Category Archives: baseball

Going ‘way back in (black) baseball history from Cubs’ Fowler

(Dexter Fowler)

Baseball coincidence is a fascinating thing. Consider just one in the many notable tidbits related to the end of the woebegone Chicago Cubs’ 71-year World Series drought—a fellow named Fowler becoming the team’s first black man to play in the Fall Classic.

That’s Dexter Fowler, a 30-year-old outfielder who, rather symbolically, was the lead-off batter in Game 1 against the Cleveland Indians. The significance of Fowler’s presence, though, isn’t related to some new civil rights breakthrough. Rather, it is another reminder of how long ago the Cubbies last appeared on the sport’s biggest stage. So long ago, in 1945, that the Big Leagues still were two years from getting around to the initial step of desegregation, in the person of Jackie Robinson.

(Jackie Robinson)

But here is the really curious statistic that does connect Fowler to racial inclusion in our national pastime. According to Baseball Hall of Fame records, the first black man on a white professional baseball team—roughly 70 years before Robinson and twice that long before Dexter Fowler—was a gent known as Bud Fowler.

(Bud Fowler)

Bud Fowler lived from 1854 to 1913 and, beginning in 1878, claimed to have played for predominantly white teams in 22 states and Canada. He was primarily a second baseman. Yellowed newspaper clippings in the Hall of Fame archives describe him as a “versatile, fast, slick fielder.” A Cincinnati Inquirer article published in the early 1900s reported that “Bud has played games for trappers’ furs. He has been rung in to help out a team for the championship of a mining camp and bags of gold dust. He has played with cowboys and Indians. He has cross-roaded it from one town to another all over the Far West, playing for what he could get and taking a hand to help out a team.”

It turns out that Bud Fowler was born John W. Jackson, son of a barber in Cooperstown, N.Y., home to the baseball Hall. There is no information on why or how he changed his name from Jackson, though he was said to be called “Bud” because of his inclination to address most people by that name. He never married, died broke and is buried in a pauper’s field just outside Cooperstown’s city limits, where a tombstone was placed on his grave in 1987 to note his place in baseball history.

He was 5-7, 155 pounds (compared to Dexter Fowler’s 21^st-Century dimensions of 6-5, 195.) Bud batted and threw righthanded. (Dexter is a switch-hitter who throws righthanded.) Like Bud, Dexter has had a number of baseball homes, playing for 10 teams at various minor-league levels—the Modesto Nuts, Waikiki Beach Boys and Tulsa Drillers among them—on his way to a nine-year Major League career with Colorado, Houston and now Chicago. And, while Dexter already has earned more than $32 million playing the game, he has a long way to go to equal Bud’s longevity.

According to that century-old Inquirer story, Bud Fowler “has been playing baseball for the past 26 years and he is yet as spry and as fast in his actions as any man on his team. He has no Charley horses or stiff joints, but can bend over and get up a grounder like a young blood….he is 48 years old, but to look at him, you would set him down to be not more than 25.” The Inquirer piece ended with the invitation to “go out and see him play second base this afternoon.”

In 1997, on the 50^th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s entry into the Majors, an Eastern Michigan University history professor, Sidney Gendin, published a paper calling Fowler “first of at least 40 blacks who played on teams in organized white baseball leagues before the turn of the century. But in the mid-1880s, with deteriorating social mores pushing blacks out of the minors, Fowler spent more time barnstorming, during which he would help support himself by working as a barber. He started his own all-black team based in Adrian, Mich., sponsored by a wire fence company, the Page Fence Giants, who toured the Midwest in the team’s own railroad car.”

Also in ’97, the Hall of Fame opened an exhibit, “Pride and Passion: The African-American Baseball Experience,” which prominently featured Bud Fowler’s role as grand marshal in the parade of long-ago baseball integration. That was before segregationists established the infamous “color line” that lasted until Robinson.

(Larry Doby)

At the opening of that exhibit, by the way, among the invited participants was Larry Doby—the first black player in the American League, who debuted months after Robinson had done so with the National League Brooklyn Dodgers. Doby’s team was the Cleveland Indians, Dexter Fowler’s current World Series opponents. And Doby, along with teammate Satchel Paige, became the first black men to win a World Series title, in 1948—the Indians’ last championship season.

Hmmm.

Vin Scully and me (sort of)

Leave a reply

It was awfully nice of Vin Scully, in his farewell Dodger Stadium broadcast wrapping up 59 seasons in Los Angeles, to mention me. Well, sort of. “Since ’58,” he said of the team’s first year on the West Coast, “you and I have really grown up together….the transistor radio was what bound us together.

“Were you among the crowd that groaned at one of my puns?” he asked. “Did you kindly laugh at one of my little jokes? Did I put you to sleep with the transistor radio tucked under your pillow?”

How did he know? In 1958, I was 11 years old. The Dodgers, with Scully in tow, had just relocated to L.A. from Brooklyn. My family had just moved to the L.A. suburb of Sepulveda in The Valley. My parents had just gifted me with a transistor radio, the modern marvel of that time, pocket-sized, which made it possible to listen to the Everly Brothers, Sheb Wooley (“It was a one-eyed, one-horned, flyin’ purple-people eater”) and Kingston Trio (“Hang down your head, Tom Dooley”) while riding a bike to the local deli or the high school gym for some pick-up basketball.

Better than the music, though, that transistor delivered Scully’s soundtrack of summertime, Dodgers play-by-play and storytelling that regularly meandered beyond baseball. His pitch-perfect combination of keen observation and verbal picture-painting, his silver-tongued accounts that somehow were simultaneously simple yet sophisticated, were a daily necessity.

