almost surely committed a blunder in its razor-and-blade business model (yes, the Kindle cost $399 at launch but it will be half that price soon enough). The device that people of the book truly need to fear is the one that is already ubiquitous ... the mobile phone.

The current Authors Guild Bulletin reports that of the ten top-selling books in Japan in 2007, five were written as cell phone novels. “Many cell phone readers have never read a novel before, according to Japanese publishers. These books owe a lot to popular comic books. The New York Times said many of the cell phone novels read like diaries.”

Information may or may not want to be free, in the decade-old web paradigm inimical to author interests, but in the modern age it certainly wants to be mobile. In a time characterized by vibrant and stable community — say, the 19th century — the solitude of reading a book was a delicious experience: escapist retreat, like today’s audio-visual forms. In a time of loneliness and anomie — say, the present day — readers will tend to value media that promote or simulate community.

A 21-year-old Japanese who goes by the single name Rin actually wrote her first novel on her keitai (mobile phone) when she was at recess in high school, punching short, crisp sentences with her thumbs to display on her small screen. “Novels I had read had more words. My stories have fewer words and are very easy to read,” she said.

Rin later released her novel, Moshimo Kimiga (If You ...) on a website, where its popularity prompted a publisher to issue it last year as a 142-page hardback book. Her story about a high-school romance and the couple’s fight against the girl’s illness (this seems to be the winning formula for keitai shosetsu— mobile-phone novels— especially the illness part) sold 400,000 copies and was ranked second on the nationwide bestselling fiction list in the first half of 2007.

People of the book, be afraid. Be very afraid.

--John Thorn

2008-06-04T17:51:00.000-04:00

Don't Stop Believing

2008-06-04T17:44:00.007-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, June 5, 2008:
Nine years after a crowning, unique achievement in baseball history, and after two entire seasons spent at home in the Dominican Republic wondering where his career had gone, Fernando Tatis recently returned to the major league scene as an inspired contributor to the dispirited New York Mets. In the space of just a few days, his late-inning hits won two ballgames, the admiration of his teammates, and the adulation of a new fan base. His twelfth-inning walk-off double in the first of these contests overcame a one-run deficit and may turn out to have saved his manager’s job.

On another comeback front, the famous-long-ago rock band Journey, missing the signature tenor of Steve Perry since 1995, kept trying to recover their sound and their audience. Searching for his clone, the band hired and fired a couple of lead singers in the interim until they found one on, of all places, YouTube — and residing in the Philippines, no less. This week Journey, fronted by its new 40-year-old chameleon vocalist Arnel Pineda, issued a new CD to bewildered but favorable reviews. “The album ... is, actually, good,” wrote a clearly surprised Ben Ratliff in the New York Times; “the band seems to have taken rock vitamins: it feels alive.”

Journey’s comeback may have been overshadowed by Pineda’s own: he had struggled along the piers of Manila, where as a boy he had collected scrap metal, bottles and newspapers to survive. As he told a Philippine reporter in January of this year, he always kept a positive outlook, thinking, Gaganda rin ’to, which may be translated as “Things will get better” or even “Don’t stop believing.”

Hillary Clinton ran a valiant if doomed race against time and math yet, conquering neither, kept running as if her power switch was stuck in the on position. “It ain’t over till it’s over,” she offered, echoing Yogi’s tautological wisdom, but what she may have really meant was that it wasn’t over until she said it was over.

Lost in the post-primaries squabble over concession etiquette was her still compelling argument that projecting to the electoral college come November, she appears to win handily while Obama may struggle. Also lost was that her comeback from the political-operative incompetence of the caucus states showed not only relentless drive but also simple courage.

What a long strange week it’s been, with hope and renewal and denial and anger all contending for the top rung. Just hold on, the still, small voice had seemed to say, and the finish line will extend magically ... another day, another season, another tour. These Comeback Kids — Hillary, Fernando, and the members of Journey — have each struggled against what seemed inevitable defeat and, if only for a moment vanquishing it or shoving it to one side, merit at least our grudging admiration.

The pump had been primed for Journey’s return to the top when the Chicago White Sox selected their 1981 anthem “Don’t Stop Believing” as their theme song on the way to winning the 2005 World Series. It became the fire-up music of all Detroit sports franchises, too, for its opening-stanza line “Just a city boy ... born and raised in South Detroit.” But the song’s ultimate return to glory came when, after closing out last year’s final episode of The Sopranos, it catapulted to the top ten of iTunes downloads — a comeback from the dead of perhaps unparalleled dimension.

Unless you think of Tatis, who on April 23, 1999, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals against the Los Angeles Dodgers, did what no one had ever done before and no one is ever likely to do again. He hit two home runs with the bases filled in the same inning ... and against the same pitcher (Chan Ho Park). In that season, when he was a rising star aged 24, he hit 34 home runs and 31 doubles, drove in 107 runs, and even stole 21 bases. He signed a multiyear, multimillion-dollar contract. The road to Cooperstown opened wide.

But he never approached those numbers again, and after four more years of dwindling production with the Cardinals and the Montreal Expos and a failed spring-training trial in 2004 with the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Tatis found himself back at home at San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic waiting for the phone to ring. For two years he stayed home with his wife and five children. After flirtations with the Baltimore Orioles and the Dodgers he landed with the New Orleans Zepyhrs, a Mets farm club for 2007, where he played alongside similarly washed up teammate Chan Ho Park.

Today both are back in the big leagues and contributing big time, Park again finding a home with the Dodgers. The two even faced each other in a single plate appearance of a game last week. What drove Tatis, at age 33, to stick with baseball, despite the indignity of diminished stature, salary, and playing time? His older children told him they wanted to see him play in the majors again. Fernando is now playing the game with a verve that his teammates would do well to emulate. He is happy to be back on the big stage.

So is Journey, whose combined CD/DVD “Revelation” floods into WalMart stores this week (the exclusive retail outlet except for the band’s website, http://journeymusic.com/). And while there are those who hate the power-ballad era and its fossil remnants, the boomer audience never really left Journey’s side.

Senator Clinton is finding it hard to give up the big stage of Presidential politics. A return to Washington as the junior Senator from New York, with an obstructed view of both the Majority Leader’s chair and that of the Armed Services Committee, seems unpalatable. Negotiating her way onto the ticket will require a position of submission (if only to reality), not strength, and thus is unlikely to prevail. Why she would want the second position is a mystery anyway.

As Hillary considers her next destination, the glowing screen may be a beacon in the dark. “Don’t Stop Believing” was Tony Soprano’s jukebox choice, along with “I’ve Gotta Be Me,” sung by Tony Bennett, selected but not heard before the abrupt blackout (other jukebox options for those who would treat the series finale as a mini-episode of Lost were: “Who Will You Run To,” “Magic Man,” and Journey’s “Any Way You Want It.”) When the Clintons made their celebrated YouTube parody of the Sopranos finale they chose “Don’t Stop Believing” as the background track ... but her jukebox choices for campaign song included “Get Ready,” “Don’t Look Back,” “I’m a Believer,” and “Suddenly I See,” as well as the song ultimately selected for the campaign, Celine Dion’s insipid “You and I.”

Unsolicited advice, from one not unfamiliar with misfortune: Don’t stop believing, but do stop bereaving. Focus on the good times. And as baseball players know, not every hit is a home run, and some days it rains.

--John Thorn

2008-06-03T19:09:00.000-04:00

“Vot? It’s not for you good enough? Strike two!”

Kessler at the Bat

2008-06-03T17:08:00.002-04:00

This previously unpublished riff on the immortal "Casey at the Bat" is by Mikhail Horowitz, bon vivant, raconteur, performance artist and, you should be so lucky, friend.

It looked, well, all farcockteh for the Putzville nine that day;
The score—don’t ask—was 4 to 2. You heppy now? Hokeh.
And so when Plotkin plotzed at first, and Schwartz popped up to third,
Already y’hay sh’may rab-boh was in the ballpark heard.

A couple shlumps got up to go, the others shrugged, and stayed
(For box seats on the field, hoo boy! their tuchuses they paid);
They thought, If only Kessler maybe gives the ball a zetz,
We’d shimmy through the shtetl and forget about the Mets!

But Stein preceded Kessler, as did his nephew, Moe,
And Stein a real shmegegee was, and Moe was just a shmo;
So maybe now for Kessler they should bother not to wait—
Moshiach had a better chance of schlepping to the plate.

But Stein, he blooped a bingle, and his mother cried, Mein Gott!
And Moshe clubbed a double, I should drop dead on the spot;
And when they finished running and bent wheezing at the waist,
There was Moe verklempt on second and Stein on third, vershtast?

So now from all those Putzville fans was such a big to-do,
They rose and davened in a wave, a hundred shofars blew;
A host of angels wept to hear a thousand chazzans sing,
For Kessler, Rebbe Kessler, he was coming up to swing.

There was schmaltz on Kessler’s tallis as he stepped into the box,
In his beard were crumbs of matzoh, small piece cheese, a bissel lox,
And when he shook his shtreimel, drenching half the fans with sweat,
No goyim in the crowd could doubt—’twas Kessler at the bet.

And now the mystic, Kabbalistic pitch comes floating in,
And Kessler’s brow is furrowed, and he slowly strokes his chin;
He comprehends that long before Creation had begun,
This pitch existed somewhere . . . but then he hears, “Strike vun!”

From the stands (donated by the Steins) the whole mishpocheh moaned,
A yenta started kvetching and a balabusta groaned;
“Hey, ump!” an angry moyel cried, “I’ll cut you like a fish!”
So, nu? They would have cut him, but Kessler muttered, “Pish!”

With a smile of pure rachmanis, great Kessler’s punim shone,
He stilled the boiling moyel, he bade the game go on;
He yubba-dubba-dubba’ed as the pious pitcher threw,
But he yubba-dubba’ed once too much—the umpire shrugged,
“Vot? It’s not for you good enough? Strike two!”

“Feh!” cried the maddened Hasids, and Elijah echoed, “Feh!”
But a puzzled look from Kessler made the audience go, “Heh?”
They saw his payus rise and fall, they saw his tzitzits twitch,
They knew that Rebbe Kessler vouldn’t miss another pitch.

The smile on Kessler’s punim now is more profound, and keener;
He glows with all the preternatural light of the Shekinah;
And now the pishka-pishka pitch so big and fat it gets;
And now the air is shattered by the force of Kessler’s zetz!

Oy. Somewhere in Jerusalem a grandson plants a tree;
A klezmer band is playing—so, the clarinet’s off-key;
And somewhere else a shmoyger with the rebbetzin has flirted;
But there is no joy in Putzville—mighty Kessler has converted.

(“The name is Kelly, if you don’t mind!”)

2008-05-07T13:06:00.000-04:00

Halcyon days? Polo Grounds crowd, 1908 playoff game.

As the Fan Turns

2008-05-07T12:48:00.002-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, May 8, 2008:

For 35 years now I have been pursuing, in varying precincts, the Great Story of Baseball, looking at the statistical record, the historical archives, and the daily action on the field. Lately I have turned my attention to the individuals surrounding me in the stands, or those silently communing with me before television shrines, and it seems to me that fandom has taken a troubling turn.

This was brought home forcibly last week when Carlos Delgado, the Mets first baseman who has been excoriated at the ballpark and in the media, broke out of a month-long slump by smacking two home runs in one game, then denying the fickle fans' behest to a curtain call at the dugout steps. It was his home run, dammit, and he would decide how to celebrate it. He was not a marionette, he implied.

As players have wrung ever money from the game — redressing a century of wage slavery — a chasm has come to separate fans from the objects of their admiration. (Players have always taken a dim view of them.) Older fans may long for a return to the days when a Brooklyn boy might bump into Gil Hodges on the streets of Bay Ridge, but they know that ballplayers have fled the lunch-bucket fraternity for good.

Younger fans, however, have taken matters into their own hands through the strange revenge of fantasy baseball, which encourages them to act like oldtime owners, holding full sway over their chattel. In turn, this view of ballplayers as mere property — rather than members of a team and champions of civic pride — has spawned a mob hauteur. For an increasing number of today’s devotees, the players are game pieces whose failure to perform to expectation triggers simmering frustration, even rage. The logorrhea of the blogs and talk radio further fuels fans’ impatience and sense of entitlement.

It may well be time for a gentle guide on etiquette and right conduct — how to be a fan, for those who have forgotten or never truly knew.

A ballgame has many features in common with theater and ritual, from rousing emotions and suspending disbelief to experiencing catharsis. But baseball is not a staged drama or religious rite, with their preordained outcomes, but a real life struggle in which we sense that risk is everywhere present ... if in the end without real consequence for our lives. Baseball in America is a sort of faith for the faithless, and its seven virtues are the same as those of religion — faith, hope, charity, fortitude, justice, prudence, and moderation. Let me explain.

Adults who come to the game late tend to make rational decisions about which team to embrace, as a forty-year-old might choose a marriage partner; it can be a cold and dispiriting business. A child, however, selects his team for a range of reasons he or she only dimly understands at the time; call it love. It would not be too much to say that reason does not enter into this choice; it is almost entirely a matter of faith. What must be comprehended at the outset, however, by even the youngest fan, is that a rooting interest is not to be reversed lightly. A youngster who wavers in his allegiance may not amount to much. Defeat is a challenge to faith, but it must be borne.

A fan’s hope is like the unreasoning, inexplicable love of Krazy Kat for Ignatz: each blow to the head is merely a love tap, binding victim ever more closely to assailant. (Some may call this neurosis.) Although maintaining faith can be a struggle in the face of present misfortune and injustice, hope is forward-looking and, thanks especially to spring training, cyclically renewable.

Charity enables the fan to appreciate the human frailty of the players. A child may regard these Hessians as heroes but a grownup fan may not. Disbelief may be suspended, especially in April, but a real baseball fan embraces reality before the end of October forces it upon him. Closers blow saves; infielders make errors on routine plays at awful times; cleanup hitters strike out with men on base. Yes, playing the scapegoat is part of the tribal role for which players sign on. Yes, this is the game you played when you were young and from a distance it still looks easy. But No, you would not have done better in their place. As an attitude borne in silence, charity is commendable. Voiced in defense of a player sorely abused in your presence — now that is a true virtue.

Fortitude is staying until the game is over, even when your team trails by ten and the traffic will be murder. Fortitude need not be exercised solo: rally caps, crossed fingers, thunder sticks, whatever fetishes you need to get you through the game, they’re all okay. Sure the players are important, but the outcome of the game depends upon you. Remember that.

Justice is being fair with others, even Yankee fans. Look upon these benighted souls with bemusement. Winning isn’t everything, and debilitates character. Let them pursue victory heedless of the ruin that awaits them in the next life. Can they gnash their teeth as you can? Certainly not. Right conduct, even in the face of provocation, will get you somewhere (though not with girls). As Mark Twain said, “Always do right; this will gratify some people and astonish the rest.”

Exercising prudence helps one to avoid excesses of optimism. When Tuffy Rhodes hit three home runs on Opening Day of 1994, he did not go on to hit 486 for the season. Don’t extrapolate from today’s good fortune. Don’t bet on the law of averages. Think twice about getting that tattoo of today’s hero. Be calm and serene even when your insides are jumping with joy as your team has come back from three down in the ninth. This will deter gloating by others when your team blows a three-run lead in the ninth.

(Okay, just kidding on that last virtue. Ya gotta believe. Ya gotta enjoy. And ya gotta suffer. That’s the human condition, not simply the arm’s-length world of fandom.)

So, to toll the seventh of fandom’s virtues: employ moderation in all things, including moderation. You know that you are not playing shortstop for the Red Sox, though your emotions are racing as if you were. But face facts — there’s no stopping that rush of testosterone or fancied pheromones when your team improbably snatches victory at the last. Winning has its rewards. Enjoy them, even while knowing, at the back of your mind somewhere, if you can recall where your mind went to after that walk-off homer, that losing is the superior instructor.

[Portions of this column are based upon my essay in Anatomy of Baseball, SMU Press, 2008.]

--John Thorn

2008-04-23T18:49:00.000-04:00

Bleacher democracy ... and worship?

Baseball as a National Religion

2008-04-23T17:29:00.004-04:00

I found this wonderful essay tucked away in my files, where it had lain untouched for nearly three decades. I am pleased to share it with you now, on the chance that it is unfamiliar. Philosopher Morris R. Cohen published it in The Dial, Vol. 67, p. 57 (July 26, 1919).

IN THE WORLD'S HISTORY baseball is a new game: hence new to song and story and uncelebrated in the fine arts of painting, sculpture, and music. Now, as Ruskin has pointed out, people generally do not see beauty or majesty except when it has been first revealed to them in pictures or other works of art. This is peculiarly true of the people who call themselves educated. No one who prides himself on being familiar with Greek and Roman architecture and the classic masters of painting would for a moment admit that there could be any beauty in a modern skyscraper. Yet when two thousand years hence some Antarctic scholar comes to describe our civilization, he will mention as our distinctive contribution to art our beautiful office buildings, and perhaps offer in support of his thesis colored plates of some of the ruins of those temples of commerce. And when he comes to speak of America's contribution to religion, will he not mention baseball? Do not be shocked, gentle or learned reader! I know full well that baseball is a boy's game, and a professional sport, and that a properly cultured, serious person always feels like apologizing for attending a baseball game instead of a Strauss concert or a lecture on the customs of the Fiji Islanders. But I still maintain that, by all the canons of our modern books on comparative religion, baseball is a religion, and the only one that is not sectarian but national.

The essence of religious experience, so we are told, is the "redemption from the limitations of our petty individual lives and the mystic unity with a larger life of which we are a part." And is not this precisely what the baseball devotee or fanatic, if you please, experiences when he watches the team representing his city battling with another? Is there any other experience in modern life in which multitudes of men so completely and intensely lose their individual selves in the larger life which they call their city? Careful students of Greek civilization do not hesitate to speak of the religious value of the Greek drama. When the auditor identifies himself with the action on the stage--Aristotle tells us--his feelings of fear and pity undergo a kind of purification (catharsis). But in baseball the identification has even more of the religious quality, since we are absorbed not only in the action of the visible actors but more deeply in the fate of the mystic unities which we call the contending cities. To be sure, there may be people who go to a baseball game to see some particular star, just as there are people who go to church to hear a particular minister preach; but these are phenomena in the circumference of the religious life. There are also blasé persons who do not care who wins so long as they can see what they call a good game--just as there are people who go to mass because they admire the vestments or intoning of the priest--but this only illustrates the pathology of the religious life. The truly religious devotee has his soul directed to the final outcome; and every one of the extraordinarily rich multiplicity of movements of the baseball game acquires its significance because of its bearing on that outcome. Instead of purifying only fear and pity, baseball exercises and purifies all of our emotions, cultivating hope and courage when we are behind, resignation when we are beaten, fairness for the other team when we are ahead, charity for the umpire, and above all the zest for combat and conquest.

When my revered friend and teacher William James wrote an essay on "A Moral Equivalent for War," I suggested to him that baseball already embodied all the moral value of war, so far as war had any moral value. He listened sympathetically and was amused, but he did not take me seriously enough. All great men have their limitations, and William James's were due to the fact that he lived in Cambridge, a city which, in spite of the fact that it has a population of 100,000 souls (including the professors), is not represented in any baseball league that can be detected without a microscope.

Imagine what will happen to the martial spirit in Germany if baseball is introduced there--if any Social Democrat can ask any Herr von Somebody, "What's the score?" Suppose that in an exciting ninth-inning rally, when the home team ties the score, Captain Schmidt punches Captain Miller or breaks his helmet. Will the latter challenge him to a duel? He will not. Rather will he hug him frenziedly or pummel him joyfully at the next moment when the winning run comes across the home plate. And after the game, what need of further strife? When Jones of Philadelphia meets Brown of New York there may be a slight touch of condescension on one side, or a hidden strain of envy on the other side, but they take each other's arm in fraternal fashion, for they have settled their differences in an open, regulated combat on a fair field. And if one of us has some sore regrets over an unfortunate error which lost the game, there is always the consolation that we have had our inning, and though we have lost there is another game or season coming. And what more can a reasonable man expect in this imperfect world than an open chance to do his best in a free and fair fight?

Every religion has its martyrs; and the greatest of all martyrdoms is to make oneself ridiculous and to be laughed at by the heathen. But whatever the danger, I am ready to urge the claims of international baseball as capable of arousing far more national religious fervor than the more monotonous game of armaments and war. Those who fear "the deadly monotony of a universal reign of peace" can convince themselves of the thrilling and exciting character of baseball by watching the behavior of crowds not only at the games but also at the baseball score-boards miles away. National rivalries and aspirations could find their intensest expression in a close international pennant race, and yet such rivalry would not be incompatible with the establishment of the true Church Universal in which all men would feel their brotherhood in the Infinite Game.

Dear Abner

2008-04-07T08:46:00.004-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, April 3, 2008:
Love and baseball are two of life’s enduring mysteries — so predictable, so commonplace, and yet so full of surprises — no matter that there are people who profess to be experts in one or the other (if seldom both; Steve Garvey is a notable exception). What happens after we die has been another eternal conundrum ... until, for those who love baseball, now.

I can’t speak for conditions in the afterlife for those who believe in this religion or that one. But as I write to you, dear fan, on April 1, 2008, I can report on impeccable assurance that there is indeed a baseball heaven (relax, you’re not pitching tomorrow). Abner Doubleday has for reasons known only to him chosen me as his interlocutor to answer your questions on baseball matters past, present, and future.

Although he neglected to invent the game or even take an interest in it in all the days he walked the earth, in death Abner has become rather smitten. Who wouldn’t? All day long he swaps stories upstairs with the Babe, the Mick, Satchel ... and even Alex Cartwright, with whom he has formed a cordial tandem (more so than Abbott and Costello, who are still not speaking to each other).

Delighted as I am to have him indefinitely at my right hand, this column truly depends upon you. While Abner’s ethereal condition provides him with all the answers, it robs him of questions, which is not altogether a good thing; we all know such people. To prime the pump, I have invited members of the Society for American Baseball Research and selected baseball cognoscenti to ask Abner’s advice on aspects of the game they have long found perplexing. If something has been troubling you and you would like to consult Abner or any of his associates in Baseball Heaven, send him an email (yes, the angels were onto this long before Al Gore invented the internet) by commenting below.

"Dear Abner" continues daily at:
http://dearabner.blogspot.com/

--JohnThorn

***

Dear Abner,
Tell us, Oh, Dear Abner, gaze into your crystal ball!!! Will this be the year for the Chicago Cubs to go (nearly) all the way? Will they win 134 games, clinch the NL Central in early June, sweep the NL championship in four games — three shutouts and one no-hitter — advance to the World Series and lose the seventh game in the most spectacular way ever? Precisely how will they lose that seventh game — will it be in the bottom of the ninth with two outs, a full count, three men on, and the score 3-2?
May Irwin, Queen of the Royal Rooters

Dear May,
Your bent for hyperbole bespeaks a certain skepticism about my predictive powers, but let’s put that aside for the moment. The Cubs are beloved by God and all his angels, even more than the Red Sox, who are now just another of the cyclically successful clubs. The Cubs will not win 134 games, and they will not lose the final game of the World Series in spectacular fashion. They will not win the National League championship, nor even their own division. They will muddle along in the hunt, continuing to test the faith of their faithful. Such is their glory. I would say that they will win when cubs have wings, but my friend Frank Chance might take offense.

Dear Abner,
What’s up with the fans who keep hating on interleague play? I've never understood why they think it’s a good thing that fans in say, Seattle, never got to see teams such as the Dodgers or Cardinals, or players such as Piazza or Ozzie Smith, unless the teams happened to meet in the World Series (and given that the Mariners have been in the World Series exactly zero times in thirty-one years, that's a long time to wait). Interleague play does mean that teams have different strengths-of-schedule — but unbalanced schedules have that same effect anyway.
Likes Interleague Play

Dear Likes,
Cloud-dwellers like balance, harmony, and order, but we understand your wish for variety, even at the expense of fairness. Indeed, we not only understand mortals’ need to inject jokers into the pack — what’s up, as you might say, with the All-Star Game determining home-field advantage for the World Series? — we applaud it, for what may look like randomness down there is part of the Big Plan up here. Our view of the wild-card innovation and the World Series use of the designated hitter is in the same vein. [As a Seattle fan you should be sure to read this column to the bottom.—jt]

Dear Abner,
So just what was the Babe doing on that day in 1932? Was he pointing at me? Or was he really showing us where he meant to hit it?
Charlie Root

Dear “Charlie,”
I address you in quotation because both Charlie and the Babe are up here with me, so this ought to be an easy question to resolve. Alas, both are sticking to the stories they offered in life. Neither Charlie nor Babe is lying (such conduct is not forbidden up here, it is simply impossible) but both have become so hardened in their convictions that the literal truth (inferior, as I more than anyone might acknowledge, to the power of myth) is no longer available to them.

Charlie says that Ruth was pointing to the bench jockeys in the dugout, who were giving him a rough time, signaling to them that despite taking two strikes he still had one strike left. “If he had pointed to center field,” he says, “I woulda stuck the next pitch in his ear.”

Ruth said, “I took two strikes and after each one I held up my finger and said, ‘That’s one’ and ‘that’s two.’ That’s when I waved to the fence. No, I didn’t point to any spot, but as long as I’d called the first two strikes on myself, I hadda go through with it.”

I could weigh in here and tell you precisely what happened, but why spoil such a good ... and in its way true ... story?

Dear Abner,
Orel Hershiser has a total of 204 wins as a pitcher, 106 of these after he had reconstructive shoulder surgery in 1990. It has been reported that the surgery made him a better pitcher. With allegations surroundingvarious current players and enhancement substances, should I contact my congressman and have him open an investigation into “Shoulder-gate” and other performance enhancing surgeries?
Wanting to Know in Knoxvegas

Dear Wanting,
Irony is little appreciated in this precinct, but I take your point to reflect on the current steroids question and the eternally vexed matter of cheating. These are subjects addressed in many of the queries I have received, and I will answer you only partway, perhaps in a manner unsatisfactory to you. We look upon aspiration as a positive thing, in fact it is both admirable and tragic, and thus defines the human condition. One may violate the law of the game or the land and still be clear of censure in Baseball Heaven. Are Orel Hershiser and Tommy John brothers under the skin with Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds? In a way, yes — as those who purchased Viagra or opted for Lasik surgery are tacit endorsers of performance enhancement. But there are worthwhile distinctions to be drawn. On another day I will bring Ken Caminiti over to share his views.

Dear Abner,
It seems to me that if we didn’t have all this ridiculous emphasis on statistics we wouldn’t be so upset over steroid record breakers. Then we could enjoy competitive championship baseball games on their own accord. Did you envision that every little nose pick on the field would be counted, historically codified and available at all times to deify or denigrate any player?
Kettle of Fish

Dear Kettle,
Whoa. I didn’t envision anything for baseball, let alone that I would be named its inventor by some spiritualists with an unfathomable agenda. I’m not blaming Al Spalding or Abraham Mills or even Abner Graves, but some others who, to put it delicately, are not available to me at this moment. I’ll get back to you with more on this, later, as the subject of my purported invention has been a popular topic with questioners.

