Dr. Metablog

Told You So, Said I Did

A while back, I complained about Allen Iverson.  Here's what I said:  "he can do everything on the basketball court except win....  When the Nuggets come down the floor, whether Iverson eventually shoots or not, he clings to the ball and dribbles around while the rest of the team stand and watch.  Iverson turns his teammates into spectators....  He isn't going to become a team player;  he's 31 years old and he's averaged 23 shots a game with a .422 shooting percentage for an entire career."  "The Answer," I said, was not the answer.  Not even close.

But things have changed for the Nuggets.  They finally unloaded Iverson -- which would have been blessing enough.  Detroit put him on the shelf -- didn't even play him at the end of the season.  But in exchange the Nuggs received Chauncey Billups, who is everything Iverson is not:  a skilled point guard, an intelligent man, a team player.  A leader, a defender.  It's marvelous how one player can change the complexion of a team.  The Nuggets are now a serious contender.  I like their chances against the Lakers.

Was it a brilliant move by the team owners and management?   I'm not privy to the details, but I'd say, not brilliance -- just plain dumb luck.  I don't think they knew either how bad Iverson was or how good Billups could be.

Bad planning, in any case.  If management could have guessed that the Nuggets would make it to the western conference final, would they have let Marcus Camby and Eduardo Najera slip through their cheapskate fingers a year ago?  No -- they would have made the investment that one makes when a championship is a possibility. The Lakers can put three seven-footers (Bynum, Gasol, Odom) on the floor at the same time -- wouldn't we love it if we could bring in Camby (an all-league defensive player) to help Nene?  And who's going to guard Bryant?  Dahntay Jones will take a crack at it, but wouldn't it be helpful if Najera could have given us some minutes as well -- if not to stop Bryant, at least to bang him around a bit?

And hey, does anyone remember that we gave up not only Andre Miller but two first-round draft picks for 'The Answer'?  We might have had a dynasty in the making if we had played our cards right -- and been willing to pay the freight.  Two first-round picks, I repeat.

So the Nuggs have a chance -- but not the chance they might have had if they'd been a little smarter, a little more imaginative, a little less tightfisted..

My New Career - III

This blague's enthusiastic readers are well aware that each year for the last two, Dr. M. has made himself available for the NBA draft, but that not a single team has selected him, even the lowly, strife-ridden Knicks.  It's incomprehensible, but true. Why are these GMs so unadventurous?  

As a consequence of being overlooked, I'm developing an entirely new marketing strategy this year.  I'm no longer going to sit at home waiting for the telephone to ring.  Heck, no!  I'm going to advertise my skills by competing in the dunking contest.  

I've developed three imaginative new dunks, any one of which could carry the day and get me the attention I require.   

The first is a variation of "making change."  I drive to the basket, leap into the air with a basketball in my left hand.  With the right hand,  I leave a quarter on the top of the backboard and take down the dime that's been previously placed there. With the left hand, I gracefully drop the ball through the net. 

My second dunk.  I have a ball in each hand and put another one under my shirt.  I spring, dunk both basketballs authoritatively and successively, then grab the third one and throw it high into the air. I land right under the backboard, and then, without pause, immediately spring into the air again and power that third one through just as it comes down into the cylinder.   

I've perfected these two moves, which, I can say without bragging, are far more interesting than anything I saw in the contest last year.  To be absolutely honest, so far I've only done them with six-foot rim and with those mini-basketballs that they sometime distribute free during the second half timeouts.  Not to worry -- I'm working on it every day and in a couple of weeks I'll be ready for the standard rim and full-sized basketball.  There's still plenty of time before All-Star Weekend. .

My third dunk is even more extraordinary.  I start at the far basket and do a series of back handsprings and back flips across the floor.  Then, as I approach the target basket, I pick up a basketball between my ankles, and with one final back flip -- in which my feet are actually above the level of the rim --.  I slam that sucker home. It's going to be something spectacular to watch, I guarantee,  just a soon as I work out a few kinks in the execution. .

BASKETBALL ANNOUNCER EXHIBITS PROFOUND KNOWLEDGE OF BIBLE

I watched the Nuggets beat the living whatchamacallit out of the Toronto Raptors.  Actually, I didn't watch the entire game -- it was a gruesome mismatch.  I can endure only so much garbage time at a single sitting.  The high point, for me, was a comment by one of our home team announcers (I'll not reveal his name).  Toronto has a reserve point guard named Willie Solomon, who acquired the nickname "King Solomon" when he played for Maccabi Tel Aviv in 2005.  "Must be a reference to the movie," suggested our announcer.  I'm guessing that he means King Solomon's Mines.

Ignorant schmuck.

The Sculpin. Slimy or Mottled?

Knowing little of the finny tribe, I borrowed the Bradford Public Library's copy of Langdon's introductory Fishes of Vermont (2006). It's an excellent, informative, helpful guide. With Langdon's help, I can now declare that it's undeniably the brown bullhead, a species of catfish, that has been multiplying in our pond, The bullhead, a villainous omnivore, is one of the causes of the steep decline of our population of frogs. The butt-ugly, scaleless, bebarbelled brute gobbles frogs' eggs.    

