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 BASEBALL . . . see "ENTERTAINMENT, HOBBIES, & LEISURE ACTIVITIES" for related links see "SPORTS" for related links Ruthlessly pricking our gonfalon bubble, Making a Grant hit into a double— Words that are heavy with nothing but trouble: 'Tinker to Evers to Chance.' --Franklin Pierce Adams (1881—1960) American columnist and member of the Algonquin Round Table. In the "New York Mail" [July 1910]. (The Chicago Cubs in those days had a great double-play combination in shortstop Joe Tinker, second baseman Johnny Evers, and first baseman Frank Chance.) [GBAQ] When I was 4, I learned that Santa Claus didn't exist. When I was 9, I found out that my father didn't know everything. When the Dodgers left I was 20, and things have never been the same. --Marty Adler, Dodger fan, on the team's move from Brooklyn to Los Angeles in 1957, quoted in "American Way" magazine [15 October 1986] [GBAQ]. If I ever find a pitcher who has heat, a good curve, and a slider, I might seriously consider marrying him, or at least proposing. --Sparky [George Lee] Anderson (1934— ) American baseball player (one year) and manager; elected to the Hall of Fame in 2000. - Little Falls, N.J. "It was perfect the first time," says Yogi Berra of Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series, "and it was even better tonight." A packed house in the theater of the Yogi Berra Museum and Learning Center on the campus of Montclair State University was in full agreement. Roberta Ziemba, who was in her early teens when she saw the game at Yankee Stadium on Oct. 8, 1956, thinks, "It was better than perfect. It was more fun this time around." In the fifth game of the '56 fall classic, Mr. Larsen faced 27 Brooklyn Dodgers and retired them all, including future Hall of Famers Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and Roy Campanella. The feat was unprecedented in the previous 52 World Series, and it hasn't been duplicated in the 49 that have followed -- or, in the immortal words of Mr. Larsen's catcher, "It's never happened in World Series history, and hasn't happened since." Last Friday, 80 guests paid $300 each to watch the game, with proceeds benefiting the museum and charities designated by Messrs. Berra and Larsen. It was the first time either man had seen a replay of more than brief highlights of the game. In fact, it was the first time that anyone in attendance had seen a replay of more than short clips of any baseball game played before 1965 -- except Doak Ewing. Mr. Ewing, a sports film collector, says that there may be only 10 complete or near-complete baseball games (the recording of the Larsen perfect game is missing only the first inning) prior to that season still in existence, all World Series games. "There are newsreels of highlights from thousands of games," says Mr. Ewing, "but nobody thought to keep entire games. Games were looked on as entertainment; nobody knew that we'd regard them as history." Mr. Ewing bought this piece of history at a flea market; it had been put up for sale by the son of the man who kinescoped it for the Armed Forces more than half a century ago. "The games were recorded in order to be shown to servicemen and then destroyed," Mr. Ewing notes. "We have this one by luck and accident." Those lucky enough to watch the eight innings of the game looked through a window back to a vanished world. "The first thing you notice," says Berra museum director Dave Kaplan, "is how much faster the game moved then than now. I mean how quickly they got the game going again after each side was out. There was only one commercial after each team's at-bat. Today, you've got three or four." There was just one sponsor for the perfect game, Gillette safety razors. Some of the commercials were done by the game's TV announcers, the Yankees' Mel Allen and the Dodgers' Vin Scully. Audience member Don MacNair, who admitted to faking illness to stay home from school and watch the game on television, noticed something else: "All you saw on the screen was the game. I didn't realize how cluttered up modern telecasts are until I saw this one. There was no box score in the corner, no ticker tape running across the bottom with scores of other games, no logo for the network or Major League Baseball, and no commercials for other shows flashing on the screen between batters. It was so enjoyable just to sit and watch the ballgame." Jim Pascuiti felt the same way about the commentary: "Mel Allen and Vin Scully were so good. Everything they said was to the point, and when there wasn't anything to say, they kept quiet." Or, as Yogi added, "If they didn't have anything to say, they didn't say it." Everyone was quick to notice one thing when the first batter was retired -- no instant replay. "Everyone had better pay attention," Mr. Ewing quipped to the crowd, "because you're only going to see everything once." Once was enough for Mr. Larsen, who got chuckles from the audience when he remarked, "Yup, that's pretty much the way I remembered it happening." As the game progressed, Mr. Larsen recalls, none of his teammates would talk to him. "They were superstitious. I wasn't. I wanted to talk about it. I sat down next to Mickey Mantle" -- who helped preserve the perfect game with a great running catch off a drive off the bat of Gil Hodges -- "and he was shocked. He got up and moved away from me." Mr. Larsen wasn't superstitious, but the announcers were. Bob Wolff, who called the game on radio, told the museum crowd: "I never actually said 'He has a perfect game going.' I kept talking around it, saying things like 'Well, all the base runners tonight have been Yankees.'" Mr. Berra thought that his pulse raced just as fast watching the replay as it did 51 years ago: "I kept worrying before each pitch as if I was playing the game tonight: 'Is this the right call? Am I set up in the right location? I don't want to ruin this by calling for the wrong pitch!' But watching the game again, I guess I did OK." Larsen concurs: "People forget that half the credit should go to Yogi. It was his perfect game as much as mine. He called every pitch of the game, and I had total confidence in him. I never shook home off once. Why spoil a good thing?" For some, the evening was an opportunity not just to relive a great memory but to pass it on to the next generation. Dr. Paul Lioy, who saw the game with his father, watched the replay with his son, Jason, who flew in from Pittsburgh. Dr. Lioy remembers: "My father actually suggested leaving around the sixth inning so we could beat