Today’s NYTimes includes an analysis of recent Red Sox player acquisitions and suggests the Bosox now have the edge in A.L. East. Read Tyler Kepner’s opinion from Yankee country here, and get the NYT if you want more.
November 24th, 2010
Forget Football for Five Minutes (see below)
The Globe and boston.com are running a series that’s a lot of fun. Chad Finn is presenting his favorite Topps baseball cards a five-pack at a time in synch with Topps’ 60th anniversary effort to identify its top 60 cards since 1952. See installment two today, and click the first installment link at bottom.
November 2nd, 2010
The Giants Did GO!
October 29th, 2010
‘Baseball Canto’ by Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Legendary San Francisco poet and founder of City Lights Bookstore and publishing company Lawrence Ferlinghetti is a baseball fan, too. The card-carrying Beat writer and publisher of Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” and several books by Jack Kerouac, including “Book of Dreams” and “Pomes All Sizes,” has a most fitting poem for this World Series week. Click here to hear Ferlinghetti reading the poem.—PM
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Baseball Canto
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Watching baseball
sitting in the sun
eating popcorn
Reading Ezra Pound
and wishing Juan Marichal
would hit a hole right through
the Anglo-Saxon tradition
in the First Canto
and demolish the barbarian invaders
When the San Francisco Giants take the field
and everybody stands up for the National Anthem
with some Irish tenor's voice
piped over the loudspeakers
with all the players struck dead in their places
and the white umpires like Irish cops
in their black suits and little black caps
pressed over their hearts
standing straight and still
like at some funeral of a blarney bartender
and all facing East
as if expecting some Great White Hope
or the Founding Fathers
to appear on the horizon
like 1066 or 1776 or all that
But Willie Mays appears instead
in the bottom of the first
and a roar goes up
as he clouts the first one into the sun
and takes off
like a footrunner from Thebes
The ball is lost in the sun
and maidens wail after him
but he keeps running
through the Anglo-Saxon epic
And Tito Fuentes comes up
Looking like a bullfighter
in his tight pants and small pointy shoes
And the rightfield bleachers go mad
With Chicanos & blacks & Brooklyn beerdrinkers
"Tito! Sock it to him, Sweet Tito!"
And Sweet Tito puts his foot in the bucket
and smacks one that don't come back at all
and flees around the bases
like he's escaping from the United Fruit Company
as the Gringo dollar beats out the Pound
and Sweet Tito beats it out
like he's beating out usury
not to mention fascism and anti-semitism
And Juan Marchial comes up
and the Chicano bleachers go loco again
as Juan belts the first fast ball
out of sight
and rounds first and keeps going
and rounds second and rounds third
and keeps going
and hits pay-dirt
to the roars of the grungy populace
As some nut presses the backstage panic button
for the tape-recorded National Anthem again
to save the situation
but it don't stop nobody this time
in their revolution round the loaded white bases
in this last of the great Anglo-Saxon epics
in the Territorio Libre of Baseball
.
---Lawrence Ferlinghetti (c)
October 25th, 2010
Double Portrait: An Historic Baseball Mystery
Note: This 18th-century portrait could be one of the earliest depictions of baseball in America. The location of the original oil painting is unknown. (The image was originally featured in Apollo.)
There’s a fascinating story by Doug Tribou on the WBUR website that originally ran on the station’s show – “Only a Game.” Tribou received an e-mail containing an image of a very early painting – two boys in period dress – one white and one black – holding what appears to be a baseball and two bats. He became hooked on the mystery. This mystery led to much searching for information about the painting, the artist, the boys and the history. The painting – if really of boys who played baseball – may be the earliest painting of baseball. For a sports guy – this was a mystery that had to be solved. The implications in a societal and cultural sense are also worthy of some historical reseach.
Tribou recounts the ups and downs, starts, stops and speculations he encountered in his quest to solve the baseball mystery. For now he concludes:
It’s been fun, and frustrating. But I take comfort in the words of Baseball Hall of Fame’s Shieber, who has done a lot more of this kind of work than I ever will.
“To me it’s about the means, it’s not necessarily about the end,” Shieber said. “The research process to me is the most fun. If I can get something neat at the end, great. It can’t just be about the end, because a lot of times I don’t get there.”
So, I’m throwing in my amateur historian towel and hanging up my research cleats. Until someone finds the actual painting, we might never know the full story of the boys and the game they played. And it’s time to move on. Unless I can get just one more clue…
Read or listen to Tribou recount his story here on WBUR 90.9FM. Learn more about Doug Tribou here.
