Nationals Baseball Quotes

Some say our national pastime is baseball. Not me. It's gossip

I'm Losing Faith in My Favorite Country Throughout my life, the United States has been my favorite country, save and except for Canada, where I was born, raised, educated, and still live for six months each year. As a child growing up in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, I aggressively bought and saved baseball cards of American and National League players, spent hours watching snowy images of American baseball and football games on black and white television and longed for the day when I could travel to that great country. Every Saturday afternoon, me and the boys would pay twelve cents to go the show and watch U.S. made movies, and particularly, the Superman serial. Then I got my chance. My father, who worked for B.F. Goodrich, took my brother and me to watch the Cleveland Indians play baseball in the Mistake on the Lake in Cleveland. At last I had made it to the big time. I thought it was an amazing stadium and it was certainly not a mistake. Amazingly, the Americans thought we were Americans. I loved the United States, and everything about the country: its people, its movies, its comic books, its sports, and a great deal more. The country was alive and growing. No, exploding. It was the golden age of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The American dream was alive and well, but demanded hard work, honesty, and frugality. Everyone understood that. Even the politicians. Then everything changed.

The problem is politics is made a sport, almost as much a sport as football or baseball. When it comes to politics, adults and politicians do more finger-pointing and play more games than children ever do. Too often are we rooting for the pride of a team rather than the good of the nation.

Foreign policy is like hitting a baseball: if you fail 70 percent of the time, you go to the Hall of Fame.

As I grew up, I knew that as a building (Fenway Park) was on the level of Mount Olympus, the Pyramid at Giza, the nation's capitol, the czar's Winter Palace, and the Louvre — except, of course, that is better than all those inconsequential places

Sometimes a strikeout means that the slugger’s girlfriend just ran off with the UPS driver. Sometimes a muffed ground ball means that the shortstop’s baby daughter has a pain in her head that won’t go away. And handicapping is for amateur golfers, not ballplayers. Pitchers don’t ease off on the cleanup hitter because of the lumps just discovered in his wife’s breast. Baseball is not life. It is a fiction, a metaphor. And a ballplayer is a man who agrees to uphold that metaphor as though lives were at stake. Perhaps they are. I cherish a theory I once heard propounded by G.Q. Durham that professional baseball is inherently antiwar. The most overlooked cause of war, his theory runs, is that it’s so damned interesting. It takes hard effort, skill, love and a little luck to make times of peace consistently interesting. About all it takes to make war interesting is a life. The appeal of trying to kill others without being killed yourself, according to Gale, is that it brings suspense, terror, honor, disgrace, rage, tragedy, treachery and occasionally even heroism within range of guys who, in times of peace, might lead lives of unmitigated blandness. But baseball, he says, is one activity that is able to generate suspense and excitement on a national scale, just like war. And baseball can only be played in peace. Hence G.Q.’s thesis that pro ball-players—little as some of them may want to hear it—are basically just a bunch of unusually well-coordinated guys working hard and artfully to prevent wars, by making peace more interesting.

So the Mets are a bad ball club. All right, they're the worst ball club you ever saw. So what? The important thing is they are in the National League and they are familiar.

It is otherwise with sports and the media. There, too, a shift has occurred, from active participation to the vicarious participation of spectatorship. Four people used to go bowling, but 100 million watch the Super Bowl. Football, where men try to hit and hurt, has replaced baseball as the national game. It is as if the demotion from participant to spectatorship and from live spectatorship to TV spectatorship has to be compensated by upping the ante in violence.

Being offended has replaced baseball as our greatest national pastime.

Base-ball is our game: the American game: I connect it with our national character.

It’s one thing to win a game with a base hit, or to save a game by pitching a scoreless ninth ... it’s something altogether different to save our National Pastime by day in and day out showing up with the joy and passion of a kid playing Little League and the determined attitude and work ethic of a consummate professional bent on doing one thing and one thing only: his job.

Bruce Sutter and his new pitch, the split finger fastball, fascinate the manager of the Cuban national teams. 'We must find out about this new weapon,' he said. 'Are the American hitters plotting to murder him?

What has become of critique when someone as eminent as Stanley Fish, the “enemy of promises” as Lindsay Waters calls him, believes he defends science studies, my field, by comparing the laws of physics to the rules of baseball? What has become of critique when there is a whole industry denying that the Apollo program landed on the moon? What has become of critique when DARPA uses for its Total Information Awareness project the Baconian slogan Scientia est potentia? Didn’t I read that somewhere in Michel Foucault? Has knowledge-slash-power been co-opted of late by the National Security Agency? Has Discipline and Punish become the bedtime reading of Mr. Ridge?

we still live in a world where might makes right. The moment we lose sight of that rule and start shrinking from our duties as a nation, is when we’ll all need to begin trading in our minivans and baseball mitts for prayer rugs and Arabic lessons.

Baseball was rooted not just in the past but in the culture of the country; it was celebrated in the nation’s literature and songs. When a poor American boy dreamed of escaping his grim life, his fantasy probably involved becoming a professional baseball player. It was not so much the national sport as the binding national myth.

When I had the honor of being included in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery in 2019, I sat for a painting with four objects on a shelf behind me in the composition: a photo of my parents; a photo of Raj, Preetha, and Tara; a Yale SOM baseball cap; and a PepsiCo annual report with the words “Performance with Purpose” on the cover.

I’m sorry. I know how much players have to focus, and I know not to be a distraction. I just got caught up in the moment, in the great game, in your terrific pitching.” But I felt a need to explain more. “Look, Jason, I love baseball. I love the crack of the bat hitting the ball. I love the seventh-inning stretch and singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ I love eating hot dogs and standing for the singing of the national anthem. I love doing the wave. I love Kiss Cam. I love that the game isn’t over until it’s over. “I love the thrill of a home run and the disappointment of an out at first. I love the way a batter stands at the plate and the catcher readies himself to receive the pitch. I love watching the pitcher windup. I love sitting in the stands and feeling like I’m part of the game. “And tonight, watching you pitch, I forgot that I’m only a small part—the spectator. Watching you, I felt like I was in the game, out on that field with you. You’re out there on the mound, living a dream that so few people ever experience. “I’m sorry, sorry that tonight I ruined the moment for you.” He was staring at me intently. I’d just bared my soul. Why didn’t he speak? What could he possibly be thinking? My nerves stretched taut. “Say something,” I demanded. “There’s nothing else to say,” he said in that quiet way he had. Then he lowered his head and kissed me.