the traffic. Can you imagine?" Dr. Lioy's father took him out of school early that day so they could go to the game. "I sure hope my grammar-school principal doesn't read this." In honor of the occasion, Dr. Lioy paraphrased a "Yogi-ism" on the spot: "It was like 'Back to the Future' all over again." --"A Far-From-Instant Replay For Larsen, Berra and Fans" Allen Barra in _Wall Street Journal_ [27 February 2007]. - Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game-and do it by watching first some high school or small-town teams. The big league games are too fast for the beginner and the newspapers don't help. To read them with profit you have to know a language that comes easy only after philosophy has taught you to judge practice. Here is scholarship that takes effort on the part of the outsider, but it is so bred into the native that it never becomes a dreary round of technicalities. The wonderful purging of the passions that we all experienced in the fall of '51, the despair groaned out over the fate of the Dodgers from whom the league pennant was snatched at the last minute, give us some idea of what Greek tragedy was like. Baseball is Greek in being national, heroic, and broken up in the rivalries of city-states. How sad that Europe knows nothing like it! Its interstate politics follow no rules that a people can grasp. At least Americans understand baseball, the true realm of clear ideas. --Jacques Barzun (1907— ) French-born American writer, educator, and cultural historian. "On Baseball", 1953, in _A Jacques Barzun Reader_ [2002] M. Murray ed.. If people don't want to come out to the ball park, nobody's going to stop them. --Yogi Berra (1925— ) American baseball player and manager; elected to the Hall of Fame in 1972. The problem with being Comeback Player of the Year is it means you have to go somewhere before you can come back. --Bert Blyleven (Rik Aalbert Blyleven) (1951— ) Major League baseball player. (Upon being named the American League's Comeback Player of the Year in 1989.) - A venerable venue: Yankee Stadium has storied history By HAL BOCK Associated Press July 5, 2008 New York - New York — When Yankee Stadium opened for business on April 18, 1923, an army of writers strained for adjectives to describe the majestic, triple-decked structure that loomed over the landscape like the Coliseum in Rome, somehow relocated to the Bronx. Babe Ruth, who was largely responsible for its construction, took one look around the place and chose a succinct description, exclaiming, “Some ball yard!” Some ball yard, indeed. It was the biggest and grandest of ballparks, a perfect setting for some of baseball’s greatest stars and most historic moments. More memories are on the way — now in its final season, the stadium will host the All-Star game on July 15. From the start, it was the home to Yankee dynasties — seven pennants and six World Series championships in eight years under Joe McCarthy, 10 pennants and seven championships in 12 years under Casey Stengel, six pennants and four championships in 12 straight playoff seasons under Joe Torre. From Ruth and Gehrig to DiMaggio and Mantle, to Jackson and Jeter, Yankee history is crowded with dynamic players flourishing in a ballpark whose roots date back to a bitter rivalry that was spiced with spite. [...] It was an instant hit. A sellout crowd of over 60,000 watched Ruth hit a three-run homer in a 4-1 victory over Boston in that first game. That October, the Yankees won the first of their 26 World Series championships, beating the Giants, and the Stadium quickly became the crown jewel of the game. It is as much museum as it is ballpark, this shrine with its sea of monuments and plaques lining the outfield wall. In this special place where stars played and Popes prayed, the Yankees became the most successful franchise in sports history. [...] “Everything seemed just larger than life. It just seemed bigger. The stadium was bigger. There were millions of people — even though it was only 50,000.” From the beginning, Yankee Stadium wasn’t only a baseball venue. It was in the Stadium that Notre Dame coach Knute Rockne, preparing for a game against Army, implored the Irish to “Win one for the Gipper.” Stirred by the memory of late teammate George Gipp, they did. It was in the Stadium where the Baltimore Colts won the 1958 NFL championship in the first overtime game in league history, an epic that was properly called “The Greatest Game Ever Played.” And it was in the Stadium where Joe Louis destroyed Max Schmeling in the first round of their heavyweight championship rematch, striking a blow against Adolf Hitler’s Nazi racial supremacy theories. First and foremost, however, Yankee Stadium is a baseball park and in its final season, after 85 years of history, it is the perfect venue for the 2008 All-Star Game. With its unique decorative facade running along the top of the ballpark, the Stadium was one of a kind. Longtime Yankees infielder Jerry Coleman once remembered the original place — the ballpark was refurbished in the ’70s — with awe. “That stadium,” he said, “ . . . that huge triple deck with the facade up there . . . my God, it was like going to a cathedral, really.” Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, who played, coached and managed in a record 14 World Series, remembered the first time he saw the ballpark. “It was a kick walking in Yankee Stadium for the first time,” he said. “Being in the place where Ruth and Gehrig and all those guys played. What can you say? I always loved that old stadium.” And why not? Berra was behind the plate there on Sept. 28, 1951, when Allie Reynolds pitched his second no-hitter of the season. Yogi was there again on Oct. 8, 1956, when Don Larsen pitched the only no-hitter in World Series history, a perfect game. [...] Ruth started that on opening day and punctuated it in 1927 when he capped a landmark season by hitting his 60th home run there. His single season record lasted until 1961 when another Yankee, Roger Maris, shattered it hitting his 61st into the same, cozy right field seats. Ruth was a larger-than-life character, an almost mythical slugger who hit 714 home runs, for many years the career record and still the third most in baseball history. His slugging partner was Lou Gehrig, who signed off the Columbia University campus and played in 2,130 consecutive games. On July 4, 1939, Gehrig stood at home plate and delivered an emotional farewell to a packed Stadium. He had been diagnosed with Amytrophic Lateral Sclerosis, a rare degenerative muscle disease. In a passionate speech, he declared himself, “the luckiest man on the face of the earth.” Two years later, he was dead. Seven years after that, Ruth, his body riddled by cancer, leaned on a borrowed bat in the same spot to say his own goodbye. Two months after that, he, too, was dead. Ruth and Gehrig were the centerpieces of the early days of Yankee Stadium. And they were followed by a parade of Hall of Fame players who kept the Yankees on top of the baseball world. Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games in 1941, Mickey Mantle won the Triple Crown in 1956 and Reggie Jackson hit three home runs in one 1977 World Series game, each against a different pitcher, each on the first pitch, each one longer than the one before it. They led a cavalcade of stars through the years, one following another, who together kept the Yankees at or near the top of the baseball world, proud occupants of baseball’s proudest ballpark. & see: So hallowed are the grounds around [Yankee Stadium] to some fans that Jimmy Haller scattered his brother's ashes in Monument Park, a section of the stadium with plaques bestowed on the best — Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle. Haller said he took his young daughter as a decoy, asking her to run and pick something in a public flower bed to divert police. 'I opened the ashes and I scattered them under the trees in Monument Park,' he said. 'That's the truth — may God strike me dead.' --Verena Dobnik, AP [7 July 2008] - You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball, and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time. --Jim Bouton (1939— ) American baseball pitcher and author. I managed good but, boy, did they play bad. --Rocky Bridges (1927— ) American Major League baseball player, coach, and manager. - Ronald Reagan might have owed his reputation as The Great Communicator to baseball: one of his first communicating jobs was as a long-distance announcer, re-creating Chicago Cubs games on the radio in Iowa. Later, during his Hollywood days, Reagan played a Hall of Famer in the 1952 film 'The Winning Team,' a sanitized biography of the Phillies, Cubs, and Cardinals pitching great Gover Cleveland Alexander. Bob Lemon, a pitcher for the Cleveland Indians and a future Hall of Famer himself, served as Reagan's stand-in for scenes requiring play. At one point the script called for Alexander to hit a catcher's mitt nailed to the side of a barn. "Piece of cake," Lemon said. Maybe it was the cameras, but Lemon proceeded to hit everything except the mitt. "Mind if I try it?" Reagan asked in an affable voice. "One pitch, smack in the middle of that mitt," Lemon later told a reporter. "I've never been so embarrased in all my life." --Carl M. Cannon, _The Oval Office and the Diamond_, "The Atlantic Monthly" [May 2001] - "When I was a small boy in Kansas," [Dwight] Eisenhower once recalled, "a friend of mine and I went fishing, and as we sat there in the warmth on a summer afternoon on a river bank, we talked about what we wanted to do when we grew up. I told him I wanted to be a real major league baseball player, a genuine professional like Honus Wagner. My friend said that he'd like to be president of the United States. Neither of us got our wish." --Carl M. Cannon, _The Oval Office and the Diamond_, "The Atlantic Monthly" [May 2001] In baseball, as in all team sports, every player's contribution counts, no matter how small. And no player made a smaller contribution than Eddie Gaedel. On August 19, 1951, Browns owner Bill Veeck introduced fans to Gaedel, a 3'7", 65-pound midget who leaped from a cake brought onto the field between the halves of a doubleheader. Wearing the jersey number 1/8, Gaedel took the batter's box, having been told by Veeck that he would be shot if he tried to swing the bat. Detroit pitcher Bob Cain couldn't find the munchkin's pea-size strike zone, and Gaedel was walked on four straight pitches. When he reached first, Gaedel was yanked for pinch runner Jim Delsing, ending his debut---and his career: The following aday, the commisioner's office voided Gaedel's contract. Veeck would later refer lovingly to Gaedel as 'the best damn midget who ever played big-league ball." --Charles Coxe and Dave Itzkoff "Maxim" [April 2000] I lost 24 games my first year with the Mets. You've got to be a pretty good pitcher to lose that many. What manager is going to let you go out there that often? --Roger Craig (1930— ) American Major League baseball pitcher. Any pitcher who throws at a batter and deliberately tries to hit him is a Communist. --Alvin Dark (1922— ) American Major League baseball player and manager. My favorite umpire is a dead one. --Johnny Evers (1881—1947) American major-league baseball player. I occasionally get birthday cards from fans. But it’s often the same message: They hope it’s my last. --Al Forman, National League umpire [baseball] 'Time' [25 August 1961] I don't know why people like the home run so much. A home run is over as soon as it starts. . . . The triple is the most exciting play of the game. A triple is like meeting a woman who excites you, spending the evening talking and getting more excited, then taking her home. It drags on and on. You're never sure how it's going to turn out. --George Foster (1949— ) American Major League baseball player. - The appeal of baseball is intimately wrapped up with one's youth. Baseball is very much about being young again in a harmless way. And one of its core appeals is to remind America of a time when it was young. You fly over a major city at night in the summer and suddenly you'll see that green oasis that reminds everybody of baseball's basic mythology: we come from a rural, simpler America. What's home? Home is longing for when you were happy because you were younger. --A. Bartlett Giamatti (1938—1989) President of Yale and Commissioner of Major League Baseball. [Baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring, when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone. --A. Bartlett Giamatti (1938—1989) President of Yale and Commissioner of Major League Baseball. _The Green Fields of the Mind_ [1977] - Baseball is very big with my people. It figures. It's the only time we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot. --Dick Gregory (1932— ) American comedian and social activist. In D.H. Nathan (ed.) _Baseball Quotations_ [1991]. ^ Herbert Hoover (1874—1964) American statesman; 31st President of the United States [1929—1933]. An autograph collector sent a request to President Hoover asking for three signatures; he explained