So, yes, the transistor was a bedtime accessory. It was a traveling companion, and we Angelenos even toted our transistors to the games, to “see” Dodger baseball better through Scully’s descriptions than with one’s own eyes.

That was partly because, from 1958 through ’61, the Dodgers’ first L.A. home was the cavernous Coliseum, designed for Olympic track and football, which afforded lousy views of baseball action from roughly 75 percent of the seats. But with Scully’s voice emanating from all those transistors, reverberating in the vast stadium, nothing was missed.

My family left L.A. in 1962, but my half-century of travels as a sports journalist occasionally brought me within the sound of Scully’s voice, and that was a little like going home. In 1969, during my senior year at the University of Missouri’s journalism school, I was assigned to cover a game between the Dodgers and Cardinals in St. Louis, and I recall my classmate Ernie Williamson—who hailed from L.A.—being more awe-struck to be standing near Vin Scully during batting practice than any of the ballplayers. (Me, too, actually.)

That spring, in my off-campus apartment, I somehow picked up a broadcast of the Dodgers’ first game in Montreal against the new expansion team there. Scully was mulling mellifluously about that bilingual city, and how the word “gauche” was French for “left,” but with the English translation of “awkward” or “tactless.” Being left-handed, he playfully wondered if he should take offense.

I laughed at his little joke.

In 1972, I was back in Los Angeles as a raw Newsday reporter, covering a Mets game at Dodger Stadium. I procured a transistor radio to listen to Scully’s call, and of course his observations and asides found their way into my game story. Made it far better, in fact.

He passed along news of Mets’ infielder Rusty Staub’s broken hand. (“For Le Grand Orange, this year has turned to a lemon.”) He noted how Mets’ call-up Dave Schneck, though off to a blistering Big League start with his bat, was guaranteed nothing in the future. (“It’s like dirt at inspection time. If you have a weakness, boy, they’ll find it, and they’ll do the best they can to get you back in the minors.”)

Schneck soon was back in the minors and finished his Major League career with a .199 batting average after barely 100 games.

In 1980, I was casting around for historical tidbits for a feature on sports lingo, and among the puzzlements was an old baseball expression I had heard for years, identifying an easily catchable fly ball as a “can of corn.” My sources for the piece included several books, a few long-retired ballplayers—and Vin Scully.

Typically, he offered a pertinent tale, delivered by phone with the same familiar elocution and institutional knowledge that always flavored his broadcasts. “The first fellow I ever heard use that expression,” he said, “was Arch McDonald, who was a pretty famous Washington broadcaster who came to New York and did the Giants games for a couple of years. Arch was a cross between W.C. Fields and Ned Sparks, and it came out, ‘CAN o’ corrrrrn!’ But we’re still debating the origin of that one.”

I recall that my mother—no sports fan—sometimes would listen over my pre-teen shoulder when the transistor was tuned to Dodger games, drawn to Scully’s often humorous yarns or personalized background notes that he slipped into the play-by-play. His was not a style limited to balls and strikes.

Which surely is why, in a farewell column for the Los Angeles Times last week, Bill Plaschke suspected, “Now that Vin Scully is leaving, we’ll never again cheer so hard for foul balls.”

Over the years, it wasn’t Scully’s great calls of special baseball moments that separated him from the pack, though those were routinely terrific. It was the endless flow of fascinating digressions and parentheses, shared as if with a nudge of the elbow to a pal. At his final Dodgers home game, that included his recollection of Gil Hodges’ steel-like grip that could shape a ball for a pitcher, and brief reminiscence of meeting Babe Ruth as a young boy. Scully described the Dodger pitchers facing the meat of the Colorado Rockies lineup with, “There are some big mountains to climb in the range of the Rockies.”

I did not groan at the pun. To the contrary.

Every semester, I play for my Hofstra University sportswriting students Scully’s ninth-inning radio account of Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax’s 1965 perfect game, a gem of narrative detail. It not only portrays in vivid words each pitch but also the drama and tension, that there were “twenty-nine thousand people in the ballpark and a million butterflies;” that Dodger teammates in the bullpen were “straining to get a better look through the wire fence in left field;” that, for Koufax, “the mound must be the loneliest place in the world right now;” that, when fans booed a called ball, “a lot of people in the ballpark now are starting to see the pitches with their hearts.”

It was the kind of riveting recitation that would keep a kid with a transistor under his pillow awake well past lights out.

Anyway, now Vin Scully is retiring, just short of his 89^th birthday. That must mean I’m not 11 anymore.

Did Russia invent baseball? Did Romania?

2 Replies

(Abner Doubleday)

Here’s a holy-cow revelation. Baseball—what Walt Whitman called “our game, the American game;” what historian Jacques Barzun recommended as the ideal window to “know the heart and mind of America”—may be just another U.S. import.

More shocking: There are assertions out there that baseball was invented on the other side of the Iron Curtain, in lands that the old Commie-baiter Joe McCarthy judged to be as un-American as you can get.

The New York Times recently published a story that cited Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin’s claim that baseball had its roots in the Russian heartland. (Not surprisingly, current Russian autocrat Vladimir Putin—always eager to disparage Western primacy—has seconded Stalin on the matter.)

That’s not all. In 1990, a Romanian sports official suggested to me—more diplomatically, but just as confidently—that baseball very well could have originated in a small Transylvanian village more than 200 years ago.