Now, back to your point: statistics came into the game to counter the seeming absurdity of men playing a boys’ game ... as if play were the business of the young and business the play of adults. The current vogue for sabermetrics lends an air of seriousness, even science, to what was, is, and forever will be something bigger than business. You can’t measure joy. And while we don’t worry about anything in Baseball Heaven, it does seem to those of us who have been here awhile — even Henry Chadwick, who more than anyone brought statistics into the game — that numbers have been elevated to a sort of religion, which was a bad idea even in Pythagoras’s time.

Dear Abner,
Who will win this year?
Curious

Dear Curious,
Ordinarily I would prefer not to venture into this speculative realm, but having sinned a little bit above, I will say that Providence (a National League club back in my day) smiles upon the following outcomes:
NL: East, Philadelphia; Central, Milwaukee; West, San Diego; Wild Card, Colorado.
AL: East, Boston; Central, Detroit; West, Seattle; Wild Card, Cleveland.
WS: Seattle over San Diego.

2008-03-31T17:25:00.000-04:00

New York Herald, Nov. 11, 1845

An Unremarked Baseball Game of 1845

2008-03-31T17:00:00.004-04:00

I wish to report a new find of some import while inviting interpretation and debate. In the New York Herald of November 11, 1845 appears the following squib, a trailing part of a larger article on trotting at the Centreveille Track on Long Island.

NEW YORK BASE BALL CLUB:--The second Anniversary of this Club came off yesterday, on the ground in the Elysian fields. The game was as follows:

Runs Runs
Murphy 4 Winslow 4
Johnson 4 Case 4
Lyon 3 Granger 1
Wheaton 3 Lalor 3
Sweet 3 Cone 1
Seaman 1 Sweet 4
Venn 2 Harold 3
Gilmore 1 Clair 2
Tucker 3 Wilson 1
- -
24 23

J.M. Marsh, Esq., Umpire and Scorer

After the match, the parties took dinner at Mr. McCarty’s, Hoboken, as a wind up for the season. The Club were honored by the presence of representatives from the Union Star Cricket Club, the Knickerbocker Clubs, senior and junior, and other gentlemen of note.

As others have noted, searching electronic databases may provide erratic results. When I ran “base ball” through the New York Herald of the 1840s some time back (using Gale’s 19th Century Newspapers as well as Newsbank’s Early American Newspapers) I failed to pick up the item above. It also did not emerge from searches for “New York base” or “ball club” or other plausible (and implausible) search terms.

However, last week I got lucky by searching for “Union Star Cricket Club,” whose members made up the Brooklyn Ball Club that played against the New York Base Ball Club in a home-and-home match on October 21 and 24, 1845. I call these games home-and-home though neither was played in New York. The first match was played at the Elysian Fields of Hoboken, home to the NYBBC since its formal founding under that name in November 1843 (the same month in which the Magnolia Ball Club of New York, as previously reported here, mustered its players for a ball game in Hoboken). The second match was played at the grounds of the Union Star Cricket Club on Myrtle Avenue in Brooklyn. Both games were played eight to the side, as depicted in the Magnolia Ball Club ticket [see:
http://thornpricks.blogspot.com/2007/11/at-play-on-hobokens-elysian-fields-1843.html

Several interesting things emerge from this newfound notice of the game played on November 10.

Prominent Knickerbocker names are present—Wheaton, Tucker, Cone, Clair (Clare). So too are Gotham players of earlier prominence—Lalor, Ransom, Murphy, Johnson, Winslow, Case. The Davis who plays here and in the game of June 19, 1846 is likely not James Whyte Davis, who was elected a member in 1850 and marked his 25th anniversary with the club in 1875. Venn is Harry Venn, proprietor of the Gotham Cottage (a billiard and bowling saloon) at 298 Bowery, longtime clubhouse to the Gotham BBC. Gilmore is one of the cricketers who played baseball with the Brooklyns on October 21 and 24.

The game was played nine to the side, clearly to 21 runs or more in equal innings. The two sides were unnamed, and the game was an intramural one despite the presence of Knickerbockers (senior and junior, no less, possibly denoting a first nine and a muffin outfit, rather than being broken out by age, for a club that had organized not even two months before). While the New Yorks and their invited friends were celebrating their second year as an organized club, on another field in Hoboken the Knickerbockers were playing an intramural match all their own.

Playing with eight to the side, including a first appearance for Charles S. Debost, the squads lined up this way:

Tucker
Moncrieff
Debost
Talman
Hale/Hall
Turney Morgan
W. O'Brien

vs.

Curry
Dupignac
Adams
Birney
Van Nostrand
Niebuhr
Hart
J. O'Brien

There is more work to be done with all this, certainly, but the NYBBC intramural match of November 10, 1845, seems to me to have more in common with the purported “first match game” of June 19, 1846, than with the “next” match against the Gotham club almost five years later (June 11, 1851, with the Knicks winning by a count of 21-11) ... which I believe to have been the true first.

Charles A. Peverelly wrote this in 1866, clearly fed his lines by a member of the Knickerbockers:

On June 5, 1846, the first honorary members were elected, viz. James Lee and Abraham Tucker. At the same meeting Curry, Adams and Tucker were appointed a committee to arrange the preliminaries, and conclude a match with the New York Base Ball Club. From all the information the writer has been able to gather, it appears that this was not an organized club, but merely a party of gentlemen who played together frequently, and styled themselves the New York Club. However, the match was played at Hoboken on June 19, 1846, it being the first the Club engaged in, and the particulars are certainly not creditable as far as runs are concerned. But four innings were played, as it will be remembered the game was won by the parties making twenty-one aces, or over, on even innings.

The scoresheet from that game was written over and altered in later years, probably by James Whyte Davis, to give the game the appearance of a match between two distinct clubs. But was it viewed that way by the men who had played in it? John Bowman and Joel Zoss address this question in their brilliant book, Diamonds in the Rough.

William R. Wheaton, who umpired the game of October 24, 1845 between New York and Brooklyn, umpired as well the Knick game of October 6, 1845, and played in the game of November 10, 1845 for the New Yorks, also drew up the original Knickerbocker rules with William H. Tucker. Before that, he averred, he had drawn up the rules for the Gotham/NYBBC club of the 1830s, and these were adopted with little if any change by the Knicks.

In short, Wheaton is a man who ought to know. He left New York in the Gold Rush of 1849, never to return, but kept up his interest in the game he had helped to create. In 1887 he said to a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, in a piece titled “HOW BASEBALL BEGAN: A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It” [note the implicit reference to 1837]:

The new game quickly became very popular with New Yorkers, and the numbers of the club soon swelled beyond the fastidious notions of some of us, and we decided to withdraw and found a new organization, which we called the Knickerbocker. For a playground we chose the Elysian fields of Hoboken, just across the Hudson river.... We played no exhibition or match games [emphasis mine—jt], but often our families would come over and look on with much enjoyment. Then we used to have dinner in the middle of the day, and twice a week we would spend the whole afternoon in ball play.

--John Thorn

2008-03-05T13:34:00.000-05:00

For What the Bell Tolls

2008-03-05T13:27:00.003-05:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, March6, 2008:

Wilfred Charles Heinz, writer, born January 11, 1915, died last week. For most of today’s sports fans it came as news that he had until lately been alive or in fact had ever lived. Oh, there were a few obituary notices and some fond remembrances in the press, notably Dave Anderson’s in the Times, but not the outpouring you might expect for a man who had been the best of his class, to use a boxing reference of the sort Bill Heinz liked but never would have applied to himself. In a 2000 interview he observed that he was “last in his class,” a survivor from the Golden Age of Sportswriting spurred by Rice and Runyon, Gallico and Cannon, Liebling and the Lardners.

Heinz had started his career as a copyboy at the New York Sun in 1937, worked his way up to the city desk, and then was assigned to cover the war in Europe. The experience only reinforced his natural modesty and his admiration for those who fought because it was their job to do so. “I believe that you should be proud of your product and your service,” Heinz said in 2002, “but not of yourself. How could I be proud of myself after I saw so many kids die in the war? I got a byline and all they got was a line in the newspaper back home.”

In 1933, in an unkind memoir of the recently departed Ring Lardner, F. Scott Fitzgerald had written: “When most men of promise achieve an adult education, if only in the school of war, Ring moved in the company of a few dozen illiterates playing a boy’s game.” W.C. Heinz knew and respected both worlds. Upon his return from the war to the Sun he settled in the sports department in preference to the more prestigious post offered him, that of Washington correspondent. He wanted to keep writing about those who fought, in Gleason’s Gym or the ballyards, even if sport was only a shadow of war.

By the time the Sun shut down in 1950, Heinz had already begun to feel confined by the 750-word limit of his column. In the years to come he would write longer pieces for Look, Life, Sport, Collier’s, Argosy, True, and the Saturday Evening Post. By stripping down his style he found he could better expose the emotion of his characters. His novelistic approach to sports heroes and bums made him a household god to a new generation of writers, from Jimmy Breslin and Dick Schaap to Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe; they would later declare Heinz a pioneer of the “New Journalism.” According to Breslin and many others, a 1951 article in True titled “Brownsville Bum” — a portrait of fighter Al “Bummy” Davis — remains the greatest magazine sports story ever written.

“It’s a funny thing about people,” Heinz famously begins. “People will hate a guy all his life for what he is, but the minute he dies for it they make him out a hero and they go around saying that maybe he wasn’t such a bad guy after all because he sure was willing to go the distance for whatever he believed or whatever he was.”

By 1958 Heinz had already won the E.P. Dutton Prize for sportswriting four times and had earned enough money from his magazine career to take a year off to write a boxing novel. Modest demeanor aside, Heinz suspected he was pretty good, but he didn’t know it for sure until Hemingway said so. In a cable to Bill’s editor after the 1958 publication of his novel The Professional, The Great One had written:

TO EVAN THOMAS, HARPER BROS. QUOTE. THE PROFESSIONAL IS THE ONLY GOOD NOVEL I’VE READ ABOUT A FIGHTER AND AN EXCELLENT FIRST NOVEL IN ITS OWN RIGHT. ENDQUOTE. HEMINGWAY.

A. J. Liebling, author of The Sweet Science, which Sports Illustrated has named the best sports book of all time, was fond of saying “I can write better than anybody who can write faster, and I can write faster than anybody who can write better.” Amusingly damning himself with faint praise, Liebling, who died in 1963, could not have imagined that his bon mot would serve as the motto for a blogger generation for whom words fly from fingers to publication without a stop at the copy desk. For Heinz, even Liebling’s slight bow to speed would have been unseemly. When interviewed at his home in Dorset, Vermont, for Jeff MacGregor’s fine article that ran in Sports Illustrated in September 2000 — a year after the publication of Heinz’s anthology of fistiana, The Book of Boxing — Bill likened his method of writing to “building a stone wall without mortar. You place the words one at a time, fit them, take them apart and refit them until they’re balanced and solid.”

In our television age the athlete’s sound-bite is king, often appearing in print 24 hours after the reader has heard it on SportsCenter. A writer dare not misquote. MacGregor noted Heinz’s devotion to method.

He butters toast the way another man might perform a ritual tea ceremony, deliberate and contemplative — something worth doing right. We take our roast beef sandwiches on white toast out to the dining room. He points to my notebook and tape recorder and says gently, “Why don't you put those away for a while?”

The accuracy of Heinz’s portrayals of Floyd Patterson, or Pete Reiser, or Red Grange was in the flavorful rendition of their speech, not its recording. In taking liberties with the verbatim word Heinz and the old masters were not sloppy journalists, they were artists. By giving more words to dialogue, they could narrate under their subjects, not opine over them.

I have found myself strangely bereaved by Bill’s death, for I never met him and spoke to him only twice, when I published his Book of Boxing. Signing on Nathan Ward to update the anthology that Heinz had created in 1961, I had the great pleasure of restoring to print, in expanded form, one of the favorite books of my youth.

In his Preface to the volume Heinz slyly referenced Liebling’s quip, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one”:

Unless a writer has his own printing press he is indebted to his publisher, and that goes for anthologists too. That means that John Thorn and his team at Total Sports Publishing get this one’s thanks and, it is hoped, the reader’s.

I have always been proud of that scant memorialized connection with him. When Bill died last week I went to the shelf for The Book of Boxing and read in the front matter, as if for the first time: “To those who did the fighting this book is dedicated.”

--John Thorn

2008-03-04T18:06:00.000-05:00

W.C. Heinz and Nathan Ward, editors

“Bill Heinz, Here”

2008-03-04T17:57:00.001-05:00

Nathan Ward worked with Bill Heinz on The Book of Boxing, issued by Total Sports Publishing in 1999. Here he remembers "the old man."

One day in 1949 Bill Heinz was crossing Reade street in Manhattan, returning from lunch to the downtown headquarters of the old New York Sun, when a truck roared round the corner onto Broadway and nearly took him out. After diving to the sidewalk, the young newsman looked up in time to see the van, loaded with afternoon editions, blazoned along one side, “READ W.C. HEINZ ON SPORTS IN THE SUN.” It was the kind of incident the maddeningly modest Heinz later loved to tell, of a man nearly run down by the symbols of his own success.

As a young combat correspondent from the liberation of France all the way to the Rhine, Heinz said he “never forgot” that he slept safely away from the front each night, while soldiers stayed in harm’s way, an attitude far removed from the self-glorying accounts of embed journalism. “If the correspondent was of draft age, as was this one,” Heinz wrote, “and he accepted that his own career as a journalist was being advanced while those of his peers, his protectors, were on hold, some forever, he knew for the rest of his life he would be in debt.” Heinz, who’d been bullied during the First World War as a small child for speaking the Kaiser’s tongue his family used at home, as a war reporter confronted the horrors of what the Fatherland had become under the Nazis. He wrote some of the finest dispatches of anyone in the war about the D-day invasion, the execution of Nazi spies, the destruction of the Huertgen Forest, and the false calm of a moonlit jeep ride in the “cool silver quiet” through Belgium. When he returned to the U.S., Heinz was offered a distinguished job in the paper’s Washington bureau, since it was assumed that general reporting for the city desk would now be beneath him. He opted instead for sports, and that, as they say, would make all the difference.

Ten years ago, I lucked into a book project with the great Heinz, an old writer’s writer whose books (other than MASH) had by then fallen out of print. Our project was co-editing a new edition of Heinz’s classic Fireside Book of Boxing, what he described as a “museum” of boxiana that had been published just before the gabby advent of Cassius Clay, over whom we politely differed. But Heinz was open to all good writing about his favorite sport, and my job was to send him fight pieces from the last 40 years (Mailer, Barich, Remnick, McIlvanney) and see if any might become new exhibits in his updated “museum.” The first time he called me I had nervously sent him a sheaf of my boxing reportage with a shrill cover letter about my qualifications. “Bill Heinz here,” a husky older voice turned up on my phone days later, sounding both wised-up and cheery, hardboiled and curious. “Ya got a nice little style there,” he said, followed by a laugh. Nothing any teacher has said to me from grade school to college thrilled me like those seven words from the great Heinz.

I supplemented the many fight stories I sent him with the occasional tape of recent bouts that had either come on too late at night or seemed ridiculously pricey to a man who’d spent so many years at ringside for free. The fight tapes always drew a phone call afterward, “Bill Heinz here,” when the master would offer his analysis of these shining lights in a game that had otherwise gone to hell. Often Heinz would ask after my solid-looking young son, whom he’d nicknamed “Butkus.” Later the tape would come back, marked by an incisive observation on a post-it. (“Thanks again,” it says on an early De La Hoya performance, “Later there came to mind the classic manner in which Arguello handled Mancini. It’s almost sacrilege to compare them.”)

Heinz’s great boxing novel The Professional (1958) famously opens with a description of the flashing human scenes along an elevated section of subway line through the Bronx. While the sports writer who tells the story is riding out to visit his favorite fighter, the book’s opener is really a stretched out version of Heinz’s very first published piece — which the Sun ran while he was still a copyboy—an evocation of the women traveling to jobs as domestics downtown and passing tenement life on his ride to work the overnight “lobster shift.” Heinz’s signature — a quiet empathy and gift for clean, compressed observation — was evidently there from the first in that early published sketch. The vital stuff really can’t be taught.

In later years, only a man with Heinz’s gift for self-effacement could tell a story about a night that began with drinking with Rocky Marciano and ended with breakfast in Ted Williams’s kitchen and not seem to be dropping names. Many more famous writers made pilgrimages to Heinz’s home in woodsy Vermont, including the novelist Richard Ford, who wrote the old sportswriter an awestruck letter about how he lost his nerve on the edge of the property. Although towards the end Heinz became increasingly puzzled by outside events, I only encountered his pricklishness once, when I published an interview with him for American Heritage in 2004. “Why should the reader care about this W.C. Heinz?” he wrote in old man scrawl beside my intro to the transcript. Why, indeed.

--Nathan Ward

The Hot Stove League

2008-02-04T16:58:00.000-05:00

FROM: "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, February 7, 2008:
There is no denying it: the Super Bowl just past was a game for the ages, with a thrilling fourth quarter. I had listened to the Giants annihilate the Bears 47-7 in the 1956 championship game, had watched them lose to the Baltimore Colts two years later in the famous sudden-death overtime game, and have watched nearly every Giants regular-season or playoff game since. This one topped them all, inspiring long suffering fans to think that we too might rise above the burdens of history.

I woke on Monday still giddy with the improbability — no, the impossibility — of what I had just witnessed. But now, with two months of winter still ahead, football is over until next fall, over in a way that baseball never quite is. The furor over Draft Day is short lived and contrived, like an installment of American Idol. On the other hand, since the World Series ended I have devoured every crumb of baseball news I could find, and have daily swapped stories of the game in distant days with a legion of likeminded friends. The web is our century’s general store and electronic missives its equivalent of spitting tobacco juice on the hot stove.

Soon pitchers and catchers will report to camps in Florida and Arizona, and American hearts and minds, even those so recently in thrall to the rites of the oblate spheroid, will spring to attention. But we still have a few weeks to swap cracker-barrel wisdom, to bask in the wintry glow of the game that connects us with our past, that races through us like blood.

Baseball has always had an active hot-stove league in which today’s stars might be matched against those of the past. Ruth and Cobb, DiMaggio and Williams, Mathewson and Johnson — they cavort like colts every winter and are content to be idle when spring rolls around. But there is no summer stadium where Grange and Nagurski, Thorpe and Baugh, Brown and Huff square off. In football there is no air-conditioner league.

When was the last time you played a game of football trivia? Or basketball? Or hockey? These sports call for controlled aggression (as in the “on” position of “the switch,” an area in the frontal lobe of the brain recently the subject of a column by Bill Rhoden in The New York Times). Skilled baseball players must retain their composure, keeping this switch in the “off” position. Cool contemplation suits the hot-stove league just fine, too.

Being an expert at baseball is, I can report, about as lucrative as being the best whittler in Punkinville. So the interesting question about this trivial pursuit of plays and players past is why we do it, why in baseball as in no other sport it feels like fun while having about it an air of importance.

Even to its most ardent practitioners, baseball trivia is a curious form of play. If like other sports baseball is sublimated warfare, a proposition I have championed in this space, then trivia is sublimated baseball, in which the currency of skill is not athletic ability but memory spurred by passion. Playing baseball trivia is clearly different from playing baseball ... but is it also different from being a baseball fan? Did people do it before the current era?

Not in a competitive, game-playing sense they didn’t: a hundred years ago and more, the accumulator of baseball data was thought to be “odd” if not downright certifiable: some of the greatest baseball cranks and bugs were reputed to reside in insane asylums; their very nickname reflected the general sense that they were seized by mania. They would know all the stats, even inventing new measures to get at “the real dope” about the players. Today they might work in a team’s front office.

Fans originally reveled in the reflected glory of their favorites and longed for the opportunity to stand beside them with bent elbow and a scuttle of suds. In this the old-fashioned fan’s relation to baseball players was no different from his attitude toward boxers or jockeys: the allure consisted in the ruboff of celebrity. But as radio and TV came along to create visual abstractions of the players for a mass audience — box-score heroes recreated from the flesh — it became easier for fans to form a relationship with ballplayers’ baggage than with their physical beings. Gathering their biographical data, keeping track of their stats and inventing new ones, pointing out odd similarities and interesting tidbits … this came to be what we now call (but older fans never did) trivia.

Radio shows such as the Quiz Kids and Information Please of the 1930s created the genre of mass infotainment, extending from an earlier period’s fascination with “Mr. Memory” tricksters of the variety-hall boards. In the 1950s television created a game-show boom — The $64,000 Question, 21, and countless more — in which ordinary people who had uselessly known all about opera or astronomy might suddenly become rich and famous. Media made stars, but it was media that became the biggest star, fueling a pop-culture craze that remains with us. We admire someone who can sing perfectly the theme song from Davy Crockett or Gilligan’s Island or who can tell us the flip side of Ritchie Valens’ "La Bamba." Not so long ago such people — the modern equivalent of the insect taxonomists of the 1600s — were regarded as freaks.

Baseball trivia is similar to but different from pop-music or movie or TV trivia, in that it stretches further back. It serves not merely to inspire memory of one’s own childhood but also connects us to a collective memory, the youth of our nation. Baseball trivia is not exactly history, but it’s “in the ballpark”: closer to it, say, than remembering who played Inspector Joe Friday on Dragnet. And in playing it, in telling tales around the hot stove, we perpetuate the legends of our culture and even the culture itself.

A baseball trivia game can be as challenging as a spelling bee was to us once upon a time, or a PhD oral exam may be tomorrow. The trivia game is real life upside-down, an inversion by which the important is replaced by the unimportant while retaining all the trappings of exams, tests, trials, contests in which the stakes are genuinely high.

A good game of baseball trivia satisfies in just the same way that a good baseball game does. The pleasure lies in caring intensely about the activity while engaged in it but, because one knows at a deep level that the outcome is unimportant, caring not at all once it’s over, regardless of the outcome. To care intensely about something that doesn’t matter — to treat it as if it did matter — permits one to deflect real concerns and to engage in simulated combat with no real consequence. Such pleasures are part of civilized society, when not all one’s waking moments must resemble war, or football.

This essay is adapted from the author's contribution to Obsessed with Baseball; see www.chroniclebooks.com.

--John Thorn

Pots & Pans and Bats & Balls

2008-01-23T19:22:00.000-05:00

This essay is modified only slightly from the keynote speech delivered at the twelfth annual Seymour Medal Conference, sponsored by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) in Cleveland April 27-29, 2007. It will be published in print in the Society's annual Baseball Research Journal, recently off press.

The presentation theme of the conference was "How Did We Come to Understand the History of the Game?" The author took brief note of that theme and then shifted his gaze from the rear-view mirror to the road ahead.

Before entering upon my remarks, I would like to thank the Society for American Baseball Research for hosting this conference, the Cleveland Indians for sponsoring it, this year’s five Seymour Medal nominees for making it necessary (Yogi can ya hear me?), and Dorothy Seymour Mills and her late husband, Dr. Harold Seymour, for inspiring it; their example encouraged so many of us to hunt for gold in baseball’s attic. Even those who may only have found brass came away with a better understanding of our game and, just maybe, the nation whose pastime it is.

Geoffrey C. Ward, with whom I worked happily on Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary Baseball, said recently that “Working on the film and book taught me [that] ... while most Americans care too little about their history, the baseball community is different. The real meaning of all those apparently impenetrable stats is that the past matters. Without them no player would know where he stood, no fan could measure his or her heroes against those who have gone before. That fact alone should endear the game to any historian.” That it had not, until Dr. Seymour’s 1956 dissertation at Cornell,[i] is a fact that may seem puzzling to attendees of this conference. Because the academy still looks askance at baseball history, regarding it as a merely descriptive exercise, despite a proliferation of theses and credit courses related to the game, we have an opportunity at this conference to ask the worthwhile question that forms our presentation theme, “How did we come to understand baseball history?”

This formulation is parallel but not identical with other questions that will concern us this afternoon: “What is baseball history good for?” “How has baseball history been practiced?" And “How might it be better going forward?”

As to the first — “What is baseball history good for?”— some in the audience might reply with umbrage that history, like art, is for its own sake and must serve neither master nor cause; that while it offers tools for discovery, it is itself imperiled when held up to a standard of utility. This is a position with which I will agree ... and disagree ... if I may be permitted to make a perhaps old-fashioned distinction between History and The Past, the former being rooted in what happened, the latter in what some annalist thought might be useful to the game or even to the nation. So much of what today passes muster as history was created as propaganda or simple cheerleading, from the fibs of Henry Chadwick and Albert Spalding,[ii] to the pinning of Jim Creighton’s death on cricket rather than baseball, to the heart-rending tale of the Babe and little Johnny Sylvester. This is the sort of history that Henry Ford described in 1916 as bunk. What he actually said was even more incendiary: “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don't want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.”[iii] George Santayana, take that!

Another description of The Past might be “what binds and sustains,” or mythology. History is what we at this gathering practice, but what we meet, out in the world, sometimes with astonishing rapidity, is this notion of The Past, in the form of that word heavy with nothing but trouble: heritage. At its best, acknowledging a common heritage allows us to form communities and maintain vital traditions, Henry Ford notwithstanding. At its worst, it abuses real history for chauvinistic gain. In a personal example, within hours of the May 2004 press conference in which I revealed that baseball was played by that name in Pittsfield, Massachusetts in 1791, well-meaning but benighted locals were celebrating their city’s usurpation of Cooperstown as the game’s Garden of Eden.[iv] As David Lowenthal notes in Possessed by the Past, history

differs from heritage not, as people generally supposed, in telling the truth, but in trying to do so despite being aware that truth is a chameleon and its chroniclers fallible beings. The most crucial distinction is that truth in heritage commits us to some present creed [or need]; truth in history is a flawed effort to understand the past on its own terms.[v]

In the hands of nearly all its practitioners today, baseball history is a moated activity, in which “what happened” is all that matters. Only occasionally will the drawbridge drop down to connect with not only “what it might be good for” but also with what it might mean in some larger analytical or social context. Finding Walter Johnson’s missing strikeout from 1913; revoking Roger Maris’s bogus RBI in 1961; getting Ty Cobb’s hit totals and batting average right once and for all ... these are not means to an end but ends in themselves. I attest to having spent many years in such pursuits: getting things right simply because with effort one could, and because “cleaning up” seemed morally superior to “going along,” accepting what was wrong. Besides, it was fun to debunk the notion, held for generations, that the pitching distance had retreated ten and a half feet in 1893 when it had only moved back five. Or to deny that the width of home plate had been expanded from 12 inches to 17 inches when it became a pentagonal shape, or to affirm that neither Abner Doubleday nor Alexander Cartwright had much if anything to do with inventing baseball. It was pleasant to accumulate and sort baseball facts, like some dotty lepidopterist, and it was sometimes useful to others if we published our research, no matter how trivial and disconnected it might be from larger themes in American life, from analysis, from interpretation.

Historian Kenneth Stampp, author of The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956), once said of a colleague in an interview: “Carl [Bridenbaugh] was very sensitive about his brand of social history. It was rather old-fashioned social history. Somebody once called it pots-and-pans social history. He probably felt that emerging American intellectual history was in some way a negative commentary on his kind of history.”[vi] By “pots and pans,” Stampp explained, he meant

the kind of social history where you talk about things like baseball and recreation — it was not analytical social history.... It was descriptive ... and I suppose some people thought that Bridenbaugh’s history was rather old-fashioned, some mod social historians. Every generation has [its new approach].[vii]

Myth and mythmaking are far more useful to the public understanding than mere findings of fact. And from the perspective of the historian of ideas and attitudes, what a man believes to be true, or purports to be true (including willful lies) may reveal more about himself and his era than the truth itself. So in trying get the facts straight about what really happened in baseball (Cartwright, Doubleday, or who?) or to slow the rush to judgment (Pittsfield), baseball’s historians may feel that they are bailing against the tide with a teacup. Who cares about their pursuit of truth? Give us a simple story, the people cry.