he wanted one for himself and two to trade for one of Babe Ruth's since 'it takes two of yours to get one of Babe Ruth's.' Hoover, amused, obliged with three signatures. --_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard [2000 ed.] ^ ^ William Hoy (1862—1951) American professional baseball player. The Washington Statesman outfielder played in the major leagues for fourteen years, from 1888 to 1902 — and was completely deaf and mute. His teammates, exhibiting the cruelty of another age, called him 'Dummy.' But he was a champion base stealer and earned the respect of his teammates. The form baseball umpires use for hand signals emphasizing the calls 'out,' 'stike,' and 'safe' were adopted for his benefit -- and continue today. --_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard [2000 ed.] ^ People think we make $3 million and $4 million a year. They don't realize that most of us only make $500,000. --Pete Incaviglia (1964— ) American Major League baseball player. [In 1990.] I should of stood in bed. --Joe Jacobs (1896—1940) American boxing manager. {After leaving a sickbed to attend the World Series in Detroit [October 1935] and betting on the loser.} Baseball is something more than a game to an American boy, it is his training field for life work. Destroy his faith in the squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more; you have planted suspicion of all things in his heart. --Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (1866—1944) First commissioner of Major League baseball. As recounted in _Smithsonian_ (magazine) [October 2000]. There are three types of baseball players: those who make it happen, those who watch it happen, and those who wonder what happens. --Tommy Lasorda (1927— ) American professional baseball player and manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers [1976-1996]. I knew it was going to be a bad season when on opening day during the national anthem one of my players turns to me and says, "Every time I hear that song I have a bad game." --Jim Leyland (1944— ) Major-league baseball manager. . . . For decades, the Cubs have labored to erase the curse of the Billy Goat. According to legend, the curse was placed on the team after a fan was refused entry to a 1945 World Series game at Wrigley Field because he tried to bring his goat along with him. --Ron Lieber, in _The Wall Street Journal_ [2003]. - "Hal Smith's Home Run" October 17, 2006 _The Wall Street Journal_ Reader Neil Houston isn't totally accurate in his memory of the Pittsburgh Pirates' home runs in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series ("A Big Hit of Yesteryear in Game 7 of 2001 Series," Letters, Oct. 12). He has Mazeroski's homer exactly right, but not Hal Smith's. In the last half of the eighth inning, the Yankees led 7-6. The Pirates had already scored twice, there were two outs and two men on base. Mr. Smith's home run scored three runs, not two, and put the Pirates ahead 9-7. The Yankees tied the game in the ninth, thus setting the stage for Mr. Mazeroski. Hal Smith, who comes to Bradenton for Pirates events occasionally, has said, "I was just not meant to be a hero." Robert McFarlin Longboat Key, Fla. - I'm a natural left-hander, but I bat and throw right-handed because that's the way I learned. But, I eat left and drink left and write left. I'm amphibious. --Dale Murphy (1956— ) American professional baseball player. Take me out to the ball game, Take me out with the crowd, Buy me some peanuts and cracker-jack-- I don't care if I never get back. --Jack Norworth (1879—1959) American songwriter. "Take Me Out to the Ball Game" [1908 song], music by Albert von Tilzer (1878-1956). - "Sisyphus and the Second City" By Philip Revzin _The Wall Street Journal_ [2003] Do they still play the blues in Chicago When baseball season rolls around? When the snow melts away, do the Cubbies still play In their ivy-covered burial ground? Steve Goodman "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request" Sad to say, the late Chicago singer-songwriter Steve Goodman's classic baseball elegy applies again this year. The Cubbies came up a fan's-foul- ball-grab and some middle-relief-pitching short of going to the World Series for the first time, as Mr. Goodman's song says, "since the year we dropped the bomb on Japan." All Cubs fans have shared this tragic journey, some for longer than others. My uncle Paul, for example, at age 88, remembers vividly the 1932 and 1938 World Series as a lad of 14, sneaking into a White Sox-Yankees game, standing (as they did in those days) with the crowd along the fence in the outfield and, as the game ended, running up and patting Babe Ruth on the back. The Babe didn't seem too happy about this, my uncle recalls, and got his revenge in the '32 Series by allegedly calling a home-run shot to center field to beat the Cubs. Down the years, my grandmother took my mother over to the Cubs' ballpark on the streetcar on Ladies Day, because it was free. My father took me on freezing April days when getting warm was a lot harder than getting a seat. I take my teenage daughters whenever we're in Chicago because there's no better place to spend a summer's day than in what Ernie Banks dubbed the Friendly Confines of Beautiful Wrigley Field. I trust they will eventually bring their offspring, too, not merely to ensure cultural continuity of a sort but also to transmit the values and lessons that emerge from such a shared experience. And what are those values and lessons? Here's where it gets a little complicated. It's not just loyalty, although any loyalty that can withstand 95, make that 96, years of futility is worth thinking about. (As everyone seems to know by now, the Cubs' last World Series victory was in 1908.) It's not just knowing that losing isn't always bad, although always losing isn't particularly good. [. . .] For Cubs fans, waiting 95 years for a championship does from time to time put a strain on loyalty. Red Sox fans (who may be celebrating today) also know how to portray losing as somehow noble, but nobody has done it so well for so long as the Cubs have. It's probably just as well that the Cubs lost. Comedian and Yankee fan Billy Crystal said the other day that if there were a Cubs-Red Sox World Series, for the first time ever neither team would win. "Something biblical would happen. Locusts, maybe." Being a Cubs fan tends to make you measure time in generations rather than in years or months. For example, I last wrote of Cub fandom in these pages in 1984, a full generation ago, when the Cubbies won