This place has got a rhythm to it. It's like a heart beating. Buh-bump. In forty-five minutes our guys will come out for batting practice. Then the vendors will start showing up. Buh-bump. Buh-bump. And the fans will start to arrive, and the other team will come in, and you can see them over there in the dugout. Buh-bump-buh-bump-buh-BUMP. Then the lights go on and the umpires step onto the field and they play the national anthem. - And in his mind's eye, Lefebvre could see it, and feel it, as surely as he could feel his own pulse, the baseball game, a living, breathing thing.

From my experience, CIA cocaine ops were what Charlie Pride4’s tournaments were really all about. Part of the cash generated was laundered through his bank in Dallas, Texas. Pride was tied into the same Savings and Loan scandals that Neil Bush5 had been caught in. Even Bush Jr.’s baseball “bud” Nolan Ryan6 owned a bank associated with CIA black ops. Additionally, the drug running I was involved with was channeled through Albuquerque’s LA Dodger baseball training camp and profits laundered through local Catholic charities. Charlie Pride’s annual Pro-Am Golf Tournaments covered it all.

Play, which I would define as anything we do simply for the joy of doing rather than as a means to an end—whether it’s flying a kite or listening to music or throwing around a baseball—might seem like a nonessential activity. Often it is treated that way. But in fact play is essential in many ways. Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, has studied what are called the play histories of some six thousand individuals and has concluded that play has the power to significantly improve everything from personal health to relationships to education to organizations’ ability to innovate. “Play,” he says, “leads to brain plasticity, adaptability, and creativity.” As he succinctly puts it, “Nothing fires up the brain like play.”3

Are you chuckling yet? Because then along came you. A big, broad meat eater with brash blond hair and ruddy skin that burns at the beach. A bundle of appetites. A full, boisterous guffaw; a man who tells knock know jokes. Hot dogs - not even East 86th Street bratwurst but mealy, greasy big guts that terrifying pink. Baseball. Gimme caps. Puns and blockbuster movies, raw tap water and six-packs. A fearless, trusting consumer who only reads labels to make sure there are plenty of additives. A fan of the open road with a passion for his pickup who thinks bicycles are for nerds. Fucks hard and talks dirty; a private though unapologetic taste for porn. Mysteries, thrillers, and science fiction; a subscription to National Geographic. Barbecues on the Fourth of July and intentions, in the fullness of time, to take up golf. Delights in crappy snack foods of ever description: Burgles. Curlies. Cheesies. Squigglies - you're laughing - but I don't eat them - anything that looks less like food than packing material and at least six degrees of separation from the farm. Bruce Springsteen, the early albums, cranked up high with the truck window down and your hair flying. Sings along, off-key - how is it possible that I should be endeared by such a tin ear?Beach Boys. Elvis - never lose your roots, did you, loved plain old rock and roll. Bombast. Though not impossibly stodgy; I remember, you took a shine to Pearl Jam, which was exactly when Kevin went off them...(sorry). It just had to be noisy; you hadn't any time for my Elgar, my Leo Kottke, though you made an exception for Aaron Copeland. You wiped your eyes brusquely at Tanglewood, as if to clear gnats, hoping I didn't notice that "Quiet City" made you cry. And ordinary, obvious pleasure: the Bronx Zoo and the botanical gardens, the Coney Island roller coaster, the Staten Island ferry, the Empire State Building. You were the only New Yorker I'd ever met who'd actually taken the ferry to the Statue of Liberty. You dragged me along once, and we were the only tourists on the boat who spoke English. Representational art - Edward Hopper. And my lord, Franklin, a Republican. A belief in a strong defense but otherwise small government and low taxes. Physically, too, you were such a surprise - yourself a strong defense. There were times you were worried that I thought you too heavy, I made so much of your size, though you weighed in a t a pretty standard 165, 170, always battling those five pounds' worth of cheddar widgets that would settle over your belt. But to me you were enormous. So sturdy and solid, so wide, so thick, none of that delicate wristy business of my imaginings. Built like an oak tree, against which I could pitch my pillow and read; mornings, I could curl into the crook of your branches. How luck we are, when we've spared what we think we want! How weary I might have grown of all those silly pots and fussy diets, and how I detest the whine of sitar music!

Baseball may be called the national pastime, but it survives on the sentimentality of middle-age men who wistfully dream of playing catch with their fathers and sons. Football, with its dull stoppages, lost its military-industrial relevance with the end of the Cold War, and has become as tired and predictable in performance as it is in political metaphor. The professional game floats on an ocean of gambling, the players' steroid-laced bodies having outgrown their muscular and skeletal carriages. Biceps rip from their moorings, ankles break on simple pivots. Achilles' tendons shrivel like slugs doused with salt. Soccer and basketball are the only mainstream sports that truly plug into the modem-pulse of a dot-com society. Soccer is perfectly suited for a country of the hamster-treadmill pace, the remote-control zap and the national attention deficit—two 45-minute halves, the clock never stops, no commercial interruptions, the final whistle blows in less than two hours. It is a fluid game of systemized chaos that, no matter how tightly scripted by coaches, cannot be regulated any more than information can be truly controlled on the Internet.

I’m sorry. I know how much players have to focus, and I know not to be a distraction. I just got caught up in the moment, in the great game, in your terrific pitching.” But I felt a need to explain more. “Look, Jason, I love baseball. I love the crack of the bat hitting the ball. I love the seventh-inning stretch and singing ‘Take Me Out to the Ball Game.’ I love eating hot dogs and standing for the singing of the national anthem. I love doing the wave. I love Kiss Cam. I love that the game isn’t over until it’s over. “I love the thrill of a home run and the disappointment of an out at first. I love the way a batter stands at the plate and the catcher readies himself to receive the pitch. I love watching the pitcher windup. I love sitting in the stands and feeling like I’m part of the game. “And tonight, watching you pitch, I forgot that I’m only a small part--the spectator. Watching you, I felt like I was in the game, out on that field with you. You’re out there on the mound, living a dream that so few people ever experience. “I’m sorry, sorry that tonight I ruined the moment for you.” He was staring at me intently. I’d just bared my soul. Why didn’t he speak? What could he possibly be thinking? My nerves stretched taut. “Say something,” I demanded. “There’s nothing else to say,” he said in that quiet way he had. Then he lowered his head and kissed me.

I quickly learned that the congressional delegation from Alaska was deeply committed to the oil industry and other commercial interests, and senatorial courtesy prevented other members from disputing with Senators Ted Stevens (Republican) and Mike Gravel (Democrat) over a matter involving their home state. Former Idaho governor Cecil Andrus, my secretary of interior, and I began to study the history of the controversy and maps of the disputed areas, and I flew over some of them a few times. Environmental groups and most indigenous natives were my allies, but professional hunters, loggers, fishers, and the Chambers of Commerce were aligned with the oil companies. All the odds were against us until Cecil discovered an ancient law, the Antiquities Act of 1906, which permitted a president to set aside an area for “the protection of objects of historic and scientific interest,” such as Indian burial grounds, artifacts, or perhaps an ancient church building or the site of a famous battle. We decided to use this authority to set aside for preservation large areas of Alaska as national monuments, and eventually we had included more than 56 million acres (larger than the state of Minnesota). This gave me the bargaining chip I needed, and I was able to prevail in the subsequent debates. My efforts were extremely unpopular in Alaska, and I had to have extra security on my visits. I remember that there was a state fair where people threw baseballs at two targets to plunge a clown into a tank of water. My face was on one target and Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini’s on the other, and few people threw at the Ayatollah’s.