However the history of baseball begins, the history of baseball history begins for most of us with Henry Chadwick. He recalled his first experience of playing baseball as taking some hard hits in the ribs in 1848[viii] — if true, his remark reveals that the Knickerbocker rules did not sweep aside all that had gone before — and he dated to 1856 his realization that this game might become to America what cricket was to England. Today most of us think of Father Chadwick cavorting at the Elysian Fields with the Knickerbockers, pausing only to invent the scoring system and the box score or to cluck about the pernicious influence of gamblers and rotters. But as Will Rankin would point out in the first years of the next century, Chadwick had for decades, while elevating the game to the status of national metaphor, elevated himself as well, campaigning on a platform of Le jeu c’est moi.[ix]

He was not baseball’s first reporter — that distinction goes to the little known William H. Bray, like Chadwick an Englishman who covered baseball and cricket for the Clipper from early 1854 to May 1858 (Chadwick succeeded him on both beats and never threw him a nod afterward). Isolated game accounts had been penned in 1853 by William Cauldwell of the Mercury and Frank Queen of the Clipper, who with William Trotter Porter of Spirit of the Times may be said to have been baseball’s pioneer promoter. Credit for the shorthand scoring system belongs not to Chadwick but to Michael J. Kelly of the Herald. The box score — beyond the recording of outs and runs—may be Kelly's invention as well, but cricket had supplied the model.

Chadwick had the good fortune to team up with Irwin P. Beadle and his Dime publication series, penning the Base-Ball Guide for 1860 on up to 1881. He also had the good fortune to outlive his contemporary sporting scribes. Today we call him a historian — along with Charles Peverelly, Jacob Morse, Al Spink, Francis Richter, and Tim Murnane — but in his own day he and they were journalists, sometimes given to gauzy reminiscences or club-supplied copy when deadlines neared and space yawned. These writers possess the advantage of having been witnesses to events that interest us today but that ought not to accord their writing blanket credence. As Dixon Wecter wrote some fifty years ago:

A readable historian of his own times will be accepted as the foremost witness par excellence, generation after generation. But by way of compensation, the historian who arrives on the scene long afterwards enjoys advantages too. Though a million details, important and unimportant, will be lost for lack of recording or proper preservation, the disclosure of diaries and secret archives, the fitting together of broken pieces from the mosaic, the settling of controversial dust and cooling of old feuds, and the broad perspective down the avenues of time, all make it possible for him to know an era in its grand design better than most men who lived through it.[x]

Baseball’s tradition of mixing — and confusing — contemporary journalism with ex post facto history continued into the mid-twentieth century, with working-press types from Fred Lieb and Frank Menke to Tom Meany and Lee Allen working both sides of the street. In recent years we have labeled some outstanding baseball journalists and statisticians as historians — I won’t mention names so as not to give offense — but then again the term “baseball historian” is an odd one, a diminutive on the order of Billy Joel’s “real-estate novelist.” Even those who have made great contributions to the appreciation of baseball’s history — I think of Larry Ritter and Donald Honig — are not themselves historians of the game in its entirety as Jules Tygiel or Charles Alexander or David Voigt or Ben Rader are. And then there are the “boutique baseball historians” — Milwaukee Brewers historian, Ty Cobb historian, and so on — who are what used to be called experts, or worse.

At the dawn of the last century, baseball’s origins were already too old to be remembered, so stories were devised to rationalize what was otherwise baffling. Baseball history then was in the hands of folklorists, not historians. Members of the Mills Commission, lacking the mundane primary documents that typically aid historians of everyday life in the reconstruction of events and the tenor of the times, looked to octogenarian reminiscences of events witnessed long ago if at all; the most celebrated of these implanted memories was, of course, that of Abner Graves. Thus was the history of baseball supplied with a starting point, a crucial requirement for being viewed seriously. (A similar sense of necessity led to the creation of baseball’s statistical record and the rapid and vertiginous climb to its current ascendancy.)

A century later we find ourselves still in the realm of eyewitnesses, as history is a term now accorded to events very recently transpired, and today’s scribes may accord more importance to documents. Baseball’s historians have largely — and thankfully — been unmoved by post-structuralist, post-Marxist, and post-Freudian siren songs, content to stay in the kitchen with the pots and pans of descriptive history, oblivious to the catcalls of political and intellectual historians. The respectable cousin of pots ’n’ pans, the “bottom up” (i.e., not “top down”) approach to history, based its claim to legitimacy, and in some measure hipness, on quantification and purported social relevance. Baseball-player studies certainly could be described as coming up from the bottom, but the continued emphasis was on story — what happened; and biography — by whom. There is some evidence of late, however, that baseball history may finally run aground in this generation’s perfect storm of race, class, and gender, so perilous to frail, tentative, hopeful insight. Styles blow through the corridors of history no less than on Seventh Avenue; if we can wait it out, this too shall pass.

Where the American Studies movement has long provided a big tent to those who sought to describe American life as it was lived by those outside the political, military, and intellectual elites, it has also come under fire from the academy for its perceived lack of social relevance and scholarly rigor, if not outright triviality (I exclude statistically based studies, which get a pass on the rigor test but not when it comes to relevance). As Daniel Boorstin and Russel Nye, household gods of mine, demonstrated forty and fifty years ago,[xi] a fella could learn a thing or two about America through its media, its advertising, and its patterns of consumption. The perspectives of Larry Ritter and Dr. Seymour were similarly revelations to many of us in this room. And in other approaches to the game, in the 1970s Roger Angell, Bob Creamer, Roger Kahn, and Jim Bouton proved that baseball is the Trojan Horse by which we come to understand ourselves. Knock on the door and say, “I’ve got history for you,” and that door does not budge. Offer baseball and the door swings open wide; once inside, a little history and useful knowledge may be imparted.

Baseball history is not so different from other forms, in the end. Solid research and command of the evidence underlie all of it. Dixon Wecter, not yet a household god but new in my experience and highly congenial in his approach, wrote:

Industry minus art, accumulation lacking charm, data without digestion — such shortcomings explain this popular allergy against American history as written…. The re-creation of a dominant personality, or daily life of an era, or the power generated by its ideas, calls for exact knowledge fired by historical imagination…. If the author’s saturation in his subject is so real that he develops affections and dislikes, his writing is sure to be more warm and vigorous than if he strikes the attitude of a biologist dissecting a frog.[xii]

My friend and protoball pioneer Larry McCray, with his taxonomic bent, likes to say that he is a tree person and I am a forest person, and sometimes we just cannot see the other, cannot grasp one another’s perspective. Wecter clearly believes that a first-rate historian must be a forest person — it is the leap of imagination that makes him a big leaguer — but he has to have a lot of little tree in him too. (Echoing another catcher there, Roy Campanella.)

It seems to me that what is lacking in baseball history is its last five letters. Even more than in general American historical writing, because it is the toy shop of history departments (the baseball beat at a newspaper used to be called the toy department), baseball must be pushed by event, driven by character, and have a freight-train narrative drive. As with a novel, there must be a truth of fact and a truth of feeling, illuminated by sensibility. In short, we may not, in the name of accuracy, neglect the speculative and aesthetic possibilities in baseball history. Issue-driven baseball history is simply baseball history unread.

Rather than depersonalize the writing of history, we should fess up to its intrinsically subjective element — the historian — and make way for passion, for intimations of sentiment if not sentimentality ... itself a lesser crime, it seems me now, than before the current age of irony. Tell us what it felt like to be alive then, in that distant age. Insert yourself and your tale of the hunt into the story.

There may be no “I” in “team” — nor in “research,” nor in “SABR” — but there is one in “history” … and there ought to be one in the writing of it.

--John Thorn

NOTES

[i] The Rise of Major League Baseball to 1891. Seymour, Harold, Phd. Cornell University, 1956. 659 pp.

[ii] For more on this, see “Four Fathers of Baseball,” a speech the author delivered at the Smithsonian Institution on July 14, 2005, at
http://thornpricks.blogspot.com/2005/07/four-fathers-of-baseball.html.

[iii] Interview in Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916.

[iv] For more on this subject, see the author’s “1791 and All That: Baseball and the Berksires” in BASE Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, Vol. I, No. 1, Spring 2007, pp. 119-126.

[v] Lowenthal, David. Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Free Press, 1996, p. 119.

[vi] “Historian of Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, University of California, Berkeley, 1946-1983: Kenneth M. Stampp,” with an Introduction by John G. Sproat. Interviews conducted by Ann Lage in 1996, p. 162.
http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=kt258001zq&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=d0e7572&toc.id=d0e7119&brand=oac

[vii] Ibid, p. 163.

[viii] From Henry Chadwick, The Game of Base Ball (New York: Munro, 1868), pp. 9-10: “About twenty odd years ago [i.e., 1848] I used to frequently visit Hoboken with base ball parties, and, on these occasions, formed one of the contesting sides; and I remember getting some hard hits in the ribs, occasionally, from an accurately thrown ball. Some years afterwards the rule of throwing the ball at the player was superseded by that requiring it to be thrown to the base player, and this was the first step towards our now National game.”

[ix] Rankled by Rankin’s challenges to his recollection and veracity in several Sporting News articles in 1904-5, Chadwick wrote to his friend “Joe” (Vila?) in April 1907: “Reference will show you that I knew of base ball in the sixties when – according to ‘mine enemy’ – I knew nothing about any game but cricket. Although in November 1848 I played as short stop in a field adjoining the old Knickerbocker grounds at Hoboken .” Per photocopy in the Giamatti Center “Origins” file.

[x] Wecter, Dixon. “History and How to Write It,” American Heritage, Volume 8, Issue 5, August 1957, p. 87.

[xi] Among many notable works, I take pains to cite Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (originally published by Athenaeum Press in 1962 as The Image or What Happened to the American Dream) and Nye’s The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York Dial Press, 1970).

[xii] Wecter, op. cit., pp. 25-26.

2008-01-09T13:58:00.000-05:00

Hero, villain, or scapegoat?

Whose Ass Is It Anyway?

2008-01-09T13:48:00.000-05:00

From: "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, January 10, 2008:
“You think I played my career because I’m worried about the damn Hall of Fame? I could give a rat’s ass about that.” Thus spake Roger Clemens in a memorable press conference on Monday, highlighted by the playback of a taped 17-minute conversation with his accuser and professed injector of banned substances into his buttocks, trainer Brian McNamee. “If you have a vote,” Clemens said to the reporters in the room, “you keep your vote. I don't need the Hall of Fame to justify that I put my butt on the line and I worked my tail off. And I defy anybody to say I did it by cheating or taking any shortcuts.”

Well, ever since the Mitchell Report was issued, McNamee has hardly been the only one on Roger’s butt. Sportswriters, fans, and culture pundits have done their best to kick Roger off the pedestal he had attained by winning seven Cy Young Awards. Prior to the report, I had not been the only one to claim that he — not Walter Johnson, Cy Young, Lefty Grove or Christy Mathewson — was the greatest pitcher in the history of baseball. The Hall of Fame was a foregone conclusion, for like his partner in purported infamy, Barry Bonds, Roger had been a lock for Cooperstown if he had retired ten years earlier.

That could not have been said about Rich “Goose” Gossage, who was elected to the Hall the day after the Clemens press conference in Texas. After having fallen short on eight previous tries of the required 75 percent of the ballots cast, this time he sailed in on a love boat of 85.8 percent. Falling short in the 2008 election were Jim Rice, who polled 72.2 percent in his 14th try, as well as such worthies as Andre Dawson, Bert Blyleven, Lee Smith, Jack Morris, Tommy John, Tim Raines, and — bringing up the rear of those who were named on one-fifth or more of the ballots — Mark McGwire. When he hit 70 and then 65 home runs in 1998-99, he too became a lock for the Hall, but then a stumbling appearance in March 2005 before the House Oversight and Government Affairs Committee convened to examine the steroids issue made him a pincushion for the noble knights of the keyboard.

As a new member of the Cooperstown Club, a partnership between elite players and the lowly scribes who covered them, Gossage the former flamethrower tossed only bouquets when asked his opinion of the swirling steroid accusations. “I have a lot of empathy for [the voters] on how to go about this. I'm glad I'm not voting.” Asked to comment on Clemens, Bonds and McGwire in particular, Gossage mused, “What we have here at stake is the greatest part of the game, the history of it.”

An active player would not typically say such a thing, though a retired one — or wistful writer, sympathetic fan or dotty historian — might. On the day before Gossage fluffed the writers who had just given him a career extension that will run the rest of his years on earth, Clemens had snarled the snarl of a player, one who from the time he was a boy loved the game for itself and the rewards of the playing field. “This is not about records and heroes and numbers,” he spat at those assembled at his press conference. “I could give a rat’s ass about that.” Rodentia redux.

What Clemens was saying, in effect, was that he pursued accomplishment for its own sake and for the contribution it might make to his teammates, and ultimately to winning — which is THE drug for players and fans alike and, despite the mandate of journalism for dispassion, most beat writers and hometown electronic-media types too.

We who love baseball might reflect on what we talk about when we talk about fame. If one required proof that fame is fleeting and fortune fickle, consider that at the All-Star Game in 1999, when Major League Baseball announced the fan balloting for the 25 spots on its All-Century Team, four then active players were elected: Cal Ripken, Ken Griffey, Clemens, and McGwire. Lacking the charm (i.e., character) factor even before the drumbeat of steroid-use allegations started, Bonds did not come close to making the cut despite three MVPs in the decade.

Enduring fame may ride the wind, like that of Abraham Lincoln or Paul Bunyan. But earning a plaque in Cooperstown has proven beyond the reach of some of the enduringly celebrated names in the game—Bobby Thomson, Roger Maris and Don Larsen, of one honorable but insufficient sort; Joe Jackson and Pete Rose of quite another, a group to whom one day we may add definitively Bonds, McGwire, and Clemens.

What kind of pantheon is this? The answer may be found in the fifth among the rules for election by the Baseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA): “Voting shall be based upon the player’s record, playing ability, integrity, sportsmanship, character, and contributions to the team(s) on which the player played.” Apart from a scary aversion to pronouns, this provision has opened the door for termites to judge themselves greater than the tree upon which they have fed, simply because they could bring it down.

Heirs to the traditions of the Star Chamber, the Salem Witch Trials, and Senator Joe McCarthy, George Mitchell and the publicity maggots in Congress have found an apt chorus in the conduct monitors of the BBWAA. While I recognize as well as anyone the societal value of scapegoats and propitiatory offerings, there can be no doubt that in the Steroids Era we have all gone quite mad.

Whose life is it anyway? The great player thinks, as long as he is in the game, that his achievements and his struggles belong to him and to his team. Once he retires, however, he finds, by way of the Bowdlerized Baseball Hall of Fame election process, that it belongs to everyone but him — fans, politicians, paragons of morality in the press box. He loses control over the life he thought he had created —he is no longer the central actor, let alone the author, of his own life drama.

Dan Shaughnessy wrote in the Boston Globe on January 9: “Clemens dismissed the Hall of Fame in his ‘60 Minutes’ interview and again Monday. It’s part of his Profile of Defiance. Clemens’s insistence that Cooperstown means nothing is harder to believe than any of his other statements and denials in recent weeks. Clemens knows his place in baseball history. He knows a case can be made that he is the greatest pitcher who ever lived. He knows that his reputation — his Hall of Fame worthiness — is what he is fighting for today and in Congress next week.”

What Roger Clemens truly knows is that if his reputation, like his Hall of Fame worthiness, is to be crafted by others, he won’t give a rat’s ass about it. That’s what Ted Williams and Muhammad Ali thought too.

--John Thorn

The Magic Glute

2007-12-21T10:42:00.000-05:00

From: "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, December 2, 2004
(don't know why I didn't post this pretty good column to the blog earlier)
In the November 18, 2004 issue of Nature, Dennis M. Bramble and Daniel E. Lieberman wrote that distance running, not bipedal walking, was what made Homo erectus look like you and me...well, like you, anyway. I recognize myself more clearly in the authors' description of the diffident Australopithecus: short legs, long forearms, and high, bookwormishly shrugged shoulders. Our nearer ancestor, Homo erectus, had shorter arms, longer legs, a skinnier ribcage and pelvis and - key to the further evolution of the species - buns.

Like chimpanzees today, proto-humans had narrow pelvises that could not support the robust gluteus maximus for which Homo sapiens is known (and you thought he was differentiated by his brain!). Identifying 25 other traits besides strong buttocks that made Homo sapiens born to run, the authors also noted the development of a nuchal ligament at the back of the neck. As with other mammals capable of high-speed or long-distance running, this connective tissue permits a runner to keep his noggin still, unlike the pigs that Bramble and Lieberman set to racing on treadmills as bobble-head surrogates for Olivia Newton-John.

In summing up the duo's findings for the New York Times, John Noble Wilford wrote: "Endurance running, unique to humans among primates and uncommon in all mammals other than dogs, horses and hyenas, apparently evolved at least two million years ago and probably let human ancestors hunt and scavenge over great distances. That was probably decisive in the pursuit of high-protein food for development of large brains."

While I was pleased thus to have confirmed my own notion that the ass figured large in human development, I was disquieted by its connection with running after food or anything else, except perhaps other asses. My friend Larry McCray, who had sent me Wilford's report, commented, "I note in passing that both sexes have developed the runner's backside, so I guess it wasn't deeply true that the men always hunted and the women always gathered." I found other holes in the story.

As I have long used my own gluteus maximus to connect the otherwise lonely armrests of my favorite chair, and to act as a counterbalance when I might otherwise be falling down drunk, the authors of this Nature study did not convince me that the ability to run long distances is crucial to the survival of the species, or ever was. If anything, their article made me wonder why our early ancestors were (a) so hungry that they would consider running long distances after food yet (b) so unimpaired by starvation that they could muster the energy to race across the veldt and into adjoining counties. Running just a little bit - I could see that as a useful evolutionary accretion. The laws of natural selection would tend to favor the effective hunters (and maybe even mobile female gatherers), who could sprint after game or away from those who would make game of them. This Darwinian trend would lead and breed to ever more muscular if not more ample glutes; the latter awaited the invention of television and fast food.

Scientists will tend to assign human progress to evidence of increasing strength, power, speed, and problem-solving skills, such as the making of tools. Artists will see the ascent of man in his rise up the great chain of being, from the bogs of the lowliest invertebrates to the spiritual realm of the angels. I believe the posterior is anterior to progress of both kinds - whether it is the bounteously insured booty of J. Lo or the bag of pudding hanging from Karl Rove. Not only does the gluteal region propel fight or flight or pursuit, as the Nature study suggests, it is also the seat of wisdom, weighing against the impulse to rush off and do something, anything, to scratch an itch.

Whether you call it an ass or an arse, a butt or a bottom, the troika of gluteus maximus, medius, and minimus form the muscles upon which we sit as we await inspiration or contemplate action, and many things are better engaged in the contemplation, from homicide to exercise. By the grace of the three glutes we may have been born to run, but it is by enabling us to sit comfortably that these magical muscles have aided Newton, Einstein, and Alistair Cooke in the formulation of their greatest ideas. If these brainy men and others like them had sat less and run more, they might have captured a scampering bunny or two but the rest of us would have descended into a race of intellectual girlymen.

Which is where we're headed, anyway. The liberal arts are suspected of undermining Americans' drive to a service economy. Book lovers are regarded as sentimental castrati. Deconstructionists and semioticians create a mock aestheticism around hiphop music and slasher films, and the fans roll in and snuffle the nonsense as if they were cats and it catnip. Once the unexamined life was deemed not worth living; now it is worth forensic examination.

The focus of American men's lust has lately been reported to have shifted from breasts to bottoms, bringing our sexual politics, if not our foreign policy, into alignment with the rest of the world. Plastic surgeons are said to be doing more butt reshaping than either breast enhancements or facial reconstructions, excepting possibly eyelifts. Unwilling to accept the river of life that makes all of us more similar than not, we regard life as an extended masquerade ball in which we may appear younger than we are, thinner than our heredity would demand, more appealing in the bedroom. In our pharmatopia no shortcoming, real or imagined, must be endured. Endorphins, pheromones, ecstatic transport are but a mouse-click away.

That oxymoronic term "Reality TV" has moved from sleepover to makeover, with reconstruction of homes, physiques, family relationships. The do-over craze has extended to our surroundings, our bodies, our body politic. A swirl of action, like Sally Rand's fan-dance way back when, convinces observers that they have seen something they haven't.

I grant that some things are less easily accomplished on one's butt than with it: war, procreation, windsurfing (did I miss anything?), yet the sedentary pursuit of such active sports is frequently less hazardous to all who might otherwise be involved or affected. The Tao has a useful construct for armchair adventurism: wei wu wei, - literally "do/don't do," but better understood as purposeful inaction, which contrasts nicely with the world's tendency to purposeless action. When we call someone an ass, it is seldom because they failed to get off theirs.

In our heedless rush to renovation - Enlarge your debt! Reduce your penis! (or was it the other way?) - who suggests getting on a spiritual StairMaster? Who says, chisel your knowledge as you would your abs? Who points out that interior decoration endures while exterior changes imply a mannequin within?

We were born not merely to run, but also to fly. Benjamin Franklin's epitaph, the one he wrote in his youth, highlights the one true makeover, against which all others wither:

The Body of
Benjamin Franklin,
Printer,
Like the Cover of an old Book,
Its Contents torn out,
And stript of its Lettering & Gilding,
Lies here, Food for Worms.-
Yet the Work itself shall not be lost,
For it will, as he believed, appear once more,
In a newAnd more beautiful Edition,
Corrected and amended
BY: The Author.

No workout or makeover is required; ladies and gentlemen, be seated.

--John Thorn

2007-12-19T17:10:00.000-05:00

Dueling syringes?

Our Champions

2007-12-19T16:48:00.000-05:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, December 20, 2007:
It is now one week since the release of the Mitchell Report, culminating a 20-month, $20 million investigation (into secondary sources, largely ... how on earth was so much spent?) in which the former Senator made 20 recommendations after identifying about 90 players who had used steroids or human growth hormone. What has been the fallout? Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said that since the report’s release he has read it twice. Players union chief Don Fehr announced his willingness to meet with Selig to discuss the report’s recommendations. Some players, including Andy Pettitte, Brian Roberts, Gary Bennett, and F.P. Santangelo, acknowledged their reported use of performance enhancing drugs. Others, including Roger Clemens and David Justice, vigorously objected to their being listed among the accused.

Even President Bush weighed in. “Steroids have sullied the game,” said the former part-owner of the Texas Rangers, whose locker room in the early 1990s had been regarded as a drug haven. “My hope is that this report is a part of putting the steroid era of baseball behind us.”

If Roger Clemens and Barry Bonds are left to cool their heels at the gates to the Hall of Fame for a while, as has been the fate of Mark McGwire, that seems to be all right with most writers and fans. On the other hand, Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle said, “I can assure you that Bud Selig will be voted into the Hall of Fame, and he is the commissioner whose name will be linked with the steroid era by first ignoring it, then profiting from it, and finally blaming others for it.”

So who killed Cock Robin? Mitchell’s report held the commissioner, team officials, the union, and the named players responsible for these dark days in baseball, which tainted the on-field product and skewed the historical record. But he gave the fans a pass.

In blogs and chat rooms last week fans registered their dismay, revulsion, bitterness and shock — shock!! — about the report’s revelations. In a flamboyant but illustrative example, one baseball lover wrote to the sports editor of the New York Times: “I’m literally in tears looking at this list. Men that I admired and respected, envied and encouraged, men who ran for me, dived for me, played for me are cheats....”

“Played for me” ... yes, that melodramatic, naive notion is at the heart of the matter. It is precisely what being a fan is about, and it is why the steroid scandal has hurt so many so much. We had pinned our honor to their sleeves and sent them forth to joust on our behalves — we could hardly do battle ourselves, could we? — and they had betrayed our trust. These ballplayers, these superhuman figures who could reach heights unattainable by mere humans, were our surrogates; they were us, and their fall feels like ours. If it were simply theirs — like Britney’s wardrobe malfunctions, or Lindsay’s driving lapses — we would register the amused astonishment that guiltily masks schadenfreude.

But the failure of the steroid era was somehow ours, loath though we are to admit it. We were complicit. We looked the other way just as Selig and Fehr and the clean players and the tolerant umpires and the beat reporters did, with rare exception.

Some wag once said, we elect the politicians we deserve. Let me suggest that we select as our champions—the bearers of our hopes, our dreams, our illusions—the heroes we deserve.
While Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, Sammy Sosa and others labored under suspicion, we cheered their assault upon the home run records of Ruth, Maris, and Aaron. We saw no irony in Rafael Palmeiro appearing between innings of a ball game to endorse Viagra, an apparently unexceptionable enhancer of performance. (Wanna be a slugger like Raffy?) If we watched the evening news programs, we were routinely bombarded with drug manufacturers’ exhortations to ask our doctors about the latest advance in easing once bearable discomforts or newly coined syndromes. The wonders of modern medicine were gloriously available to all, we believed. We might aspire to bodies that heal quickly and stay functional beyond what used to be termed reasonable limits of age. But athletes were members of a priestly class whose place is to inspire us with unaided exploits: they had to play by the rules of the old ball game, the one we think we remember from our childhoods.

If athletes are magicians or culture priests, who perform the superhuman when summoned to do so, why shouldn’t they have elixirs and potions and magic wands? Even though part of their appeal is that they are truly just like us only a bit different — we could hit a Roger Clemens splitter, we could blow one by Barry Bonds — in truth they are not like us. We may wonder how a magician brings off his trick but we don’t expect him to share his secrets with us in the audience ... we just want a good show. We might not be flattered if we learned that at the core of his magic were the credulity and distractibility of the audience.

Marion Jones’s tearful admission of her use of illegal supplements caused us barely a moment’s shared pain, and not a twinge of remorse for having waved the flag in victory along with her. NBA referee Tim Donaghy’s admission of colluding with gamblers was yesterday’s news in an instant. NHL goonery was tacitly a part of the game; why get excited about that? The Michael Vick canine abuse matter was larger, of course, and repellent for reasons discussed in this column previously. But the fans “owned” none of the dogfighters’ collateral guilt. Baseball’s scandal was different.

Baseball fans love a trick, a ruse, a sly swindle, as long as it is played out between the white lines. Scarred baseballs, pine tarred pitching hands, corked bats, even the hidden ball trick ... all are countenanced gladly as part of the game, if a guy can get away with it. Mechanically aided schemes like the one that may have tilted the 1951 pennant race — a telescope at a window of the center field clubhouse at the Polo Grounds, linked to an electrical buzzer to the bullpen, with signals thence flowing to the batter to signal the oncoming pitch — seem beyond the pale, yet even in that instance the players in the know kept their silence for half a century. In baseball as in real life, we may admire those who abide by the law but we will love those who successfully evade it.