Readers of this blague will not be astonished to learn that Dr. M .has fallen deeply in love with fish names. Take the brown bullhead, for example. It's also known by such evocative and lunatic denominations as the horned pout, the mudcat, and the minister. Minister?  To whom, and under what circumstances, would a brown bullhead minister?

My favorite Vermont fish, nomenclature-wise, is the slimy sculpin, also performing under such titles as the blob, the chucklehead, the rock cusk, the stargazer, and the cockatouch. The slimy sculpin should not be confused with its near cousin, the mottled sculpin -- which can also be addressed as the slowfish or gudgeon. 

Many of the common Vermont fishes have lost their colorful historic names. The bowfin was once called the John A. Gindle, the stonecat was the doogler, the lake trout was the togue or longue, the burbot was variously ling or lawyer (lawyer? minister?  why not accountant? or dentist?), the quillback was the buffalo, and the gar was the needlenose. On the other hand, the blandly-named pond perch of olden days is trending in the reverse direction: it's now called the pumpkinseed -- a name which seems curiously vegetarian for a denizen of the deep.   

If I had known that there was a fish called the cisco (known on jolly days as the tollibee and on prosaic days as the sand herring), I would long ago have promoted Galen Cisco to my all-time-great Baseball-Fish Team, adding him to such piscine luminaries as Catfish Hunter, Dizzy Trout, Chico Salmon, Sid Bream, Bobby Sturgeon, Art "Red" Herring, and Shad Roe. And Mudcat Grant.

No Sculpins in MLB that I can recall, but In a more poetic universe, "Slimy" Sculpin would have been a spitball pitcher, or perhaps even a team owner.

My New Career - II

Regular readers of this blague will remember that last year I made myself available for the NBA draft.  I'm sorry to report that not a single one of the general managers was daring enough to gamble on me.  It was disappointing and inexplicable.  I would have suspected that at least one or two of the teams would have read my official statement.   And jumped at the chance of adding me to their roster.  I was depressed for a couple of weeks, but now, every day for eleven months, I've been working on my inside moves.  Baby hook with both the right and left hands.  My basketball is worn smooth from the concrete driveway.

I now believe that I have discovered the reason that I was not snatched by the Lakers or the Celtics or another one of the elite teams (frankly, I'm not all that enthusiastic of starting my pro career in an off-brand situation like Memphis or Denver). 

Last year, I was scrupulously honest about listing my height.  It was exactly "five feet ten and one-quarter (formerly five feet ten and three-quarter) inches." How naive I was!  Apparently, guys are exaggerating their credentials, and I now discover that chicanery and bloviation are rife in the hallowed halls of the basketball-draft world.  For example, Michael Beasley of Kansas State, supposedly 6' 10", measured only 6' 7" even wearing sneakers.  Derrick Rose of Memphis dropped from 6' 4" to 6' 1".  You see what's happening -- I'm playing the draft game fair and square and so I don't get the same kind of publicity that the guys do who tweak their credentials. 

So there will be some changes on my application this year.  a) I'm taking out all references to my atrial hypertrophic cardiomyopathy -- it hasn't bothered me for months and certainly doesn't stop me from playing at my peak for periods of 3 or 4 minutes at a stretch.  So that's gone.  b) I'm also going to list my height at 6' 2 1/2".  A slight exaggeration but I doubt anyone will notice because I play big.  Also, I'm wearing thick soles. c) In the interest of absolute truth, I'm going to admit that I've put on a couple of pounds during the last year.  Not a deficit -- an asset.  I'm getting to the point that I could be described as a "widebody"  -- very rare in the NBA --and much coveted.  Also, my cataracts are stable and, though I take the prostate medicine every other day, there's no sign yet that it will compromise my ferocious aggressiveness.  And let me be perfectly clear -- there's not the slightest bit of truth to the rumor that I will have to frequently leave the field of play to make use of the restroom facilities. 

CCNY Basketball Ups and Downs, 1950-51

My friend (and frequent contributor to Dr. Metablog) Otis Jefferson Brown has reminded me about the crushing sports-and-morals tragedy of our joint childhoods.  It all took place in 1950/51, when I was a creeping like snail to sixth grade in P. S. 217 and Otis, a Bay Ridger, was trudging with satchel and shining morning face to P.S. 102.  Our guys, our local heroes, the CCNY basketball team, won both of the major basketball tournaments, the NIT as well as the NCAA.  The city -- New York City -- was electric with excitement.  Headlines, victory parades, demonstrations. 

The twin wins -- it never had happened before and will never happen again -- was a great event in the public sphere but an even greater one in my family.  My father had attended CCNY for a year in the 1920s but, like so many of the sons of immigrants, had to drop out to help put potatoes and black radishes on the family table. While at City, he had played on the freshman basketball team.  Would he have made the varsity?  Who can tell?  He was a strong man, a fine natural athlete, very graceful in his movements even into his 70s, and very serious about basketball.

His coach had been Nat Holman (one of the first stars of professional basketball), and Nat was still the City College coach twenty-five years later.  So whenever CCNY played, everything in our family came to a halt, and we all gathered around the Philco to listen as my father's team went down to the wire against Bradley or Kentucky or Toledo.  My father was as partisan and as jubilant as I ever knew him to be.  Not only were the victories a fulfillment of his own hopes, but it was all accomplished by a bunch of local players -- Jews and "Negroes" from the Bronx and Brooklyn who, in those days, would not have been welcome at most of the big basketball powers.  Ed Roman and Ed Warner and Irvin Dambrot and Normie Mager and Floyd Lane were household names as familiar and as admired as Koufax and Campanella. 

