Recently Read

Summer of '68
by Tim Wendel

It happens every year. The winter months come, the last baseball season is left far behind, and I get the itch for the game to come back. So I usually try to jump that gun and bring baseball back, a little earlier than scheduled, by picking up one of the many works of literature devoted to the game. It's not exactly a day at the ballpark, but reading a good book about baseball will do in a pinch.

Summer of '68 by Tim Wendel

So it came to pass that, on a recent trip to the local library, I picked up Summer of '68, an account of the legendary "Year of the Pitcher" by longtime sportswriter Tim Wendel.

Just based on the title alone, this book held enormous promise. It is an account of 1968, that most famous year both in baseball (the last year before division play, the year when true giants stood atop the mound, the year before everything changed) and beyond (a year of unprecedented upheaval, with assassinations, demonstrations, riots, Olympics, and elections...not to mention my own birth, during game 6 of that year's World Series). As with other such baseball books--accounts of one particular, stand-out year in the game's history (Halberstam's October 1964 and Summer of '49 immediately spring to mind)--Summer of '68 comes with the built in advantage of a narrative already created and neatly packed; all the author needs to do is dig into the details and tease out the hidden side of the already well-known story to bring the reader a fascinating and refreshing experience of days--and the game--gone by. Given that standard, Summer of '68 is a win--but it's not a blowout win by any means.

After all, it's hard to go wrong when your chief subjects are the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals and Detroit Tigers: two teams full of larger than life characters who matched up against each other in that year's World Series. The tale of Bob Gibson's dominance on the mound, fueled in part by his reaction to the King and Kennedy assassinations, makes for deeply interesting reading. So too with the carnival show that was Denny McLain, winning 31 games at the height of his career; Mickey Lolich, overcoming adversity, doubt, and envy to stand in the end as the Series hero; Curt Flood, the game's best centerfielder who still had his greatest challenges ahead of him; Tigers legend Al Kaline, capping a Hall of Fame career with an exhibition of true greatness on the game's biggest stage; and...well, the list goes on and on. Great stories abounded on those two teams, not to mention the fascinating tales that peppered the major leagues outside of those two cities (Don Drysdale, Catfish Hunter, Frank Howard, Milt Pappas, Luis Tiant, and more). Almost any writer could produce an interesting book with such characters and their deeds as his subject.

And yet, Summer of '68 never quite caught fire for me, despite its glorious subject matter. The blame for that lack of intensity must lay in author Wendel's shortcomings as a writer. Perhaps it is telling that Wendel, according to his bio, was a founding editor of USA Today; Wendel's writing in Summer of '68 mirrors the blandness of that 'least common denominator' publication. The author is just not much of a stylist; his prose is flat and uninspiring, and that deficiency bleeds some of the drama out of otherwise fascinating characters and scenes. Much of the narrative is choppy, and comes across as less a flowing, unified work and more a quilt of disparate texts cobbled together from unrelated articles. (The reader gets the impression that large parts of Summer of '68 were pieced together from previously published works, though there are no 'previously published' credits anywhere in the book's cataloging info.) The writing also contains many stylistic faults, such as needless identifications and explanations of things already identified and explained--small flubs that are individually forgivable, but pervasive enough to be distracting. All in all, Summer of '68 suffers greatly from burdens that are almost more than its grand subject matter can overcome.

That the book does overcome those burdens, just enough to make the reader want to keep going forward, is a testament to the work's core story. What the Tigers and Cardinals accomplished in 1968, and the maelstrom in which they achieved their greatness, makes for a story too intriguing to be sidetracked by the presentation's failings. In a perfect world, this story would have gotten a better treatment by a truly gifted writer; as it stands, baseball fans can make do with Summer of '68 and honor the memory of what were truly legendary days.

Weirdness, Baseball Edition

This is an odd thing: the baseball season has arrived, and I did not publish any kind of preview prediction thing. It's the first time in several years I have not bothered to put together a prediction sheet. It's not that my life is too busy right now, per se, but I seem to have little time to spend on activities that are not "must do" actions. Nevertheless, I'd like to say a few things about the new season, just to put a few observations down for the record.