BEYOND THE GAME In 2007 some of the Colorado Rockies’ best action took place off the field. The Rocks certainly boasted some game-related highlights in ’07: There was rookie shortstop Troy Tulowitzki turning the major league’s thirteenth unassisted triple play on April 29, and the team as a whole made an amazing late-season push to reach the playoffs. Colorado won 13 of its final 14 games to force a one-game wild card tiebreaker with San Diego, winning that game 9–8 after scoring three runs in the bottom of the thirteenth inning. Marching into the postseason, the Rockies won their first-ever playoff series, steamrolling the Phillies three games to none. But away from the cheering crowds and television cameras, Rockies players turned in a classic performance just ahead of their National League Division Series sweep. They voted to include Amanda Coolbaugh and her two young sons in Colorado’s postseason financial take. Who was Amanda Coolbaugh? She was the widow of former big-leaguer Mike Coolbaugh, a coach in the Rockies’ minor league organization who was killed by a screaming line drive while coaching first base on July 22. Colorado players voted a full playoff share—potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars—to the grieving young family. Widows and orphans hold a special place in God’s heart, too. Several times in the Old Testament, God reminded the ancient Jews of His concern for the powerless—and urged His people to follow suit: “Learn to do right; seek justice. Defend the oppressed. Take up the cause of the fatherless; plead the case of the widow” (Isaiah 1:17). Some things go way beyond the game of baseball. Will you?

Good game,” someone said, patting my shoulder. “Thanks,” I said, laughing. Then I felt arms come around me and pull me close. “Hey,” Jason said, kissing my neck before parking his chin on my shoulder. Smiling brightly, I turned around in his arms. “Great game.” “Thanks.” “You hit a home run,” I said, like maybe he hadn’t realized it. “I know it seems odd, considering how long I’ve played baseball, but I’ve never hit one before,” he said. “But I knew, I knew as soon as I felt the bat make contact with the ball, that it was going to go out of the park. I don’t know if it sounded different or felt different, but I just knew.” “You did look stunned out there.” “I was. Like I said, I’d never done that before. I mean, hitting has never been my strength.” “It was tonight.” I reached up and kissed his chin. “I need to figure out what it was I did that made me hit the home run.” “You connected the bat to the ball.” “No, it was more than that. Something I did before the game, maybe--” “No, no, no,” I said, lifting myself up onto my toes so I could look directly into his eyes. “There was no thing you did other than keeping your eye on the ball and hitting at the precise moment when the impact would send the ball over the fence.” “I’m not so sure.” “Okay, you want to know what it was? It was having me for a girlfriend--” He put his hand behind my head and kissed me to shut me up. Obviously, he didn’t think I understood the whole ritual scene, and in truth, I didn’t. I mean, sure, when I played softball, I always chewed cinnamon-flavored gum during the game, and I never started chewing until after the national anthem. But that was different. If I didn’t do that, I missed way more balls than I caught. But home runs? There was nothing that guaranteed home runs. Jason drew back. “Maybe it is having you for a girlfriend.” “I was kidding.” “I’m not.

As I saw it, there was a 75 percent chance the Fed’s efforts would fall short and the economy would move into failure; a 20 percent chance it would initially succeed at stimulating the economy but still ultimately fail; and a 5 percent chance it would provide enough stimulus to save the economy but trigger hyperinflation. To hedge against the worst possibilities, I bought gold and T-bill futures as a spread against eurodollars, which was a limited-risk way of betting on credit problems increasing. I was dead wrong. After a delay, the economy responded to the Fed’s efforts, rebounding in a noninflationary way. In other words, inflation fell while growth accelerated. The stock market began a big bull run, and over the next eighteen years the U.S. economy enjoyed the greatest noninflationary growth period in its history. How was that possible? Eventually, I figured it out. As money poured out of these borrower countries and into the U.S., it changed everything. It drove the dollar up, which produced deflationary pressures in the U.S., which allowed the Fed to ease interest rates without raising inflation. This fueled a boom. The banks were protected both because the Federal Reserve loaned them cash and the creditors’ committees and international financial restructuring organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Bank for International Settlements arranged things so that the debtor nations could pay their debt service from new loans. That way everyone could pretend everything was fine and write down those loans over many years. My experience over this period was like a series of blows to the head with a baseball bat. Being so wrong—and especially so publicly wrong—was incredibly humbling and cost me just about everything I had built at Bridgewater. I saw that I had been an arrogant jerk who was totally confident in a totally incorrect view. So there I was after eight years in business, with nothing to show for it. Though I’d been right much more than I’d been wrong, I was all the way back to square one.

Fidel Castro, who always enjoyed sports, promoted programs that helped Cuba become a front-runner in Latin America. The island nation fields outstanding baseball, soccer, basketball and volleyball teams. It also excels in amateur boxing. Believing that sports should be available for everyone, not just the privileged few, the phrase “Sports for all” is a motto frequently used. When Castro took power, he abolished all professional sports. Only amateur baseball has been played in Cuba since 1961. An unexpected consequence of this initiative was that many players discovered that they could get much better deals if they left Cuba. As an attempt to prevent this, Fidel forbade players from playing abroad and if they did leave the island, he would prevent their families from joining them. Originally, many Cuban baseball players played for teams in the American Negro league. This ended when Jackie Robinson was allowed to play with the Brooklyn Dodgers during the late 1940’s. Afterwards, all Cuban baseball players played for the regular leagues regardless of their race. The Negro National League ceased after the 1948 season, and the last All-Star game was held in 1962. The Indianapolis Clowns were the last remaining Negro/Latin league team and played until 1966. Cuban players with greater skill joined the Major League Baseball (MLB) teams. If they defected to the United States directly, they had to enter the MLB Draft. However, if they first defected to another country they could become free agents. Knowing this, many came to the United States via Mexico. In all, about 84 players have defected from Cuba since the Revolution. The largest contract ever given to a defector from Cuba was to Rusney Castillo. In 2014, the outfielder negotiated a seven-year contract with the Boston Red Sox for $72.5 million. Starting in 1999, about 21 Cuban soccer players have defected to the United States. The Cuban government considers these defectors as disloyal and treats their families with disrespect, even banning them from taking part in national sports.