their first division title and almost their first pennant since 1945. I wrote that piece on a manual typewriter and handed it to a telex operator in our Chicago bureau, who retyped it and sent it to New York over a phone line. I wrote this piece partly on a Blackberry on the 7:57 a.m. train from Summit, N.J., to Hoboken, while listening to "A Dying Cub Fan's Last Request" on my MP3 player, with a Cubs cap planted firmly on my head. None of my fellow commuters batted an eye, naturally. Should we have to wait another 95 years for a Series ring, the march of technology won't change the basic values involved. My daughters, now bitten, think nothing of following the games and standings on the Internet. From their first exposure, when we dragged them to the games in little blue Cubbie dresses and Cubbie bows for their pony tails, through a phase of their coming to the game solely to eat (constantly), to their actually watching most of the game, they now actively cheer. Next year they'll wonder why Dusty didn't send Lofton on a 2-and-1 count. A new generation of fan has been birthed. May it suffer fewer disappointments, respect well-directed effort, and treasure success. - I never threw an illegal pitch. The trouble is, once in a while I toss one that ain't never been seen by this generation. --Leroy "Satchel" Paige (1906—1982) American baseball pitcher in both the Negro Leagues and the Major League; inducted in the Hall of Fame in 1971. ^ Baseball's Dirty Open Secret By Joshua Prager _The Wall Street Journal_ October 26, 2006 Kenny Rogers's 2006 regular season ended miserably -- two losses in four days, seven earned runs yielded in 5.2 innings. Headed with his Detroit Tigers to the playoffs, the pitcher had no reason to expect improvement. His career post-season ERA was 8.85 -- 20 runs allowed in 20.1 innings -- the worst of any pitcher in baseball history who had thrown at least as many innings. But Mr. Rogers threw 7.2 shutout innings vs. the Yankees, 7.1 more vs. the A's and a scoreless first inning against the Cardinals in game three of the World Series. One month shy of 42, he was the fist-pumping belle of the ball; a post-season goat wondrously resurrected in his 17th season. It was after Mr. Rogers retired his third Cardinal that St. Louis manager Tony La Russa mentioned to umpire Alfonso Marquez that Mr. Rogers's left palm was discolored, the skin below his thumb shellacked ochre. The ump told the lefty to clean himself up. Has Kenny Rogers owed his post-season resurgence to goo? The baseball brass would rather not know. Pitchers have long nicked or slicked baseballs with everything from emery boards to mustache wax. A doctored ball can be harder to hit or easier to grip. Major League Baseball does not approve. Rule 8.02 is clear: "The pitcher shall not apply a foreign substance of any kind to the ball." If he does, he is ejected from the game and suspended for 10 more. [ . . . ] One Cardinal, however, had a message for the pitcher who had already been pardoned. "Whoever does those types of things," said Cardinal outfielder Preston Wilson, "they have to live with it. They have to sleep with that at night, they have to sit back at the end of their career and say whether they did it on their own merit. To me, I think that's a bigger burden." Over the past six years, I wrote an article and then a book about a glorious baseball team that cheated and, likely as a result, found itself in the World Series. And I think Mr. Wilson is right. On July 20, 1951, the New York Giants stationed a coach with a telescope in their centerfield clubhouse. He spied the signals of opposing catchers, decoded whether an imminent pitch was a fastball or off-speed, and pressed a button that sounded a buzzer in the bullpen -- where a player relayed the stolen sign to the batter. The home-field scheme was in place through the end of the season, helping the Giants to overcome a 13.5-game deficit to tie the Brooklyn Dodgers. The teams met in a playoff that ended in astounding fashion when Giants third baseman Bobby Thomson hit the most famous home run in baseball history: "the Shot Heard Round the World." Rumors that the miracle Giants had cheated first surfaced in 1962. "No, no, no," manager Leo Durocher told the Associated Press. "There was no buzzer." Players Alvin Dark, Larry Jansen, Whitey Lockman, Willie Mays, Bobby Thomson and Wes Westrum all lied too. "I said," Mr. Thomson recalled to me, "you mean Leo Durocher would steal signs? I didn't admit it. I didn't admit it to anyone." No one wanted him to. The desire to keep pure our idylls is deep-seated. Looking the other way every now and then is a small price to pay for their perpetuation. Rule 8.02 aside, did we really want a starting pitcher ejected this week from the World Series? Did we want another cloud? No matter that the mustard-colored splotch on the left palm of pitcher Rogers was shiny and glutinous. It was, explained umpire supervisor Steve Palermo, "observed as dirt." But if looking the other way helps the game, it harms the player. In 1998, baseball turned a blind eye to rampant steroid rumors while Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa thrilled fans with titanic home runs. Today both men are figures of shame. Likewise, in 1962, when scoreboard spyglasses were in abundance, baseball commissioner Ford Frick failed to act on rumors that the Giants had cheated in their 1951 playoff. "If such a charge were substantiated," he said, "I would forfeit the game." Perhaps he knew that even a forfeited pennant is a mild sentence compared to the lifelong burden of a sin never confessed. It is possible that Mr. Rogers (who last season shoved a cameraman) does not possess the conscience of Mr. Thomson, a wonderful man whose greatest fault is an inability to self-congratulate. But should the pitcher take the ball in a possible sixth World Series game this Saturday night and then throw four more consecutive shutout innings to tie the single post-season record of 27 held by Christy Mathewson, will he regret years hence smearing on his hand what he said was dirt? In late 2000, 38 years after a team of Giants denied they had cheated, several spoke to me at length of the scheme their manager had set in motion. And when my article then ran in this newspaper, playoff hero Thomson spoke at once of his coming clean. "Getting it all out is the best thing," he said on air. "I feel almost like I just got out of prison." Mr. Prager, a senior special writer at the Journal, is the author of "The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World." ^ Baseball is a game of inches. --Branch Rickey (1881—1965) American baseball executive. ^ Jackie Robinson (1919-1972) American baseball player. On the day of his first appearance with the Dodgers, Robinson kissed his wife good-bye at their hotel before setting out. 