Most notable right now, several teams got off to very good starts. The Dodgers came flying out of the gate, while the Nationals, Cardinals, Rangers and Tigers have all impressed in the early going. Some of these starts will be meaningful in the long run, but I'd caution any fans of these teams about getting too excited just yet. There's a muddled record for fast starting teams achieving ultimate success; especially teams that were nowhere just last season, and are now pushing the envelope in April.

That may mean trouble for Washington. They have talent, but it's young talent, and those are the kinds of ballplayers who play well when they're playing well, but then have trouble bringing themselves out of the tailspin when the slump comes (as it inevitably will). I also retain my prejudice against St. Louis; championship or no, I remain convinced that that team isn't as good as recent results suggest. (They will, however, benefit from playing in an obviously weakened division this year.)

Conversely, Texas has made a believer out of me. You can't go to the Series two years in a row, then come flying out of the gate the next year, and not convince the doubters. I think they're in it for the long haul. I expect the Dodgers to stick around, too; their fast start suggests that their struggles the past couple of seasons represented artificially suppressed output, due to the toxic scene caused by the ownership fiasco. Detroit will probably stay up there, too, but I'm less certain about that.

On the other side of the coin, I'm worried about the team of my youth, the Phillies. They're scuffling even with their superior pitching, and that worries me. Injuries in the offense should have an impact, but even so a set of starters that good should keep you winning games. I'm not writing anything off just now, but check back with me in June, and the answer might be different.

There's a smell around the Angels, too, just now, and that might linger as well. Yes, Pujols will eventually hit his usual share, but I get the vibe that that team, for whatever reason, is less than the sum of its parts, and has been for a few years now.

As for my local nines, both teams look a lot like "four games over .500" teams this season--and that will play very differently on either side of the bay. An 83 win season will not find many friends with the Giants, but that feels like their ultimate destination. They just have that one step up, one step back feel to them, despite their own high expectations. Conversely, finishing over .500 will be hailed as a triumph by the Athletics, should they get that far. Everyone was very down on them going into this season, but as of this writing they're one game over .500, with almost half of Manny Ramirez's suspension in the books. That may turn out to be a non-trivial matter; if they hold their own for the next 30 games, and then get a little more juice in their lineup from MR's presence, the A's could turn into a very big surprise. Again, get back to me in June.

Finally, whither the eternal questions about the Red Sox and Yankees? Since there can never be any baseball discussion anymore without those two teams in the mix, we must address the issue. The good news is, I think the results of the last couple of seasons have worn away the veneer from these two teams. The Yankees look good, but not that good. Meanwhile, Boston just reeks of bad medicine. Worst of all--for these two teams; it's good for the rest of us--the mystique has been dissipated, and rest of the AL East has just about caught up. The Rays are legit challengers, as always lately, but even the Jays and the Orioles aren't afraid of the big two anymore. I think that erosion just might be enough to send one, or even both, of these teams packing come the end of the regular season. And a big sigh of relief for that.

Keep watching this space for more baseball related insight, or at least baseball related whining.

Recently Read

Baseball in the Garden of Eden:
The Secret History of the Early Game
by John Thorn

Baseball in the Garden of Eden

It's an annual ritual, on a par with pitchers and catchers reporting in mid-February, the pomp and circumstance of Opening Day, and the passionate denouement that is the World Series: my yearly off-season quest for a literary baseball fix to get me through the dark, game-less days of Winter.

This year's entry into that long tradition is John Thorn's Baseball in the Garden of Eden. Subtitled "The Secret History of the Early Game," veteran writer and researcher Thorn's volume utilizes a two pronged approach to cover the baseball's earliest development. Much of the text is devoted to a straightforward narrative of the game's evolution from various forerunner activities into the sport that would become the nation's pastime. Wrapped around that core history is Thorn's somewhat well-documented, somewhat speculative account of the "secret history" that surrounds baseball's "creation myth"--specifically, the doings of the members of the Mills Commission of the early 1900s and their specious conclusion that the Civil War hero Abner Doubleday created the game out of whole cloth one day in Cooperstown, New York in 1839.