Naturally, such a revelation smacks of heresy to the hot-dog, apple-pie faithful. (And, to some extent, sounds a bit like self-serving boasts by foreign elements.) But this is what you get when you rummage around in the dustbin of history—a debate of baseball evolution (with characteristics developed over time and great distances) as opposed to baseball’s New World creationism (fully formed in its current structure right here in the U.S. of A.)

Let us first acknowledge that scholars, while long ago dismissing as myth that Civil War general Abner Doubleday invented the game in rural Cooperstown, N.Y., nevertheless recognize Elysian Fields in Hoboken, N.J., as the sport’s mid-1800s birthplace. Baseball archaeologists do accept that the sport likely was influenced by the English games of rounders and cricket. But shaped by a Russian stick-and-ball game called lapta? Or Romania’s oina?

The Times cited a 2003 Moscow newspaper article in which the vice-president of the Russian Lapta Federation, Sergei Fokin, theorized that “Russian immigrants or Jews from Odessa [now part of Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire] brought lapta to America, and baseball evolved from there.”

Folkin argued that “lapta is a much older game, and there are so many similar concepts: tagging runners out, hitting and catching fly balls, for example.”

(Russian lapta)

But what about the lapta “pitcher,” a member of the batting team who kneels by the batter and serves up a lazy underhand toss?

As for Romania’s oina—pronounced OYN-yah—I was on assignment in Bucharest in the spring of 1990 just as the country officially revived baseball, which had been banned for a half-century because Communist despot Nicolae Ceausescu considered it a capitalist sport. When the hated Ceausescu was executed amid the Eastern bloc upheaval shortly after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a fellow named Cristian Costescu was appointed national baseball chief, based on his previous job running the oina federation.

(Romanian oina team)

Oina, he contended, “was exactly like baseball” in its original form in the southern Romanian village of Alba Iulia and was brought to the United States by two immigrants in the early 1800s. Costescu said those immigrants became soldiers in the U.S. Army and taught their game to fellow troops—who happened to be commanded by none other than Abner Doubleday.

The Doubleday reference, as noted above, could be a disqualifying factor in Costescu’s oina-baseball timeline. (Oina, by the way, employs the same “pitcher” role as lapta, which makes it closer to T-ball than baseball.) Furthermore, the Russians’ lapta-to-baseball story loses a bit of credibility for anyone who witnessed the 1990 baseball game between the U.S. and USSR during the now-defunct Goodwill Games in Seattle.

At the time, because baseball was about to become an Olympic medal sport for the first time at the ’92 Barcelona Games, nations such as Romania and the about-to-collapse Soviet Union were eager to hone their diamond bona fides. Yet all indications were that they were starting from scratch.

The Soviets had recruited an American businessman named Rick Spooner, who was based in Moscow, to work with the natives. “About two years ago,” Spooner told me then, “a batter got hit in the back with a fastball, turned around and said to me, ‘Richard, what does that mean?’ I said, ‘Boris, that means you go to first base.’”

A cycling coach, Vladimir Bogatyrev, who never had seen baseball until he toured Cuba with his cycling team, was hired to manage the national team. Three baseball diamonds hurriedly were built in the USSR but, when the Soviets got to the Goodwill Games in Seattle in the summer of ’90, they mostly were mimicking American players’ habits of chewing tobacco and spitting, slapping high fives and tipping their caps—with rudimentary evidence of mastering pitching, hitting and fielding skills. They lost that game to the Yanks, 17-0.

“Chew tobacco?” Soviet catcher Vadim Kulakov said. When he smiled, his teeth showed the answer. “Red Man,” he said.

First baseman Ilya Onokov proudly related that, like so many Major Leaguers he had studied, he had a nickname, which he reported in clear but accented English. “WACK-yoom CLAY-nar,” he said. The vacuum cleaner.

Through five Olympic cycles, neither the Soviet Union/Russian team nor the Romanians ever qualified for the Games. But, now that baseball has been reinstated for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, after being dropped from 2012 and 2016, there surely will be renewed efforts to ramp up baseball commitments in those countries.

Possibly, we again will hear their cases for having birthed the sport.

In 1990 Costescu, the Romanian official, showed me some articles he had published on the history of oina, one of which asked, “Baseball=oina?” Just so he would not be accused of outright plagiarism, Costescu offered, tactfully: “We are not saying Romanians invented baseball. We are saying this: We would not like someone else to tell us that oina was invented by others.”

That’s a deal. (But we Yanks reserve the right to keep calling it the “World” Series, whether the lone non-U.S. team from Toronto makes it or not.)

A baseball habit without rhyme or reason

Leave a reply

It’s baseball season. It’s also the first week of a New York City law that bans chewing tobacco at the ball field. The timing of this—folklore encountering legislation and coinciding with National Poetry Month—surely demands a sardonic little ditty.

They’re chewin’ toback

Bubblegum, Zwieback;

They’re swearin’ and scratchin’ and such.

All drivel and drool,

They’re lookin’ so cool;

No wonder we love ‘em so much!

Could it be that one of the sport’s most ingrained customs will be snuffed out? Is it possible that a quintessential baseball convention—so long considered manly, even cute—at last will go the way of the equally unsanitary spitball?

Consider the long history of ballplayers resembling chipmunks—wads of tobacco packed in their grotesquely distended cheeks. Expectoration forever has been a part of baseball’s “look,” coexisting with the game’s quasi-religious symbolism and perfect symmetry, a field of dreams with Garden-of-Eden roots mirroring the American soul.