September 16th, 2010
I Think I Miss Zoilo Versalles
I like baseball. I really like baseball and have liked it as far back as I can recall. One of my great memories is of my father taking me to a Red Sox-Minnesota Twins afternoon doubleheader at Fenway when I was 11 years old. It was the mid-60s, and the Twins were a hot team with players like Harmon Killebrew, Tony Oliva, Camilo Pascual, Bobby Allison, Jim Kaat, Earl Battey, and Zoilo Versalles. The Red Sox had Tony Conigliaro, Yaz, Jim Lonborg, and others of that era. The game was sold out when we got to the park, so my dad bought standing-room tickets and we stood in the back of the grandstand behind home plate for 18 innings. At one point we got a couple of seats when two people left, but mostly my dad stood with me the whole time. I inherited the baseball gene from him.
It occurred to me the other day that this is the first time that I’ve gone a whole season without watching one Red Sox game on TV. I didn’t go to Fenway either. I watched half an inning here and there while skipping through channels on TV, but that’s about it. I glanced at the headlines in the Globe or Sun sports pages or on boston.com to see who won. I just wasn’t interested this year. It seemed like the Sox’s prospects for being a contender faded by mid-spring. It felt like a “wait till next year” year. Every week there was a new player injured. The line-up was forever changing. The Yankees surged again, which was a turn-off itself. In late summer the Roger Clemens scandal re-surfaced. Maybe the cumulative weight of the cheating with drugs, stratospheric contract deals, and endless free-agent musical chairs soured me on major league baseball overall.
This year my family gave up the charter season’s tickets we’ve had for the Lowell Spinners. We didn’t go to one Spinners game this summer for the first time ever. I spoke to owner Drew Weber about letting the four tickets go, and he understood that it is a real challenge for people to go to even half of the 35 home games. I was spending more and more time posting available tickets online for sale or finding people to take the tickets for free. In the past few years we went to five or six games during the year, and always enjoyed it. Drew said it’s better for folks like us to give up the tickets so that the seats aren’t empty. It’s better for him, of course, to have happy patrons in the park buying hot dogs and ice cream. At the park, they wait a few innings to be sure the season’s ticket people are not coming and then let standing-room folks fill in the empty premium box seats. Makes sense. Taking a pass on the Spinners was part of the overall baseball blues this year.
We’ll see what happens over the fall and winter. Maybe the World Series will be a memorable set of games this October. In the meantime, I’ll pull out my old baseball cards and see if I can rediscover the magic.
July 30th, 2010
Not Exactly Proust
Somehow in my household I get the walk-the-dog-duty about 90 percent of the time. Half of that is the by-product of being an early riser; the other half is being a slow evader at suppertime. It’s been so hot this summer that the grass crisped up early on the South Common, especially on the south slope facing the Eliot Church. In another post I described the color of the grass as the color of mountain lion haunches. Walking on that grass day after day has reminded me of the hours I spent in the outfield at the Lowell park in Centralville that I knew as Aiken Avenue Park, but whose official name I believe is Hovey Square Park, on the border of Dracut and Lowell. The two ball fields used to be called Hovey 1 and Hovey 2 in my softball-playing days.
As a kid I spent countless summer afternoons and evenings in the park with two of my cousins who lived across from the park on Aiken Avenue, up the street from Ouellette’s Funeral Home (now Ouellette-McKenna). The outfield grass in high summer was short, scrubby, and bleached-out, but as much as what was underfoot triggered my memories, being in the large open space itself helped bring back those days at Hovey Square. Wide open spaces are rare to find in the city. Wide open spaces with grass are even more rare. (We do have some big parking lots, such as the one at Cross Point.) Crossing the expanse on the Common gives me a sense of liberation. The feeling is like tracking a fly ball in the outfield, running and running until you catch it or run out of room. There’s also the sensation of standing still in the middle of a big open space—waiting for the inning to begin or the next pitch to be thrown. My cousin Tom and I would often play home run derby at the field whose home plate is closer to Aiken Ave. There would be just the two of us: one hitting the ball out of his hand, and the other positioned in right field, which was bordered by tall grass and brush on two sides, making it a better option for smashing home runs. Deep center and deep left blended with the outfield of the other field that it backed up to. We would take turns and play that game for hours. Baseball requires skills that are sharpened by repetition. We didn’t mind it at all. Hit. Catch. Hit. Catch. Over and over.
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