It was the very next year that it all blew up in our faces.  The CCNY players, or most of them, confessed to taking bribes from the gamblers and bookies and to shaving points and managing the spread.  There were indictments, "perp walks," headlines, indignant editorials.

My father was devastated.  Although in size he was only a scrappy guard, in person he was a tower of rectitude, and it was beyond his ken that our guys, even poor guys who desperately needed cash, would compromise their integrity and their futures for a few bucks.

He turned the episode into a morality play.  Every day, for a year it seems in retrospect, I heard still another lecture about keeping to the straight and narrow.  Not that there was anyone in the world who would pay me to miss a shot;  I could miss shots on my own.  But I knew what he meant.   

I've now read Charles Rosen's Scandals of '51, how the gamblers almost killed college basketball [New York, 1971]).  It's a shoddy, melodramatic, disheartening book. Rosen makes it clear that there was more than a little nativist glee about taking CCNY and its upstart culture down a peg.  It was sad to read that players from many other colleges were also indicted (I hadn't remembered), but discouraging to learn that their defenders were happy to extol heartland values and to blame the corruption on big city depravity.  It was also sad to be reminded that the only basketball player who served hard time was Sherman White, the biggest, the best, and the blackest of all the athletes.  Nor was it pleasant to discover that although there were apparently point-shavers at St. Johns, a Catholic college, DA Frank Hogan brought no indictments against them because the evidence was "inadvertently" destroyed.

The events were a blight on my basketball-loving childhood.  But I must say that we, as a family, engineered a strong comeback.  It was only a few years after the scandals that one of those 13" black and white TVs with the rabbit ears made its first appearance in our home.  And along with the Zenith came the NBA. I think that my father was on perpetual alert for signs of malfeasance, but our faith in the game and in humanity was restored by a new set of New York heroes:  Harry Gallatin, Connie Simmons, Carl Braun, Bud Palmer, Vince Boryla, Sweetwater Clifton, Max Zaslofsky.   

Hoop News

Extremely important bulletin:  Cornell's basketball team is going to the NCAA tournament -- first time in a generation.  Twelve and 0 in the Ivy League, Randy Wittman's son the main man.

Is the Big Red going to manhandle Kansas and UCLA and Duke?  I'm not, at this moment, prepared to bet the house.  But Cinderelloid success is not beyond possibility. 

Let's hear it for Cornell, where I took my first timid steps into adulthood. 

March 22.  Bad news:  Cornell played like a bunch of junior high-schoolers.  They were nervous and intimidated.  Hey, Duke didn't do much better.  And is that a rug that Coach K is wearing, or is he just using too much black shoe-polish? 

More on Religion and the Rockies

I'm trying to remember the name of the superstitious 1940s Dodger pitcher, who, when the inning ended, would flip his mitt into the first base coaching box, then walk over and reposition it so that the fingers pointed directly toward the mound.  (I'd better stop here and remind the young folks that in days of yore, players left their gloves out on the field when they came in for their turn at bat. I can't remember exactly when the Commissioner prohibited this harmless, colorful custom -- was it in the late 50s?)

Baseball players have always been notably superstitious. They don't step on foul lines or talk about no-hitters in progress.  They wear the same underwear or socks for the length of a winning streak.  Turk Wendell had to brush his teeth and chew licorice between innings.  Wade "Chicken Man" Boggs, a good enough hitter not to solicit divine intercession, had to eat a meal of chicken before every game.  Craig Biggio refused to wipe the dirt or the pine tar off his helmet for an entire season.  Baseball is where the Curse of the Bambino and the Curse of the Billy-Goat are items of faith. It's also where players wear gold crosses in their ears and ostentatious floppy crucifixes around their necks and point triumphantly to the sky when they bloop a single to center.

Chewing licorice and making the sign of the cross are equally effective procedures, as far as I can tell.  The only difference is that one is a private superstition while the other has the sanction of religion.  It's individual delusion versus mass delusion.

At this writing, the biblethumpatudinous Colorado Rockies, baseball's most Christian-y organization -- the only team with a chaplain on its payroll -- have won twenty-one of twenty-two games and will (after an eight-day timeout) head for their first-ever Series.  It's astounding and wonderful, and I'm rooting for the home town boys.  But my enthusiasm is tempered because fanatics are already calling it "a miracle," or "destiny," or claiming that "it's meant to be."  Baseball's a gritty, subtle game, and the Rocks are winning because they're playing excellent defense, getting timely hits, making great pitches at the crucial moments, and committing very few mental errors -- not because of their prayer circle or their morning bible study or because the Great Signifier in the Sky has decided that this year, the Rockies are kosher and the Diamondbacks are treyf.   

But, say the superstitious, it's unlikely that any team could take twenty-one of twenty-two.  Of course it's unlikely.  But if statistics tells us anything, they tell us that even unlikely events will occur some of the time.