Despite many amateurish attempts to correlate the use of performance enhancing drugs with enhanced performance (the latest such appearing in the Milwaukee Sentinel of December 16), no scientific study has yet determined or even indicated that the drugs in question make a pitcher throw a ball with more speed or cunning, or make a batter deposit his hits in locations more distant or artful. As David Kaplan of the University of Wisconsin has demonstrated, baseball has long exhibited statistical “outliers” like those whose homers per at bat were more than three standard deviations from the mean. These have included not only Barry Bonds in 2001-04 and Mark McGwire in 1998-2000 but also McGwire in 1992 and Bonds in 1993 ... as well as Hank Aaron in 1973, Willie Mays in 1965, and Ted Williams in 1960. None of these and many other “freakish” long-ball feats have had any impact on the long-term (half-century) trend to more home runs and fewer triples.

Is it possible that HGH, the new bugaboo of those who would restore the game’s virginity, is (as many have argued about steroids) a placebo, boosting performance for those who believed it could? Yup. Dr. George Griffing, Professor of Medicine at St. Louis University, writing this week for WebMD’s eMedicine service, reports:

In people with normal GH levels, HGH does not improve athletic performance in terms of muscle strength, flexibility, and endurance. In fact, several placebo-controlled studies have been negative. A four-week, double-blind Swedish study using two doses of HGH and placebo found no differences in subjects exercising on a bicycle in terms of power output and oxygen uptake. In another study, a single injection of HGH increased plasma lactate and reduced exercise performance.... It turns out that, like Paul Bunyan, the athletic benefit of HGH is a myth.

Facts be damned. Fans say that they want the game cleaned up and the miscreants punished. They want their baseball back. The cruel thing is that while fans praise tricksters and connivers, this time the joke’s on them, maybe even a double or triple joke. They thought they were watching one sort of game while in fact they were watching another. The steroid scandal has trashed their memories—their places in their own family albums—and it has held up to them, mockingly, their own gullibility.

More than any other sport, perhaps more than any other American institution, baseball is the game of memory, individual and collective, real and imagined. What has been “sullied,” to use the President’s term, is not merely the game but our individual and collective past. Because baseball took advantage of our innocence, we seem inauthentic to ourselves ... even though scientific evidence of an actual massive assault on the integrity of the game and its records, rather than simply a widespread intent to commit one, is lacking.

Major League Baseball and its fans will get back together, as they did after 1994, aided by the glamour of home run records. But it will be a bit sad, as all reconciled couples are.

--John Thorn

A Really Good Find: More Magnolia Blossoms

2007-11-16T11:44:00.001-05:00

From: "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, November 15, 2007:

[This story expands considerably upon the one posted to the blog earlier, in which the find was revealed.]

My lady friend has taken to calling me, with bemused affection and the merest hint of derision, “the great indoorsman.” True enough. I embark on no safari, pointlessly climb no piles of rock, and find myself paralyzed by the algebra of any hand tool more complex than a hammer. And yet, seated at my computer or on a distant prowl of dusty archives, I do experience the thrill of the hunt, the rapture of the capture, and the enduring satisfaction that comes with a really good find. This is the story of one such — or rather, the beginnings of the story, because this figurative grain of sand has opened onto an entire beach, and I have not yet fully grasped its enormity. More will come to light in the coming months and I will revisit this story then; but for now I must write, because the excitement is high.

One month ago, in the classified advertisement section of the New York Herald of November 2, 1843, I spotted a notice for a heretofore unknown New York ball club that played at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, a celebrated playground for New Yorkers of all social classes, jostling with each other contentiously and joyously for nearly a half century beginning in the 1830s. The ad provided clues to a much larger story — with some truly fascinating characters, including Walt Whitman, Mike Walsh, and George Wilkes, whom we will encounter in passing, but of whom there is a great deal more to be said in the context of baseball and the working class.

The ad, which also ran in the Sun, read in full:

NEW YORK MAGNOLIA BALL CLUB – Vive la Knickerbocker. – A meeting of the members of the above club will take place this (Thursday) afternoon, 2nd instant, at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken. It is earnestly requested that every member will be present, willing and eager to do his duty. Play will commence precisely at one o’clock. Chowder at 4 o’clock.
JOHN McKIBBIN, Jr., President.
JOSEPH CARLISLE, Vice President
ANDREW LESTER, Sec.n2 1t*m

The coding at the bottom signaled that the ad was to appear one time only (1t) and on November 2 (n2). Of the named officers, modest research revealed that the president was a waiter, the vice president an eating-house proprietor (the Magnolia Lunch and Saloon, offering “the best of Wines, Liquors, Segars, and every other requisite”), and the secretary a billiard-room proprietor. All had working-class and political associations of the sort that historians presume to have emerged only with the unruly Brooklyn clubs of the following decade, notably the Atlantics.

Indeed, the Magnolia is precisely the sort of club that the formation of the gentlemanly Knickerbocker was designed to checkmate. As key Knick founder William R. Wheaton told an interviewer in 1887 of the game of 50 years ago, “The new game quickly became very popular ... beyond the fastidious notions of some of us, and we decided to withdraw [from the original Gotham club] and found a new organization, which we called the Knickerbocker.” The Knickerbocker innovations of 1845-46 — handed down to us as 90 feet between bases, nine men to the side, and nine innings — are by custom linked with Alexander Cartwright though there is no evidence for his feats of legerdemain. There is, however, considerable backing for the idea that all these essential features of the game as we know it did not take hold until a decade later, long after Cartwright had gone west with the Gold Rush of 1849.

In fact, the Knickebockers became known as the “pioneer club” as early as 1860, despite everyone acknowledging the existence of at least one prior club, the New York Base Ball Club (NYBBC), which defeated the Knicks 23-1 in their “historic” first match of June 19, 1846. That the Knickerbockers were preceded not only by the NYBBC but also others was widely acknowledged, if with a wink, as late as 1910, when Arthur B. Reeve wrote in Outing Magazine: “The honors for the place of birth of baseball are divided. Philadelphia claims that her ‘town ball’ was practically baseball and that it was played by her Olympic Club from 1833 to 1859. It is also claimed the Washington Club of New York in 1843 was the first to play the game.”

The Washingtons were intermingled with the New Yorks, and both derived from the aforementioned Gotham, which dated from 1837 or possibly as early as 1832. When the Gotham “Cottage” (i.e., saloon) at 298 Bowery, where the club members regularly met, was torn down in 1878, Leslie’s commented in matter-of-fact fashion: “The Gotham Baseball Club, the first in the country, held its meetings there, and the balls it won from many of the ‘crack’ clubs were in a glass-case behind the bar.”

Moreover, the NYBBC played two matches with the Brooklyn Club, an offshoot of the Brooklyn Star Cricket Club, in October 1845 that pre-date the beatified Knickerbocker game with the New Yorks of June 19, 1846. What did these baseball matches look like? The Brooklyn Evening Star of October 23, 1845 reported: “A match of base ball was played on Tuesday at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken, between eight members of the New York Ball Club and the same number of players from Brooklyn.”

So why, in the more than 160 years since the Magnolias sprung into blossom on the Elysian Fields, has there been not a single mention of them in print, except for the classified pages? They appear to have been deliberately written out of the game’s history, very early on.

Why would the Magnolia ad contain the phrase “Vive la Knickerbocker”? These were Irishmen, after all, not Dutch patroons, and they had little claim to the 18th-century gentility of Diedrich Knickerbocker’s New York. Let me say that this Magnolia motto was certainly not a reference to the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, whose formation was two years in the offing. It may have been a bow to the unionist Whig political affiliations of some of the Magnolia’s officers, or it may even have may have been a reference to labor leader and radical hero Mike Walsh, editor of the radical Subterranean ... but prior to that known as the founder of the scurrilous Knickerbocker, one of many “flash” weeklies launched in the 1840s, with titles like The Rake, The Sporting Whip, and Venus’s Miscellany. These were designed to titillate, but as weeklies they stood little chance of making money from subscriptions or newsboy sales; their principal business, acknowledged in court proceedings, was blackmail of high-toned citizens caught out on the town with women of questionable virtue: pay the editors or find yourself the talk of the town. (These early scandal sheets, which culminated in 1845 in blackmailer George Wilkes’ founding of the long-lived National Police Gazette, is but one of many fascinating sidelights that spun off from my originally narrow range of research.)

Or the Magnolia club members may have beeen members of Knickerbocker Engine Company No. 12, which had disbanded in the latter months of 1843, though it was to reorganize on February 22d, 1844 under the name of “Tradesman's,” before finally disbanding in 1847. Or saying, “Long live the Knickerbocker” may simply have been the Magnolia way of declaring the old-fashioned virtues of the men who gathered to play baseball on the green fields of Hoboken. That baseball was not a spontaneous brainstorm of Abner Doubleday or Alex Cartwright is a commonplace now, some three years after I broke the story that baseball was being played under that name in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in1791. Everyone in the 1850s knew that baseball had been around as long as they could remember. The Herald of December 19, 1854 remarked: “Cricket is not the only game of ball that has its admirers. There are now in this city three regularly organized clubs, who meet twice in each week for about eight months of the year, for exercise in the good old fashioned American game of base ball.”

But let’s get back to the Magnolia Ball Club. As soon as I saw the ad in the Herald I recalled that some months ago historian David Block had kindly pointed me to a curious image that he thought might be suitable to illustrate a forthcoming article on town ball by Richard Hershberger, which has now been published in the fall issue of the journal Base Ball. David pointed me to a web link to an undated, unidentified card offered as Lot 1600 in a Lelands auction of December 2002.

The auctioneer described the item as a “signed copper plate engraving of the quality of paper money. The card itself is a heavy stock with a silver mirror finish. This invitation to the ‘1st Annual Ball of the Magnolia Ball Club’ measures 5x3.25 [inches]. The image is magnificent. It shows the plantation like Magnolia Club with its main building and a yacht flying the ‘M’ flag. Half the image is a richly detailed state-of-the-art baseball game in progress. The players are wearing long pants, there are wickets instead of bases, the catcher stands steps behind the batter with no equipment (pre-mask and shin guards) and catches the ball on one bounce. The engraving is signed ‘Eng. By W. Fairthorne.’ Fairthorne worked in New York City starting in 1839 until the time of his death in 1853, thereby, dating the piece from that 1839-53 time period. Finally, Magnolia is an area in southern New Jersey and the site of many stately plantations not unlike the one graphically illustrated we see pictured here.”

In a Eureka moment, I realized that I knew for certain what that plantation-like building was. It was the Colonnade, later known as the Colonnade Hotel or McCarty’s Hotel, whose proprietor provided the Knickerbockers and other clubs with many a lavish dinner after exertions on the ball field. Built in the early 1830s, it survived into the 1890s. As to Magnolia being in southern New Jersey, it is indeed a borough in New Jersey’s Camden County, but it was founded in 1915 and is not the site for this image.

Moving on to William Fairthorne, the auction description is correct as far as it goes, but does not touch upon the fellow’s brushes with the law for counterfeiting or his eventual management of the Lafayette Gentleman’s and Ladies’ Oyster Saloon at 38 Division Street. (“Oysters served up in every style, at the shortest notice, and families supplied by the thousand, hundred, or quart, at the lowest prices.”) Fairthorne, born in England in 1811, tried a Southern tour before settling in New York, just as Mike Walsh had done in the mid-1830s and Walt Whitman would do in the 1840s. “A chap calling himself W. Fairthorne,” reported the Mobile Advertiser in mid-February of 1836, “has within a few days decamped from this city leaving several persons of our acquaintance in the vocative as to their running accounts with him. He passed himself off here as an Engraver, and it would not be strange if he should set up for something of that sort in N. Orleans, before many days. He is an Englishman by birth, and a huge eater by education, has light hair rather disposed to curl, large grey or blue eyes, and a tolerable wide mouth. Although he is a squat figure, not likely to improve by age, he looks full as well in the distance as near at hand.”

By 1838 William Fairthorne — whose very name may have been a work of art or artifice, seized in honor of the notable English engraver of that name (1616-1691) — had settled in with wife Hannah at his New York City home at 68 Nassau Street, with a workplace of 350 Houston. On February 17, 1839 the New York Spectator offered this police report: “A Mr. Fairthorne, an engraver, was arrested some days ago, and yesterday examined, as a suspected accomplice of Conner, the counterfeiter, forger, and alterer of bank notes. The examination resulted so strongly in his favor, that he was held to bail only in the sum of $500....” Recalling that in those days a dollar a day was “very good pay,” the Spectator was ladling out the irony generously.

The auction-house description erred in calling the Magnolia card an invitation. It is a ticket, costing a dollar (see below) and, given its enamel-coated card stock and its original, commissioned imagery, intended to be saved as a memento of the fancy ball. The baseball scene on the card reveals three bases with stakes (not “wickets”), eight men in the field, and a top-hatted waiter bearing a tray of refreshments from the Colonnade. The “in” side are arrayed behind as well as seated upon on a long table. The pitcher tosses underhand. A base runner heads from first to second base. This is the original Knickerbocker game, and that of the New York Base Ball Club; both were inherited from the Gothams of the 1830s, for whom Wheaton codified the rules. (Shortstop as a ninth man did not kick in till 1847-48 and when, on occasion, a ninth man was thrown into the mix, he became a fourth outfielder.)

Extending from the names mentioned in the Magnolia ad, we find that restaurateur and club vice president Joe Carlisle was the power behind the ball club. He doubled as a jailer at the city’s notorious Tombs. The Herald of April 15, 1843 described him on his rounds: “The second corridor is under the charge of that jolly-hearted soul, Joseph Carlisle; one whose joyous laugh reverberating through the lofty edifice, excites a hearty response from the most lonely, desolate and dejected who hear it; to look at him is to laugh — his love of innocent fun and frolic is so earnest and hearty, that it is contagious, and he makes the poor devils around him for the time being almost happy—and as he turns the fatal key upon them, he gives them a pleasant jest and a jocund laugh, that sensibly relieves their otherwise melancholy musings. Such a man is sure to please every one, even the most grave, if they are not over fastidious with regard to an audible smile.”

So jolly was Joe that his company was sought by the firebrand Mike Walsh, leader of the Spartan Association that broke up Whig and Democratic political rallies with equal gusto. In his weekly Subterranean of January 31, 1846, Walsh wrote, in SLEIGHING LAST WEEK—GREAT SPORT: “I started to go out in Colonel Bratine’s fine sleigh and drawn by the celebrated ‘Lotion’ and a horse that beat ‘Lady Suffolk.’ The Colonel, than whom a better driver never snapped a whip, drove in person, the company was composed of Andrew Lester [secretary of the Magnolia], Joseph Carlyle [an understandable misspelling], Frank Stuart [a.k.a Stewart] and myself. It would be pretty difficult to pick up a choicer little party, or a finer team than this....”

Michael Walsh, known universally as “Mike,” was born in Youghal, near Cork, Ireland, May 4, 1810. He immigrated to the United States and moved to New York City, where he apprenticed to a lithographer in 1826. After some wandering years that took him to New Orleans, then purportedly Texas, and then Albany (New York) he returned to New York City in 1839. He aligned himself with the Red Rover (“Howard”) Engine Company No. 34 at a time when the volunteer fire laddies ruled the roost. One of his fellows in the fire company was Bill “The Butcher” Poole (think of Gangs of New York) who was shot in Stanwix Hall on Broadway by Lewis Baker on February 25, 1855; another was David C. Broderick, bartender at the saloon named after Walsh’s Subterranean and later a United States Senator from California who while in office was fatally shot in a duel. Walsh himself died under mysterious circumstances that may have been murder.

In 1842 Walsh became the Washington, D.C. reporter for the New York Aurora, a paper edited by the 23-year-old Walt Whitman. On July 15, 1843, after the failure of his weekly sheet the Sunday Knickerbocker, of which no example survives, he launched the Subterranean, featuring a Whitman poem, “Lesson of the Two Symbols.” In this year Whitman also served as sub-editor for The Plebeian, a literary newspaper whose editor, Levi D. Slamm, successfully prosecuted Walsh for libel and had thrown into the prison at Blackwell's Island.

Illustrating the confused and confusing political and ethnic cross-currents of the day, Whitman had been editor of the Van Burenite paper the Aurora and was at this time rabidly anti-Irish; Walsh was a workingman’s advocate who nonetheless backed the pro-slavery candidate for the presidency in 1844, John C. Calhoun ... and of course he was Irish born. This did not stop him from winning election as a Democrat to the Thirty-third Congress (March 4, 1853 to March 3, 1855) or running unsuccessfully for reelection, despite his not having been naturalized. A man of surpassing and intriguing inconsistencies, Walsh was against both the Hunkers (the establishment Democrats who looked to obtain spoils from the system) and the Barnburners, the “principled” Democrats led by Van Buren. Walsh opposed the extension of slavery but was for the annexation of Texas and the notion of manifest destiny generally, and thus allied himself with the pro-slavery but expansionist Calhoun.

A gifted extemporaneous speechmaker as well as an inciter of premeditated riots, Walsh was an inimitable leader. “In his restless search for a political voice and public persona,” wrote Sean Wilentz in Chants Democratic, “Walsh came to embody a new and curious figure in New York politics, the radical Bowery Boy politician. His use of force was perfectly in keeping with the roughhouse standards of the 1840s.”

But it is his words, not his disturbances, that captivate today. In the lamentably out of print Sketches of the Speeches and Writings of Michael Walsh (1853) we see a master of persuasion. After the Astor Place riot of May 10, 1849, an exercise in ethnic and class warfare in which New York State forces intervened and 22 were killed and 38 injured, Walsh spoke out with passion:

“Where,” he asked, “where were these national guards during the late war with Mexico? Where were those gingerbread soldiers? They were drinking punch at their firesides while it was the poor man who fought the battles of the country.... No doubt there are thousands like the Mayor who are drinking the blood of the operatives, who long for the power of an army with which they may oppress and trample the poor man under foot....

“We toil to feed their lusts, we bleed to back their quarrels, coin our sweat and blood to feed their wassail and maintain their pomp! And they, kind, gentle, gentle lords — in payment plunder our dwellings, spurn us as their dogs, stain those we love, and mock at our affliction....”

Walsh believed that the source of crime and misery in the world was rooted in the inequality of society. He regularly referred to Irish laborers as wage slaves to “idle and dishonest capitalists.” He was for the workingman, the pub, recreation on the Sabbath, ball playing, and chowder—all the elements that are encapsulated in that little classified ad in the Herald on November 2, 1843.

In the Subterranean of October 25, 1845, the day after the Brooklyn and New York clubs played their second match game, Walsh wrote: “Three different parties of whole-souled fellows are going to express their gratitude to Heaven for its manifold blessings, to-morrow, by playing ball and eating chowder. They could not have selected a more appropriate and sensible method of doing it, as a man is never on so good terms with his God and fellow men, as when he is enjoying himself in healthy and rational manner.” On July 11 of the previous year he had been quoted in similar vein in the Berkshire County Whig: “There has been more Democracy diffused in Porter houses on Sunday than in any other place!”

Another Magnolia advertisement in the Herald that eluded me on my first pass came to light weeks after my original find. It describes the actual event for which the Magnolia card provided admission. The ad ran in the Herald, and perhaps in other papers unavailable to me, on February 6-8 of 1844. It read:

THE FIRST ANNUAL BALL of the New York Magnolia Ball Club will take place at National Hall, Canal st. on Friday evening, Feb. 9th, inst. The Club pledge themselves that no expense or exertions shall be spared to render this (their first) Ball worthy the patronage of their friends. The Ball Room will be splendidly decorated with the insignia of the Club. Brown’s celebrated Band is engaged for the occasion. Tickets $1, to be had of the undersigned, and at the bar of National Hall.
JOSEPH CARLISLE, Chairman.
PETER H. GRAHAM, Secretary
f6 4t*cc

Although the ad was intended to run four times, presumably February 6-9, I was unable to find it in issues of Friday the 9th, the day of that evening’s ball.

I did not own this card when I made my initial find last month, but I immediately knew I had a tiger by the tail. I realized that my find would impart a great deal of value to the card and its owner, whose identity I did not and do not know. However, through channels I was able to conduct a transaction via an intermediary and I now own the card (after gulping hard about its new price). Accordingly, I will have to guard against making extravagant claims for its importance, as it will be easy for others to chalk up my views to self-interest. But the facts are the facts after all.

Allow me to sum up what I see dispassionately as the significance of the Magnolia card. It is:

* the first depiction of men playing baseball, discounting the 1744 image of boys playing “base-ball” (without a bat) in Little Pretty Pocket-Book, or that of boys playing on Boston Common, shown in Robin Carver’s Book of Sports from 1834;
* the earliest artifact to have survived related to the New York Game [only the 1837 Philadelphia Olympic Constitution (town ball) is earlier];
* the only artifact, apart from the newspaper ads, related to this newly unveiled pre-Knickerbocker club that played in Hoboken but whose membership was based in New York; and
* arguably, depending upon one’s taxonomic views, the first baseball card.

But the greater significance of the find is not the properties of the card but the new understanding that its underlying story affords of how baseball really began in New York, and what impetus the workingman’s culture of that day may have given to baseball’s growth.

--John Thorn

2007-11-11T16:51:00.000-05:00

At play on Hoboken's Elysian Fields, 1843-44

Important Early Baseball Find

2007-11-11T16:40:00.000-05:00

One month ago, in the classified advertisement section of the New York Herald of November 2, 1843, I spotted a notice for a heretofore unknown New York ball club that played at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken. The ad provided clues to a much larger story—with some truly fascinating characters, including Walt Whitman, Mike Walsh, and George Wilkes—that I am writing up now for publication. However, I thought I would first share the basics of the find with my colleagues in the research community.

The ad read in full:

NEW YORK MAGNOLIA BALL CLUB – Vive la Knickerbocker. – A meeting of the members of the above club will take place this (Thursday) afternoon, 2^nd instant, at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken. It is earnestly requested that every member will be present, willing and eager to do his duty. Play will commence precisely at one o’clock. Chowder at 4 o’clock.
JOHN McKIBBIN, Jr., President.
JOSEPH CARLISLE, Vice President
ANDREW LESTER, Sec.
n2 1t*m

The coding at the bottom signaled that the ad was to appear one time only (1t) and on November 2 (n2). Of the named officers, research revealed that the president was a waiter, the vice president an eating-house proprietor (the Magnolia Lunch, offering “the best of Wines, Liquors, Segars, and every other requisite”), and the secretary a billiard-room proprietor. All had working-class and political associations of the sort that we presume to have emerged only with Brooklyn clubs of the following decade, notably the Atlantics.

Indeed, the Magnolia is precisely the sort of club that the formation of the Knickerbocker was designed to checkmate. As key Knick founder William R. Wheaton told an interviewer in 1887, “The new game quickly became very popular ... beyond the fastidious notions of some of us, and we decided to withdraw [from the original Gotham club] and found a new organization, which we called the Knickerbocker.” As to why the Magnolia ad would contain the phrase “Vive la Knickerbocker,” well, that’s a story in itself, and must be left for a fuller treatment.

But I get ahead of myself: as soon as I saw the ad in the Herald I recalled that some months ago David Block had pointed me to a curious image that he thought might be suitable to illustrate a forthcoming article on town ball by Richard Hershberger, which has now been published in the fall issue of the journal Base Ball. David pointed me to this link to a curious undated, unidentified card offered as Lot 1600 in a Lelands auction of December 2002:

http://www.lelands.com/bid.aspx?lot=1600&auctionid=212

The auctioneer described the item as a “signed copper plate engraving of the quality of paper money. The card itself is a heavy stock with a silver mirror finish. This invitation to the ‘1st Annual Ball of the Magnolia Ball Club’ measures 5x3.25”. The image is magnificent. It shows the plantation like Magnolia Club with its main building and a yacht flying the ‘M’ flag. Half the image is a richly detailed state-of-the-art baseball game in progress. The players are wearing long pants, there are wickets instead of bases, the catcher stands steps behind the batter with no equipment (pre-mask and shin guards) and catches the ball on one bounce. The engraving is signed ‘Eng. By W. Fairthorne.’ Fairthorne worked in New York City starting in 1839 until the time of his death in 1853, thereby, dating the piece from that 1839-53 time period. Finally, Magnolia is an area in southern New Jersey and the site of many stately plantations not unlike the one graphically illustrated we see pictured here.”

In a Eureka moment, I realized that I certainly KNEW what that plantation-like building was. It was the Colonnade, later known as the Colonnade Hotel or McCarty’s Hotel, whose proprietor provided the Knickerbockers and other clubs with many a lavish dinner. Built in the early 1830s, it survived into the 1890s. Magnolia is indeed a borough in New Jersey’s Camden County, but it was not the site for this image.

As to William Fairthorne, the auction description is correct as far as it goes, but does not touch upon the fellow’s brushes with the law for counterfeiting or his management of an oyster saloon. Additionally, the Magnolia card is not an invitation, as the auction-house copy had it, but a ticket, costing a dollar (see below) and, given its enamel-coated card stock and its original, commissioned imagery, intended to be saved as a memento.

The baseball scene on the Magnolia card reveals three bases with stakes (not “wickets”), eight men in the field, and a top-hatted waiter bearing a tray of refreshments from the Colonnade. The “in” side are arrayed behind as well as seated upon on a long table. The pitcher tosses underhand. A base runner heads from first to second base. This is the original Knickerbocker game, and that of the New York Base Ball Club; both were inherited from the Gothams of the 1830s, for whom Wheaton codified the rules. (Shortstop as a ninth man did not kick in till 1847-48 and when, on occasion, a ninth man was thrown into the mix, he became a fourth outfielder.)

I offer here none of the context of New York baseball before 1846, nor the relevant associations with politics, engine companies, gangs, ethnicity, race, and class. These will all figure in my later remarks.

Another advertisement in the Herald that eluded me on my first pass came to light weeks after my original find. It describes the actual event for which the Magnolia card provided admission. The ad ran in both the Herald and the Sun, and perhaps in other papers unavailable to me, on February 6-8 of 1844. It read:

THE FIRST ANNUAL BALL of the New York Magnolia Ball Club will take place at National Hall, Canal st. on Friday evening, Feb. 9^th, inst. The Club pledge themselves that no expense or exertions shall be spared to render this (their first) Ball worthy the patronage of their friends. The Ball Room will be splendidly decorated with the insignia of the Club. Brown’s celebrated Band is engaged for the occasion. Tickets $1, to be had of the undersigned, and at the bar of National Hall.
JOSEPH CARLISLE, Chairman.
PETER H. GRAHAM, Secretary
f6 4t*cc

Although the ad was intended to run four times, presumably February 6-9, I was unable to find it in issues of Friday the 9^th, the day of that evening’s ball.

Allow me to sum up what I see as the significance of the Magnolia card. It is:

* the first depiction of men playing baseball, discounting the 1744 image of boys playing “base-ball” (without a bat) in Little Pretty Pocket-Book, or that of boys playing on Boston Common, shown in Robin Carver’s Book of Sports from 1834;

* the earliest artifact to have survived related to the New York Game [only the 1837 Philadelphia Olympic Constitution (town ball) is earlier];

* the only artifact, apart from the newspaper ads, related to this newly unveiled pre-Knickerbocker club that played in Hoboken but whose membership was based in New York;

* arguably, and depending upon one’s taxonomic views, the first baseball card.