While erudite essayists, with lumps in their throats and tears in their eyes, have written of how central baseball is to fathers relating to sons, of the spiritual connections to past gods of the diamond, the rough-hewn image of slugger-with-chaw has been equally persistent. And almost as celebrated.

It was only natural that, in his 1994 parody of the classic poem “Casey at the Bat,” humorist Garrison Keillor depicted Mudville’s Casey, as the hated opponent of the Dustburg side, stepping to the plate with his he-man plug.

Oh the fury in his visage as he spat tobacco juice

And heard the little children screaming violent abuse.

He knocked the dirt from off his spikes, reached down and eased his pants.

“What’s the matter? Did ya lose ‘em?” cried a lady in the stands.

Herb Washington, who had been a track star at Michigan State before he signed with the Oakland A’s in the early 1970s, exclusively to run bases with his exceptional speed, was asked the difference between track and baseball. “In baseball,” Washington said, “the players have an overabundance of spittle.” Because chomping on that stuff promotes the need to spit regularly.

A 1999 poem by John Poff, “Baseball Sestina,” contains the word “tobacco” in every stanza, beginning

An ancient North Carolinian broke off a plug of tobacco

And said, “When you get to the ballpark,

First thing you do is check which way the wind is blowing…”

Spit tobacco is said to have come to baseball with the predominance of 19^th Century farm boys, who had learned that smoking interfered with chores but a nicotine fix was available with the smokeless substance. More revolting than poetic are such tales as the one of Don Zimmer, who spent 65 years as a player, coach and manager. Zimmer was known to wrap bubble gum around his chaw to keep it intact, but that caused the gum to stick to his false teeth, and after once angrily flinging the wad to the ground during an argument, he had to sheepishly retrieve his dentures from a dusty glob.

Steve Hamilton, who pitched for six teams in 12 seasons into the 1970s, was with the Yankees when he swallowed his chaw while standing on the mound in Kansas City. And threw up.

Still, in his 1990s “Baseball Catalogue,” veteran baseball author Dan Schlossberg included a short section on “The Art of Chewing.” Big-league rosters continue to include fellows who took up the smokeless tobacco habit, sometimes as early as grammar school, because they saw older players chewing and thereby judged that “it was cool.”

My friend Tony has told me that, as kids attending Giants games at New York’s Polo Grounds in the late 1940s, he and his pals would position themselves near the visiting bullpen and ask likeable catcher Joe Garagiola to demonstrate a Major League tobacco spit for them. Of course he would.

Post-playing career, an enlightened Garagiola spent decades preaching about the evils of chewing tobacco, though it wasn’t until 1993 that the stuff was banned throughout the minor leagues. A 2011 attempt to prohibit it in the Majors was blocked by the players association as unreasonably restricting a legal product.

Then, two years ago, Tony Gwynn—one of baseball’s most admired and loved figured—died at 54, after Gwynn attributed the oral cancer that eventually killed him to have resulted from years of chewing tobacco.

That moved real estate agent and poet Steve Hermanos to compose “Why Do They Chew Tobacco, Dad?”

‘They chew tobacco?!’ the confused child asks.

‘That’s disgusting! Why do they chew tobacco, dad?!’

And so, revealed to the youngster at this moment,

Baseball players chew tobacco.

The players’ cheeks and lips bulge with the bitter stuff,

They spit brown spit.

–

How can you, the parent, respond?

‘It’s just what they do.

They’ve always done it.’

That’s Exhibit A of the charge Extremely Lame Parenting.

Now, sanely and long overdue, New York has joined San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles and Chicago in a municipal assumption of the good parenting role abdicated by professional sports leagues. Here and now, in National Poetry Month.

Incongruity

Of health and P-TUI !

Finally moved cities to act.

Our heroes might learn

A leaf they can turn;

Just spit out that wad of toback.

The U.S., Cuba and baseball diplomacy

Leave a reply

(N.Y. Daily News photo)

Anyone lucky enough to visit La Esquina Caliente in Havana’s El Parque Central immediately learns the exalted status of baseball in Cuba. There, at The Hot Corner of the island capital’s Central Park, men have been gathering for decades to passionately argue the value of players and teams.

It is the Cuban version of discourse that we Yanquis typically experience on barstools and sports talk radio, evidence of an unbroken spiritual link between Americans and Cubans in spite of a half-century of political polarization.

Baseball is their national pastime, too.

So, now that the Obama administration at last has moved to normalize relations with Cuba, what could be a more logical cultural exchange than sending the Tampa Bay Rays to the Caribbean island for an exhibition game next spring?

If all the details can be ironed out, that will be the first such tour by a Major League Baseball team since the Baltimore Orioles played a home-and-home exhibition against the Cuban national team in 1999. But it hardly would represent a new relationship, despite the decades of ideological hardball between the two nations.

As early as 1937, the New York Giants made Havana their spring training site, followed by the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1941, ’42 and ’47 and the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1953. When Jackie Robinson broke the majors’ color barrier in 1947, one benefit to training in Cuba was that country’s long history of racial integration.

In his acclaimed 1952 novel, “Old Man and the Sea,” Hemingway—a Cuban resident for most of the 1940s and 1950s—had the fictitious Cuban fisherman Santiago talk baseball with his young companion, rhapsodizing about the Yankees and “the great DiMaggio.”

The 1959 Cuban revolution severed the island’s formal ties with Organized Baseball. But big-league teams, technically prevented from doing business in Cuba, found ways to get Latin American scouts into the country to evaluate the plentiful homegrown talent, and a fairly steady stream of Cuban defectors continued to find their way to the majors—Yoenis Cespedes, Yasiel Puig and Aroldis Chapman being some resent examples.