Here's what's genuinely unlikely:  that the Rockies' shortstop, Troy Tulowitski, who (if there's any justice under the heavens) will be soon named rookie of the year, has a "Christian" name that is an acronym for The Rookie Of Year. What, pray tell, are the odds?  And also, that the Rockies' have a catcher, Yorvit Torrealba, whose name is an anagram for "real toy vibrator."  Such an extraordinary unlikelihood has never happened before and it's never going to happen again, and it's entirely more remarkable than any winning streak, however extended.  Yorvit Torrealba is one of those gosh-darned superstitious sky-pointers.  It would suit my Manichean view of the world if Yorvit would also point downward, toward Sheol or Gehenna or whatever is supposed to be down there, every time he futilely chases a high fast ball, which he does far too frequently.   

I would also like to point out that the Rockies have a reliever named LaTroy Hawkins, whose name would also anagrammatize into "real toy vibrator" if he would simply rechristen himself LaTroy Riverboat.  Coincidence?  Or destiny. 

Go Rockies! 

My New Career

Ever since I retired a few years ago, friends and relations have been asking what I intend to do with the rest of my life. It's time to start on a new career, and after much deliberation, I've decided to fulfill a lifelong dream. I've always had the soul of a power forward;  now I'm going to make it happen. With this blague entry, I declare my eligibility for the NBA draft.

Let me confess:  I don't expect to be a lottery pick. There's too much college talent and too many 7-foot Lithuanian teenagers. High second round is what I aspire too.  I might even have to play a year or two in a European league to sharpen my game -- no problem. 

I figure that to play in the NBA, a guy needs three things: the game, which I have; the attitude, which I certainly have; and the body, which I am working on. 

Let me point out that at 5' 10 1/4"  (formerly 5' 10 3/4") I am a full five inches taller than Earl Boykins. Plus I can get into the air higher than Yao Ming; I'm a better three point-shooter than Shaquille O'Neal; and I'm a more consistent at the charity stripe than Ben Wallace. Those are some big names there. Not only that, I'm a better interview than anyone in the league past or present--even better than Sir Charles himself. I'm a team player. I don't need to play 48 minutes;  I don't need to take the game-winning shot. On defense, there's not a player in the league whose flopping will be more authentic. 

Because I've lived a more-or-less bookish life, my body is still in tiptop shape. No gimpy knees or repaired Achilles tendons or fused vertebrae. True, the A-fib could be a problem down the road, but I don't imagine that the apical hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, of which I have the merest tad, will hold me back in the slightest. 

To the club owners and general managers who are reading this blague entry -- let me point out that I appeal to an entirely different demographic than players now in the league. Until now, there was no one to be a "spokesman" for Beltone hearing aids or Avodart or AARP. Untold, untapped commercial opportunities waiting to be seized!!

I've been running this idea by my friends and family for the last few weeks, and I'm sorry to say that there's a lot of ageism and size-ism and negativity out there.  Let's leave that skepticism behind us! I'm ready to roll! I just have to decide on the appropriate tats.   

(For an update on this subject, read more here.)   

"The Answer" is not the Answer

I never, ever, thought that the Denver Nuggets' acquisition of Allen Iverson was a good idea. He has skill, he has speed, and he's the most resilient guy in the world. He can do everything on a basketball court except win games. These last four losses against San Antonio prove the point. It's not just that last night he was 6 for 22;  it's that when the Nuggets come down the floor, whether Iverson eventually shoots or not, he clings to the ball and dribbles around while the rest of the team stands and watches. Iverson turns his teammates into spectators. Last night, Carmelo had three points in the fourth quarter; he barely touched the ball.  Nene, who can score off almost everyone down in the post, might as well have sat for the last twelve minutes.   

Of course it's clear that the Nuggets can't advance in the playoffs until they find themselves a reliable three-point shooter.

It's just as obvious that Iverson isn't going to become a team player; he's 31 years old and he's averaged 23 shots a game with a .422 percentage for an entire career. He's not going to alter his game, but he's definitely going to deteriorate. I'm afraid that we're stuck with him. Meanwhile, Philadelphia has done better with Andre Miller than with The Answer. In addition, we gave Philly two first-round draft picks to help them fill in their gaps. I like Philadelphia's chances;  I don't like ours.   

My Favorite Criminal Athletes

Here are some that come immediately to mind:   

Riddick Bowe. Heavyweight boxing champion who served 18 months for kidnapping.

Tonya Harding.  The first American woman figure skater to land a triple axel in competition, she is most famous for arranging to have her competitor Nancy Kerrigan smacked on the knee.  She later dabbled in pornography, boxing, and boyfriend-beating.

Denny McLain.  Baseball's last 30-game winner and inveterate gambler, McLain was imprisoned for drug trafficking, embezzlement, racketeering.

Jack Molinas.  Columbia and NBA forward famous for fixing college and NBA games.  Banned from basketball, Molinas spent five years in jail for bookmaking.  After his release, he took up a new career in pornography.  His murder in 1975 was probably mob-related.

Gerry Priddy.  1940s-1950s American League Infielder, convicted and jailed for extortion (he claimed to have left a bomb on a ship).

O.J. Simpson.  Nicole Brown Simpson, Ronald Goldman, r.i.p.

Darryl Strawberry.  Numerous counts of wife and girlfriend-beating;  tax evasion, DUI's.

Mike Tyson.  Rape, earbiting, various drug and DUI charges.