The greater significance of the find is not the properties of the card but the new understanding that its underlying story affords of how baseball really began in New York. And of that, as I have said in this already overlong “brief,” more later.

--John Thorn

2007-10-03T17:33:00.000-04:00

Roger Craig was 10-24 in 1962, 5-22 the next year.

Distant Karma: The Ancient Curse of the Mets

2007-10-03T17:18:00.000-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, October 4, 2007:
Hell froze over. A month of Sundays hit the calendar. The 500-to-1 shot came in ... literally: in Clay Davenport’s computer simulation of the possible outcomes given the standings in the National League East on September 13, when the Mets led the Phillies by seven games with 17 left to play, the Mets made the playoffs 99.8 percent of the time. According to this simulation, even the Colorado Rockies’ wild run to the wild-card spot in the NL playoffs, in which they won 14 of their final 15 games, was — at its statistically most improbable date of September 17 — 10 times more likely than the collapse of the 2007 Mets.

But how bad was it, really? Worse than the crackup of the 1951 Dodgers or the 1964 Phillies or the 1995 Angels?

Yes. Attribute it to choking, or hubris, or karma, this was the worst September implosion of a first-place club in all of baseball history, and we’ve consulted the record going back to 1882, when the Providence Grays spurred the wrath of their fans by blowing a three-game lead to the Chicago White Stockings with 15 left to play. But before we can do a combined C.S.I./R.I.P. of what happened to our Metropolitans in the final weeks of the 2007 campaign, and propose some changes for 2008, let’s get our arms around the enormity of this swoon for the ages.

Frank Vaccaro wrote, in the days before the debacle dreaded by Mets fans was confirmed: “No major league team had owned a lead of seven games or more with 17 to play and failed to finish in first place.... The 1938 Pittsburgh Pirates (September 1) and 1934 New York Giants (September 6) also led by seven games in the final month only to tailspin.” But in examining other flops of historic proportions we risk mixing apples with oranges. Leads larger than that of the 2007 Mets were lost by the California Angels (11 games over the Seattle Mariners in August 1995), the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1951 (13 games over the Giants on August 11), the Red Sox in 1978 (14 games over the Yanks on July 19). And then there is the all-time champion fold of the 1914 New York Giants, who on July 4 held a 15-game lead over the last-place Boston Braves, who proceeded to win the pennant by 10.5 games, thus gaining 25.5 games on their rivals in half a season. Other clubs with calamitous conclusions include the 1942 Dodgers, 1969 Cubs, and 1987 Blue Jays; you can probably come up with another one or two.

But for a greased-pole slide from the top in mid-September, the Mets are now the champs, and it is fitting that their beneficiaries are the Phillies, who in 1964 led the NL by six and a half games with only 15 games left. One might argue that this 43-year-old collapse was thus even greater than that of the Mets, as the Phils lost their last ten games in September, the first seven of which were played at home. But the teams that vanquished them — Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis — were all first-division teams, two of which caught or passed the Phils in the early days of October. Still, the Phils were so demoralized by their meltdown that in the next five seasons they finished sixth, fourth, fifth, seventh, and fifth again. They didn’t win a pennant until 1980.

For pure suffering, however, Mets fans have a long way to go before playing in the same league with the Brooklyn Dodgers. In the postwar era the Bums tied for the flag in 1946 but fell in a playoff with the Cards. Then they lost two World Series to the Yanks and in 1950 came up one game short of the pennant by losing to the Phils on the final day on Dick Sisler’s home run. In 1951 they “blew” a 13-game lead to the Giants, who it must be said won the flag at least as much as the Dodgers lost it, closing out the 1951 campaign by winning 37 of their final 44 contests and then capturing a best-of-three playoff on Bobby Thomson’s ninth-inning homer. But even the Dodgers weren't ahead by seven games with 17 to play and, as Mike Lupica noted, “they didn't get to play the last two weeks of the season against teams whose combined record was more than 40 games under .500 the way the Mets did.” So, in pairing apples with apples, here is the sad list that the Mets now head.

GREATEST FLOPS WITH 17 GAMES REMAINING
2007 7.0 NY-N
1951 6.5 BKN-N
1964 6.0 PHI-N
1995 6.0 CAL-A
1934 4.5 NY-N
1891 3.5 CHI-N
1915 3.5 PIT-F
1965 3.5 SF-N
1981 3.5 STL-N

Note that the Mets are joined on this list by the Dodgers and the Giants. It occurs to me, in this 50th anniversary of the Dodgers’ and Giants’ departure for the Golden West, that they may have left some unexpired karma behind. The Giants played their last game on September 29, saying farewell at the Polo Grounds, future home of the Mets. The Brooklyn Dodgers on that day in 1957 also represented New York for the last time, in a loss at Philadelphia behind Roger Craig, who with those Manhattan Mets of 1962-63 would go 15-46. On September 30, 2007 the Mets trusted their season to the limp-noodle left arm of Tom Glavine, who was slapped around for seven runs in the first inning while recording only one out. This ought not to have been an unexpected result, except to the hopeful whose spirits had been lifted by John Maine’s near no-hitter the day before: including Sunday’s farce, Glavine registered an ERA of 14.81 ERA in his final three starts, culminating in Met losses of 8-7, 10-9, and 8-1. Now pitching for the Mets, Dorian Gray.

Might the Mets have fallen victim to a curse nearly as powerful as the one that afflicted the Red Sox from 1919 until 2004? After all they do wear the black and orange of the Giants and the blue and white of the Dodgers...

A more probable cause for the 2007 collapse is not an ancient curse but a curse of the ancients: an elderly cast of characters combined with a management determined to win now and distrustful of youth. Martinez and Hernandez are still formidable talents, but the only young starting pitchers the Mets have developed lately are working elsewhere: Scott Kazmir and Brian Bannister (Perez and Maine came to New York via trades). The Mets’ pitching staff has been built from bullpen out, the strategy being to amass plenty of middle relievers and then expect no more than 5-6 innings from superannuated starters who could be picked up off the scrap heap. This strategy collapsed in 2007 when the starters repeatedly ran into trouble in the third or fourth inning, forcing middle relievers to warm up early and then throw too many pitches in the bullpen or in the game. That Duaner Sanchez and Ambiorix Burgos were of no use all year was unexpected but their absence was not filled. The only remedy is to get some younger starters who trust their hard stuff, who don’t nibble at the strike zone and fall behind in the count, and thus can give you six innings reliably. Easier said than done, I know, but the Mets will go south by hanging on to guys who throw 20 pitches per inning.

In their 5-12 nosedive while the Phils went 13-4 to win the title on the final day, the Mets failed in all areas of execution, but certainly they scored enough runs to have won most of their games, especially at home against weak opposition. Look at the runs allowed in nine of their 12 concluding losses:

Starter Opponent Score
Perez Phillies 10-6
Lawrence Nationals 12-4
Maine Nationals 9-8
Glavine Marlins 8-7
Pelfrey Nationals 13-4
Glavine Nationals 10-9
Humber Nationals 9-6
Perez Marlins 7-4
Glavine Marlins 8-1

Pedro pitched well on an evening when Joel Pineiro, of all people, shut out the Mets. El Duque did his best in relief despite an injury that should have shelved him and will now require surgery. Perez and Maine were unpredictable, as capable of a shelling as a masterpiece. Although Phil Humber and Mike Pelfrey, young pitchers of undemonstrated ability, were awarded starts down the stretch, the staff in New York and at triple-A New Orleans was characterized by soft-tossing righthanders and purportedly crafty lefties.

So much for the starters. Excepting Aaron Heilman, who pitched well down the stretch (1.50 ERA), every other Met reliever struggled, to put it mildly. The ERAs over the final 14 games were:

Scott Schoenweis 4.70
Pedro Feliciano 4.70
Billy Wagner 5.40
Guillermo Mota 5.63
Joe Smith 6.35
Jorge Sosa 8.31

Others pitched too few innings to matter, from Aaron Sele to Carlos Muniz to Willie Collazo.

I expend so much space here on the pitching because its intersection with gerontology is the Mets’ principal issue. Even down the stretch, they hit enough to win. The team has everyday players who are long in the tooth as well, but in Carlos Beltran, David Wright, and Jose Reyes they have three stars for years to come. Reyes will learn to elevate neither his swing nor his hands in on-field celebration.

Moises Alou, Paul LoDuca, Billy Wagner, and Carlos Delgado will return in 2008, I expect, because the Mets have no adequate replacements for them. Shawn Green will not, nor will Tom Glavine. The rest of the roster is fungible, although the inside word is that the Mets are more likely to offer Lastings Miledge in trade than Carlos Gomez.

Whether they have cast a curse on the Mets or not, the old New York City teams do offer a possible beacon for Mets fans bewildered in their postseason wilderness. The Dodgers, after their epic failure in 1951 — and unlike the Phillies after 1964 — went to the World Series in four of the next five seasons, winning it in 1955. Losing does not create character; it reveals it. What happens in 2008, the club’s last year at Shea Stadium, is pivotal for the future at Citi Field.

--John Thorn

2007-09-15T08:32:00.000-04:00

When fans were players too.

Rooters

2007-09-15T08:29:00.000-04:00

From: "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, September 13, 2007:

I have written about sports for a long time now, and I am grateful for having been thus permitted to extend my adolescence into my dotage. Lately, however, I have begun to turn away from the fields of play to look at the individuals surrounding me in the stands. How do they come to root for a team, or a player? Why do some of them love football more than they do baseball? What psychic battles are they reenacting when in the throes of their ardor? September, when collegiate and professional football horn in on baseball, is a fine month to be asking such questions.

It now seems clear that, after some moments of despair, both the Mets and the Yankees will still be playing in October. Over baseball’s long season talent will out; only a novice or halfhearted fan will give up on his team because of a stumble from the gate or even a late August losing streak. After only one week of NFL play, however, Giant and Jet fans are ready to toss in their towels because their quarterbacks have been hurt and their multiple inadequacies exposed by superior opponents. This chicken-little response is not entirely without justice, for football’s season provides only one tenth as many games as that of baseball—and since 1993, only two teams that started the season with three straight losses have made it to the postseason. Going into this weekend led by Jared Lorenzen and Kellen Clemens, the Giants and Jets, respectively, have outstanding chances of hitting 0-2.

Those who love football love the air of crisis that attends each game. It is a cliche to say that football is like war, yet it is so. A lapse of attention for a play, let alone a game, can be fatal. Defeat is catastrophic.

Those who love baseball love its languorous flow, its slow build to a climax and its ever- present prospects for redemption—within a season begun badly or maybe, as 29 0f 30 clubs ultimately must admit, next year. Baseball is not like war—it is like life, filled with losses and disappointments that provide rich context to the occasional victory, making it all the more delicious. A baseball fan who cannot abide defeat is intolerable company; one who trades in his allegiance for a team with superior prospects is not a fan but a frontrunner ... if not a Quisling.

A soon to be released documentary film about the Boston baseball rooter, that most long suffering of all breeds except for the Cub fan, is instructive in the value defeat. With an October premiere, Rooters: The Birth of Red Sox Nation traces the story of the Red Sox and particularly their loyal fans from the times of pride (five World Series victories in five tries from 1903 to 1918) through the 86 years in the wilderness, an on up to Big Papi and Dice-K.

One might argue with reason that losing was what made the Red Sox and their fans (and the Cubs and theirs) special, as it once did for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Now that Boston has the 2004 championship under its belt and is marching toward the AL East flag for 2007, it may be seen as just another powerhouse team, with fans as demanding and narcissistic as those of the Yankees. Rooters (in which I act the part of The Drowsy Historian, having been filmed in the throes of a head cold) reflects the Red Sox in their true age of off-field heroics, when hope and acceptance triumphed over need.

When baseball was new, a club might be formed for spirited exercise and good fellowship on the playing field. But soon, as skilled players were brought in to play for the honor of the club, the displaced club members sought the pleasures of the sidelines and the retiring tent, where postgame libations united those who had played with those who had watched. Thus was born the fan, though his species was not be known by that name for another two or three decades. First, this very important person was known as an enthusiast, later a crank, a bug, or a rooter. By the 1890s there arose a “team” of rooters that for local and even national renown came to rival the nine on the field for publicity.

The Roxbury Rooters, as they were first known, started as supporters of the formidable Boston National League clubs of the 1890s, a decade in which they won championships four times. Several hundred strong, they spurred on their lads at the Walpole Street (South End) Grounds and traveled with the club to New York and Philadelphia. In a memorable road trip memorialized in one of baseball’s most celebrated photographs, the merry band of horn-tooting, banner-waving, beanpot-wearing inebriates accompanied the team to Baltimore for the pennant-deciding games of 1897. The most famous of the Rooters (the etymology of the name is from the bellowing of cows) was the outsize personality John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, then a Congressman but later famous as the Mayor of Boston and father of Rose Fitzgerald, mother of President John Kennedy.

That band of brothers soon came to be known as the Royal Rooters, and at their head for all the years they prospered was one Michael T. McGreevey, universally known as Nuf Ced, the star of the film and the universal Father of Fandom. His “Third Base” saloon (so named because for fans it was the last stop before home), became a haunt for players as well as fans, attaching the Red Sox to Boston in an enduring way. The distance between players and fans was not so great then as now—the early Red Sox were laborers, not unapproachable celebrities, and the fans were so close to the action in those days that they felt they were players, too.

The Royal Rooters certainly had an impact on the outcome in 1903, when their incessant singing of parody versions of the song “Tessie” unnerved the Pittsburgh Pirates, who had been favored to win this first “modern” World Series. “Tessie, why do I love you madly?” became “Honus, why do you hit so badly?” This mild insult would have had little sting but for the endless repetition. “It was that damn song,” Pittsburgh outfielder Tommy Leach noted ruefully in later years. “They started singing that ‘Tessie’ song, the Red Sox fans did ... sort of got on your nerves after a while.”

The Rooters were also a force in the Red Sox World Series wins of 1912, 1915, and 1916, though by the championship season of 1918 they were a shadow of their former selves. Then Prohibition drove the saloon into the embrace of the Boston Public Library, which transformed it into a branch division, the Roxbury Crossing Reading Room.

In a January 21, 1951 interview, Tom Kenney, a functionary at Fenway Park, recalled when he tended bar at the “thirst emporium”—an illogical if atmospheric phrasing of the day—when it was in its glory:

“It was located on Ruggles Street and Columbus Avenue, Roxbury, and it was almost impossible to go to either the Walpole Street (National League) or the Huntington Avenue Grounds (American League) without passing it going or coming. It was what the Army engineers might say “strategically located.’

“Nuf Ced got his tag from a short, terse statement he’d make whenever a customer from the midwest might become a little over-enthusiastic over Bill Bradley’s third-basing talents, as compared to Jimmy Collins, the idol of the Boston fans.... When the argument started to heat up, Mr. McGreevey would say, ‘Nuf Ced,’ which meant the argufiers would have to pipe down or be ejected. And he always had a big, strong bouncer on the payroll to see that peace prevailed; and the boys could continue their argument in the middle of Columbus Avenue, where the stout limbs of the law would take it from there.

“But usually it was nice and orderly. Most of the customers would take their scuttle of suds (glass of beer) and look at the pictures of the star ballplayers of that era or discuss what had taken place at the Walpole Street Grounds or the Huntington Avenue Grounds that afternoon.”

And a fella who bought a scuttle of suds might not have to content himself with looking at pictures of ballplayers, Kenney continued. “Jimmy Collins, Chick Stahl, Larry Gardner, Harry Hooper, Hal Janvrin, Babe Ruth, and Eddie McFarland always used to drop in to do a bit of fanning with Nuf Ced. Those were the good old days before anybody ever heard of the Volstead Act (Prohibition) and if anybody had mentioned it they would have thought it was a new act at Keith’s they hadn’t seen.”

Today we get no closer to our idols than talk radio or memorabilia shows but the illusion of intimacy, bred back when giants truly walked among us, endures. They are part of our lives, our extended families. They matter, maybe more than they should.

--John Thorn

2007-08-24T09:01:00.000-04:00

Sirius, the Dog-star, from

The Every-Day Book (1825-26), William Hone

Dog Dayz

2007-08-24T08:48:00.000-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, August 24, 2007:
There’s no need to run through the allegations, the indictments, the horrific findings at Michael Vick’s Bad Newz Kennels. You’ve been shocked and revolted by how these four boyhood pals — Quanis Phillips, Purnell Peace, Tony Taylor, and Vick — could be so inhumane to man’s best friend. You’ve been puzzled by how the quarterback of the Atlanta Falcons could jeopardize a $130 million contract and multimillion-dollar endorsement deals so that he could gamble chump change on dogfights. Well, I’m puzzled, too, and disgusted, and angry ... and interested.

Sentencing of the guilty — for all four indictees have now admitted their guilt in sequential plea bargain agreements — will follow formal allocution to their crimes sometime in November. In the government-orchestrated game of musical chairs over the past month, Taylor was the first to take a seat on the prosecution side. When Phillips and Peace joined him, the music stopped and Vick was left without a chair in sight. Game over. But even though he accepted a deal that would forestall a RICO-based indictment for racketeering, with its potential for more severe sentencing, the bad newz for Vick promises to keep on coming. NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is a court unto himself and is unlikely to be satisfied with a Federal deal by which Vick would serve no more than a year in the pen.

Remember when younger brother Marcus Vick was the troublemaker in the family? Ah, those were the halcyon days when stomping on a player’s leg or pointing a gun at a bunch of kids would only warrant being kicked off the football team.

Indeed, there are those in the press who are saying this week that the Vick family background was so deprived and their neighborhood so depraved that Michael and Marcus never stood a chance, any more than Mike Tyson did. Vick’s own attorneys are saying that he fell in with the wrong crowd, that he is “very remorseful,” that he “wants to get his life back on track.” Vick attorney James D. Williams Jr. said, frighteningly perhaps: “Michael is a father, he’s a son, he’s a human being — people oftentimes forget that.”

So Michael’s associates, those boys from the hood, turned his head. Maybe. But he had better not say that in court, when accepting full personal responsibility is all that the judge will be willing to hear. In a Fox television news program on August 21 attorney Ted Williams (unrelated to James D.) opined that “Vick got too close to his boys, and he has blown a $130 million contract because of his boys and that association. I do not think Vick is really a bad guy. It is his association with his boys.”

Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star echoed that sentiment: “It’s my belief that if Vick stayed involved with dogfighting, he did so primarily because it was a way to stay involved in an activity in which his ‘boys’ still participated. It was Vick’s way of keeping it real. He was fearful of being labeled a sellout, fearful of having his blackness questioned.”

Shaun Powell of Newsday, in an especially softheaded search for villains in society, blamed those “who gave power and money and influence to someone who has done nothing, other than sling a football, to deserve it ... who failed to teach him right from wrong, or the importance of making good choices, when they had the chance ... who unleashed, pardon the expression, Vick on those dogs.... Those are the real guilty people. If the feds are correct about Vick’s role, then those people also helped strangle and shoot and drown animals that in essence were poisoned by a man who was poisoned himself long ago.”

To be fair, all of the above pundits also genuflect in the approved manner about Vick’s needing to take personal responsibility. On the other end of the Michael Vick seesaw, however, are Jay Mariotti of the Chicago Sun-Times and Bill Dwyre of the Los Angeles Times. The former calls Vick “a disgrace to humankind” [a perhaps rosy estimation of our species] and advocates a lifetime ban from the NFL, while the latter writes “Throw away the key.”

I have no suggestion for how Michael Vick should be punished, in the courts or by the NFL Commissioner, but I know how this is likely to play out: three years in lockup, with the judge rejecting the more lenient sentencing recommendation of the plea bargain; and an even harsher judgment by the NFL’s Goodell, who as the new sheriff in town will suspend Vick indefinitely and not hear a plea for reinstatement. (See below for the kinds of mischief tolerated by his predecessor in the job.) This in turn will enable the Atlanta Falcons to void Vick’s contract with them and demand the return of some of his huge signing bonus.

To those who love animals (myself included), there is nothing to be said in defense of the electrocution, hanging, and bludgeoning to death of dogs whose fighting skills were found wanting. And yet look at the degree of athlete violence, especially against women, that has been tolerated by the sports leagues and their fans. The litany is too long for this space, but here is a sample, confined to the NFL:

Christian Peter played six years in the NFL after eight arrests (and four convctions) while starring at Nebraska. Twice accused of rape, he accepted an out-of court settlement for one and a conviction for sexual assault in the other.

His teammate at Nebraska, Lawrence Phillips was taken sixth overall in the 1996 NFL draft by St. Louis despite his having pleaded to a brutal domestic abuse case — he was accused of breaking into his ex’s room, dragging her by the hair down three flights of stairs, and ramming her head against a mailbox. Phillips would be arrested three times over the next 19 months. Later, the Miami Dolphins would release him after he was accused of punching a woman in a bar after she declined to dance with him.

In 1998 St. Louis Rams defensive end Leonard Little, driving drunk, ran a red light and killed Susan Gutweiler, a 47-year-old wife and mother. He got 90 nights in a work release program and 1,000 hours of community service. In 2004, he was arrested for DUI again, though he beat the charge. Last year, he signed a new contract with St. Louis.

Baltimore Ravens running back Jamal Lewis, following a plea-bargain confession of drug trafficking, was suspended by the NFL for two games.

Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis pleaded to obstruction of justice in a double-murder case in which he had originally been charged with taking a hand. With soothing financial balm he settled civil suits brought on behalf of the victims’ families. The NFL took no action against him.

Most egregiously, on November 16, 1999, near the home of Carolina Panthers receiver Rae Carruth in Charlotte, North Carolina, Cherica Adams, a woman Carruth had been dating and who was eight months pregnant with his child., was shot four times in a drive-by shooting. In the moments before her death, she called 911 and related how Carruth had stopped his car in front of hers as another vehicle drove alongside hers and its passenger shot her. Carruth then drove from the scene. Doctors saved her son but, born prematurely, the boy suffers from cerebral palsy. Following a manhunt, Carruth was captured and convicted of conspiracy to commit murder; he is scheduled for release in 2018.

Yes, it is quite an all-pro team that Vick now quarterbacks. Let’s dispense with palaver about the psychology of hip-hop culture, or the extended infantilization of our athletic champions, or the NFL’s cashing in on contained violence while clucking when it shows itself off the field. There are a hundred explanations for Vick’s conduct but no excuse. The point is that the protective umbrella of a group, any group, will enable individuals to park their sense of morality and act unconscionably.

Psychologists and ethicists have long grappled with the question of what makes good people do bad things, let alone people whose personal histories and peer group might identify them as bad people. It is not too much, when contemplating the the path to infamy of Michael Vick, to reflect on Abu Ghraib, or Nazi Germany, or the Ku Klux Klan. Philip G. Zimbardo, former president of the American Psychological Association, said in 2004: “That line between good and evil is permeable. Any of us can move across it.... I argue that we all have the capacity for love and evil — to be Mother Theresa, to be Hitler or Saddam Hussein. It’s the situation that brings that out.”

Stanley Milgram, in a classic experiment in 1961, showed that university study participants, when given an order by someone in authority, would deliver what they believed to be extreme levels of electrical shock to those who answered questions incorrectly. This study was completed four days before the Israeli government hanged Adolf Eichmann.

Even though Michael Vick appears to have been the crypt keeper of his house of horrors, he was responding to archaic mandates, too. It is frightening to think how this man, or any of us, was made.

--John Thorn

2007-08-01T19:08:00.000-04:00

Edgar Allan Poe, a daguerreotype

The Tell-Tale Art: A Psychoanalytic Study of Poe’s Short Stories

2007-08-01T19:00:00.000-04:00

This essay is by Mark Thorn, who wrote it for his American Renaissance class.
Few literary topics seem more conducive to psychological analysis than the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Throughout many of his stories appear the same irregular and fascinating themes: morbidity, powerful yet inexplicable anxiety, reanimation, and “over acuteness of the senses.”[i] Many have endeavored to link the deviancy in Poe’s writing with the abnormality of Poe’s life, and have sought to explain the former in terms of the latter. This examination will proceed from such a work, Marie Bonaparte’s comprehensive psychoanalytic study of Poe,[ii] but with a different aim. Instead of attempting to synthesize Poe’s literature and life, it will focus preponderantly upon his writing—incorporating biographical information only when absolutely necessary—and seek to reveal the deeper relation among the themes of his work; the domain of this essay is the text and subtext of Poe’s work, and only with great caution will it enter the realm of psychobiography. By examining Poe’s distinctive themes primarily as they appear in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Morella,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” I will identify in his works the unconscious as a perpetual and powerful threat to the conscious, and the subtle ways in which he misdirects the reader from the dangerous subtextual strains that run through his writing.

Bonaparte emphasizes the Oedipal qualities of Poe’s short stories. She views the morbid, quasi-animate woman, a surprisingly common figure in his corpus, as a representative of Poe’s mother, who died when Poe was yet an infant: “[his mother’s] diaphanous beauty and the mysterious malady by which she was slowly consumed, were later to be immortalised by her son’s genius in the forms of Berenice, Morella, Madeline, Eleonora, and Ligeia, little though he might suspect whence they came.”[iii] Moreover, Bonaparte divides Poe’s stories into two broad psychological and Oedipal categories—“Tales of the Mother” and “Tales of the Father.”[iv] This analysis will deal similarly with “family romance,” but will reflect Poe’s psyche only mediately through its conclusions regarding his pen.

The Repression of Consanguinity and the Horror of Transference
We shall first examine Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” which contains many of the themes central to his writing.[v] The basic plot is as follows: A man is afflicted with “a sense of insufferable gloom” as he approaches the house of an ill childhood friend, Roderick Usher, who had summoned his presence after years without interaction between them. The man scrutinizes the landscape, from the “black and lurid tarn” to the “vacant and eye-like windows,” seeking the source of his vague unease.[vi] He finally enters the House of Usher and finds therein a “wan” and “ghastly” figure whom he reluctantly identifies as the poor remnants of his boyhood companion.[vii] He learns of Roderick’s condition, a “nervous affection” that produces an overbearing “acuteness of the senses” combined with morbidity and an obstinate insistence upon the sentience of the house.[viii] Roderick’s sister, Madeline, whose “gradual wasting away” eludes diagnosis, then passes by, producing in the guest “an utter astonishment not unmingled with dread.”[ix] Madeline soon dies—at least by appearance—and Roderick suggests, with dubious justification, that her corpse should remain temporarily within the house. So Roderick and the guest entomb her, at which point the guest first notices the striking resemblance between the two siblings, who in fact are twins. After the burial, Roderick’s mental and physical atrophy intensifies, and the guest suspects that he is “laboring with some oppressive secret.”[x] Finally, as Roderick and the guest are reading together, Madeline returns terrifyingly from the tomb with “blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame.”[xi] She falls “heavily” upon her brother, thereby leaving him “a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had anticipated.”[xii]

The ending of the story is surely remarkable, but its meaning is unclear. Roderick proposes that Madeline returns to “upbraid him for [his] haste,”[xiii] or his failure to certify her death before inhuming her. Her ensanguined robes, however, suggest that Roderick’s transgression may not have been Madeline’s premature burial but rather her sexual violation.[xiv] In this case, the “secret” that oppressed Roderick concerned his incestuous impulses toward if not affair with his sister. But instead of considering Roderick’s sexual misdemeanor a physical deed enacted during the timeframe of the story, I recommend that we treat it as ancient and long-since repressed incestuous impulse whose return parallels the plot.