He found that when the Montreal Canadiens ice hockey team—once described as the national team of French Canada—got knocked out of the playoffs early between 1951 and 1992, Quebecois males aged fifteen to thirty-four became more likely to kill themselves. Robert Fernquist, a sociologist at the University of Central Missouri, went further. He studied thirty American metropolitan areas with professional sports teams from 1971 to 1990 and showed that fewer suicides occurred in cities whose teams made the playoffs more often. Routinely reaching the playoffs could reduce suicides by about twenty each year in a metropolitan area the size of Boston or Atlanta, said Fernquist. These saved lives were the converse of the mythical Brazilians throwing themselves off apartment blocks. Later, Fernquist investigated another link between sports and suicide: he looked at the suicide rate in American cities after a local sports team moved to another town. It turned out that some of the fans abandoned by their team killed themselves. This happened in New York in 1957 when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants baseball teams left, in Cleveland in 1995–1996 when the Browns football team moved to Baltimore, and in Houston in 1997–1998 when the Oilers football team departed. In each case the suicide rate was 10 percent to 14 percent higher in the two months around the team’s departure than in the same months of the previous year. Each move probably helped prompt a handful of suicides. Fernquist wrote, “The sudden change brought about due to the geographic relocations of pro sports teams does appear to, at least for a short time, make highly identified fans drastically change the way they view the normative order in society.” Clearly none of these people killed themselves just because they lost their team. Rather, they were very troubled individuals for whom this sporting disappointment was too much to bear. Perhaps the most famous recent case of a man who found he could not live without sports was the Gonzo author Hunter S. Thompson. He shot himself in February 2005, four days after writing a note in black marker with the title, “Football Season Is Over”:

What would be the natural thing? A man goes to college. He works as he wants to work, he plays as he wants to play, he exercises for the fun of the game, he makes friends where he wants to make them, he is held in by no fear of criticism above, for the class ahead of him has nothing to do with his standing in his own class. Everything he does has the one vital quality: it is spontaneous. That is the flame of youth itself. Now, what really exists?" "...I say our colleges to-day are business colleges—Yale more so, perhaps, because it is more sensitively American. Let's take up any side of our life here. Begin with athletics. What has become of the natural, spontaneous joy of contest? Instead you have one of the most perfectly organized business systems for achieving a required result—success. Football is driving, slavish work; there isn't one man in twenty who gets any real pleasure out of it. Professional baseball is not more rigorously disciplined and driven than our 'amateur' teams. Add the crew and the track. Play, the fun of the thing itself, doesn't exist; and why? Because we have made a business out of it all, and the college is scoured for material, just as drummers are sent out to bring in business. "Take another case. A man has a knack at the banjo or guitar, or has a good voice. What is the spontaneous thing? To meet with other kindred spirits in informal gatherings in one another's rooms or at the fence, according to the whim of the moment. Instead what happens? You have our university musical clubs, thoroughly professional organizations. If you are material, you must get out and begin to work for them—coach with a professional coach, make the Apollo clubs, and, working on, some day in junior year reach the varsity organization and go out on a professional tour. Again an organization conceived on business lines. "The same is true with the competition for our papers: the struggle for existence outside in a business world is not one whit more intense than the struggle to win out in the News or Lit competition. We are like a beef trust, with every by-product organized, down to the last possibility. You come to Yale—what is said to you? 'Be natural, be spontaneous, revel in a certain freedom, enjoy a leisure you'll never get again, browse around, give your imagination a chance, see every one, rub wits with every one, get to know yourself.' "Is that what's said? No. What are you told, instead? 'Here are twenty great machines that need new bolts and wheels. Get out and work. Work harder than the next man, who is going to try to outwork you. And, in order to succeed, work at only one thing. You don't count—everything for the college.' Regan says the colleges don't represent the nation; I say they don't even represent the individual.

Comebacks Baseball and malaria keep coming back. GENE MAUCH The problem with being Comeback Player of the Year is it means you have to go somewhere before you can come back. BERT BLYLEVEN It was like watching a movie you’ve seen a hundred times, only they snuck in an alternate ending. BILL SIMMONS, on the Red Sox winning the 2004 World Series

enough. Standing for an ovation at a baseball game is not enough. To do right by our veterans—to recognize their value to our society and fulfill our solemn obligation to those who volunteered to protect the rest of us—we first have to understand what they have accomplished and what they offer our nation.

Biography Titles Fowl Tips: My Favorite Chicken Recipes by Wade Boggs … It Pays to Steal by Maury Wills … Planet of the Umps by Ken Kaiser … Some of My Best Friends Are Crazy by Jay Johnstone … Sox and the City by Richard Roeper … The Umpire Strikes Back by Ron Luciano … Veeck as in Wreck by Bill Veeck … The Catcher in the Wry by Bob Uecker … The Wrong Stuff by Bill Lee … The Zen of Zim by Don Zimmer.

Imagine this for a moment, if you will (you can reject the premise later on, but please just go along with it for now): imagine a baseball game.  The Dodgers are playing the Giants.  If you don’t know much about baseball, you may not know the Dodgers and Giants are bitter rivals.  They both want to win, obviously.  And obviously it’s just a sport, so it’s ok that they both want to win. But suppose the score is 10-1, with the Dodgers leading, and it’s the ninth (last) inning.  Suppose after all those games, and all those years and decades (over a century) of this bitter rivalry, the players, managers, coaches and fans said, “Let’s do something different.  Just for this one game, let’s see if we can play to a tie.  It will be different.  I mean we’ve played hundreds of games the other way.  And that was fun.  But let’s just try something different for now.  I mean, all this sweating and fighting and yelling just to win a game—it’s not the only thing in the world.  It’s good, but why not try something new for a change?  So let’s just play the game differently the rest of the way out, this one game.  And how about the fans of the Dodgers and the fans of the Giants switch caps, or at least try to root for the other guys for a while?  I mean, it’s just this once—it can’t hurt, right?  This old game of baseball, it’s a wonderful game, but come on—do we have to play the same way over and over game after game for the rest of our lives?  Just once can we do things differently?” Well, i know some of you sports fans are laughing right now, if not vomiting.  I mean, this is kind of ridiculous—trying to lose, on purpose?  It’s a bit of a left-wing stereotype i’m living up to right now.  So go ahead, get it all out of your system.  Call me every name in the book.  Say the world will fall apart if one baseball game is played differently.  I mean competition is the basis of everything.  If we didn’t compete over everything in life, what sort of meaning would life have?  Our civilization would fall apart.  The Dodgers letting the Giants win would be the end of western civilization.  It would destroy all our western values.  It might even be un-Christ-like.  A lot of you may not be able to imagine such a ridiculous thing even being considered, much less actually happening. And i find this interesting.  I find it interesting that we are so wrapped up in the idea that there must be winners and losers, and that somehow the outcome of this competition (whether it’s a baseball game or the life of a nation) is fair because that’s simply the natural order of things.  The side that wins is supposed to win; the side that loses is supposed to lose.  To dispute this is to dispute the most basic assumptions of who we are. If winning is this important to us, and—by extension—competition is too, then we need to be completely certain that the rules are fair, that nobody is cheating.  That is, suppose the Dodgers were cheating and that’s how they scored 10 runs?  What would we do then?  They probably should forfeit the game, right?  Well, i say white amerika has been cheating.  We’re not all bad—we have talent, we played hard, we love our mothers, but the fact is we’ve been cheating.  White amerika should forfeit.