Thorn's narrative about the origins of the game--who really developed the rules of baseball, where and when the game truly became "baseball" (rather than ancestral forms like "rounders" or "three old cat"), where and when those pioneers played the game, and how it evolved into the sport we've followed for roughly 130 years--is far more successful than the other half of his presentation. Die-hard fans, even those well versed in the history of the game, will learn new and fascinating facts about early baseball, including: the antiquity of some of baseball's current rules (e.g., the rule that the catcher must cleanly catch a third strike to record the out goes all the way back to the earliest schedule of regulations, the Knickerbocker Club's rules from the 1850s); the fact that the "World Series" was played, under that specific name, as the post-season championship between the National League and the American Association, long before the 1903 detente between the NL and the new American League; that the DH was proposed, and almost enacted, back in the 19th century; and the eternal fact that free agency, player salaries, and ownership shenanigans (including syndicate ownership of multiple teams) were crucial concerns then as much as now. All of Thorn's revelations about baseball's primordial form and environment serve to deeply enrich the hardcore fan's appreciation of where the sport has been, and perhaps where it may yet go.

Unfortunately, the other side of Thorn's narrative--his meticulous examination of the development of the Doubleday creation myth--provides less interesting fare, even for the reader most primed for this sort of history. The author's study and speculations on the Mills Commission, the role Albert Spalding played in ginning up the Cooperstown fantasy (it was known contemporaneously to be a humbug among those in the know, despite the poobahs' pronunciations on the matter), even his conspiratorial notions about the role the Theosophical Society (of all things) played in the creation scheme--all of this examination proves to be of little particular interest.

Perhaps the problem is one of time and perspective. While this story might have been a revelation to baseball fans 50 years ago, today almost no baseball fan believes the Doubleday story. Even the favored alternate history, placing Alexander Cartwright in the sport's primal position, has been superseded by further revelations on baseball's antiquity, in some form or another, far exceeding Hoboken's Elysian Fields in 1845. (Thorn himself notes the now well-known reference to baseball, in the laws of the town of Pittsfield, MA, from 1792.) Since the whole thing is now widely regarded a sham, today's reader can see little more than a historical curiosity in the tale of American chauvinism and vague Victorian spiritualism leading Spalding to rig up Doubleday (a fellow Theosophist) as baseball's Prometheus. The creation myth exegesis is a story that probably won't resonate with most readers, and holds little connection to the modern organization of baseball, beyond the continuing location of baseball's Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

Thus, Baseball in the Garden of Eden reaches to the reader as only half of a good story--or rather as one good story needlessly paired with a second, much weaker story. Still, those Winter nights are long and dark, with nary a pitch, bunt, double play, or home run to take the edge off the cold. Thorn's book has the necessary ingredients to make it worth a look while waiting for the opening of Spring Training. It's about baseball, after all, and it's hard to go wrong with a book about our most literary sport. Baseball in the Garden of Eden may not be a solid hit, but it will get the runner over to where he needs to be: in scoring position, ready to move when that hit finally does come.

Calls of the Wild

The children of the night...
such music they make.
(Photo courtesy wikipedia.org)

So here I am, staying at my Mom's place in the old folks' village of Rossmoor, and every night about 1 or 1:30 I get to hear a brief symphony from the local coyotes.

This is not exactly new to me; I heard the coyotes howling plenty of times during my residence at my apartment in nearby Lafayette. But these late episodes bring something special to the scene: a certain wonderfully ominous character to them that strikes my ironic funny bone in a most peculiar way.

You see, it's basically winter out there (not by the calendar, but for the Bay Area, this is pretty much it as far as that season goes). And you have all these old people holed up in their boxy little apartments, while outside a band of mini-wolves is howling at the door. It's like a theater in the round version of a very odd Russian play. Next thing you know an army will march through and seize everyone's grain.

Yeah, I know it's not much, but in these trying times I have to amuse myself with what I've got. Check back in next week when I'll be house-sitting and enjoying more leisure time with myself for something more entertaining.

Momentous Occasion

It happened just short while ago, in my kitchen. As I walked past the open window, I caught the first distinct whiff of that certain flavor in the air that always says "Fall" to me. I don't know what it is exactly, what constitutes that scent and distinguishes the air of autumn from any other time of the year, but I've always been able to smell it, distinctly, and this evening proved to be the first time this year I met that welcome omen. Bring on the football, falling leaves, holidays, and crisp weather!