The first failure of repression is the curious moment when the guest, watching Roderick entomb Madeline, first realizes the uncanny resemblance between them. I say curious because the guest, who so meticulously catalogues even the minutest observations, fails to recognize this blaring truth until now, a failure that indicates how resistant he was to acknowledge it. I shall follow Bonaparte in viewing “the compound of Usher and the narrator” as one personality—namely, Poe—both because of the narrative precedent his other stories establish and the strong physical similarity between Roderick and Poe.[xv] Thus what accompanies the guest’s realization of Roderick’s and Madeline’s physically undeniable consanguinity is a parallel revelation for Roderick.[xvi]

It is after this event that “an observable change [comes] over the features of [Roderick’s] mental disorder.”[xvii] His countenance becomes yet more “ghastly” and his voice devolves into “a tremulous quaver.”[xviii] I propose that what transforms, or mutates, Roderick is not Madeline’s death but his (and the guest’s) recognition of their relatedness, his realization that consanguinity—of people, of love-objects—may not always be manifest. This realization could so distress him it seems only if it revealed his love-objects as consanguine and his fantasies as incestuous. The fact that Roderick then begins “laboring with some oppressive secret” supports this supposition.

Roderick’s recognition of the incestuousness of his sexual desire—the first instance of failed repression—opens the floodgates, so to speak, for his unconscious material. Accordingly I recommend that we consider the story’s fantastic finale—Madeline’s return from death and “final death-agonies”[xix]—not as physical events but as an allegory of Roderick’s psychical drama. Madeline appears with signs of sexual violation and then falls upon Roderick, killing him in a manner that he strangely had “anticipated.”[xx] This is merely the instantiation of his psychically dangerous incest-wish, with inverted temporality and agency: to “fall heavily inward” upon her and leave her sexually violated. The story’s conclusion, manifestly Roderick’s physical death through the Madeline’s return, is latently Roderick’s psychical devastation through the return of his impossible wish for Madeline.

The same general pattern appears, perhaps more lucidly, in Poe’s story “Morella,”[xxi] a summary of whose plot follows: A man, also the narrator, is married to Morella, to whom he never has been erotically attracted. Their relationship is largely tutorial, as Morella, whose intellect is “gigantic,”[xxii] spends most of her time reading and guiding him through abstruse works of German mystical philosophy. Eventually the man withdraws his friendly affection for Morella, who is afflicted with some mysterious and mortal illness. And then he begins to loathe her, to entertain “an earnest and consuming desire for the moment of [her] decease.”[xxiii] While on the brink of death, Morella declares oracularly, “I am dying, yet shall I live,”[xxiv] and delivers a child “which breathed not until the mother breathed no more.”[xxv] The man loves the child, his daughter, intensely, but as she grows “strangely in stature and intelligence,”[xxvi] he sees in her troubling reflections of Morella. As the appearance and manner of the girl and her deceased mother continue to converge, the man grows increasingly agitated. Finally, at her baptism, when he must select her name—for “my child” and “my love” were her only appellations thus far—he, urged by a “demon,” chooses “Morella,” causing his daughter to convulse, pronounce “I am here!” and die prostrate upon the family vault.[xxvii]

Bonaparte claims that Morella is yet another morbid mother-figure, as “like [Poe’s mother], she is wasting with consumption.”[xxviii] Moreover, Morella’s role as the narrator’s teacher certainly recalls maternal guidance. “His dependence on her for instruction in the forbidden, ‘accursed’ lore—doubtless sexual knowledge”[xxix]—is illustrated perfectly in this passage: “And then—then, when poring over forbidden pages, I felt a forbidden spirit enkindling within me—would Morella place her cold hand upon my own.”[xxx] What surfaces here is the narrator’s concern that Morella, his purportedly unviable love-object, is arousing his taboo or “forbidden” sexual feelings;[xxxi] similarly, the assumption that Morella is a maternal figure makes sense of the narrator’s insistence that his union with Morella was detached utterly from Eros. As we have said, his aversion to Morella grows as she becomes more ill with consumption; in other words, as Morella and Poe’s mother converge, as he (meaning Poe and the narrator) becomes no longer able to deny their identity, he is overcome with Oedipal disgust.

Then his daughter arrives, on whom he bestows every token of open affection. Bonaparte cites this as a clear instance of “transference”: “the husband and father of both Morellas transfers his love from one to the other.”[xxxii] But the narrator’s love for his daughter is, unlike his detached respect for Morella, at first fervent and uninhibited; it seems that his daughter is a more viable, or less threatening, love-object than was his wife—but why? I suggest that while his wife was hopelessly conflated with his mother, his daughter, despite his relatedness to her, represents the possibility of a love-object untainted by Oedipal qualities.

Before long, however, his daughter’s “rapid increase in bodily size” and intelligence conjures in him disturbing memories of her mother.[xxxiii] His failure to name her for “two lustra,”[xxxiv] I posit, symbolizes a repression of their consanguinity, a denial of her resemblance to “the entombed Morella.”[xxxv] But this repressive measure proves ineffectual, as the rapid convergence between his daughter and deceased wife provides “food for consuming thought and horror.”[xxxvi] And finally, at his daughter’s baptism—a thinly veiled marriage surrogate—he is no longer able to deny her resemblance to the deceased and identifies her, quite aptly, as “Morella”; repression is abolished.

“Morella” is Poe’s symbolic expression of the horror of transference. It is an illustration of the Freudian notion that love-objects are substitutive, that in each love-object one sees—for Poe, horrifyingly—traces of its predecessors. This chain of erotic precursors leads ultimately back to the mother, the first love-object of the little boy, and for Poe, a figure fraught with morbidity and horror. In fact, one can read “Morella” also as an allegory for psychological processes: the death of maternal Morella as the young boy’s withdrawal of erotic affect from his mother; and the birth of young Morella as the commencement of a new sexual relationship, which is tragically the mere reincarnation of its antecedent.

The Negation of Repression
We mentioned earlier that a “hyper-real meticulousness” pervades Poe’s writing—an “acuteness of the senses” that manifests in a catalogue of “every inward sensation, physical or emotional, with phenomenal, hyper-real acuteness.”[xxxvii] Here is an example, from “The Fall of the House of Usher,” of his descriptively exhaustive prose:

I know not how it was—but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into everyday life—the hideous dropping off of the veil.[xxxviii]

This rhetorical style, Coviello notes, permits Poe to recount “the most grisly or horrible” comically by preventing the reader from being certain, “when treading on the taut surfaces of Poe’s prose, of the degree to which he is, or is not, putting you on.”[xxxix] But how does Poe’s idiosyncratic writing style cohere with the psychological portrait we have formed thus far? Surprisingly, Poe himself supplies the answer, doubtless unconsciously, in his short story “The Tell-Tale Heart.”[xl]

In that story, the narrator kills an old man—for reasons that we will analyze later—and stores his dismembered corpse beneath the floor of the chamber of the deceased. Police officers soon arrive at the house and inquire about the din heard by neighbors from within the house. The narrator, “in the enthusiasm of [his] confidence,” implores them to “search—search well.”[xli] He even leads them to the old man’s chamber, whose floorboards conceal the damning evidence, and invites them there “to rest from their fatigues.”[xlii] To his horror, however, he hears the heart of the deceased pounding with increasing amplitude from beneath the planks and, when the sound becomes intolerable, then confesses his crime.

I believe this to be an allegory of Poe’s rhetorical style. The narrator welcomes the policemen, offers them practically unrestricted access to his house, and urges them to “search well,” while the incriminating object is hidden beneath the floor. So does Poe offer the reader seemingly unrestricted access to his mind, and invites the reader to canvass his mental landscape, while the incriminating or dangerous thoughts or impulses lie beneath consciousness within the subtext. The beating of the heart that threatens to rise above the floor is like the unconscious subtext that continually threatens to penetrate the text, to become explicit; and just as the discovery of the beating of the heart would inculpate the story’s narrator would the emergence of the unconscious subtext expose the author.

Poe’s hyperconscious rhetoric is fundamentally equivalent to a Freudian negation. It protests, a bit too much, “I’m not repressing anything; there is no reason to seek hidden meaning because I’ve made everything apparent.” Ultimately, however, Poe’s deflective measures fail: the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” confesses his crime, and the astute reader detects the undercurrents seething beneath the “taut surfaces of Poe’s prose.” Perhaps then “The Tell-Tale Heart” is Poe’s symbolic recognition of the inadequacy of his subtly obfuscatory rhetoric, his assent to Freud’s proposition that in humans, “[self]-betrayal oozes out… at every pore.”[xliii]

Wish Fulfillment
As we have seen, Poe’s stories focus upon the macabre and the troubling; their manifest intent is to inspire terror. Freud’s hypothesis that “imaginative creation, like day-dreaming, is a continuation of and substitute for the play of childhood”[xliv]—that creative writing is largely wish-fulfilling—seems simply not to apply to Poe. But despite how disturbing his stories are, despite that they seem to be expressions of extreme mental conflict, they also represent attempted resolutions of that conflict through the gratification of largely Oedipal wishes.

Such a wish-fulfillment appears perhaps most transparently in Poe’s story “The Man That Was Used Up.”[xlv] The story’s narrator is introduced to Brevet Brigadier General John A. B. C. Smith, whom he finds “a very remarkable man”[xlvi] with perfectly proportioned “bodily endowments”[xlvii] and unparalleled eloquence. Yet, the narrator detects an “odd air of je ne sais quoi”[xlviii] about the General and endeavors zealously to discover its origin. Each interview he conducts on the subject, however, is frustrated by some annoying contingency. With no remaining alternatives, the narrator visits the General’s residence, wherein he resolves the great mystery: the General had been utterly dismembered while battling the Bugaboos and Kickapoos and now subsists sadly as a “bundle” of prosthetic body parts.[xlix]

This story represents a fairly primitive satisfaction of the Oedipal wish to usurp the powerful father, to reveal the dominant father-figure as a fraud. Bonaparte, focusing specifically upon the tale’s mutilation, considers it a “pure” example of the “father-castration motif” in Poe’s writing.[l] Moreover, by ascribing (or projecting) the violent deed to the Kickapoos and Bugaboos, Poe fulfills the Oedipal fantasy without incurring the concomitant guilt. Bonaparte views “The Tell-Tale Heart” as a similar, though less direct, father-castration tale in which the old man’s terrifying eye surrogates the father’s intimidating penis.[li]

Even in “Morella” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” whose manifest content is so intensely disturbing, lies the veiled satisfaction of Oedipal wishes. As we proposed before, reanimate women, who signify Poe’s moribund mother, return to reprove characters for their incestuous strivings; they embody the return of repressed Oedipal impulses. But while Madeline’s and Morella’s resurrections fill their respective protagonists with horror and Oedipal disgust, they also gratify Poe’s particular form of Oedipal longing: for a dead woman—his mother—to return to life and engage him physically. The final scene in which quasi-animate Madeline climbs atop Roderick is a direct expression of this wish. Furthermore, Roderick’s passivity if not resistance relieves him of the guilt that otherwise would attend the fulfillment of such an incest-wish.

Conclusion
We thus see the logic underlying Poe’s fantastic and seemingly whimsical short stories. They serve simultaneously to gratify incestuous wishes and punish those who harbor them, all the while veiling the most inappropriate or threatening material beneath Poe’s hyperconscious rhetoric.

And while it may seem that I have delivered an imbalanced analysis of Poe’s writing by focusing only upon a few of his stories, I remonstrate, with Bonaparte, that “the monotonous repetition of the same theme” throughout Poe’s oeuvre allows one to understand the broader ideas of his work from relatively few of his writings.[lii] Poe’s works suggest that he was tortured by the image of his morbid mother, his fervent and inadmissible love for whom left him uneasy and often horrified. And perhaps Poe’s work remains capable of inspiring terror precisely because it deals symbolically with those forbidden areas of family romance whose terrain appears to the modern reader vaguely and horribly familiar.

N O T E S

[i] Edgar Allan Poe, Poe: Poetry, Tales, & Selected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1997), p. 557.
[ii] Marie Bonaparte, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation (New York: Humanities Press, 1971).
[iii] Bonaparte 7.
[iv] Bonaparte vi-vii.
[v] Poe 317.
[vi] Poe 318.
[vii] Poe 321.
[viii] Poe 322.
[ix] Poe 323.
[x] Poe 330.
[xi] Poe 335.
[xii] Poe 335.
[xiii] Poe 335.
[xiv] Peter Coviello, Intimacy in America: Dreams of Affiliation in Antebellum Literature (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), p. 76.
[xv] Bonaparte 237.
[xvi] But why does this recognition occur at that point in the story? Well, it occurs while Roderick is laying Madeline to perpetual rest, placing her in her final bed—an act not without latent sexual meaning; and it happens only after Madeline is (ostensibly) dead. As Bonaparte insists, morbidity and maternity are related intimately in Poe’s writing; thus as a woman dies, she gradually inherits maternal significance. Consequently, laying a dead woman to her ultimate bed for Poe symbolizes an Oedipal fantasy.
[xvii] Poe 330.
[xviii] Poe 330.
[xix] Poe 335.
[xx] Poe 335; The fact that Roderick had anticipated this preternatural form of death reinforces the conception of the story’s conclusion as a psychical narrative; he was able to presage these incredible “events” because they were already within him, merely waiting to penetrate consciousness.
[xxi] Poe 234.
[xxii] Poe 234.
[xxiii] Poe 236.
[xxiv] Poe 236.
[xxv] Poe 237.
[xxvi] Poe 237.
[xxvii] Poe 238.
[xxviii] Bonaparte 220.
[xxix] Bonaparte 222.
[xxx] Poe 234.
[xxxi] It is perhaps not coincidental that transposing the last three letters of “Morella” to the beginning of the word produces “Llamore,” or “L’ amore.” This linguistic distortion might further indicate the repressed eroticism of the narrator’s relationship to Morella.
[xxxii] Bonaparte 221.
[xxxiii] Poe 237.
[xxxiv] Poe 238.
[xxxv] Poe 237.
[xxxvi] Poe 238.
[xxxvii] Coviello 64.
[xxxviii] Poe 317.
[xxxix] Coviello 64.
[xl] Poe 555.
[xli] Poe 558.
[xlii] Poe 559.
[xliii] Sigmund Freud, Collected Papers, trans. James Strachey and Alix Strachey, 1st ed., vol. 3 (New York: Basic Books, 1959) 94, Questia, 2 Apr. 2007 .
[xliv] Sigmund Freud, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming,” On Creativity and the Unconscious: Papers on the Psychology of Art, Literature, Love, Religion (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1958), p. 53.
[xlv] Poe 307.
[xlvi] Poe 309.
[xlvii] Poe 308.
[xlviii] Poe 308.
[xlix] Poe 314.
[l] Bonaparte 501.
[li] Bonaparte 501.
[lii] Bonaparte 223.

Second Home

2007-06-14T19:49:00.000-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, June 14, 2007:
Last week I joined with some baseball pals for a day trip to Cooperstown. I had driven there easily a hundred times over the past three decades, most often for research or business, but also just for fun: a weekend with the family, or a solo getaway, or an excursion with a new friend whose response to this serene village would serve as something of a litmus test. Yes, the cheesy memorabilia and souvenir bat shops have proliferated; Smalley’s theater, where once I took my now oldest two sons to see their first movie after sundown (Ghostbusters), was now a trading card and knick-knack emporium; and the venerable Shortstop Restaurant, where proprietor Sam Sapienza would sit by the window and greet me by name, was no more. But still I loved the place.

While strolling down Main Street or along Lake Otsego I have invariably reflected, This feels like home ... whatever that might mean to one whose residential résumé rivals that of a hermit crab. Though I have never lived there I call Cooperstown my second home because it feels so familiar, so comfortable, so strangely mine — in a way even more proprietary than my first home in America, New York City, where in my regular visits I still stride the sidewalks with the confidence of a native.

Ulster County, where I have lived for 30 years, is now booming with New York City house buyers for whom a weekend getaway or garden spot may one day become, as it did for me, home. And their feelings for their home away from home may well become more intense, as mine did, for their having chosen it rather than being born into it. The real estate folk know that these wandering Gothamites will buy a house that bodes to fulfill their inchoate expectations of “home,” a word which potently bundles refuge, safety, and nurturing with the seat of domestic life. City people may be counted upon to pay handsomely for “charm” in their home away from home because they are purchasing not merely a physical place but a state of being. “Be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home,” wrote John Payne in 1822, and he knew what he was singing about.

Homelessness and statelessness are tragic conditions for all but the Lapps and Bedouins and artistic itinerants, nomadic peoples who define home as where they happen to be. We all know such citizens of the world, seemingly unafflicted by geographical longing. Realizing early on that they would never quite fit in, they made their permanent home between their ears, and carried their nautilus shells with them. Feeling expelled, they made a virtue of their gypsy souls and become not gatherers but hunters: the explorer, the warrior, the stranger.

When the vagabond becomes weary of travel and wishes to return home, he may find that he cannot — it and he have moved on. Home is so rich in alternate meanings that it may be both a place of origin and one of ending. Our aged population is herded into “homes,” another semantic trampling that recalls the title of madam Polly Adler’s memoir, A House Is Not a Home. In this prep school for the old, where dogs do not bark and children do not laugh, our parents ponder their next home. That ultimate journey at least is not a real-estate or medical-industry euphemism. In 1303 the Oxford English Dictionary records “To thy long home shalt thou wend” (To *y long home shalt *ou wende).

If a house is temporary but home is forever, then the concept of a second home is, if not an outright oxymoron, then at least a troubling concept. As a home from home, as the British would put it, it is a place where “one feels at one's ease, in one's element, as if in one's own home, unconstrained, unembarrassed” (OED) ... as if one had returned to Eden. As a construct of the fancy, the second home is a place to which one may indeed return, unlike the Garden from which man was expelled or the place Thomas Wolfe said you couldn’t go again. A first home (a womb) and a last one (a grave) are locales to which and from which return is not possible.
So, the question arises: Which feels more like “home” — the second or the first? The second, and not only because it is selected to conform with an individual or collective ideal. There is also the matter of home ownership, or real estate. Man’s “real estate” may be in heaven, but on this earth, the house which he has purchased bodes to be his home.

For this wandering Jew, Cooperstown, where I have never lived and never will, makes an ideal — in both senses of the word — second home. For all you New York City newcomers to Woodstock and environs, welcome home.

--John Thorn

2007-05-16T19:11:00.000-04:00

My Space and Welcome to It

2007-05-16T19:07:00.000-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, May 17, 2007:
I have begun to notice lately the proliferation of queasily friendly automated intrusions into one’s personal space. MySpace is perhaps the best known of the many social networking sites (Facebook, Orkut, Friendster, et al.) mimicking intimacy and exclusivity while exposing one to a barrage of unwelcome guests and commercial blandishments. I confess to having signed up, one day recently when I was feeling curious and maybe a bit lonesome, with a geezer social-networking site for alumni of my college called MyBeloit. (Why the sudden urge to reconnect with classmates of 40 years ago? Dunno.) These sites aim to provide a club experience, designed to be exclusive, at least in its implied promise to exclude dweebs.

Many mock-personalized sites approach the information pipeline from the other side: YouTube (“Broadcast Yourself”) encourages young Spielbergs to put their camerawork out there and maybe enough idlers will take a peek that select videomongers may win a measure of folkloric fame. The impulse is similar to that behind self-publishing and self-promotion, about which I have written before in this space (“Blogs, Zines, and other Graffiti,” April 7, 2005).

And then there are the information filtering sites, also appropriating that seductively basic English word — customized feeds including my.aol.com, my.yahoo.com, my.msn.com ... and ersatz-social (i.e., shopping) sites that beckon with “my.” The illusion of considered decision is presented to he who must run as he reads; will you have AP or Reuters with your morning coffee? Some choice. Google News, a content aggregator though presenting as a filter, does a better job of masking the fact that you have consented to replace your own selection process with an algorithm. As to RSS feeds, I’ll leave that to our Geekology columnist.

So if my space is not to be found online, I ask at age 60, what and where may it be? The reflexive answer is to fall back on Freud’s: love and work. That neat formulation will serve to encompass friends, family, mate, and a long, rewarding career in the business and pleasure of words and sports. But that is the here and now, my so-called real world; I have another. It is a dream life of the past, in which I walk surefooted in a way I seldom do in the present moment. It is a life of reading and ruminating rather than action, yet in its imaginative journeys I find not only satisfaction but also, often enough, genuine excitement. It is not unusual for me to resent the demands of the day because they keep me from a book. I guess that makes me a dweeb.

For many years now I have been delving into the origins and earliest instances of baseball, a search that increasingly has driven me to speculation and study of the nature of other field games, board and table games, and the phenomenon of play itself. Some part of each day is spent reading about earlier times, notably the middle ages. While I have not yet faded off into Mitty-esque imaginings of myself in shining armor at Agincourt, the period seems very real to me. In much the same way, the 1950s in New York City has been a daily presence these past two years, while I have been occupied with a forthcoming exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York. (Blatant plug: “The Glory Days: New York Baseball 1947 -1957” opens June 27; the companion book of that name, published by Collins, hits the bookstores and the online sellers this week.)

As a sports researcher with interests in the distant past, this exhibition has provided an unsettling opportunity to examine with historical distance a period, a locale, and events which I experienced personally — though as a child, for whom the golden age of anything may be said to coincide with the wide-eyed years before puberty. To what extent should I separate myself from my personal knowledge of those thrilling years, capped by the poignant if not downright crushing departure of the Dodgers and Giants for the Golden West? Should a professional historian remark upon how, while imitating Duke Snider’s cocked-elbow stance and wide-arcing swing in the living room of his family’s apartment, he miscalculated and smashed the Admiral television set?

Memoir is the literary form of our egocentric age—we narcissistically observe ourselves and obsessively monitor others, especially celebrities. This is a predictable turn in the age of contrivance, in which our hunger for the genuine is so raw that we will gobble up even the disremembrances of a James Frey. In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Daniel Boorstin wrote 45 years ago that Americans “will not so supinely allow themselves to be deprived of the last vestiges of spontaneous reality. By a new residual effect, then, we become doubly interested in any happenings which somehow seem to offer us an oasis of the uncontrived. One example is the American passion for news about crime and sports. This is not simply an effect of the degradation of public tastes to the trivial and unserious. More significantly, it is one expression of our desperate hunger for the spontaneous, for the non-pseudo-event.... Sports is a last refuge of the authentic, uncorrupted spontaneous event....”

And that’s why this era still grips us: baseball mattered then in a way that it has never quite mattered since and can never do so again. In the 1950s New York was the capital of the world in more than finance. Heroes walked among us, in East Flatbush or Bay Ridge, on the Upper West Side or the Concourse Plaza. The period presents a wonderful opportunity to depict history through autobiography, as Tocqueville and Emerson and Whitman each indicated was destined to be the American narrative gift. Neither New York nor baseball, nor any of us who recall the period, can turn back the clock. But we can recall those bygone days with more than the treacly veneer of nostalgia—they were not unmitigatedly grand, but they were glorious.

What was it like, to be alive then? That’s the question for the historian, whose mission is to go beyond a mere accuracy of fact to an accuracy of feeling, to deliver on the aesthetic promise of history. To do that, he must be alert to the ghostly emanations from the present landscape, have a psychic connection with the past, whether lived in or not. Walking about in the present but dreaming in the past, this is my space.

--John Thorn

2007-04-18T15:36:00.000-04:00

Calyx-krater (mixing bowl) with scene from a phlyax play
Greek, South Italian, Apulian, Late Classical, red-figure, ca. 400-390 B.C.
Attributed to the Tarporley Painter
Terracotta, h. 12-1/8 in. (30.8 cm)
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fletcher Fund, 1924 (24.97.104) cat. # 179

Tradition

2007-04-18T15:30:00.000-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, April 19, 2007:
On Friday, April 20, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will open to the public its New Greek and Roman Galleries. Five years in the making and ten more in the planning, the project involved a redesign of the southern end of the building and a reinstallation of the superb collection of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman art. Returned to view after generations in storage are thousands of works from the Metropolitan’s collections dating back to its founding in 1870.

The centerpiece of the New Greek and Roman Galleries is the dazzling Leon Levy and Shelby White Court, with a soaring two-story atrium. Indeed it is natural light — more than any given object or themed gallery — that is the “star” of the new space. The new design marks a return to the McKim, Mead and White atrium that had served to display Roman art until 1949, when it was uprooted to make way for the Met’s admittedly elegant restaurant and cafeteria; all the same good riddance, if this is what we get in its stead. On the first floor, contiguous to the central court on three sides, are galleries for Hellenistic and Roman art. The installation continues on a mezzanine level, where galleries for Etruscan art and the Greek and Roman study collection overlook the court from two sides.

This column cannot begin to reference all the splendors that await you upon your visit (soon!), though it will touch upon a few spectacular features. I will say, however, that a three-hour prowl of this “museum within a museum” was not enough, and a return trip is on the near horizon.

My son Jed — the eldest, a doctoral candidate in Classics and Archaeology — accompanied me to Monday’s center-hall breakfast, ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and press preview. He had flown into Newburgh to attend the function and there to guide this old baseball writer who wouldn’t know Euphronios from Suetonius. He was also on hand to help me celebrate my birthday with a “Nerds’ Night Out” 36-hour Big Apple extravaganza, complete with impromptu walking tour of the city, foraging at the Strand Bookstore, oasis stops at favorite taverns, and Mediterranean restaurants coordinated with the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome. He was 30, I was now 60 and, despite his confession that he had seethed with resentment when I dragged him along to secondhand-book stores when we were both younger, the apple had not fallen far from the tree.

It had, however, fallen of late in Apulia, the southern Italian province famous in Classical times for its red-figure pottery, which is the subject of his doctoral thesis. In the red-figure technique, the background is filled in with black paint and only the figures’ details are painted, allowing the unpainted portions of the figures to take on the reddish tone of the clay after it is burned in the presence of oxygen.

From the mid-eighth century B.C., according to a wall text in the New Greek and Roman Galleries, “parts of Italy south of Rome were colonized by Greek emigrants. Connections with the mainland remained strong, intensifying the transplantation of Greek traditions, culture, and language. Indeed, this area of Italy was known since antiquity as ‘Magna Graecia’ (or Greater Greece). The interaction with native Italic and Latin peoples significantly influenced the appearance and development of local arts. One of the principal features of South Italian culture is its interest in Greek drama, often reflected in works of art.”

A red-figure calyx-krater (ca. 400-390 B.C., Greek, South Italian, Apulian) shows three comic actors performing a scene from a phlyax play, a parody of Greek tragedy developed in southern Italy. Jed pointed out to me that the actors’ lines of dialogue were painted on the vase to emanate from the speakers’ mouths, much in the manner that cartoonists today employ bubbles to enclose their characters’ speech. Thrillingly for me, as we stood before the krater he voiced the ancient Greek and translated easily.