The president and Colson were in the middle of their conversation about Henry Kissinger when assistant Steve Bull entered the Oval Office to report that Coach Allen of the Redskins had finally arrived. Bull also informed the president of the news, just filtering in, that baseball star Roberto Clemente was on a plane that had crashed after taking off from the San Juan International Airport late the night before. “Was he killed?” Nixon asked. “They don’t have confirmation yet,” Bull replied.1 Clemente, the popular outfielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates, had boarded a rickety four-engine DC-7 plane that was overloaded with relief supplies for the victims of a massive earthquake in Nicaragua. The earthquake was believed to have resulted in the deaths of more than seven thousand people. Most of the deaths had occurred in the capital city of Managua, which had taken the brunt of the 6.2 magnitude shock at midday on Saturday, December 23.2 The city was leveled. The lumbering plane that Clemente was on nose-dived into heavy seas shortly after takeoff from San Juan. Clemente was thirty-eight years old and had been a perennial All-Star, four-time winner of the National League batting championship, defensive genius, and MVP in 1966. He led the Pirates to two world championships, one in 1960 and the other a decade later in 1971. “Mr. Clemente was the leader of Puerto Rican efforts to aid the Nicaraguan victims and was aboard the plane because he suspected that relief supplies were falling into the hands of profiteers,” the New York Times reported after his death was presumed.3 Clemente was scheduled to meet Anastasio Somoza, the military dictator of Nicaragua, at the airport, one of the very grafters he was attempting to circumvent with his personal mission. Clemente’s body was never recovered. It was a bad omen for the start of 1973.

They weren’t happy with us, but they also knew that Milwaukee was an incredible baseball town. The Braves were the first National League team to draw 2 million fans. The fans were so passionate. But it was an uphill battle.

BLOCK: When you're cruising around on the Internet, there's something you do all the time and maybe never really think about. Let's say I wanted to get tickets to a baseball tonight. So, I'm at the Web site for the Washington Nationals. I'm asking for two tickets, the best available seats. And here's what I have to

Joan Joyce is the real deal, a fierce competitor and one of the greatest athletes and coaches in sports history. Tony Renzoni’s moving tribute to Joan shows us why she is a champion in sports and in life. —Billie Jean King, sports icon and equality pioneer The story is all true. Joan Joyce was a tremendous pitcher, as talented as anyone who ever played. [responding to a newspaper account of his early 1960s match-ups against Joan Joyce] —Ted Williams, Hall of Famer and Boston Red Sox great, December 30, 1999 Joan Joyce is truly the greatest female athlete in sports history. And a great coach as well. Tony Renzoni’s well-researched book is a touching tribute to this phenomenal athlete. I highly recommend this book! —Bobby Valentine, former MLB player and manager Quotes for Historic Connecticut Music Venues: From the Coliseum to the Shaboo: I would like to thank Tony Renzoni for giving me the opportunity to write the foreword to his wonderful book. I highly recommend Connecticut Music Venues: From the Coliseum to Shaboo to music lovers everywhere! —Felix Cavaliere, Legendary Hall of Famer (Young Rascals/Rascals, Solo) As the promoter of the concerts in many of the music venues in this book, I hope you enjoy living the special memories this book will give you. —Jim Koplik, Live Nation president, Connecticut and Upstate New York Tony Renzoni has captured the soul and spirit of decades of the Connecticut live music scene, from the wild and wooly perspective of the music venues that housed it. A great read! —Christine Ohlman, the “Beehive Queen,” recording artist/songwriter Tony Renzoni has written a very thoughtful and well-researched tribute to the artists of Connecticut, and we are proud to have Gene included among them. —Lynne Pitney, wife of Gene Pitney Our Alice Cooper band recorded the Billion Dollars Babies album in a mansion in Greenwich. Over the years, there have been many great musicians from Connecticut, and the local scene is rich with good music. Tony Renzoni’s book captures all of that and more. Sit back and enjoy the ride. —Dennis Dunaway, hall of famer and co-founder of the Alice Cooper band. Rock ’n’ Roll music fans from coast to coast will connect to events in this book. Strongly recommended! —Judith Fisher Freed, estate of Alan Freed

We are a people pathologically in love with mourning not only our deceased family members but our national heroes as well. Poets, mathematicians, philosophers, politicians, sports heroes, cosmonauts. I swear that the funeral is to Russia what baseball is to the United States, its national pastime.

There was a time when the [National baseball]League stood for integrity and fair dealing. Today it stands for dollars and cents. Once it looked to the elevation of the game and an honest exhibition of the sport. Today its eyes are on the turnstile. Men have come into the business for no other motive than to exploit it for every dollar in sight. Brotherhood Manifesto, November 1889

Put simply, when free from fat stigma, it is possible for all bodies to achieve health and wellbeing. Yet diets remain monolithically prominent in mainstream culture. With about half the American population trying to lose weight right now (that’s almost 180 million people) and spending major coin to that end ($66 billion in 2017, according to a Marketdata research report), one might conclude that dieting has replaced baseball as the national pastime. Why? Diets are seductive. They make empty but attractive promises.

Humans, whether contemplating the genesis of their customs or of their species, yearn to locate “an explicit point of origin,” rather than accept that most beginnings are gradual and complex. “Creation myths,” [Stephen Jay Gould] concluded, “identify heroes and sacred places, while evolutionary stories provide no palpable, particular thing as a symbol for reverence, worship, or patriotism.” As with baseball, so, too, with America’s birth. The country’s European founding was slow and messy: a primordial slime of false starts and mutations that evolved, over generations, into English colonies and the United States. Once on its feet, the newborn American nation looked back in search of origins, and located its heroes and sacred places on the stony shore of Massachusetts. The Pilgrim Fathers of 1620 begat the Founding Fathers of 1776. Cooperstown had Doubleday’s cow pasture, Plymouth it’s hallowed Rock.