It might be worth remembering that a young Castro was once considered a pitching prospect by the Giants; that Havana was home to the Cincinnati Reds’ Triple-A affiliate Sugar Kings of the International League from 1954 to ’59; and that just months after Castro’s rebels ousted the U.S.-backed authoritarian government of president Fulgencio Batista, the Junior World Series was contested between the American Association champion Minneapolis Millers and the I.L. pennant-winning Sugar Kings.

That series concluded with a seventh-game, ninth-inning Havana victory, with future Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski playing second base for the Millers, who were managed by perennial hard-luck baseball man Gene Mauch. Castro was omnipresent—in the stands, in the Sugar Kings dugout, addressing the home fans: “I came here to see our team beat Minneapolis, not as premier, but as just a baseball fan. I want to see our club win the Little World Series. After the triumph of the revolution, we should also win the Little World Series.”

The next year, Castro nationalized all U.S.-owned enterprises in Cuba and then-baseball commissioner Ford Frick decreed the Sugar Kings be moved to Jersey City, the first of several stops for that franchise before reaching its current iteration as the Norfolk Tides. (An Orioles affiliate; small world.)

U.S. national teams have made a couple of Cuban appearances since then, including the 1991 Pan American Games, which were attended by both Castro and (separately) Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, a U.S. Olympic Committee vice president at the time.

Steinbrenner contended then that Castro had wanted the Yankees to “come down here for an exhibition in 1977, ’78, but [baseball commissioner] Bowie Kuhn, in his infinite wisdom, wanted it to be an All-Star team instead. And it never happened.”

Now, what a visitor to Havana from Estados Unidos might be surprised to find, along with the baseball knowledge of those fanaticos at La Esquina Caliente, is a lovingly maintained 45,000-seat national stadium, Estadio Latinoamericano, smack in the middle of the city’s many paint-starved, deteriorating buildings. And, on the scoreboard, the retention of English-language baseball parlance—“ball,” “strike,” “out.” Topps baseball cards have been known to find their way around Cuba.

The island is a thoroughly natural locale to host a team from what Cubans know as the Gran Ligas. If the Rays indeed venture to Havana a few months hence, it will be—for baseball fans here and there—a touch of paradise lost and found.

A song of long-suffering, and the Cubs

Leave a reply

Enough about the Mets for a moment. What Chicago needs now, with the Cubs having added to their historic run of baseball failure, is someone whose allegiance to the team—and whose sense of humor—is not diminished by grinding, recurrent baseball disappointment.

Steve Goodman died in 1984 of leukemia, only 36 years old. But, before he went, among the splendid songs he wrote was “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request.” It is a roguishly heartfelt ditty, not so much crying-in-his-beer hopelessness as an expression of lasting affection.

Do they still play the blues in Chicago when baseball season rolls around? Goodman sang. When the snow melts away, do the Cubbies still play, in their Ivy-covered burial ground?

It was Chicago native Nelson Algren, a prominent literary figure of the 1940s and 50s, who said, “Before you earn the right to rap any sort of joint, you have to love it a little bit.” Of his beloved Cubs, Goodman had license to sing, from a rooftop overlooking Wrigley Field, of “the home of the brave, the land of the free, and the doormat of the National League.”

For outsiders, celebrating Mets fans among them, it is entirely too easy to mock the Cubs who, for five score and seven years, have gone without a championship—squirming in public in what could be spelled “wriggley” field. Carl Sandburg’s description of his hometown, “the city of the big shoulders,” calls to mind a symbolic Cub-at-the-bat, appropriately proportioned with a broad, ample resting place for his Louisville Slugger while watching another imminently hittable pitch go by.

One is tempted to think of Cubs hitters as somehow lacking courage. Chicken in the car and the car won’t go, that’s how you spell….

Their last National League pennant was in 1945–and only then while most of Major League Baseball’s best players were off fighting in World War II. Their past is freighted with curses and omens, and such meatheaded experiments as the College of Coaches, an eight-man committee mandated by owner P.K. Wrigley that functioned (sort of) in place of a manager from 1961 into the 1965 season, a span when the Cubs never finished higher than seventh in the league.

The only lesson there, a form of double-play combination for Old Man Wrigley: He who Tinkers with a franchise for Ever hasn’t a Chance.

So here was singer/songwriter Goodman, a man with whom Mets fans—who have endured their own lengthy diamond travails—should be able to identify. Author of “City of New Orleans,” a 1970s hit covered by Arlo Guthrie, Goodman grew up a Cub devotee in suburban Park Ridge, Ill., where he was a Maine East High School classmate of Hillary Rodham Clinton. Clinton, it happens, is among the members of the Emil Verban Memorial Society, which is nothing more than a collection of roughly 200 loyal Cubs fans, their organization named for a plodding Cubs player who hit (if “hit” is the right word) .095 in 1950.

President Ronald Reagan, an Illinois native who briefly did radio play-by-play for Cubs games in his salad days, was part of the Verban Society, along with TV personalities Bryant Gumbel and Bruce Morton, golfer Ray Floyd, actor Tom Bosley and conservative columnist George Will.

Plus, of course, the club included Goodman, who also wrote a strangely optimistic anthem, “Go, Cubs, Go,” with the refrain, “The Cubs are gonna win today.” It has been reported that Goodman only created that song out of spite, after the team’s general manager in the early 1980s, Dallas Green, proclaimed “A Dying Cub Fan’s Last Request” too depressing.