On view nearby, at the entrance to the gallery, was an Apulian terracotta column-krater that depicts the painting of a marble statue. As depicted, an artist applies an emulsion of pigment and wax to the surface of a statue of Herakles (Hercules). Afterward, a red-hot iron rod (a number of which are shown being heated by an assistant or slave) would be passed over the statue, causing molten paint to penetrate the surface of the stone. This Apulian appetite for color has been regarded by many scholars as gaudiness, representing a decline from the monochromatic Greek purity of form.

And yet, one of the Met’s most celebrated acquisitions was the Euphronios calyx-krater (ca. 520 BC), the supreme example of Greek vase painting of the 6th-5th century. Acquired for one million dollars in 1972 (it would fetch perhaps one hundred times that sum today) from an American art-dealer living in Rome, it turned out to have been, in all probability, looted from an Etruscan tomb. In 2006, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Italian government signed an agreement under which ownership of the krater and several other pieces of art was transferred to Italy in exchange for long-term loans of other comparable objects. Although at some time it will be returned to Italy, the krater was still on display, featured less than prominently in the New Greek and Roman Galleries, the elephant in the room about which no one spoke. (Jed, however, did engage in spirited discussion of these issues of provenance with another invited admirer of the Euphronios work.)

While our most passionate interest for the day was the wealth of Apulian art on display, it was impossible to miss such grand treasures as the “Sarcophagus with the Triumph of Dionysus and the Four Seasons” (Roman, Late Imperial, A.D. 260-70), better known as the “Badminton Sarcophagus” because beginning in 1733 it had been part of the collection of the dukes of Beaufort and was formerly displayed in their country seat, Badminton Hall in Gloucestershire, England. Carved in high relief from a single block of marble, it shows the god Dionysus seated on a panther and surrounded by an entourage of lusty satyrs, maenads (his female devotees), the horned god Pan, and four youths who represent the Seasons, each bearing appropriate attributes.

Also among the highlights of the first-floor galleries are two actual rooms from Roman villas — with their stunning wall paintings — that were buried nearly two thousand years ago by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79. The frescoes from a cubiculum nocturnum (bedroom) are all the more haunting in the context of the bent ironwork in the window opening. Elsewhere, fragmented masterpieces abound — a sandaled foot, an upper arm and hand displayed to emphasize the absence of the forearm — all conveying an aching sense of what has been lost.

The centerpiece of the Leon Levy and Shelby White Gallery for Etruscan art located on the mezzanine floor is the newly restored, world-famous Etruscan chariot (second quarter of the sixth century B.C.). Made of bronze (mounted on a wooden substructure) and inlaid with precious elephant and hippopotamus ivory, the chariot is richly decorated with scenes from the life of the Greek hero Achilles. The chariot is funerary and symbolic, as military use of such vehicles had long since stopped.

The intersection of Hellenistic, Roman, and Etruscan influences epitomized by this chariot is a subject of enduring fascination and controversy — over dating, interpretation, supposed Greek or Roman hegemony, and provenance. How does an understanding and appreciation of classical art strengthen western civilization? This was a subject raised earnestly and engagingly in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s opening remarks, which were followed upon by those of Governor Eliot Spitzer and capped by those of Museum Director Philippe de Montebello. Do we absorb and convey tradition across the generations or do we reinvent or redefine it to be useful to present concerns?

Western civilization these days may be giving tradition a black eye, but we can’t claim that the sculptors and potters (or poets and philosophers) of old gave us a deficient mold. If we broke from it, that’s our mistake. Go to the Met, and look to the past.

--John Thorn

The Long Season

2007-03-21T14:15:00.000-04:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, March 21, 2007:
Exhibition games in Florida or Arizona are not exactly a rite of spring but a harbinger: the magical mid-February date on which pitchers and catchers report reminds us in the north that somewhere else in America it is warm, that soon we will see the crocus.

It is not necessary to take a trip to feel the stirrings of renewal, but all of my friends in the baseball business had been to spring training many times and viewed it as a delightful perk of office. Most of my fan friends, too, periodically arranged a winter holiday around a Grapefruit League or Cactus League game. Until last year, though, I had never been to a spring training game and only went then because I had been invited to give the keynote address at a conference in Tucson, Arizona, sponsored by the academic baseball journal NINE.

At the turn of this year, staring at a sixtieth birthday, I surprised myself by registering as a conferee, with no task commissioned, no expenses reimbursed, totally on my own hook. I knew that I would be coming off a hard couple of months as I was scheduled to deliver, in the days before the NINE conference opened, a new book and a new scholarly journal of my own, called BASE BALL. I saw the conference as an opportunity to renew old acquaintances, take in a few games, rest and recuperate. For five days, nothing to do! I even looked forward to the transcontinental flight, with its layovers and inevitable delays, as a chance to read.

To others my choice for onflight reading—Francis Willughby’s Book of Games: A Seventeenth Century Treatise on Sports, Games, and Pastimes—might seem like a chore, but to me it was a thriller, with fresh insights on nearly every page. Created in the early 1670s as The Book of Plaies, the manuscript had never been printed prior to its issue in 2003, when it was renamed by its modern-day editors to deter librarians from cataloging it with dramaturgy. I will have more to say about this another day but for now let me just say that I learned more about early baseball from this book, in which the game is never mentioned, than any other.

The Clarion Hotel was the conference site, located just 10 minutes from Tucson Electric Field (home to the Diamondbacks and White Sox) and 15 minutes from Hy Corbett Field (home to the Rockies). As airport hotels go, it was perfectly nice and, with the NINE group rate, astoundingly cheap. There was a ballroom, a conference room, a pool, and a bar masquerading as a restaurant. Heaven, in short, except for the acoustic-tiled ceilings. Checking in late Wednesday, I looked forward especially to Saturday evening’s keynote address by old friend Bob Creamer, the incomparable biographer of Babe Ruth and Casey Stengel. I was less sanguine about the prospects for the 30 research presentations, but I would do my best to stick with most of them.

According to its official description, NINE “studies all historical aspects of baseball, centering on the societal and cultural implications of the game wherever in the world it is played. The journal features articles, essays, book reviews, biographies, oral history, and short fiction pieces.” It had been created by Bill Kirwin of the University of Calgary (Edmonton) in 1993 and he had been editor of the journal and organizer of the conference ever since. This year he issued the opening welcome on Thursday evening by announcing, in an admirably matter-of-fact way, that he was handing the reins of the publication over to Trey Strecker of Ball State University because he had an inoperable brain cancer. Though he was still able to walk about a bit, he did not stray far from his wife and his wheelchair.

Most of the conferees, myself included, had eased into the fall of our lives. For Bill Kirwin it was suddenly winter, with the shock of his announcement compounded by its spring-training setting. But he was in such fine spirits that after an opening presentation of surpassing irrelevance the attendees headed off to the “social mixer,” where they updated each other on forthcoming books and articles (Lee Lowenfish showed off his massive new Branch Rickey biography). We old boys swapped reminiscences of those no longer with us—the writer Charles Einstein, the ballplayers Lew Burdette and Hank Bauer, the photographer Hy Peskin (“he always smelled of aftershave,” recalled Creamer, who like Peskin had been an original Sports Illustrated staffer back in 1954).

The following day, after some morning presentations, we made our way to Tucson Electric (with a Son Volt CD aptly blasting in the car), with the 10,000 foot San Catalina Mountains in the background making for a lunar landscape like that of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat. On the previous day, early conference arrivers had seen Sammy Sosa continue his drive for a roster spot with the Texas Rangers. Today’s game between Chicago’s Cubs and White Sox would be dominated not by an oldtimer struggling to come back but by the record-setting 95-degree heat. Despite liberal doses of suntan oil and beer, my pals and I said “Uncle” before the sixth inning (and after seeing the ageless Minnie Minoso greeting fans in the shaded vendor arcade).

The blistering heat did not quit for the next day’s NINE excursion, to Hy Corbett Field. The Tucson Mountains loomed behind its right field fence, over which the Rockies sent homer after homer as they mauled the Giants. For this game we baked on aluminum bleachers for three innings, lacking only sour cream and chives before heading out with the score 8-0. Such behavior would be heresy for a baseball lifer in the regular season (except in Los Angeles) but here, with guys wearing numbers in the 60s and 70s, our sense of decency eroded—or fried. We headed back to the air conditioned comfort of the hotel bar.

We had already begun to hear some fine presentations and more would be mixed in among the dross. Karl Lindholm talked about “Pitching’s Moonlight Graham: Frank ‘Socko’ Worm”—a fellow whose one-third of an inning pitched for the Dodgers in 1944 defined his life. James E. Brunson III opened my eyes to an unfamiliar part of black baseball history with “‘Colored’ Champions: Henry Bridgewwater’s St. Louis Black Stockings, 1881-1889.” Jean Ardell spoke movingly about Organized Baseball’s first woman pitcher in “Life after Baseball: Whatever Happened to Lefthander Ila Jane Borders?” New NINE editor Trey Strecker discussed Heywood Broun’s 1923 novel The Sun Field, in which the author’s wife, Ruth Hale, was featured as a thinly veiled character (the two both figured large in their son Heywood Hale Broun’s memoir Whose Little Boy Are You?). Academicians vying for fashion props reported ploddingly on matters of race, gender, and class, but two undergrads—Mina Makarious of Harvard and Kim LaGuardia of the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse—both gave promise of having a good deal more to contribute as they progressed beyond their own spring training.

At unscheduled moments we drove south into the desert, just short of the Mexican border; we lunched at El Charro Cafe, a Tucson institution since 1922; and we imbibed at the Tap Room of the Hotel Congress, so skillfully remodeled that you’d think it hadn’t been touched since its founding in 1919. Back at the hotel we struggled to make ourselves heard over the TVs blaring Final Four basketball contests; only in our archaic world did March Madness refer to baseball. Yet on Saturday morning the hotel courtyard was dominated by Little Leaguers in uniform, warming up for a late-morning playoff game; and on Saturday evening, after Creamer’s fine talk on “Barry and the Babe,” the conferees walked out of the banquet hall into a lobby filled with teenagers and family celebrating a girl’s Quinceañera, or 15th Birthday. A cross between a Sweet 16 and a debutante’s coming out, the celebration united old and young guests in a coming- of-age gala.

All during the days of the conference, and everywhere we happened to go, the young had vied for their place in the sun with the old. And those of us who are headed west, toward the sunset, were glad of it.

--John Thorn

2007-02-06T18:47:00.000-05:00

Grossman's tosses spelled death for the Bears.

QB, or Not QB

2007-02-06T18:26:00.000-05:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, February 7, 2007:
When the Sloppy Bowl was blissfully over, the Colts had more points than the Bears. This entitled them to hold the Lombardi Trophy high, but sheepishly; they had earned it largely by giving opposing quarterback Rex Grossman enough rope to hang himself along with his teammates. At least that’s the way the stories were written for the Monday morning papers. DysRexia cost the Bears a shot at the title. Fumbled snaps, intercepted passes, lack of downfield vision and nerve, a limp arm, poor powers of concentration ... we could go on.

And we will. If only backup Brian Griese had been named the starter. If only Grossman had squelched his gunslinger instinct and played a caretaker role throughout — no turnovers, let the backs run the ball — then middle linebacker Brian Urlacher and his defensive Monsters of the Midway would have found a way to win. All of this appeared in the press in the days that followed.

We’ll admit it: Rex was lousy. But he had company, especially on the sideline.

Those cheering for the Bears, seven-point dogs going in, hoped against reality and past performance that when it came down to the inevitable moment when Grossman must produce, that he would. This hope was not unfounded; not only had the Bears somehow made it to the Super Bowl, they had gone 15-3 with the kid QB. True, they had won many a bruising game by virtue of their extraordinary defense and special teams, and their offense was built around a battering run attack. Yet Rex’s 23 touchdown passes testified to his ability... didn’t they?

Good defense beats good offense. Ask Bill Parcells. Ask Brian Billick. They won Super Bowls with Jeff Hostetler and Trent Dilfer at quarterback. Relying upon a great defense to hold opponents down, one may hope for a kickoff return for a score, turnovers that provide field position, and a bit of luck. But luck is not enough, or last year’s Oakland Raiders might have been the AFC representative at Dolphin Stadium Sunday night. Borrowing from another sport — in which it is said, by the way, that good pitching tends to beat good hitting — John Kruk opined that “you can’t make chicken salad out of chicken shit.”

To a degree, that is what the chefs in the Bears’ kitchen had been attempting to do (with a laudable level of success) all season. But that could have been said about the Colts’ experiments in the culinary arts, too. The Bears were way better than average on defense; the Colts way better on offense. The Bears could run the ball; the Colts couldn’t stop the run. The Bears had to scramble to score 20; the Colts were hard pressed to hold opponents under 30. This could have been a classic matchup if both teams had played to form. That they didn’t was a coaching decision, not simply an atheltic failure.

Also, did you hear that this was the first time two black coaches have met in the Super Bowl?

Chicago’s special teams dynamo, rookie Devin Hester, returned the opening kickoff 92 yards to give Da Bears a 7-0 lead before ten seconds had elapsed. That alone should have insured that the game would still be close at the half, and that those who had bet on the Colts and given seven would suffer from restless leg syndrome all game long.

This lightning bolt proved to be as unimportant as Ted Ginn Jr.’s opening return TD had been for Ohio State in the BCS Championship against the Florida Gators. The Colts’ Peyton Manning, he of the Alfred E. Neuman visage, in effect said, “What, Me Worry?” Two weeks ago Indianapolis had been pronounced dead on the table when trailing New England by 15 at the half in the AFC Championship game against the Patriots. Compared to that, this was nothing.

A botched coverage in a blitzing down left Reggie Wayne wide open downfield and Manning found him for a 53-yard score. There were turnovers aplenty to follow, giving Bear fans not only hope but also a 14-6 lead in the first quarter — but they were happening with such frequency that the first half seemed not to matter, ending with the Colts up 16-14.

Even though the field was wet, the Bears were so scared of a potential barrage of long scoring plays (knowing that its offense would stand no chance in a shootout) that their plan from the outset was to drop Urlacher back into the secondary, thus denying him any chance to exercise his customary impact on the game. In the NFC Championship against New Orleans, he had played a prominent role in neutralizing Reggie Bush as a rusher.

Not only did dropping Uhrlacher back against the Colts fail to stop the feared long ball (see Wayne, above), it also enabled running backs Joseph Addai and Dominic Rhodes to make play after play in the flats and underneath. The two combined for 191 yards rushing and Addai alone caught ten passes, one short of the Super Bowl record.

Nickel and dime completions aren’t what made the Colts AFC Champions. However, if they are plainly being offered up to any QB, he will graciously accept. As Phil Simms stated, “even I can still complete three or four yard passes.” Now if only Peyton could only forget how to do the arms-raised-in-complaint gesture he does after every unsuccessful play, more people would like him.

Lovie Smith’s Cover 2 defense encouraged Manning to run a dink-and-dunk passing game, conceding yardage between the 20 yard lines then stiffening inside the red zone. This works only when your offense can be relied upon to score some points, because you have ceded control of the ball and he clock to the other side. We thought the Bears should have played to their own strength and dared Manning to beat them from his side of the field, thus securing enough three-and-outs over the course of the game to gain good starting field position. When Grossman is playing a short field, he’s not panic-stricken.

After the Colts’ first two touchdowns they were limited to field goals on their next three entries into the red zone. In other words, once the foreshortened field forced the Bears to play their accustomed in-your-face defense, they looked like themselves again. With the score 22-17 three minutes into the fourth quarter, the Bears were well positioned to win ugly, as they had so many times before.

And then Grossman lofted a wounded duck out toward the sideline, in the general direction of receiver Muhsin Muhammad; the Colts’ Kelvin Hayden picked it off and returned it 56 yards for the killing touchdown. The Bears are not built to come back from two-score deficits in the fourth.

This was the turning point of the game in the press coverage the next day. To us, however, the turning points had occurred earlier: first, when Lovie Smith decided that the Colts’ strength (offense) was superior to his own team’s (defense), and made a fatal adjustment; second, when Bears running back Cedric Benson was injured.

Chicago needed to run the ball in order to slow the pace of the game, to keep the Colts’ offense off the field with seven-minute drives, and put off for as long as possible that moment when an inspired play by a quarterback decides who goes home a champion.

Thomas Jones ran well in Benson’s absence, but the Bears need to get more than the 17 rushes they got from their backs combined. (Indianapolis got 40 rushes from their combo pack of Addai and Dominic Rhodes). Once the injury occurred, the Bears began to throw the ball far more than they ran it. This cannot be chalked up merely to having fallen behind in the score; again, the soft defense underneath permitted the Colts to march up and down the field in so dominating a fashion that they ran off 81 plays from scrimmage to Chicago’s 48. Time of possession: Colts, 38:04, Bears 21:56.

You can’t blame Rex for that; Lovie, take a bow.

--Isaac Thorn & John Thorn

2007-01-11T16:22:00.000-05:00

No rag-arm QB he.

A Tale of Two Teams

2007-01-11T00:19:00.000-05:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, January 11, 2007:
In October, while teams from St. Louis and Detroit played a World Series before invited guests only, this column tucked the Mets and Yankees into their beds for a long winter’s nap. Now it is January, and while other, more skilled or fortunate teams than the Giants or Jets remain in the hunt, the locals are left once more with the ashy taste of postseason tristesse. Will the Chargers and Saints clash in the Super Bowl? Or the Bears and the Patriots? Who cares.

In New York, where football is over, it is revealed — yet again for the ingenuous — that everything is in the expectation, that nothing is either good or bad but thinking makes it so. The Giants slipped into the playoffs as a wild card entrant with a victory in their final game and then, compelled to play on the road, lost. Their fans are bitter and despairing of the future. The Jets slipped into the playoffs as a wild card entrant with a victory in their final game and then, compelled to play on the road, lost. Their fans are okay with that, and can’t wait until next year.

In truth, neither team is likely to make the playoffs next year, continuing a long pattern of dashed hopes. The Giants did win two Super Bowls under Bill Parcells and competed in another under Jim Fassel, all within the last twenty years or so. The Jets have never returned to the dance since Joe Namath led them to an upset victory in 1969. And yet hope returns each year with the shimmering heat of August; go figure.

The Giants came into the 2006 campaign with high hopes of reaching the Super Bowl, having won the NFC the previous year with an 11-5 record. The Jets, who had endured a 4-12 season marked by quarterback carnage, star player defection, and a coach angling for a job elsewhere, were expected to scrape bottom again. But in the NFL’s dedication to parity, which means weighted schedules based on previous results, the Jets were given a relatively easy ride to guard against their losing a dozen games again. The Giants’ slate, given their success in 2005, was much tougher.

Forgotten by many fans — though not by Patriots’ coach Bill Belichick, who dared to place the Jets’ “comeback” in perspective — is that the Jets of 2004 were only a Doug Brien field goal away from playing in the AFC championship. With the return to health of quarterback Chad Pennington, a 10-6 mark in 2006 was by no means remarkable. Yes, the 2005 team had allowed 115 points more than it scored, and this year’s edition scored 21 more than it allowed, a whopping turnaround. But the Jets of ’06 won only one game against a playoff-bound team (New England in Week 10) while losing three. Their other twelve games, of which they won nine, were against non-contenders.

The Giants, on the other hand, went from a positive point differential of 108 in 2005 to a minus 7 this past year. They squeaked into the playoffs with a mirror-image schizoid season of 6-2 in the first half and 2-6 in the second. Like the Jets, they defeated only one playoff-bound team (Philly in Week 2) ... but they lost to five such teams compared to the Jets’ three.

This two-game difference is precisely the gap between the Giants’ “disappointing” 8-8 record and the Jets’ “surprising” 10-6. Two cheers for parity.

Let’s look coldly at each team, as if we had no rooting interest (I confess I do, equally in both).

The Giants thought they had a rising star at quarterback in Eli Manning, despite his awful performance in the playoff game last year against Carolina in a shutout at home that prompted Tiki Barber to say that the Giants were outcoached. Manning was shaky all year long in ’06, and so was coach Tom Coughlin, whose competence was further questioned by Jeremy Shockey. In my view Manning should return, for reasons discussed below. Coughlin should not. His 11 percent favorable rate in an ESPN poll coming into Week 17 provides perhaps the first example of Vox Populi getting things right.

The receiving corps was a disaster of epic proportion, its awfulness fully revealed when Amani Toomer, the only one to run precise, reliable routes, went to the sideline with a season-ending injury. Tim Carter and David Tyree were non-factors in a passing game marked by scowls from Plaxico Burress and misguided missiles to Shockey, who seemed to run alongside a defender all year long as his previous crossing patterns and deep routes went MIA. Some of this may be chalked up to Coughlin’s game plan, but not all of it. I believe Manning can be a good QB, but not with this corps of receivers and not with a revolving door at left tackle. And what’s with all the false-start penalties—is it Manning’s fault for fooling around with hard counts or are injuries and shifting personnel to blame?

The running game was brilliant when Tiki got the ball — i.e., when his team was not trailing by two touchdowns in the first half. Brandon Jacobs is a mystery, effective as a pounding counterpoint o the slashing Barber, but irritatingly unable to pick up short yardage in the red zone or on third down and one. Next year the Giants will have to face what the Jets did this year when Curtis Martin proved unable to return — the absence of an assured 1500 yards from your lead back. The Jets made do with Leon Washington and a legion of plodders; the Giants will have to do so, as well, though my recommendation is to give Jacobs 250 carries and see what you get. Earl Campbell might be hiding underneath those pads.

The formidable Big Blue pass rush of ’05 never showed up in ’06, not even when Michael Strahan was healthy. As a result, the new defensive secondary was revealed to be no better than it what it replaced — corners who couldn’t cover or tackle, safeties who could not catch the ball when it seemed aimed at their hands. The linebacking corps is solid, though, and with the return of LaVar Arrington next year, this will be the strength of the defense. Special teams were fine, even though Jeff Feagles no longer punts for a high average and Chad Morton’s injury revealed for all to see what a useless draft pick was made in Sinorice Moss.

Summing up, it is not an accident that only one Giant was named to the NFC squad in the coming Pro Bowl (a nod for Shockey as a reserve at tight end, reflecting a conference-wide weakness at the position and a nod for past glories). Despite slim pickings at quarterback, too, Manning was passed over for a reserve spot by Tony Romo, for chrissake ... and Phil Rivers, whom the Giants traded for the rights to Manning, will go to Hawaii as part of the AFC squad. (The Bears will send seven players to the NFC contingent, the Chargers nine to the AFC.)

The Jets’ principal strength is the Giants’ main weakness: their head coach. Eric Mangini ended the season with a 92 percent favorable rating in the aforementioned ESPN poll, and with good reason. He didn’t complain about not having Curtis Martin, or having to stage a quarterback bakeoff in training camp. He made the talent on hand perform better than it had, and he worked his draft picks into the starting lineup with great success, especially at center with Nick Mangold. And the Jets’ talent was judged no better than the Giants by those who voted for the Pro Bowl. The only Jet who will get lei’d will be Justin Miller, as a special teams pick.

Linebacker Jonathan Vilma made far fewer tackles for the Jets this year than last, and is thought to have slumped. But Mangini’s replacement of the former 4-3 alignment with a New England-style 3-4 guaranteed fewer tackles for Vilma, and the no-name defense proved to be the key to the Jets’ success in the second half of the season. John Abraham was not missed as Blair Thomas came into his own and Kerry Rhodes put his stamp on the secondary.

Laveranues Coles and Jeremy Cotchery made an effective complement to Pennington’s dink-and-dunk West Coast offense, and you can be sure the Jets will draft a tall wideout as well as a big running back, both obvious deficiencies this year. But improved talent is not the key to the Jets’ prospects in ’07 ... it is sticking with the system, continuing to have faith in the schemes that Mangini, Brian Schottenheimer, and the other assistants vary so cleverly from week to week. Unlike baseball, where a great manger hardly ever is enough to lift mediocre talent to the top, football is a coach’s game.

Whether Coughlin stays or goes, the Giants will struggle to come in at 7-9, despite getting a few more cupcakes on their schedule. The Jets will improve, but not in the standings; with a tougher slate, they too will struggle to finish 7-9.

There, I’ve said it. And now I’ll forget it and, when autumn nears, root for both teams.

--John Thorn

2006-12-27T14:13:00.000-05:00

Bruegel's "Corn Harvest," detail

Bruegel and Me

2006-12-27T13:59:00.000-05:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, December 28, 2006:
Walking through the European Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art last week with my son Mark, returned from college for the holidays, we glided from gallery to gallery at a leisurely pace. He had seen many of these glorious paintings before, but only as color plates in an art history textbook. I had visited them at the Met before, but never with him; our earlier visits, when he and his older brothers were still living at home, had tended not to stray far from the mummies, the hieroglyphs, and the Temple of Dendur, unless it was to check out the medieval armor and, as a sop to me, the American Wing.

Now we were two adults, with his interest in Northern Renaissance and Flemish painting far exceeding mine. His newfound passion would determine our path, as it had the very idea of a full-day ascent of this cultural Matterhorn. We were still father and son, I was still the guide and he the willing initiate, but the gap had narrowed. We were near, if not at, the point at which my relationship had twisted and turned with his brothers, from parent to grownup friend and, enduringly, to peer.

Our mission was to gawk until we dropped. By our second hour of strolling through Constable and Gainsborough and Rembrandt and Goya I was beginning to get hungry. Maybe we should go to one of the cafes now, I suggested, as there might be a line and I didn’t wish to be starving when I faced a pre-made sandwich in cellophane. But he had come especially to revel in Van Eyck, Vermeer, and Bruegel, and we happened to be standing in a gallery that marked a neat end to our morning circuit.

We had paused right in front of Bruegel the Elder’s “Corn Harvest” (1565), one of the world’s great paintings of everyday life. Bruegel is a marvel not only for his craft but also for his bottom-up approach to story that tells us more about the human condition than paintings of battle and royalty; his dedication to landscape tells us more about heaven than dreamy depictions of anthropomorphic deities and silly putti. Mark and I resolved to place hunger on hold and take our time in this last room of the section. (Why, you may ask, is “Corn Harvest” called by that name when the crop is obviously wheat? Because a generic name for grain in German is Korn, and it labeled this painting in English early on.)

Turning 90 degrees to the wall, my eye fell upon a tiny tableau at the left-center of the painting in which young men appeared to be playing a game of bat and ball in a meadow distant from the scything and stacking and dining and drinking that make up the foreground. Mark agreed: there appeared to be a man with a bat, a fielder at a base, a runner, and spectators as well as participants in waiting. The strange device opposite the batsman’s position might have been a catapult. As I was later to learn with hurried research, this detail is unnoted in the art-history studies.

Now, it could be argued that as a historian of early sport, particularly games of bat and ball, I may tend to see instances of my specialty popping up everywhere, like hobgoblins. Or I may just be lucky; you may judge.

It might be argued as well that the title of this column is misleading as it is less about Bruegel than it is about me. But I would rejoin that is about both of us, and all three of my children, and you and yours too.

Christmas vacation is a great time to reconnect with your kids, whether they live at home, are away at college, or are grown and live at great distance. It’s also a way to connect with how children everywhere view the world — not as a series of milestones to be marked, honors to be won, and rewards to be earned ... but as an arena for new experience. And in the end, it’s a great way to connect with your own childhood and thus who you are and always have been. A recurring theme of “Play’s the Thing,” of which this piece is the last of a third year in this space, has been that play is serious business, broadly revealing of who we are and yearn to be. Getting older is an opportunity to revisit one’s happy childhood or to set one’s unhappy childhood right, if only through one’s own children.