Jayson Williams.  New Jersey Nets star rebounder was acquitted of murder but, when the jury deadlocked on manslaughter, settled with the family of the dead man for $2.5 million. 

March 30, 2007.  Bulletin:  "Former Major League pitcher Ugueth Urbina yesterday was sentenced to 14 years in prison in Venezuela for the attempted murder of five workers on his family's ranch."

The All-Johnson Team

Here's the eagerly-awaited all-Johnson NBA team:  Magic, Marques, Kevin, Dennis, Gus.  Everyone knows the first four, but only those with a few years on their backs will recall Gus Johnson, who averaged 17 points a game and 13 rebounds in nine season with Baltimore.  Johnsons in reserve:  Vinnie ("the Microwave"), Larry, Joe, Avery.  There's not a last name that can compete (there are 49 NBA Johnsons to choose from, including the three Eddies and the three Georges).

I would lay odds that the Johnsons would easily defeat the Williamses (though not in depth -- 54 Williamses played in the league).  The all-Williams team:  Gus, Aaron, Buck, Walt, Deron, Jason, Herb.  All of them role players -- no real stars in the group.  What about the 53 Smiths?  Could they compete with the Johnsons.  I don't think so:  Elmore, Adrian, Joe, Kenny, and all three Charleses (subsumed into one mega-Charles) could play, but they'd be better if the rules allowed them to use Rik Smits at center.  Who else?  The Millers -- not much there beyond Reggie. The Joneses:  Caldwell, Bobby, Sam, K.C., Eddie, Popeye -- good but not in the same league as the Johnsons.  It's Magic and the guys by a landslide.  Anyone out there with other suggestions?  Search here for the data. 

Too Many Fouls, Too Many Timeouts

Our local basketball team is in the Big 12. We're far from the best team in the league, but the Big 12 is a major conference and as a consequence we have the opportunity to see some well-played, exciting games and also a goodly number of excellent young players. Great athletes appear regularly, mostly, I must confess, on opposing teams, but we've sent a number of guys on to the NBA, including Scott Wedman, Jay Humphries and Chauncey Billups. Last week the U of Texas brought in a freshman named Kevin Durant. Remember the name -- he's going to cut quite a swathe in the NBA. I'm a fan; I've gone to almost every home game for twenty-five years or more. At it's best, basketball is the most beautiful of team sports. But I have some serious bones to pick about the way the colleges play the game nowadays. Here are two of those many bones. 

a) Time outs.  Every four minutes there's a "media timeout," so that the TV stations, if there are any, can intrude their commercials. Media timeouts have everything to do with money and nothing at all to do with the sport. Media timeouts interrupt the flow. Team A is on a roll; the coach of Team B doesn't have to use one of this allotted legal timeouts to change the dynamics of the situation -- he just waits for the scheduled pause. Four extra timeouts in a half, at a minimum of a minute and a half each, add twelve minutes to the length of the game. And because each coach can hoard his timeouts, he has them all available at crunch time, which means that the climax of the game is far too frequently interrupted and the final moments become more the coaches'  responsibility than the players'. 

b)  Fouls.  Too many ticky-tack fouls are called. The result -- teams are regularly "in the bonus" nine or ten minutes into the half. And into the "double bonus" four or five minutes later. All fouls -- offensive fouls, fouls away from the ball, incidental contact -- become shooting fouls. The first ten minutes of each half often have a pleasing rhythm, a bit of pace, but the second ten minutes are always stop-and-go; rarely is there a full minute of uninterrupted action. Boring?  You bet.  Contests routinely turn into prolonged exhibitions of foul-shooting. A gazelle of a game now hobbled and shackled.

Our own basketball stadium is at altitude -- a mile high, in fact. Our opponents are almost always flatlanders. We should have an advantage because we're better conditioned to play at 5280 feet.  But because the games are so long and punctuated by so many timeouts and fouls, our advantage is lost.  No twenty-year-old is going to run out of breath when a forty minute game takes two and a half hours to complete.

Solution: a) no more "media timeouts."  Oh yeah, I know, the teams need the money. Well, maybe there would be some revenue from increased attendance if the games were quicker and shorter and more exciting.  b) better-trained and better-instructed referees. No bonus shots. No free throws except for fouls in the act of shooting.  And teams should always be able to "decline the penalty," as they do in football, and take the ball out of bounds. Then there would be no incentive to foul in order to stop the clock. Take back the game from the coaches and from the referees. Let the young men play.

Common sense changes, in my carefully considered view, which, if adopted, would make life richer and more satisfying and more aesthetic.         

Radio Baseball

Yesterday the Yankees were drubbed, absolutely demolished, by the Detroit Tigers. Sent home packing. Their loss joyed my vindictive, Yankee-hating heart.   

When I was a boy hanging out at the P. S. 217 schoolyard and learning about life, there was no question but that the pin-striped Yankees were privileged bland tea-sipping Republicans, while the Brooklyn Dodgers were a bunch of upstart and underachieving heroes to whom we neighborhood kids could relate;  they were colorful, they were multicultural (before the letter, they were Democrats, and they were ours. 

I watched this week's games on the TV and savored not only the outcome, but all the pealing bells and slick technological whistles that modern TV can offer: the multiple replays, the ball-tracking systems that allow the viewer to inspect both the pitcher's grip and his release and also the spin he puts on the ball.  I could count the number of rotations on Kenny Rogers'  lovely curve. 

