Play Ball
When I was a kid it seemed as if baseball was the only professional sport that mattered. Football, basketball, and hockey were still struggling for attention, but baseball truly was "the national pastime," and the World Series mesmerized the nation as the Super Bowl, March Madness, and American Idol rolled into one. Well okay, maybe not as big as American Idol. Ironically, back then there were only sixteen franchises, and none west of the Mississippi. Few things echo the transformation of America from a laconic Norman Rockwell tranquility to the high pressure, greed-driven country of today, where our leaders no longer work to unite us and instead encourage us all to distrust and detest each other. And yet I still love going "to the ball game," which is very different from watching on TV. Once I've got past the traffic jams getting in, the astronomically-priced parking, the stratospheric cost of tickets, and the rip-offs at the refreshment stands, and once I put out of my mind the reality that the thugs on the field are steroid-besotted egomaniacs, I can enjoy leaping up from my seat on the uppermost tier, from where people on the field are smaller than my thumbnail. and scream "yer blind ya bum" at the umpire, who stands four feet from the play in question. Passions in the stands run high, but it's all good fun.
posted by John M Crowther @ 7:21 AM
4 Comments:
Love the baseball cartoons John. This is the cubs year! lol roger
Ah yes, Roger, misery springs eternal.
John’s paean to the game of baseball as it once was played fills me with teary nostalgia. Why, I can even taste the hotdogs sold at Yankee Stadium in 1945, the last year of the Second World War. Served on a tepid roll with pungent mustard, those meatless wartime wieners are even more evocative of “temps perdu” than any Frenchman’s crummy lemon cookie.
That year, while most of his fellow players were still in the services, Georgia “Snuffy” Stirnweiss won the American League batting title with only a .309 average. The rest of his team-mates --4Fs and old men left behind— did their best to uphold the grand tradition of the game. And who knows what they were paid? Carfare and a few bucks?
We do know that a few years later in 1949 Snuffy’s more spectacular team-mate, DiMaggio, became the first professional player to be signed for $100,000.
This year a hundred thousand bucks won’t buy you a bat-boy and a hot dog at that same stadium will cost $5 or more!
Baseball, baseball, your very name is like a bell for whom no one tolls.
(I have no idea what that means.)
Il Professore, my hat is off to you. Your wicked sense of humor is a perfect fit for John C's. You both make me laugh out loud every time!
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