Seeing this mysterious game of ball depicted in Bruegel’s “Corn Harvest” recalled for me another of the master’s great works, his “Children’s Games” of 1560. Although not yet 500 years old, this painting is nearly as mysterious as the hieroglyphs of the pyramids and requires no less a Rosetta Stone. Although some 80 different sports and games are depicted, scholars have only been able to identify 32 with certainty. A few of these will be familiar to 21st-century readers: Blind Man’s Buff, Bowls, Crack the Whip, Follow the Leader, Hoops, King of the Hill, Leap Frog, Marbles, Mumblety-Peg, Tug of War. As to the rest, an interactive key to “Children’s Games” (a floating cursor prompts a detail of Bruegel’s painting and a description of the game) may be located at the wonderful interactive website of the Elliott Avedon Museum & Archive of Games at Waterloo University in Ontario, Canada: http://www.ahs.uwaterloo.ca/~museum/VirtualExhibits/
Brueghel/imgmap.html

When I unearthed the now celebrated bylaw of 1791 which prohibited the play of baseball within 80 yards of a soon-to-be built meeting house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, I noted that baseball was but one of the banned games: “wicket, cricket, baseball, batball, football, cats, fives, or any other game played with ball.” For reporters covering the press conference in which the find was announced in May 2004, I felt obliged to explain what these games were, as no one any longer plays wicket or batball or cat (one-, two-, three-, or four-hole varieties), and on this side of the Atlantic few would know that fives was handball. A century earlier, the Mills Commission investigating the origins of baseball had declared that Abner Doubleday was its inventor and Cooperstown its Garden of Eden. That was history from the top down. The Pittsfield prohibition, seeking only to preserve the glass windows of a new structure, opened a new (if broken) window onto what children actually played and thus what really happened. That is history from the bottom up, a la Bruegel.

We play fewer games today than a century ago, and fewer still than in 16th-century Europe, just as the evolution of species has produced the dubious triumph of fewer and not necessarily superior survivors. Because increasingly our children exercise their minds and thumbs in play but not their limbs, young men and women must build suppleness and mass through the simulated play of fitness routines that translate, upon reflection, to just another form of work. We are overstimulated mentally, underutilized physically and, bombarded with media messages, discontented with our daily lives more than ever before.

Or at least that is what has often been reported, and not only in these days of virtual reality. The New York Times of December 30, 1883 published a story headed “Boyhood's Merry Games; Some of the Sports in Which Our Fathers Indulged; The Healthful Games of a Generation Ago of Which the Boy of Today Knows Little or Nothing.” The anonymous author was stunned to learn that the only game his 10-year-old son played was marbles. “Now, marbles is all right,” he wrote, “but I don’t like the idea of a steady diet in that line. It isn’t broadening. It’s a sort of one-sided development. Boys are dying out in this country, or at least the boy I’m bringing up is of a different species from what I used to know.”

How we play is ever changing. Play is a constant. Today we still have a few things to teach our children, and a lot to learn from them.

--John Thorn

2006-12-15T10:33:00.000-05:00

The Matsuzaka Dilemma

2006-12-15T10:24:00.000-05:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, December 13, 2006:
This whole swirl may be over by the time you read this, but the meaning is the same, no matter how it comes out, and so is the moral. I’m talking about the sequence in which the Boston Red Sox were revealed to have outbid other baseball clubs for the thirty-day negotiating rights to “posted” Seibu Lion pitcher Daisuke Matsuzaka, who wishes to pitch in the United States but is not, under Nippon Professional Baseball (NPB) regulations, eligible for free agency until 2008. This Thursday night at midnight, when December 14 becomes December 15, is the witching hour.

As I write, Boston Red Sox executives have just landed the owner’s plane on the West Coast to plant themselves on agent Scott Boras’s doorstep. His Japanese client is mum on the seeming breakdown in negotiations, but as he has not fired his representative one may deduce that he is in on the game. It is a game designed by Major League Baseball (MLB) and the NPB, but as they seem only dimly to have understood their own rules, D-Mat and his designated hitter have made their own—or rather, as we shall see, correctly fathomed the implicit rule structure of the posting system. Bottom line: no matter how this shakes out, while D-Mat is not exactly the reincarnation of Curt Flood, Scott Boras has taken the mantle of Marvin Miller, and is my new hero.

Yesterday I had lunch at the local Chinese restaurant where, despite my better judgment, I ate my customary sacramental portion of the stale fortune cookie and read its message. “It is better to have a hen tomorrow than an egg today” was the word from on high. Wait, I thought; this reverses the more commonly expressed wisdom that not only is an egg today better than a hen tomorrow, but also its avian corrolary about birds in hand and those in the bush. I wondered: might Boras have received the same, seemingly counterintuitive message?

***

Let’s back up for a moment and see how we got here. In the system by which a player is to be posted, both the team and player must agree on the posting. The team then notifies the NPB Commissioner’s Office that the player will be posted, which then notifies MLB, which notifies all of its teams. The MLB teams then have four days to submit a closed bid for the right to negotiate a contract with the player. If the high bid is accepted by the NPB team holding the player’s rights, the winning MLB team has thirty days to reach an agreement with the player. If the bid is rejected, the player is not “posted.” If the player signs a contract with the MLB team by the end of the signing period, then the NPB team receives the bid money. If the player does not sign a contract with the MLB team by the end of the signing period, the player is returned to the NPB team and the NPB team receives nothing.

Whoever designed this may have had in mind that classic scenario of game theory called the “Prisoner’s Dilemma.” It is a mathematical and psychological game illustrating how rational actions by individuals may not always lead to positive outcomes for either the individuals or the group. The Prisoner’s Dilemma is described neatly in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

“Tanya and Cinque have been arrested for robbing the Hibernia Savings Bank and placed in separate isolation cells. Both care much more about their personal freedom than about the welfare of their accomplice. A clever prosecutor makes the following offer to each. ‘You may choose to confess or remain silent. If you confess and your accomplice remains silent I will drop all charges against you and use your testimony to ensure that your accomplice does serious time. Likewise, if your accomplice confesses while you remain silent, they will go free while you do the time. If you both confess I get two convictions, but I’ll see to it that you both get early parole. If you both remain silent, I’ll have to settle for token sentences on firearms possession charges. If you wish to confess, you must leave a note with the jailer before my return tomorrow morning.’

“The ‘dilemma’ faced by the prisoners here is that, whatever the other does, each is better off confessing than remaining silent. But the outcome obtained when both confess is worse for each than the outcome they would have obtained had both remained silent. A common view is that the puzzle illustrates a conflict between individual and group rationality. A group whose members pursue rational self-interest may all end up worse off than a group whose members act contrary to rational self-interest. More generally, if the payoffs are not assumed to represent self-interest, a group whose members rationally pursue any goals may all meet less success than if they had not rationally pursued their goals individually. Puzzles with this structure were devised and discussed by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher in 1950, as part of the Rand Corporation’s investigations into game theory (which Rand pursued because of possible applications to global nuclear strategy).”

So, the underlying scheme of Prisoner’s Dilemma is to have the two prisoners collaborate wittingly or unwittingly against their own interest, with the outcome weighted to benefit the sate as represented by the police and prosecutor. The dilemma resides in the fact that each prisoner has a choice between only two options, but cannot make a good decision without knowing what the other one will do.

I suggest that the posting system was created along these lines to benefit the “state”—each league and each team involved. Think of MLB and Boston as the police and prosecutor in the above scenario, knowing that the salutary actions of Prisoner A (NPB and Seibu) and Prisoner B (Matsuzaka and Boras) are necessary to prevent the mutually assured destruction (M.A.D.) of MLB. That was the prospect some owners envisioned in 1973-74, at the dawn of free agency: that in an auction scenario, dollars would pursue scarce/unique assets in an irrationally exuberant way that would effectively transfer control of the game into the players’ hands. Marvin Miller cleverly assuaged the owners’ fears while assuring high prices for his players’ union by restricting free agency to those with six years’ service in the major leagues; had he opted for universal free agency, as he might have, the flood of talent onto the market each year would have depressed salaries.

The design problem in the Prisoner’s Dilemma game above is that Prisoner Seibu has its deal in hand and is (ostensibly) denied the option of contributing some of its $51.1 million posting fee from Boston toward Prisoner Matsuzaka’s new contract. Indeed, without flexibility the fortunes of Seibu/NPB are more closely tied to the Police/Prosecutor than to Matsuzaka despite the pitcher’s total control over Seibu’s posting windfall. Boston, which stands ready to pay the sum and call it a bargain, instead feels aggrieved because its $51.1 million in expense is counted as nothing by Boras, who is looking to obtain $100 million for a six-year contract, pretty much in line with what his client would fetch in an unrestricted market. Boston had intended to pay out $100 million, all right, but had figured that Boras would give the club credit for half of that for “liberating” his client. No such luck, nor should there have been.

The posting system entices Boston (and other bidding clubs) with the lure of paying for a free agent in a tangential way that would not increase its exposure to luxury tax. The Red Sox are further compensated by considering the payment to Seibu as an inexpensive licensing or entry fee to market their brand vigorously in Japan. Additionally, the exclusivity that came with their winning bid permitted them not only to pursue Matsuzaka, but also to defend against the Yankees landing him.

With its $51.1 million sugarplum, Seibu thought it was being rewarded for having nurtured Matsuzaka’s talent to the point that he was one of the top five pitchers in the world, and for graciously letting him go to America two years before NPB regulations would otherwise allow. In fact Seibu was also being pulled out of a very considerable financial hole, as the posting fee hits up on their bottom line as pure net income ... plus they gain at least $12 million in the amount they would otherwise have had to pay Matsuzaka for 2007 and 2008, the last years of his contract with the Lions.

MLB/Boston is in effect attempting to coerce a “confession” from Prisoner Matsuzaka because he risks embarrassment by returning to pitch for Seibu after 36,000 fans bade him farewell at the Lions’ Stadium, and because Seibu doesn’t want him back at the forfeiture of $63 million it is already counting on.

What did MLB and the 29 teams not in the running for D-Mat’s services gain by the posting system? A presumptive lid on D-Mat’s demands and their escalating effect on pitcher salaries, already heightened by the ineffectual Adam Eaton and the awful Justin Marquis, each of whom received multiyear contracts at about $8 million per. With Matsuzaka wearing carmine hose, MLB will gain a new hero to promote its brand in Japan as well as the USA, just as Ichiro proved a marketing windfall. In fact this posting system is a nostalgic throwback, recreating for owners a glimpse of the paradise they enjoyed prior to free agency, when they owned the market and could say “take it or leave it” to the players. While the posting system may have been born of a genuine wish to protect Japanese baseball and avoid the appearance of American cultural imperialism, it has played out as an exercise in “Who will rule.”

As Boras has evidently surmised, even though MLB and NPB thought they had boxed in Prisoner Matsuzaka, it turned out that he and his client were not locked in behind iron bars but instead, like Br’er Rabbit, had been thrown into a briar patch from which they could easily escape. Boras has recognized that while the game is structured like Prisoner’s Dilemma, counting upon Seibu and his client to act independently in their perceived self-interest to the benefit of Organized Baseball, there is in fact only one prisoner, and without his yielding, there is no palatable outcome.

If MLB and NPB had a game theory for how this would play itself out, it was the wrong one ... styled as Prisoner’s Dilemma but quickly revealing itself to be the “Dollar Auction,” another, even more vicious game, in which each of two contestants seeks to overpay for an asset in order to avoid being the second-place bidder whose money will have been utterly wasted.

In the Dollar Auction someone offers to sell a dollar bill to the highest bidder. The highest bidder will get the dollar, but the second-highest must also pay what he bid yet get nothing in return. Think here of “throwing good money after bad,” of “saving face,” of “having too much invested to cut and run,” of “staying the course.” If you can buy a dollar for a dime, this looks like a good deal. Even as the bidding rises in ten-cent increments to the 50-cent level, it still seems a bargain. At the 70-cent level, one may expect that all but two bidders will have fallen off the chase. When the dollar-mark is reached, the underbidder, rather than accepting defeat, will tend to bid ten cents more so as not to lose 90 cents.

“People escalate their commitment both to justify their earlier bids and to prevent the financial and ego loss of coming in second,” Max H. Bazerman wrote in Psychology Today twenty years ago. “No specific bid is clearly wrong, since it is rational to bid ‘just another 10 cents,’ if the other party is about to quit bidding. But when both parties think this way, an escalatory spiral emerges that is very reminiscent of the Vietnam War and other international and industrial failures in which both competitors get trapped by their previous commitments.”

At first blush the winner in the Matsuzaka Dilemma appeared to be Boston; if the Mets were second, at $13 million less, they felt no ill consequence of their bid. Had the posting system had been a true Dollar Auction, with succesive rounds of bidding, rather than a veiled Prisoner’s Dilemma with closed bids, the price for D-Mat might have gone much higher, as the underbidder would have been highly motivated to stay in the game. But now Boston’s inadvertent partner has been revealed not to be MLB but Seibu, which unlike Boston—which will retain the defensive benefit of its bid—will lose everything, as if it had been the underbidder in a Dollar Auction. And Br’er Boras and D-Mat, if they do not prevail this year, can play again only with more bargaining clout.

--John Thorn

2006-11-29T15:26:00.000-05:00

Why another Hall of Fame? See below.

Wide World of Sports

2006-11-29T15:02:00.000-05:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, November 30, 2006:
This morning’s sports headlines and talk radio were dominated by Headbandgate, the struggle for power in which Chicago Bulls’ head coach Scott Skiles benched star center Ben Wallace for wearing a headband, in violation of club policy. This may serve as, if not a sure sign of the impending apocalypse, then a defining moment in my life as a fan. The sports world is too much with us, making the lost world of pushball, subject of my previous column, seem appallingly attractive.

Sport matters. So do the individuals or teams of high character and winning ways whose exploits may move multitudes to raise them to the level of heroes, and in the process stand a bit taller themselves. But in the cult of celebrity that grips us now, the routine activities of ordinary men are more amply analyzed than the greatest feats in all the world’s history of sport.

For sport to retain its power to inspire, we may now wish to squelch the noise of what any fan, upon a moment’s reflection, will agree doesn’t matter. One institution has sprung up that is dedicated to cutting through the clutter to recognize the great champions of sport, in some cases famous long ago but little recalled today. The World Sports Hall of Fame (WSHF) launched its website last week and invites global participation in a selection process for the greatest athletes of all sports, all nations, and all time, from Milo of Krotona to Michael of Air Jordan. [see: http://worldsportshof.com]

The WSHF, a not-for-profit institution incorporated in Canada, aims to bring attention to the single activity that links all mankind in passionate interest and good feeling. With a mission of “building mutual respect for national cultures through the international love of sport,” the WSHF will also, in the language posted on its home page, “serve as a supporting body for national and regional sports archives, websites, and recreational organizations for purposes of education and community development.” (In the spirit of full disclosure, I serve on this body’s executive committee.)

There are halls of fame for baseball, football, basketball, hockey, and almost any other sport you can name ... but until now none for the world of sport. Why, one might ask, do we need another? The quick A-to-Z quiz below may provide an answer: match the athlete, in each case a famed champion in his or her day and thus a candidate for WSHF enshrinement, with sport and nationality; the guess is that you will fall far short of a perfect score. [Answers are provided at the end.]

Vasiliy Alekseyev Wrestling Poland
Aleisha Cline Cycling USA
Alfredo DeOro Cricket France
Pierre Etchebaster Track & Field Spain
Niki Lauda Skiing Sweden
Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji Billiards India
Ingemar Stenmark Auto Racing Austria
Major Taylor Extreme Sports Canada
Qu Yunxia Tennis China
Stanislaus Zbyszko Weightlifting USSR

The first WSHF induction class consists of far more celebrated names than these — from Muhammad Ali and Babe Ruth to Gordie Howe and Bill Russell and more — but the quiz illustrates the point that great athletes come from everywhere, and that the heroes of other nations may well have stories to tell us that are more compelling than Headbandgate or Steroidgate.

How do the WSHF organizers unearth not only the athletes but even the sports that may one day be honored in its Valhalla? There are many sources, of course, but a surprisingly fruitful one has been the world’s trading cards, an infallible guide to who were the heroes of bygone days. The cards provide a veritable archaeological site for understanding sport and society.

The big four American team sports, plus tennis, golf, NASCAR, and other individual pursuits, have not always been the focus of this nation’s ardor, let alone the world’s. (We will set to one side for this column British cigarette cards celebrating stars of cricket, soccer, tennis, etc.) Only a century ago, when trading cards were given away with cigarettes rather than with candy or bubble gum — and never sold by themselves — football, hockey, golf, and tennis were barely represented and basketball not at all. Baseball was dominant, but card sets to then had featured champions of billiards, boxing, sharpshooting, pedestrianism, sculling, bowling, and horseracing.

Before the turn of the century, champion walker Edward Weston or sharpshooter Annie Oakley, jockey Isaac Murphy or oarsman Ned Hanlan were culture heroes of a greater magnitude than any baseball or football player. And boxer John L. Sullivan was the most famous man in North America in any field of endeavor. Collegiate football was becoming a national obsession by the late 1880s, but aside from an 1894 set of 36 players from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, the only football player depicted in a card set was Captain Henry Beecher of Yale in the 1888 Goodwin Champions, a 50-card set containing only 8 baseball players.

Forty-five years later the Goudey Gum Company issued a 48-card “Sport Kings” set that spoke to the country’s changed tastes while honoring stars of the past, too. The checklist includes the first basketball cards ever (Nat Holman, Ed Wachter, Joe Lapchick, Eddie Burke); the first pro football cards (Red Grange and Jim Thorpe, although both were honored more for their amateur accomplishments); the first U.S. issued hockey cards (Eddie Shore, Howie Morenz, Ace Bailey, Ching Johnson); swimmers Helene Madison, Johnny Weissmuller, and Duke Kahanamoku; skater Irving Jaffee and hurdler Babe Didrickson. There were tennis players, aviators, jockeys, cyclists, wrestlers, golfers, billiardists, skiers, even a speedboat racer and a dogsled champion.

If the WSHF has a compact model for its eventual composition, this card set is it. Today’s arena of sport stars seems impoverished by comparison. Think of how one might compose a 48-card set of today’s North American “sport kings” and queens ... and then there are the sports the rest of the world plays!

The World Sports Hall of Fame may just be what we need now.

ANSWERS:
Vasiliy Alekseyev Weightlifting USSR
Aleisha Cline Extreme Sports Canada
Alfredo DeOro Billiards Spain
Pierre Etchebaster Tennis France
Niki Lauda Auto Racing Austria
Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji Cricket India
Ingemar Stenmark Skiing Sweden
Major Taylor Cycling USA
Qu Yunxia Track & Field China
Stanislaus Zbyszko Wrestling Poland

--John Thorn

2006-11-15T19:53:00.000-05:00

Tattered but fabulous--the hunt started with this.

Who Remembers Pushball?

2006-11-15T19:47:00.001-05:00

From "Play's the Thing," Woodstock Times, November 16, 2006:
I knew that hockey was the ancient game of shinny transplanted onto ice, that baseball had evolved through bat and ball games dating back to the banks of the Nile, that football was a game even more ancient. But I had always believed that James Naismith was the lone true “inventor” of a major sport, when he nailed peach baskets at opposite ends of the overhead track at a gymnasium in Springfield, Massachusetts on December 15, 1891. As a physical-education instructor he felt that his students needed a vigorous indoor game for the winter months, and so — boing! — basketball.

This week, however, I have learned that the idea for the game of basketball did not alight on Naismith’s pate in a Eureka moment. An Associated Press story about a current auction of his recently unearthed relics indicated that he had been inspired to invent basketball by recalling a game he had played as a boy in Canada — “Duck on a Rock,” a medieval game of rock-throwing and tag. More interestingly to me, it reported also that before coming up with basketball he had invented other games in that winter of 1891: “He tried to adapt lacrosse and football to be played inside. He even introduced his students to a slew of invented games like Hylo Ball, Scruggy Ball and Association Football. None of them took.”

Hylo Ball? Scruggy Ball? These innovations had been lost to history until now. For an opening bid of $10,000 at Heritage Auction Galleries, one might purchase Naismith’s crudely typed rules for these heretofore hidden bypaths of basketball.

Too rich for my taste, as just one week earlier I had purchased much more modestly an Open Sesame to a whole lost world of sport: auto pushball, a variant game deriving from one very nearly as strange and obscure. The original game of pushball had been invented by Moses G. Crane of Newton, Massachusetts in 1894, barely before the age of the automobile and only three years after Naismith’s brainstorm. But I get ahead of myself.

I was on my way out of an antique shop on Catskill’s Main Street that has long been a favorite haunt of mine when I spotted a cardboard poster depicting three 1930s hot rods maneuvering around a huge ball. There wasn’t much left of it — mice had had their way with it long ago — so the proprietor, who said the placard had come from a barn in Coxsackie, let me have it for $8.00.

Bringing it home and prowling the internet, I was able to reconstruct the wording as:

B. WARD BEAM’S New 1933
INTERNATIONAL
CONGRESS of
DARE-DEVILS
Auto Push-ball [image]
10 OTHER THRILLERS!
... JULY

B. Ward Beam and Company were probably entertaining crowds at the Greene County Fair, but I guessed that an “International Congress of Dare-devils” was not designed to be a local phenomenon. It turned out that Beam was a thrill-show racer and entrepreneur even more important historically than the names that may have greater resonance today—Barney Oldfield, Aut Swenson, Earl “Lucky” Teter and his Hell Drivers, the Jimmy Lynch Death Dodgers, Jack Kochman's Champion Hell Drivers, Joie Chitwood’s Chevy Thunder Show. All that Beam did was to invent the auto thrill show, when he launched his Congress of Dare-devils in Toledo, Ohio, in 1923. Soon he was playing county and state fairs in Michigan, Indiana, and parts west. The Chicago Tribune of February 18, 1925 reported that “Country people will not attend an agricultural exhibit unless they are assured of plenty of entertainment.... Auto push-ball is a new form of amusement offered that is meeting with favor.”

Did Beam invent auto pushball as well as the auto thrill show? Almost certainly not, as the Washington Post of May 9, 1922 features an image of auto pushball — the only other one I have come across besides my poster — at San Francisco, and Beam appears not to have taken his show to California. “The latest sport to be inaugurated on the Pacific Coast is auto pushball. In it one gets many a thrill, for it is more exciting and hazardous than polo. Six autos are needed to play the game, three of them constituting a team. The same rushes apply that are used in polo. The game originated in San Francisco.”

Beam’s troupe may have been in Davenport, Iowa for a “motor rodeo” on Memorial Day in 1926, when, according to the Davenport Democrat and Leader, “the champion Canadian and American push ball teams are slated to play their [tie-breaking] thirty-first game on the 1926 championship schedule.” Surely this was Barnumesque promotion to inflate interest along with the Spalding-Goodyear ball used for the occasion, as auto pushball was just one of many attractions, from motorcycle racers to aerial acrobats. Auto pushball was tame entertainment when contrasted with the staples of the Beam show: demolition derbies, leaping buses, flaming barriers, and sundry death-defying stunts.

The August 6, 1931 Amherst (NY) Bee contained this telling advertisement: “Wanted: Single man, not over 25 years, to drive automobile in head-on collision with another car at the Albion Fairgrounds in connection with the Congress of Daredevils on August 19. Must crash with another car at 40 mph and give unconditional release in case of injury or death. Name your lowest price. Write B. Ward Beam, Albion, N.Y."

His traveling shows continued into the 1950s but biographical data about B. Ward Beam has proved hard to come by. From his 1917 draft card I learned that he was born November 18, 1892, had a wife and two children as of that time, and was a student at an aviation school in Celina, Ohio. His Social Security data indicates that he died in September 1979 (no precise date given) in Goshen, New York.

Even after his thrill-show days were done (he played the Orange County Fair in the late 1940s and early 1950s), he continued to book acts for county fairs through the Ward Beam Agency in Goshen as late as 1973. And there the trail ends for now, though I would certainly like to hear from any reader who knows more about this fascinating auto-race pioneer.

Pushball’s pioneer, Moses G. Crane, is known today instead as an inventor and manufacturer of the fire alarm box. What bit of whimsy drove him, as a member of the Newton Athletic Association in 1894, to devise the game of pushball is beyond my reconstruction. However, he did not live to see its rapid progress in the first decade of the next century, as he committed suicide July 7, 1898 in Newton.

Photographs survive of teams grappling with the six-foot-diameter leather-covered ball weighing 50 to 100 pounds, reminiscent of the giant breast chasing Woody Allen through the fields in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex. There is even a 1903 documentary short, produced in England but distributed in the U.S. as well, described in the catalogs as “A splendid and most interesting picture of a new game by two teams using a ball 6 feet in diameter. Taken at the Crystal Palace, London.” The game depicted in the film had been played in the previous October; a game two months earlier at Headingley had been between two eight-man squads representing England and America.

Such a grand international setting ... and not even a decade after its first media splash, when pushball was played between the halves of a Harvard-Brown football game played at Soldiers Field in Cambridge. The Boston Globe of October 20, 1895 reported: “It was very amusing yesterday to see the large ball rolled from side to side. Now and then a man got under the ball, and sometimes the ball was raised way above the heads of the men. The players got into very amusing attitudes.... every one who saw the exhibition was highly entertained....” The student newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in its report of the game that day, added, “Although the game is said to be conducted on carefully studied scientific principles, the first impression on the spectators was irresistibly comical.”

Adding to the comic effect, in 1902 pushball was played on horseback in Berlin and at Durland’s Riding Academy in New York, where basketball on horseback had also made its debut that year. In the following year pushball was played for laughs at Madison Square Garden. At some universities the game replaced class rush as the favored ritual clash between freshmen and sophomores. An Iowa City postcard from 1909 depicted a riotous pushball contest on “Farmers Day.”

The Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911, however, played it straight when describing pushball as a “game played by two sides on a field usually 140 yds. long and 50 yds. wide, with a ball 6 ft. in diameter and 50 lb in weight. The sides usually number eleven each, there being five forwards, two left-wings, two right-wings and two goal. The goals consist of two upright posts 18 ft. high and 20 ft. apart with a crossbar 7 ft. from the ground. The game lasts for two periods with an intermission. Pushing the ball under the bar counts 5 points; lifting or throwing it over the bar counts 8. A touchdown behind goal for safety counts 2 to the attacking side.”

Oddly, pushball continued to flourish into the 1940s in military training environments. In 1916, on the eve of America’s entry into World War I, a British short film depicting pushball offers a title card that reads: “Yale students engaged in an exciting game of push ball. This game has been recommended as being particularly suitable for soldiers who have lost their sight at the front.” U.S. Marines in training played it in 1918 at Camp Lewis, American Lake, Washington and in the 1940s at Parris Island, South Carolina.

Revived in Australia in 1971 as “sogball,” the game featured a vinyl-covered ball that punctured within minutes. The game was described by one of the organizers of the intravarsity contests as the “stupidest occupation possible, involving the greatest number of participants.”

All the same, it sure looked like fun, which is more than can be said of many of our sports. Requiescat in pace, pushball.

--John Thorn

2006-11-10T15:18:00.000-05:00

Where the twain shall meet?