Although TV is amazingly informative, in my heart I prefer baseball on the radio -- the radio of my youth, that is. In those days, baseball was radio and radio was baseball. It's no wonder that baseball was the nation's game -- and it's only game -- when radio was the dominant medium.

I love the perennial rhythms of radio baseball: "Steps to the plate... digs in... closed stance... takes a few practice swings.... steps up on the rubber... round comes the right arm...  slider low and outside....  checks the runner on first...  looks down for the sign...  the pitch... high fly to left...  settles under it... two gone in the third...."  It's an enduring, comforting sound. 

Radio baseball as I remember it transformed the players into larger-than-life figures. It romanticized them. Radio baseball was a never-ending oral epic, Homeric in dimension. TV, with all its wealth of detail, turns the players into ordinary mortals; it makes them too familiar, too common. It plucks out the heart of the mystery. It's impossible to believe that these young men with their stringy beards and their horrid tattoos and their acneed faces are reincarnations of the bronze-age superheroes of my childhood. If an announcer were honestly recording what the TV sees, it would be, "steps up to the plate... digs in...  adjusts his nuts...  steps out of the box... spits a huge goober into the dirt...  now he's really excavating his left nostril."

Radio was reverent; television is intrusive.

Radio baseball was noble, and radio listeners were the better for listening to it. Radio baseball brought us together. On East 9 Street, where I grew up, there was very little in common among the Petrantos, the Burkes, the Bernsteins, the Constantinos, the Pynns, the Rhodins, and the Meinekes who populated the block  -- except that we could all talk about Cox, Reese, Snider, Robinson, Campanella. I have a strong memory of riding my Ivor Johnson (later my Raleigh three-speed) on a hot summer evening when there were so many people sitting on their porches, or on their stoops, or on the fire escapes listening to Red Barber and Connie Desmond that I could bike for many a mile and not miss a single pitch. Radio baseball turned us into a community. Which is why we'll never, ever, forgive that foul black-hearted traitor Walter O'Malley.

But I'm cheerful. It's autumn and the Republican Yankees have lost. It's a favorable omen. Is it too much to hope that, inasmuch as the Yankees have lost in October, the Democrats could win in November?   

The Colorado Rockies and the Christianists

From 1947, when Jackie Robinson broke the barrier, until 1957, when Walter O’Malley hijacked the franchise to Los Angeles and cut the heart out of Brooklyn, the Dodgers represented the best of America. While the United States remained legally segregated by race and fractured by religion and ethnicity, it was the Brooklyn Dodgers who offered the nation a vision that was more inclusive and more just.  One year before Harry Truman issued an executive order banning segregation in the armed forces, eight years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on a Montgomery bus, eighteen years before the enactment of federal statutes protecting the right to vote, the Brooklyn Dodgers hired Jack Roosevelt Robinson to play first base. And on an unforgettable day in April in Cincinnati, when racist fans hurled taunts at Robinson, Pee Wee strolled over and put his arm on Jackie’s shoulder.  It was an iconic moment and one that transformed not just baseball, and sports, but the world.

 

 The boys of summer made us proud to be democratic, proud to be Americans. All good men were Brooklynites, at least some of the time. Moreover, the Dodgers were talented: they won five pennants during those years, and, in 1955, they won the world championship. Half a century later the Dodgers are still the most loved, most chronicled, most mythologized team in history.

 

What will be written about the Colorado Rockies fifty years from now?  The Rockies’ watchword is not inclusion but exclusivity. They are a team not of destiny, but of narrow sectarianism. They search for and hire players of “character”-- which means players of their particular "Christian" denomination. Their general manager, Dan O’Dowd, is thoroughly delusional. "You look at some of the moves we made and didn't make. You look at some of the games we're winning. Those aren't just a coincidence. God has definitely had a hand in this." A hand in what?  In a history of failure?  In a losing record?  Last place in their division once again?  God takes sides in baseball games? Either God is bush league with bat and glove or O’Dowd is a one helluva sloppy theologian.

 

O’Dowd, along with club president Keli McGregor and manager Clint Hurdle, join together for telephone prayer sessions. Is it possible that they hold on to their jobs not because they are capable of assembling a winning team, but because they subscribe to the same beliefs as owner Charlie Monfort (“I believe God sends signs, and we're seeing those")?

 

Baseball is not about religion. It’s about 95-mile-an-hour fastballs, about hard sliders, about come-from-behind ninth-inning victories.  Colorado taxpayers didn’t fund three-quarters of the cost of Coors-–Coors!!! -- Field so that evangelical ballplayers could testify to their faith.

 

And what a curious faith! The Rockies depart from established Christian thinking and veer toward the banal new cult of “prosperity gospel.” Reformation Calvinism had asserted that an omnipotent deity elects some for salvation and consigns many more to damnation. Believers sometimes understood material success to be a sign (but never, ever a reward) of salvation. The Rockies’ unChristian theology turns Calvinism upside-down and defies common sense when it proclaims that faith leads directly to base hits. (As a matter of fact, “prosperity gospel” seems to work better for the capitalist owners than for the players. The team loses, but the franchise increases in value).