It is only depressing to know that Goodman died so young, sad to know he won’t be giving us more sly lyrics like these, in which he lamented how the Cubs…

made me a criminal, that’s what they did; they stole my youth from me. I’d forsake my teachers to sit in the bleachers in flagrant truancy. One thing led to another, and soon I discovered alcohol, gambling, dope. Football. Hockey. And lacrosse.

But what do you expect when you raise a young boy’s hopes and just crush ‘em like so many paper beer cups? Year after year after year. After year after year after year after year after year…..

Before we are surrounded by the noisy passion of Mets fans during the upcoming World Series, then, listen to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xBxZGQ1dJk

Not exactly winning behavior

Leave a reply

What’s the word I want here? Inane? Asinine? Puerile? When the Mets clinched a berth in baseball’s post season last week, they celebrated by pouring champagne on each other. Vacuous? Same thing when the Yankees secured a spot in the playoffs. Moronic?

Oh, it’s an old baseball ritual, as predictable as the changing leaves of autumn. A team qualifies for the so-called “second season”—the World Series or league divisional series, even the one-game wild card competition—and its players engage in a liquid food fight. As delirious as if they had cured cancer or ended war.

They should be happy, of course. They have achieved a worthy-enough goal in their decidedly competitive profession. Woo hoo. But their tiresome, annual champagne-bath rite—wasteful, childish and ultimately far out of proportion to the accomplishment—spirals into embarrassment.

When Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay became the first men to reach Mount Everest’s summit, they did not pour adult beverage over each other’s head. Nor did Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin when they set foot on the moon. There was a poet named Ted Koosner who, after 35 years of plugging away, in 2006 won the Pulitzer Prize, the World Series ring of his chosen field. He marked the occasion by going to a local café and having a hot beef sandwich.

Then there is baseball, with its over-the-top, frat-house custom of pouring bubbly onto goofy teammates, coaches, other team employees and reporters. The whole exercise is choreographed—team attendants prepare for the event by hanging protective plastic sheets in the clubhouse and provide safety goggles for the players.

It’s an expensive mess, once reported to cost from $20,000 to $40,000 and requiring day-after steam-cleaning of carpets and replacing ceiling tiles ruined by the spraying booze. Former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent once called the bedlam “silly” and tried to curtail it, but got no support from players or owners.

In 2009, the Los Angeles Angels took the idiocy down another notch, to insensitive crassness, when they doused beer on the jersey of Nick Adenhart, their teammate who had been killed during the season by a drunken driver.

There has been some effort by baseball to limit the champagne and, in some cases, replace it with Ginger ale. (Which also is dispensed incoherently.) But the tradition no doubt is fostered by witless media treatment: The wallowing player jubilation is quite visual, after all, just the thing for SportsCenter and sports-page photos.

Yet it may be worth noting that the most exaggerated sports championship of them all, the Super Bowl, is observed without such behavior. In the 1960s, NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle decreed that no alcohol be permitted in locker rooms at any time—a rule that still stands—because it conveyed a poor image of the players, particularly to young fans.

Here’s the suggestion I have for giddy baseball celebrants—which comes from the late football Hall of Famer Andy Robustelli, who used to cringe when players punctuated their own terrific performances with wild look-at-me dances: “Act like you’ve been there before.”

Stumbling into some dark American history

Leave a reply

Sometimes a carefree getaway to some charming locale can stumble a person onto a bit of dark, sad American history. We were in Seattle recently and took a ferry ride to Bainbridge Island, a trendy little place on Puget Sound that proclaims itself “35 minutes by ferry, miles from ordinary.”

On the island, there is a walkabout guide directing tourists to wine-tasting boutiques, bake and ice cream shops, art galleries, coffee houses and a farmer’s market. And a small historical museum, wherein there are detailed accounts of what Presidential historian Michael Beschloss has called Franklin Roosevelt’s “now-notorious Executive Order 9066.”

That decree, issued shortly after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, was based on the unreasonable fear that all people of Japanese descent were security risks. (American Muslims since 9/11 may identify with this.) It mandated the forcible removal, without due process, of more than 110,000 people—about two-thirds of them American citizens—to 10 distant, primitive camps patrolled by armed guards.

And the first unseemly roundup of anyone with Japanese roots, something of a test case to see if the U.S. government could get away with such a scheme, was on Bainbridge Island, where Japanese immigrants first landed in 1883 to farm and work the sawmills.

In early 1942, there were 277 people packed off from Bainbridge to the Manzanar camp in the California desert and retained until the end of World War II, cooped up in crude barracks. In the Bainbridge museum are videos detailing the operation, and pictures by renowned photographer Ansel Adams of those incarcerated in Manzanar.

The whole xenophobic undertaking—U.S. soldiers brandishing rifles with fixed bayonets as they herded the Japanese-Americans from their homes—is disorienting to consider in the land of the free, where all men supposedly are considered equal, “endowed by the Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The old films in the Bainbridge museum—of Japanese-Americans allowed to bring only possessions they could carry, marched onto ferries and trains and ultimately fenced into camps with barbed wire, watch towers and searchlights—are eerily similar to scenes of Nazi trains loading up Jews.

It wasn’t until 1988 that President Ronald Reagan at last acknowledged the injustice, issued a formal apology for the nation and pledged a measly $20,000 for each survivor of the camps.

But here’s the astonishing part. Some of those in relocation camps signed up for service in the U.S. Army’s almost all-Japanese-American unit and fought for the government that essentially had jailed them.