'If you come down to Ebbets Field today,' he said, 'you won't have any trouble recognizing me.' He paused for a moment, then added, "My number's forty-two.' --_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard [2000 ed.] ^ Open the window, Aunt Minnie-- here it comes. --Rosey Rosewell Pittsburgh Pirates sportscaster - whenever a Pirate hit a home run in Forbes Field, a small park situated near a residential area. Football is to baseball as blackjack is to bridge. --Vin Scully (1927— ) American sportscaster. Trying to throw a fastball by Henry Aaron is like trying to sneak a sunrise past a rooster. --Curt Simmons (1929— ) American professional baseball player inducted into the Hall of Fame. - I went over and introduced myself. 'Mr. DiMaggio, I'm Paul Simon. I'm the guy who wrote 'Mrs. Robinson.' He knew. He invited me to sit down... It was still the hippie days and he was wondering whether I was making fun of him. I told him I wasn't making fun of him. I said the song was about heroes, a certain type of hero. --Paul Simon (1941— ) American singer and songwriter. - - Ninety feet between the bases is the nearest thing to perfection that man has yet achieved. --Red [Walter] Smith (1905—1982) American sports columnist and broadcaster. Baseball is dull only to dull minds. --Red [Walter] Smith (1905—1982) American sports columnist and broadcaster. - Baseball is an allegorical play about America, a poetic, complex, and subtle play of courage, fear, good luck, mistakes, patience about fate, and sober self-esteem. . . . It is impossible to understand America without a thorough knowledge of baseball. --Saul Steinberg (1914—1999) Romanian-American cartoonist painter and cartoonist. Quoted in Harold Rosenberg _Saul Steinberg_ [1978]. - The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided. --Casey Stengel (1891—1975) American Major League baseball player and manager; inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966. They didn't give him a cake. They were afraid he'd drop it. --Casey Stengel (1891—1975) American Major League baseball player and manager; inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966. At a Mets birthday party for the weak-fielding first baseman Marv Thorneberry. Don't cut my throat. I may want to do that later myself. --Casey Stengel (1891—1975) American Major League baseball player and manager; inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1966. Speaking to his barber after his team, the Brooklyn Dodgers of 1935, lost a doubleheader, quoted in Joseph Durso _Casey_ [1967]. - ^^ Don Sutton (1945- ) American Major League baseball pitcher The Dodgers pitcher was occasionally accused of altering baseballs to heighten the power of his pitches. When asked if it was true that he had used a "foreign substance" on baseballs, Sutton replied, 'Not true at all. Vaseline is manufactured right here in the United States of America.' _Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard [2000] ^^ The outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day; The score stood four to two with but one inning more to play. And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same, A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game. A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast; They thought if only Casey could but get a whack at that-- We'd put up even money now with Casey at the bat. But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake, And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake; So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat, For there seemed but little chance of Casey's getting to the bat. But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all, And Blake, the much despis-ed, tore the cover of the ball; And when the dust had lifted, and the men saw what had occured, There was Johnnie safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third. Then from 5,000 throats and more there rose a lusty yell; It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell; It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat, For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat. There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place; There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile on Casey's face. And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat, No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat. Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt; Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt. Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip, Defiance gleamed in Casey's eye, a sneer curled Casey's lip. And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air, And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there. Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped-- "That ain't my style," said Casey. "Strike one," the umpire said. From the benches black with people, there went up a muffled roar, Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore. "Kill him! Kill the umpire!" shouted some one on the stand; And it's likely they'd have killed him had not Casey raised his hand. With a smile of Christian charity great Casey's visage shone; He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on; He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the spheroid flew; But Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said, "Strike two." "Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered fraud; But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed. They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain, And they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again. The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate; He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate. And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go, And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow. Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright; The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light, And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout; there is no joy in Mudville-- mighty Casey has struck out. --Ernest Lawrence Thayer (1863—1940) American writer and poet. "Casey at the Bat," published in the "San Francisco Examiner" [3 June 1888]. Willie Mays and his glove: where triples go to die. --Dodgers executive Fresco Thompson ^ The 1951 playoffs and 1954 World Series marked the last hurrahs for the Polo Grounds of the Giants. Over a million people came to watch Mays and his teammates in their 1954 championship season. But the ballpark, now four decades old, had begun to atrophy, and the neighborhood around it suffered from crime and decay. Robbers accosted fans, and on one occasion a bullet fired from a nearby rooftop killed a spectator during a game. Built to take advantage of mass transit lines, the Polo Grounds suffered from woefully inadequate parking. As the Giants dropped in the standings, attendance plummeted along with them. In 1956, after thirty-one years of residency, the football Giants announced that they were moving to Yankee Stadium. Rumors floated that when the Giants' lease expired in 1962 the old ballpark would be torn down and replaced by a low-income housing project. On June 18, 1958, Giants owner Horace Stoneham announced, "We can anticipate a decrease in income each year from now on.... As a fan and president, I know the Giants must leave the Polo Grounds." Two months later, Stoneham confirmed that the Giants would leave New York and go west to San Francisco. On September 29, 1957, the Giants played their last game at the aging arena. Eleven thousand fans turned out to watch the veterans of the 1951 and 1954 pennant-winning teams - Mays, Thomson, Rhodes, and others - lose 9-1 to the Pirates. At the game's end souvenir-seeking fans ravaged the field, ripping up bases, pitching rubbers, signs, and telephones. John McGraw's widow, Blanche, disconsolately watched the final game. "I still can't believe I'll never see the Giants in the Polo Grounds again," she exclaimed. "New York can never be the same to me." "Dispossessed" groundskeeper Matty Schwab and his family moved out of their left field apartment, but the old ballpark retained some vitality. Jay Coogan, whose family still owned the land and stadium, vowed, "The Polo Grounds will not be demolished quickly. I will wait for callers. I am not going to give up." In 1958 the Polo Grounds hosted Israel's tenth anniversary celebration, a rodeo, Gaelic football, and a series of Sunday baseball games featuring the remnants of the Negro Leagues. The next few years also saw professional soccer come to the Polo Grounds. The New York Titans of the new American Football League assumed occupancy in 1960, although owner Harry Wismer called the park a "graveyard" and, according to one sportswriter, most of the fans came disguised as empty seats. In 1962 the Mets moved into the arena for a planned one-year stay. On the last day of the season, they staged a fond farewell to the Polo Grounds. Television cameras caught septuagenarian manager Casey Stengel, who had played many games at the ballpark in the teens and twenties, slowly walking from home plate to the remote clubhouse as "Auld Lang Syne" filtered through the loudspeakers. Once again, however, the reports of the Polo Grounds' demise had been greatly exaggerated. When problems delayed the opening of Shea Stadium, the Mets found themselves back in their crumbling castle in 1963. "At the end of the season they're gonna tear this place down," Stengel told home run- prone pitcher Tracy Stallard as he removed him from a game. "The way you're pitchin' that right field section is gone already." But even in New York City construction projects inevitably reach completion. The Mets and the Titans, now renamed the Jets, moved into Shea Stadium in 1964. On April 10 of that year, the long-scheduled destruction of the Polo Grounds began. Employees of the Wrecking Corporation of America, bedecked in Giants shirts, repeatedly slammed a two-ton iron "headache ball," the same ball that had demolished Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, against the superstructure of the Polo Grounds, reducing the once grand sports palace to rubble. Four thirty-story apartment buildings, dubbed Polo Grounds Towers, rose on the site. On the patch of land once occupied by the vast green acreage of center field sits an asphalt playground. They call it Willie Mays Field. --Jules Tygiel "The Polo Grounds" _American Places: Encounters with History_ [2000] ^ The highlight of my baseball career came in Philadelphia's Connie Mack Stadium when I saw a fan fall out of the upper deck. When he got up and walked away, the crowd booed. --Bob Uecker (1935— ) American Major League baseball player, broadcaster, and actor. In _Quotes That Say It All About '92_ "San Francisco Chronicle" [30 December 1992]. - I have discovered in 20 years of moving around a ballpark, that the knowledge of the game is usually in inverse proportion to the price of the seats. --Bill Veeck (1914—1986) Baseball team owner & innovator. Baseball's unique possession, the real source of our strength, is the fan's memory of the times his daddy took him to the game to see the great players of his youth. Whether he remembers it or not, the excitement of those hours, the step they represented in his own growth, and the part those afternoons - even one afternoon - played in his relationship with his father are bound up in his feeling toward the local ballclub and toward the game. When he takes his own son to the game, as his father once took him, there is a spanning of the generations that is warm and rich and -- if I may use the word -- lovely. --Bill Veeck (1914—1986) Baseball team owner & innovator. _The Hustler's Handbook_ [1965] - ^ Earl Weaver (1930- ) American baseball player and manager. Outfielder and born-again Christian Pat Kelly once called out to Weaver, 'You've got to walk with the Lord, Skip!' 