The day’s most notable clash occurred when a group of pacifists visited Lodge, an acerbic Boston Brahmin with a white beard. Lodge was an enthusiastic proponent of war who thought Wilson weak-willed, snorting contemptuously at the president’s call for “peace without victory” of a few months earlier. When the senator stepped into the hallway outside his office to meet the pacifist delegation, its spokesman, Alexander Bannwart, a former minor-league baseball player, attacked Lodge’s enthusiasm for war. The senator was furious. “National degeneracy and cowardice are worse than war!” he told Bannwart, who retorted, “Anyone who wants to go to war is a coward! You’re a damned coward!” This was too much for the 67-year-old Lodge, who shouted, “You’re a damned liar!” and punched Bannwart, 36, to the floor. Bannwart fought back, slamming Lodge against a closed door. Office workers, police, and even a passing Western Union messenger joined the melee in defense of the senator. Lodge triumphantly yelled, “I’m glad I hit him first!” but it was the bloodied Bannwart whom the police hauled away in a paddy wagon.

So many players enter the game with the same approximate skills. The difference is not aptitude but attitude.” - DAVE WINFIELD, 12-time MLB All-Star, World Series Champion, and Member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame

As with baseball, so, too, with America’s birth. The country’s European founding was slow and messy: a primordial slime of false starts and mutations that evolved, over generations, into English colonies and the United States. Once on its feet, the newborn American nation looked back in search of origins, and located its heroes and sacred places on the stony shore of Massachusetts. The Pilgrim Fathers of 1620 begat the Founding Fathers of 1776. Cooperstown had Doubleday’s cow pasture, Plymouth its hallowed Rock.

On our trip from Atlanta to San Diego we had a stopover in Dallas at Love Field. There’s a huge statue of a Texas Ranger in the terminal and it’s inscribed: “One Riot, One Ranger.” It reminded me of an incident when I was playing baseball in Amarillo. There were about five or six players having a drink at a table in the middle of this large, well-lit bar, all of us over twenty-one. Suddenly, through the swinging doors—Old West fashion—come these four big Texans, ten-gallon hats, boots, spurs, six-shooters holstered at their sides, the works. They stopped and looked around and all of a sudden everybody in the place stopped talking. I wouldn’t have been surprised if one of them said, “All right, draw!” They spotted us ballplayers and sauntered over, all four of them, spurs jangling, boots creaking, all eyes on them. “Let me see your IDs, boys,” one of them says. I don’t know what got into me, but I had to say—I had to after that entrance—to these obvious Texas Rangers, “First I’d like to see your identification.” I said it loud. He rolled his eyes up into his head in exasperation and very slowly and reluctantly he reached for his wallet, opened it and showed me his badge and identification card. I gave them a good going over. I mean a 20-second check, looking at the photo and then up at him. Then I said, “He’s okay, men.” Then, of course, we all whipped out our IDs, which showed we were all over twenty-one, and the Texas Rangers turned around and walked out, creaking and jangling. We laughed about that for weeks. I find it curious that of all the things Dallas could have chosen to glorify in the airport, it chose law enforcement. The only thing I know about Dallas law enforcement is that its police department allowed a lynching to occur on national television. Maybe the statue should have been of a group of policemen at headquarters, with an inscription that read: “One Police Department, One Lynching.

Baseball Dennis & the French tells the true story of Paul Croshaw, longtime liberal activist, and connoisseur of French films, who amazed his family, friends, and himself by becoming a churchgoing, conservative Christian after years of listening to nationally syndicated radio host Dennis Prager.

The days were growing shorter, and oil was too expensive to use often, so after dinner James and I would sit on the front porch of our cabin until dusk and talk about his work at the store, the people he’d seen during the day, and our dreams for our life. On Saturdays he played baseball. He still had hopes of a professional career. It was 1906 and another league, the American, had been formed to compete with the National. Baseball was sweeping the country. They’d even begun forming teams all the way across the ocean, in Europe.

In the end, the Expos needed a champion, someone with money and power who could run the team through the harsh 1990s, then reap the benefits in the next decade when an explosion in national and local TV deals and a vastly expanded revenue-sharing program made even the poorest teams prosperous and relatively secure. No one ever showed up. That, more than anything, is why baseball didn't work in Montreal. In the league's eyes, Montreal had failed baseball. The cold, hard truth was that for the most part, this was absolutely right.

The lead item on national network evening news programs was the end of the major league baseball strike. Thirty minutes later, the death of Selena was the lead item on all the television stations in Corpus Christi, San Antonio, Houston, and the Rio Grande Valley.

In the future I would have to find books with national interest. The world of books was changing, and to survive, I had to change with the times.

isn’t frowning on the new craze. It’s actively promoting sports gambling with corporate partnerships and in-game graphics broadcast on national television, giving viewers live betting odds of the current batter’s chances of hitting a home run in that very moment. There’s simply too much money in play not to be involved. In 2023, fans in America wagered more than one hundred billion dollars on sports, enough money that they could have pooled their cash to buy the Cincinnati Reds a hundred times over or purchase every single Major League Baseball team—and still have billions of dollars left in their pockets.

The people were wrapped in rags given to them by the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, UNRWA. Rags originally "donated by the American people." The girls walked around wearing baseball hats. Out of the sacks our UNRWA flour rations came in mothers cut underpants for their sons. I often walked around with my behind covered with a handshake and the proclamation that the contents were a "gift from the American people.

It is understood that this invented narrative will turn on certain familiar elements. There is the continuing story line of the “horse race,” the reliable daily drama of one candidate falling behind as another pulls ahead. There is the surprise of the new poll, the glamour of the one-on-one colloquy on the midnight plane, a plot point (the nation sleeps while the candidate and his confidant hammer out its fate) pioneered by Theodore H. White. There is the abiding if unexamined faith in the campaign as personal odyssey, and in the spiritual benefits accruing to those who undertake it.

A few stations, starting with one owned by AT&T, started broadcasting messages for advertisers. Within a couple of years, AT&T’s broadcast activities had become far more professional. Baseball games and highlights, news reports, music, and other forms of entertainment soon made their way onto the air. AT&T, as the nation’s telephone company, owned an advanced wiring system that enabled small and distant radio broadcasters nationwide to pick up programming from hundreds of miles away—with this, a small station in Maine could pick up a signal from Washington DC via a wire and broadcast the signal to a local audience. Rather than have countless stations develop their own expensive programming, AT&T’s primary station, WEAF, allowed other local stations to broadcast a programming block. With its national infrastructure and early entry into broadcast advertising, AT&T’s national broadcast operation was profitable.