 

There's no hint of supernatural intervention in the Rockies unremarkable record. If the Rockies were to run away from the opposition, it would indeed constitute a "miracle" -- but a miracle only in the common secular sense of the word. It would be a miracle indeed if an incompetent skinflint ownership could somehow stumble into success. 

 

Are the Colorado Rockies the most foolish, fatuous, and vain organization in the mountain west?  Not in the least. There's a church in Broomfield that has a website where “you can send your prayers and encouragement for the Rockies by clicking here.” Click for Christ. Good Lord!

 

I wonder if the Rockies ever knew, or if they would like to learn, who it was who said “do not love the world or the things in the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him." If they could answer this question,they'd be in a position to recognize that there's less real religion in the entire history of the Colorado Rockies than in five seconds of Reese and Robinson.

 

October 19, 2007.  More on the Rockies and religion? Click here. 

"Within" Again; Backbiting

On March 10 of this year, I registered an objection to use of the word "within" in sportscaster-slang. Here's my complaint: "Why in the living heck do they say that the Nuggets are "within" two points of the Lakers?  "Within" means less than than the proclaimed margin -- 1.9 points perhaps. Why not say that the Nuggets are two points behind?  Or trailing by two points?  But not -- goodness gracious -- 'within'."  Now, at the website Language Log, an accomplished young linguist, Benjamin Zimmer, has independently offered a theory of the origin of this idiom. He claims that "within" is short for "pull within," as in the case of a rower plying his oars to literally "pull" within a certain distance from his opponent. Over time, he says, "pull within" migrated from sports such as racing and rowing, which measure advantage in distance, to sports such as baseball and basketball, which measure advantage in discrete numbers, and where, he concedes, "the metaphorical fit was not exact." It's an interesting theory, and it might very well be correct. It's consoling to imagine that there's a reason for the irrational use of "within."

Zimmer is less persuasive when he moves from linguistics to chronology.  He claims that "it became common by the mid-20th century for announcers and reporters to talk about teams pulling (to) within a certain number of runs, points, goals, or even games in the standings." He offers no evidence for the "mid-20th century" assertion. I can't say that my memory supports his version of history. I've been listening to basketball games on the radio since just after World War II, when the NBA succeeded the old BAA, and I'm moderately sure that I didn't hear the idiom "within two points" until the 1980s at the earliest. It was an unpleasant innovation in language that stuck painfully in my ear. To the best of my recollection, "within" was the relatively recent invention of Marv Albert  -- one of his limited repertoire of linguistic tics. Others: "from downtown," "served up a facial," " yesss," "a spec-tac-ular move."

Marv Albert, it may be remembered, was a protege of the late great Marty Glickman, sprinter and sportscaster, and (regular readers of these essaylets will be delighted to learn) as far as I know the only genuine celebrity to have set foot in the fabled P. S. 217 schoolyard. Glickman would not have been proud of Albert, who is less well known for his creativity in language than for his strange sexual exploits. In 1997, Albert plead guilty to sexual assault. He had proved himself to be a man without a tad of castration anxiety and of exceptional, perhaps unparalleled, courage, when he first bit a woman fifteen times on the back, drawing blood, and then forced her to perform fellatio. A spec-tac-ular move!! Just a couple of months after the Albert nonchalance, Mike Tyson bit Evander Holyfield on both ears, taking quite a chunk out of one of them -- the left, I believe. I had high hopes for a great TV moment: the sportscaster Marv Albert interviews the boxer Iron Mike. Two Brooklyn boys discuss the theory and practice of oral incorporation. Yesss! 

May 19: On Language Log, Benjamin Zimmer responds to my reminiscence that "within two points" was a creation of the 1980s. He offers comprehensive evidence that the idiom "pull within" was in print as long ago as the 19th century. Although he hasn't offered a chronology for "within" without a preceding "pull," and hasn't discussed radio basketball (how would he access radio archives, even if they exist?), he's certainly a thorough and imaginative researcher. But just because a phrase can be found deep in the archives somewhere, doesn't mean that it was in common oral usage.   

A Rare Baseball-Shakespeare Confluence

It's not often that there's an intersection of the worlds of Shakespeare and baseball. Yet even such disparate areas of experience occasionally overlap.

A contributor to a Shakespeare discussion group recently wrote about "Jim Bouton's Ball Four (1970), which was a very good baseball book." Like Bill Bradley's excellent Life on the Road, it was written from the player's perspective, and, if I remember correctly, neither sensationalized nor glamorized professional athletics.

The Shakespeare correspondent had "recently read Howard Bryant's earnest history of baseball in the 1990s called Juicing the Game (Viking, 2005) and was reminded that Ball Four did not make Bouton's fellow ballplayers happy. 'Bouton revealed to the world what most everyone in baseball already knew, and what most people outside it suspected: Players took amphetamines.... They had girls in different cities.'  Ball Four sold two million copies but Bouton himself was ostracized and eventually harassed out of baseball."

"Juicing the Game reports that sometime after Ball Four appeared, Bouton was "on the mound against Cincinnati... when he heard the voice of Pete Rose bellowing from the top step of the dugout, "Fuck you, Shakespeare" (195).  Literary criticism has seldom been more explicit."   