Beschloss recently wrote of how baseball teams, organized by those trapped within the so-called “war relocation camps,” flourished, because many inmates considered baseball a “weapon with which, amid their hourly humiliations, they could assert their Americanism.”

Manzanar (Ansel Adams photo)

My only brush with formerly incarcerated Japanese-Americans was just as startling for the apparent lack of resentment. When the U.S. flag was raised, and the Star Spangled Banner played, to celebrate Kristi Yamaguchi’s gold-medal victory in figure skating at the 1992 Winter Olympics, it certainly seemed ironic—given that Yamaguchi’s father, Jim, was a California-raised, third-generation American who had been banished to an internment camp for people of Japanese ancestry. And her mother, Carole, had been born in such a camp.

Jim Yamaguchi was 7 when he was sent to a camp in Arizona. Carole Yamaguchi’s parents, George and Katherine, had been exiled to Amache, Colo., even though George was serving in the Army in Germany at the time.

Yet Carole Yamaguchi told me during those Olympics, “Our parents never said much to us children about it until we were much older, and then they just explained what happened. My dad wasn’t bitter. He was such an American he didn’t even give us Japanese names.”

Jim Yamaguchi’s only trip to Japan, Carole said, was years after the war. He was a dentist in the U.S. Air Force. “He had a great time,” Carole said. “He was just fixing teeth and playing golf.”

Baseball records, discounted

Leave a reply

First of all, we need to lose the term “steroid era” in baseball. All that label describes is the period of time when the sport’s leadership weaponized the use of performance enhancing drugs by ignoring their long-obvious presence among elite athletes.

Only with the Balco revelations in 2002 and the 2007 Mitchell Report was Major League Baseball at last shamed into doing something about doping. That was four decades after Olympic sports began policing illegal substance abuse. Even then, it took years before baseball’s commitment to testing resembled effective international standards.

Furthermore, we need to be grown-up enough to admit that the improved drug screening and stiffer penalties have not magically eliminated banned substances. Just this year, more than two dozen players in the major and minor leagues have been busted for various steroids, including repeated cases involving Stanozolol, an old, old favorite that got sprint champion Ben Johnson spectacularly stripped of his gold medal at the 1988 Olympics.

With the curtain pulled back on this ongoing nefarious behavior, then, there is the persistent riddle of statistics, and just what effect juicing should have on baseball’s precious records. No other sport is as obsessed with averages, means and medians to theoretically collate career accomplishments of men who played the game in different decades—even different centuries.

Two recent posts on the FiveThirtyEight web site considered this pickle, citing a SurveyMonkey Audience poll asking Americans whether some players’ stats should be subject to a “steroid discount.” (Another dilemma here: Would a discount be applied to players merely accused of doping by credible sources as well as those who have admitted drug use or have failed tests?)

FiveThirtyEight reported that 41 percent of poll respondents believed all records should stand as they are; 23 percent said dopers should have their records wiped out completely; 36 percent suggested some reduction percentage. FiveThirtyEight subsequently settled on three charts, one reflecting actual home run totals, another with home run numbers reduced by 20 percent and another downgrading long-ball stats by 33 percent. (Other batting stats and pitching records were not considered.)

According to those calculations, the notorious Barry Bonds drops from No. 1 in all-time homers (762) to No. 4 (657) via the 20-percent discount and No. 6 (588) with a 33-percent penalty. (Bonds, it should be noted, played the last of his 22 Major Leagues seasons in 2007 and never failed a drug screening, while MLB did not commence “survey” drug testing until 2003, and did not establish even moderate penalties for positive tests until 2004.)

Alex Rodriguez, who likewise never failed steroid screening though he has twice confessed to doping, would have his homer ranking slip from No. 4 (674) to No. 7 (598) and No. 11 (548) in the FiveThirtyEight models.

Here I acknowledge the absolute impossibility to know just who has cheated and who hasn’t, as well as an aversion to canonizing ballplayers based simply on their athletic skills—naturally produced or not. (A modest proposal: Skip Hall of Fame enshrinements and limit a demystified Cooperstown to its fabulous museum aspect, housing a full record of player history that includes any proven moral turpitude. This would minimize the danger of affording venerated status to really good athletes by hanging their plaques in a reverential hall and allowing their grand statistics to confer on them the title of Great Men. And would address the problem of deputizing a group of baseball writers to determine which players are worthy of entering the Hall’s pearly gates.)

I confess, with baseball’s ever-proliferating formulas—WHIP, WAR, VORP and so on—being numbed by numbers. So I give the last words on the subject to my friend Tony Spota, whose elaborate set of impressive quantitative measurements enable him to rank every player in baseball history.

Tony Spota in his statistics lab

(Among the Spota equations are Ye=(G/300) + (Ab/1000) and C=[2(W+Sb)-K]/(Ab+W), which conspiracy theorists might mistake for nuclear codes but which are carefully devised and weighted to consider, beyond the usual batting and slugging averages and defensive numbers, what he calls “productivity” and even “cunning.”)

Bottom line: “Records should stand,” Spota has concluded, though his overall evaluation of players does not ignore the doping quandary. For ranking purposes, he applies a 10-percent steroid penalty to what he defines as each player’s “quality” (as opposed to “longevity”). And he places that level of punishment not only on players who have had a positive drug test, but also to those included in the Mitchell Report and those who have admitted doping. Even, he said, “a guy like Ivan Rodriguez who, when asked about using steroids, said, ‘God only knows.’”

Arbitrary? “It’s my formula,” Spota reminded.