First we devise the notion that this spec of cosmic gas and elements is the universe’s Disneyland. Then we further display our arrogance by declaring that this particular country on this spec of dust is beloved by some imaginary creator. We’re so engorged on national pride that we stop baseball games in the 7th inning just to sing a self-aggrandizing dirge celebrating how much the man in the sky loves us. We well up at songs, waving flags, and jets flying overhead spewing out red, white and blue smoke in a proud demonstration of patriotic flatulence. We get aroused over symbols but are too lazy or stupid to ponder the concepts they represent. Don

Indians love baseball,” jokes Charlie Hill, “but we don’t set up camp in the ballpark! Hey, if the Atlanta Braves think that using Indians as mascots is simply harmless fun, then why not have them dress up some white guy in a three-piece suit and have him shuffle around a mobile home parked in the middle of the outfield every time their team scores a hit? Or how about changing the names of a few of these sports teams? Why not have the Atlanta White Boys or the Kansas City Caucasians or the Chicago Negroes, the Washington Jews or New York Rednecks?” My

pitch. Guess where it went? Yeah, it sailed into the stands and hit Alice. It broke a bone in her knee! That lady was not having a good day. Deion Sanders is the only person in history to hit a home run in a Major League Baseball game and score a touchdown in the National Football League in the same week! The most valuable baseball card in the world is a Honus Wagner card from 1909–10. In perfect condition, it’s worth more than two million dollars.

Drinking, as Eric Burns writes, was our first national pastime—long before baseball was invented.

Of course it’s fairly obvious where it’s coming from. Even the most casual Democratic voters understand by now that there is a schism within the party, one that pits “party insiders” steeped in the inside-baseball muck of Washington money culture against . . . well, against us, the actual voters. The insiders have for many years running now succeeded in convincing their voters that their actual beliefs are hopeless losers in the general electoral arena, and that certain compromises must be made if the party is ever to regain power. This defeatist nonsense is sold to the public in the form of beady-eyed party hacks talking to one another in the opinion pages of national media conglomerates, where, after much verbose and solemn discussion, the earnest and idealistic candidate the public actually likes is dismissed on the grounds that “he can’t win.” In his place is trotted out the guy the party honchos insist to us is the real “winner”—some balding, bent little bureaucrat who has grown prematurely elderly before our very eyes over the course of ten or twenty years of sad, compromise-filled service in the House or the Senate. This “winner” is then given a lavish parade and sent out there on the trail, and we hold our noses as he campaigns in our name on a platform of Jesus, the B-2 bomber, and the death penalty for eleven-year-olds, consoling ourselves that he at least isn’t in favor of repealing the Voting Rights Act. (Or is he? We have to check.) Then he loses to the Republicans anyway and we start all over again—beginning with the next primary election, when we are again told that the antiwar candidate “can’t win” and that the smart bet is the corporate hunchback still wearing two black eyes from the last race. No

America’s game. It has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere. It belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly as our Constitution’s laws, is just as important in the sum total of our historic life.” Baseball is, to be sure, an American cultural declaration of independence. It has come to express the nation’s character—perhaps never more so than during the years immediately after a scandal threatened to ruin the integrity of the game. That time ushered in a preoccupation with defining the national conscience, and particularly defining the national identity, which Babe Ruth came to symbolize.

Flipped through memories like old copies of National Geographic, pages in a yellowing high-school year book, cable-television channels looking for a baseball game.

The average veteran who joined the Legion in the 1920’s had been unaware that big-business men were backing it to use it as a strikebreaking agency. When workers struck against wage cuts, Legion posts were informed that the strikers were Communists trying to create national chaos so that the Reds could take over. Legionnaires were given baseball bats to break up strikes and civil rights demonstrations. The American Civil Liberties Union later reported, “Of the forces most active in attacking civil rights, the American Legion led the field.

Guar, mostly imported from India, is derived from the guar bean. It is used extensively in the food industry to assure consistency in cakes, pies, ice cream, breakfast cereals, and yogurt. But it has another major use—in fracking, in a Jell-O-like slosh that carries sand into the fractures to expand them. But guar and the related additives were expensive. At a baseball game in Dallas, Steinsberger ran into some other geologists who had successfully replaced much of the guar with water, but in another part of Texas and not in shale. In 1997, he experimented with their water recipe on a couple of shale wells, without success. Steinsberger got approval for one final try. This was the SH Griffin #4 in Dish. The team was still using water to replace most of the guar, but this time they fed in the sand more slowly. By the spring of 1998, they had the answer. “The well,” said Steinsberger, “was vastly superior to any other well that Mitchell had ever drilled.” The code for shale had been broken.

My father is taking me to my first baseball game. The Philadelphia Athletics are playing. I feel I've been sitting on my strange hard seat for a long time. I stand up. It is the National Anthem. "I want to go home now," I tell my father. He is looking down at the big green field. "But the game hasn't started yet," he says. Then he shrugs. He laughs and his laughter is big like the wind. "O.K., kid. O.K." And he takes my by the hand and leads me out of the stadium.

I also showed the engineers a framework for play devised by Scott Eberle, an intellectual historian of play and vice president for interpretation at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. Eberle feels that most people go through a six-step process as they play. While neither he nor I believe that every player goes through exactly these steps in this order, I think it’s useful to think of play in this way. Eberle says that play involves: Anticipation, waiting with expectation, wondering what will happen, curiosity, a little anxiety, perhaps because there is a slight uncertainty or risk involved (can we hit the baseball and get safely on base?), although the risk cannot be so great that it overwhelms the fun. This leads to . . . Surprise, the unexpected, a discovery, a new sensation or idea, or shifting perspective. This produces . . . Pleasure, a good feeling, like the pleasure we feel at the unexpected twist in the punch line of a good joke. Next we have . . . Understanding, the acquisition of new knowledge, a synthesizing of distinct and separate concepts, an incorporation of ideas that were previously foreign, leading to . . . Strength, the mastery that comes from constructive experience and understanding, the empowerment of coming through a scary experience unscathed, of knowing more about how the world works. Ultimately, this results in . . . Poise, grace, contentment, composure, and a sense of balance in life. Eberle diagrams this as a wheel. Once we reach poise, we are ready to go to a new source of anticipation, starting the ride all over again.

It is unlikely that we will hit a home run anytime soon but if we are unable to get rid of offensive sports team nicknames, we will strike out.

It’s no surprise, however, that baseball and finally softball teams continued to adopt the honey bee as their mascot after World War II. With the issue of race becoming an explosive issue, sports and schools became the avenues for the American public to address racial and gender prejudice. Because Americans don’t have a national religion, sports provide a way for people to share rules and values. From the Burlington Bees to the Salt Lake Buzz, baseball teams chose the honey bee as their icon because such a symbol emphasized a tightly organized social infrastructure, which good baseball teams need.