'Hell,' replied Weaver, 'I'd rather you walked with bases loaded.' --_Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes_ edited by Clifton Fadiman and André Bernard [2000 ed.] ^ - Once when the Yankee's Lou Pinella was batting he questioned a Steve Palermo strike call. Pinella demanded, 'Where was that pitch at?' Palermo told him that a man wearing Yankee pinstripes in front of 30,000 people should not end a sentence with a preposition. So Pinella, no dummy, said, 'OK, where was that pitch at, asshole?' --George F. Will (1941— ) American columnist. Baseball, it is said, is only a game. True. And the Grand Canyon is only a hole in Arizona. Not all holes, or games, are created equal. --George F. Will (1941— ) American columnist. _Men At Work: The Craft of Baseball_ [1990] - - In the hours before dawn Sunday, accountant Tom Maguire left his wife, his kids and his tax returns at home for a street corner in South Philadelphia. As hundreds of strangers gathered, he pointed a camcorder at them, calling out: "Any memories? Any stories to tell?" The crowd had formed outside Veterans Stadium, which would be dynamited at 7 a.m. to make way for a new stadium's parking lot, and many were willing to help Mr. Maguire with his home movie. They wanted to talk about the exhilarating and exasperating Phillies and Eagles games they'd attended here, about their odd feelings of loss over the stadium's demise, and about their childhoods, when mom or dad took their little hands and walked them into this ballpark. [. . . ] People often feel a powerful bond with their home stadiums. But in recent years, many ballparks have been destroyed as cities and teams rush to build new taxpayer-financed palaces. Chicago Stadium, Boston Garden, Pittsburgh's Three Rivers Stadium, Cincinnati's Riverfront Stadium, Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium -- all are now dust. In the debris, people see lost pieces of their childhoods. [...] The Vet was named to honor military veterans. It has been replaced by Lincoln Financial Field (for football) and Citizens Bank Park (for baseball). ... Of course, decades from now people will have built attachments to today's new stadiums as well, even with their generic corporate names. The reason: Those bonds are often more about the history you witness at the ballpark and the friends and family who witness it with you. That helps explain why thousands of fans buy bottles of infield dirt from demolished facilities for $20 a pop, or battered stadium seats for $150. A University of Pittsburgh academic building stands on the former site of Forbes Field, where Bill Mazeroski's ninth- inning homer won the World Series for the Pirates on Oct 13., 1960. Fans still make a pilgrimage to home plate, now preserved under glass in the flooring inside that building. And on Oct. 13 each year, at the spot on campus where a piece of Forbes's wall remains, people gather to recall Mr. Mazeroski's heroics. A few years ago, he showed up unannounced to help stunned fans reminisce. [...] As a teen in the late 1970s, I spent my summers working as a hot-dog vendor at the Vet. On Sunday, as I waited for it to implode, I sorted through my memories. I recalled how fans always addressed me ("Yo, hot dog! Over here!"), the constant smell of mustard on my skin, the pretty usherettes, the silly rhymes I'd shout to lure customers: "I've got mustard, I've got meat; if you've got money, I'll come to your seat!" My parents weren't sports fans, but they did visit the Vet a few times to proudly watch me work in the Big Leagues. Once, they took a photo of me clutching my hot-dog kettle in the Vet's upper deck, as thousands of fans ignored me. They still display it in their home. On Sunday, 2,800 explosions felled the Vet in 62 seconds. Many in the crowd were subdued. Gazing at the ruins, Peter Paoli, 45, talked about his father's last Eagles game, in 1991. His father felt well and happy. Months later, he'd be dead from cancer. "As the stadium was settling, all these memories came rushing through my head," said Mr. Paoli. "I literally saw my father here today." --"It's Root, Root, Root For the Old Stadium: Saying Goodbye to Childhood Haunts" By Jeffrey Zaslow _The Wall Street Journal_ [25 March 2004] - Gene Mauch, Montreal Manager, when his players rushed to dispute a call: 'The first guy who lays a finger on this blind old man is fined fifty bucks!' - Say it ain't so, Joe. --Small boy to "Shoeless Joe" Jackson of the Chicago White Sox, as he emerged from a grand jury session [1920] on corruption in the 1919 World Series. - Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat. --anon. - Dizzy Dean, on umpire William McKinley: "Why, they shot the wrong McKinley!" - Washington, first in war, first in peace, last in the American League. --Popular saying, referring to the Washington Senators, quoted in Howard Cosell _Like It Is_ [1974] --- Trivia: The first inductees into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936 were Ty Cobb (center field), Walter Johnson (pitcher), Christy Mathewson (pitcher), Babe Ruth (right field), and Honus Wagner (short stop). They were selected by the Baseball Writers' Association of America. In 1897, the Washington Senators became the first baseball team ever to introduce "Ladies' Day." In 1977, Mike Schmidt earned the first $500,000 salary in baseball. - Two 90-year-old women, Rose and Barb, had been friends all of their lives. When it was clear that Rose was dying, Barb visited her every day. One day Barb said, "Rose, we both loved playing women's softball all our lives, and we played in all through High School. Please do me one favor: when you get to Heaven, somehow you must let me know if there's women's softball there." Rose looked up at Barb from her deathbed, "Barb, you've been my best friend for many years. If it's at all possible, I'll do this favor for you." Shortly after that, Rose passed on. At midnight a couple of nights later, Barb was awakened from a sound sleep by a blinding flash of white light and a voice calling out to her, "Barb Barb." "Who is it?" asked Barb, sitting up suddenly. "Who is it?" "Barb -- it's me, Rose." "You're not Rose. Rose just died." "I'm telling you, it's me, Rose," insisted the voice. "Rose! Where are you?" "In Heaven," replied Rose. "I have some really good news and a little bad news." "Tell me the good news first," said Barb. "The good news," Rose said, "is that there's softball in Heaven. Better yet, all of our old buddies who died before us are here, too. Better than that, we're all young again. Better still, it's always springtime, and it never rains or snows. And best of all, we can play softball all we want, and we never get tired.." "That's fantastic," said Barb.. "It's beyond my wildest dreams! So what's the bad news?" "You're pitching next Tuesday." - --- PLAY BALL! http://www.baseballhalloffame.org/default.htm http://baseball-almanac.com/ end page | BABIES - BARTENDERS | BASEBALL | BASTARDS - BEATLES (THE) | BEAUTY | BED - BEGINNINGS | BEHAVIOR - BELIEF | BENNY (JACK) - BIBLE | BICYCLES - BIRDS | BIRTH - BLAIR (TONY) | BLAME - BLOGGING | BLONDES - BOOK BURNING | BOOKS | BOOMERS (THE) - BOXING | BOYS - BREAKING UP | BREASTS - BRITAIN | BROADWAY - BUBBLES (ECONOMIC) | BUGS BUNNY - BUREAUCRACY | BURMA SHAVE - BUSYBODIES | | A | B | C | D | E | F | G | | Return Home | The Credits | The Cast | Act 1 | Act 2 | Act 3 | The End | The Reviews | Photos | |
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