Fair enough. In the end, by making his various integers and digits dance, he figured that Barry Bonds’ widely accepted use of steroids—though never legally proven or acknowledged by Bonds—knocks the mighty slugger down from No. 1, all-time, to a less-heroic No. 8. (Still not so bad. Spota’s top six are Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Walter Johnson, Hank Aaron, Cy Young and Stan Musial.) Likewise, via the Spota rules, Alex Rodriguez falls from 23^rd to 52^nd, Roger Clemens from 27^th to 60^th, Rafael Palmeiro from 31^st to 66^th.

“By the way,” Spota warned. “All of this gets blown away when we start genetic engineering.”

Ah. The “bionic era.”

Jackie Robinson, the only real No. 42

2 Replies

To have every Major League player wearing No. 42 for games on April 15 these past eight years, as they did again Wednesday, is poignantly contrary to Brooklyn Dodger outfielder Gene Hermanski’s dark humor on a 1947 evening in Atlanta.

The Dodgers were about to play an exhibition game that night with Jackie Robinson in uniform No. 42. As the first black man on a big-league roster, in the days of Jim Crow, Robinson couldn’t be missed among his all-white teammates, no matter his raiment, and there had been a telephone call promising that if Robinson stepped onto the field, he would be shot. In the pre-game clubhouse, Hermanski offered, “Why don’t we all wear No. 42? They won’t know who to hit.”

So we have continuity with an encouraging twist. From Robinson’s solitary mission to personally integrate baseball, which was legitimately the “national pastime” when the populace was barely aware of the NFL or the brand-new NBA, we now have solidarity. Everyone, for one night, dresses up like Jackie Robinson on the anniversary of his first big-league game.

It is a nice gesture to an historic figure. Although, by and large, it doesn’t go much beyond a passing reference to a man—and a time—that current players and citizens born after 1947 can barely fathom. “Babe Ruth changed baseball,” Long Island University history professor Joe Dorinson said. “Jackie Robinson changed America, which in the long run is more important.”

When we spoke briefly by phone on Thursday, Dorinson was on his way to teaching his “History of Sports: A search for heroes” class. “I am wearing,” he said, “my Brooklyn Dodgers No. 42 uniform shirt.” Dorinson happens to be among the prominent Jackie Robinson scholars and in 1997, the 50^th anniversary of Robinson breaking baseball’s color line, Dorinson was co-coordinator of a massive Jackie Robinson symposium at LIU.

Dorinson preaches that sports “is not only a mirror on society but also a catalyst to produce social change,” and that three-day 1997 LIU academic conference demonstrated by gathering historians, baseball experts, old ballplayers, psychologists and just plain fans to sort out Robinson and his consequential legacy.

Recent events beyond athletic fields continue to confirm that a post-racial America hardly is a settled issue. But Dorinson has quoted the late historian Jules Tygiel (who had participated in the Robinson symposium) that “Jackie Robinson’s story, like the story of Passover, has to be retold each year. As the Jews were once slaves in Egypt, blacks were slaves in America, and the Jackie Robinson story brings renewal and hope.”

So, while there is consternation in some circles that the percentage of American blacks in Major League baseball actually has fallen in recent years—from a high of 17 percent in 1997 to 8.2 percent now—the Robinson inheritance lives on as one of diversity, of increased opportunity in American sports for Latinos, women, Asians. From being 100-percent white in 1946, the Majors’ current rosters are roughly 60 percent white. A real meritocracy.

George Vecsey, a giant in sports journalism, recently shared a poem on his Web site from Charles Barasch’s 2008 book, “Dreams of the Presidents,” in which Barasch imagined William Taft’s reverie of pitching in relief of Taft-era Hall of Famer Walter Johnson. Taft, the first President to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at a major league game (in 1910), fancies himself—in the Barasch verse—being beckoned from the stands, removing his tie and cuff links, rolling up his sleeves and striking out Ty Cobb.

And then retiring both Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. Black men. In the big leagues.

In reality, in those decades before Jackie Robinson, what seems normal now—to have a prominent sports league’s workforce mostly reflecting the population in general—didn’t exist. Only with the appearance of Robinson, essayist Roger Rosenblatt told the 1997 LIU symposium attendees, was there “a victory over absurdity. Victory over the ludicrous….When Robinson played, he turned an upside-down nation right-side up. Life created by white America for black America is nuts. Enter Jackie Robinson, to show us the nonsense in his bright, aristocratic way.”

Robinson, of course, was a baseball superstar. A .311 hitter over 10 seasons, the leader on six league championship teams, Rookie of the Year in 1947 and league MVP two seasons later, holder of the ungodly statistic of stealing home 20 times, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1972.

Much more than all that, he was a poke in the eye of an unjust world, an elbow in the ribs on an unfair society not living up to its ideal of all men being created equal. Yet a fellow who tempered his on-field aggressiveness with years of turning the other cheek to outrageous insults. Yeshiva University English professor Manfred Weidhorn called Robinson “a rare case of applied Christianity.”

Another April 15 is a reminder: Even if we all don No. 42, there’s no mistaking which of us is Jackie Robinson.

(Illustration by Bob Newman)

John Jeansonne

Newsday sportswriter emeritus/Hofstra University journalism adjunct

Category Archives: baseball

Going ‘way back in (black) baseball history from Cubs’ Fowler

Vin Scully and me (sort of)

Did Russia invent baseball? Did Romania?

A baseball habit without rhyme or reason

The U.S., Cuba and baseball diplomacy

A song of long-suffering, and the Cubs

Not exactly winning behavior

Stumbling into some dark American history

Baseball records, discounted

Jackie Robinson, the only real No. 42