By Anne Kihagi - For Wine Enthusiasts Looking for Off-Beaten Path Ideas- Consider the Town of MurphysSuggested by Anne Kihagi California is known for its numerous vineyards and wineries. Located in Calaveras County, the town of Murphys is situated between Yosemite National Park and Lake Tahoe. It is home to several dozen wineries that operate year-round. Some of the wineries in the town include Indian Rock Vineyards, Mineral Wines Tasting Room, Newsome Harlow, and Courtwood Wine Tasting Tours. The town also offers unique boutique shops, art galleries, and fine dining. You can find items that are new to you at Best Friends Consignment Shop, peruse baseball cards at KCK Collectibles, and sample olive oil at Marisolio Olive Oil Tasting Bar. Unwind after a long day of shopping and wine tasting with dinner at Gabby’s Mexican Cuisine or V Restaurant, Bar, and Bistro. If you have a sweet tooth, visit JoMa’s Artisan Ice Cream or Aria Bakery. A place of interest located near Murphys is Moaning Cavern in Calaveras Trees State Park. It is the largest cavern in the state. If you are a history buff, you will enjoy learning about the town’s origins during the Gold Rush Era. It was started in 1848 by brothers John and Daniel Murphy. Some of the town’s original buildings are still in operation, like the Murphys Historic Hotel and Lodge. It earned a registered historic landmark designation because of the significant figures who once visited it, including Mark Twain and General Ulysses S. Grant.

One afternoon, in the suffocating damp heat of a Washington summer, I was taken to learn about the American game of baseball. The game remained something of a mystery to me, but I learned more about the actual separation between the white and black races. In the stadium I and my white escort were seated on the side reserved for whites, and on the opposite side of the stadium were seats for the blacks, of whom there were many more than the whites. In buses, too, separation of the races was strictly enforced, with whites at the front and blacks at the back. The public toilets were strictly separate. No Afro-American would think of entering a hotel or restaurant frequented by whites; the division was absolute. Blacks had their own eating and sleeping places. And of course, all schools were segregated. There was nothing like this in Baghdad. While there were very few black students in both the boys’ and the girls’ schools, they were treated just like the rest of us and many real friendships developed between the two. This easy relationship existed although it had been only a few years since Ottoman days, when Iraqis were able to buy black slaves openly, a practice that was banned when the British army arrived in 1917. Yet here in the United States, the Land of Liberty and Equality, at least in the southern states, no white man could sit down in a restaurant and have a meal with a black friend. Though this discrimination no longer existed legally, it was clearly still in practice in the nation’s capitol.

Is it of any significance I wonder that the two countries of the Western Hemisphere whose governments the United States would most like to overthrow - Venezuela and Cuba -have the greatest National obsession with baseball outside of the United States?

Before coming to Atlanta in 1966, the Braves had been in Milwaukee, and before 1953, they had been one of the charter National League teams as the Boston Braves. The team had emerged as the Boston Red Stockings in the 1870s and were next the Red Caps, the Beaneaters, the Doves, and then the Rustlers. They became the Braves in 1912 because one of their owners, ex–New York cop James Gaffney, was a fixture of the Tammany Hall political machine and Tammany’s famous symbol had long been an American Indian.

Activity pouch on airplanes Buttons and pins Crayons and coloring place mats from restaurants Disposable sample cup from the grocery store Erasers and pencils with eraser tops Fireman hat from a visit to the fire station Goodie bags from county fairs and festivals Hair comb from picture day at school Infant goods from the maternity ward Junior ranger badge from the ranger station and Smokey the Bear Kids’ meal toys Lollipops and candy from various locations, such as the bank Medals and trophies for simply participating in (versus winning) a sporting activity Noisemakers to celebrate New Year’s Eve OTC samples from the doctor’s office Party favors and balloons from birthday parties Queen’s Jubilee freebies (for overseas travelers) Reusable plastic “souvenir” cup and straw from a diner Stickers from the doctor’s office Toothbrushes and floss from the dentist’s office United States flags on national holidays Viewing glasses for a 3-D movie (why not keep one pair and reuse them instead?) Water bottles at sporting events XYZ, etc.: The big foam hand at a football or baseball game or Band-Aids after a vaccination or various newspapers, prospectuses, and booklets from school, museums, national parks . . .

A total of 56 members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame have been associated with the New York Yankees at one time or another as a player, manager, or front office executive - the highest representation of any other team.

Play, which I would define as anything we do simply for the joy of doing rather than as a means to an end—whether it’s flying a kite or listening to music or throwing around a baseball—might seem like a nonessential activity. Often it is treated that way. But in fact play is essential in many ways. Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, has studied what are called the play histories of some six thousand individuals and has concluded that play has the power to significantly improve everything from personal health to relationships to education to organizations’ ability to innovate. “Play,” he says, “leads to brain plasticity, adaptability, and creativity.” As he succinctly puts it, “Nothing fires up the brain like play.” 3

The Times ad marked a seminal intersection in the history of cancer. With it, cancer declared its final emergence from the shadowy interiors of medicine into the full glare of public scrutiny, morphing into an illness of national and international prominence. This was a generation that no longer whispered about cancer. There was cancer in newspapers and cancer in books, cancer in theater and in films: in 450 articles in the New York Times in 1971; in Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, a blistering account of a cancer hospital in the Soviet Union; in Love Story, a 1970 film about a twenty-four-year-old woman who dies of leukemia; in Bang the Drum Slowly, a 1973 release about a baseball catcher diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease; in Brian's Song, the story of the Chicago Bears star Brian Piccolo, who died of testicular cancer. A torrent of op-ed pieces and letters appeared in newspapers and magazines.

It wasn’t as outside as they wanted. Sisler drove it over the left-field fence. The Whiz Kids were going to the 1950 World Series. They lost. The Yankees of Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and Phil Rizzuto swept them in four games. The Yanks had their second consecutive World Series title and thirteenth overall; the Phillies were still looking for their first. They had scored all of four runs while getting swept in the last all-Caucasian World Series. (Mays, Monte Irvin, and Hank Thompson would play for the New York Giants in the 1951 Series.) Still, they rode the train home to a heroes’ welcome at Philadelphia’s Broad Street Station. The Whiz Kids were National League champions, the youngest club in the league, with better years in store, they thought.

Fuck. It wasn’t often that I had to rely on my old trick of naming baseball rosters in my head, but right now, thoughts of the Washington Nationals were the only thing keeping me from cutting our night short.

Devin Pohl's life in Bend, Oregon, revolves around his deep love for baseball, supporting the Oregon Ducks and Boston Red Sox. His enthusiasm for the sport includes following game stats and attending games. Devin also treasures his time hiking in the Deschutes National Forest, where he finds tranquility and inspiration in nature.

Character Profile: MOE DRABOWSKY