It's a good story, but the correspondent to the Shakespeare list does not understand its implications. "Fuck you, Shakespeare" uses the epithet "Shakespeare" as a generic term for a writer -- almost as though Pete Rose could not think of the name of any other author. Under ordinary circumstances, it would be laudatory to term someone a Shakespeare. This particular usage is either a very uncommon or a unique instance of the epithet serving as a term of derogation. In a way, it's a tribute to Shakespeare's prominence. "Fuck you, Flaubert," had such words been bellowed by Pete Rose, would have had an entirely different signification.

I myself feel confident in surmising that Rose's acquaintance with Shakespearean drama -- and with the written word in general -- is less than profound. No one, even those who vastly admired the convicted rapscallion's skill with the bat, has ever confused 'Charley Hustle' with 'Bertie' Russell? 

"Fuck you, Shakespeare" reminds me of two of my favorite baseball/intelligence anecdotes. The first is the laudatory evaluation of Yale-educated Yankee pitcher Ron Darling by his teammate, center-fielder Mickey Rivers: "he knows the answers to things what I don't even know the question of."  A second anecdote has a similar valence.  I'll call the participants in the following genuine conversation Player A and Player B because I no longer recall who they were (although I do remember that both were Yankees). Player A:  "That guy is a total idiot."  Player B: "What are you saying?  He has an IQ of a hundred thirty." Player A:  "Yeah?  Outta what?"

May 9.  My brother Jon called to say that Ron Darling never played for the Yankees. He hypothesizes a memory failure on my part: Darling was with the Mets and the center-fielder in question therefore must have been Mookie Wilson (former Rockies outfielder Preston Wilson's uncle and stepfather [note Hamlet reference] and the man who hit the grounder that went through Bill Buckner's legs). But the identification of Darling's admirer isn't crucial; let's just agree that he was someone with the linguistic facility of a Pete Rose.

Baseball Purity

My father played excellent tennis and basketball -- he was a guard on the CCNY team under Nat Holman until he left school to put a few cents in the family coffers.  During the 20s and 30s he also played some semi-pro baseball. He'd make $5.00 or $10.00 a game as a "ringer" -- and in those days, an extra buck or two went a long way.

He was a catcher and had the busted-up fingers to prove it. He paid for the broken bones when the arthritis caught up with him. Although he had been an unusually strong man, in his last years he didn't have enough left in his twisted fingers to pull the match out of the matchbook to light his pipe. But he could still discuss "inshoots" and "outshoots."

Sometime in the early 80s (it was after mom died), he was in the hospital recuperating from a hip replacement. He was not a good patient and the confinement left him testy and bored, but he could be a little cheered by watching whatever sports were on the TV. One day I visited him and found the television off.

"Pop, there's a Yankee game on. Why aren't you watching it?"

He waved his gnarled old hand. "American League. DH rule. Not baseball."

I'm glad he didn't have to see the changes since he left the scene. It's a new, impermanent, history-hostile, TV-friendly, high-scoring production: franchises jumping all around the country; new stadiums with mighty short porches; players coming up to bat wearing not only gold necklaces and earrings, but also helmet, gauntlets and greaves; the incredible shrinking strike zone; pitchers no longer allowed to knock down the over-aggressive batter; an epidemic of steroids that has led to  unnaturally bulked-up sluggers; balls flying out of the park as if the guys were playing Sunday-afternoon slow-pitch softball; mediocre hitters slamming 40 hr's a year -- not to mention baseball played in the thin Colorado atmosphere where the batted ball takes off like a rocket and where curve balls can't curve.

I know exactly what my father would have said: "Not baseball." 

A Brush with Greatness

I'm not generally given to boasting, but it's a fact:  Don Newcombe once told me-- me! -- to shut up. I believe that this noteworthy event occurred in 1949.

Here's the story.  During the summer vacation, it was the custom for neighborhood kids to arrive at Ebbets Field early in the morning.  The games didn't start until 1:30, so we'd take a half a day's supply of salami sandwiches and stand outside the players' entrance at 10:00 or so in the morning, hoping to catch sight of Robinson, or Cox, or Furillo walking up the ramp to the clubhouse.   After the stakeout, we'd watch a couple of hours of batting practice, and then some fielding practice, and then there would be a long pause while the groundskeepers cleaned up the field, and then we'd listen to Gladys Gooding at the organ, and at last, anticlimactically, we'd watch the actual game.  I sometimes paid the 60 cents for a seat in the bleachers, but often I was admitted with one of the free tickets that were distributed by neighborhood fraternal organization -- the P. A. L (Police Athletic League) or the Sons of Italy or the Sons of Norway.  What a treat -- you could go to a Dodgers' game and at the same time be Norwegian for a day!

One morning, there I was, loitering among a crowd of kids just as Big Don arrived.  He was huge.  I can't remember exactly what I shouted to him, but it was probably something like "Hi Don.  Are you going to pitch today?  How's the arm?  Do you think you'll pinch-hit.  Huh. Huh?"  Newk turned and looked directly at me and said, and I quote, verbatim, "Shut up, kid."  What a thrill!  I had been noticed by the great man himself.  It was a transcendent moment -- even more exciting than the time when, sitting in the left field lower deck, I scrambled for a home-run ball off the bat of Bobby Morgan (a ball that later, to my eternal regret, I sold for five bucks.  But hey, five dollars could take you -- at 60 cents a ticket, two 5 cent subway fares, and another 5 cents for "a big delicious glass of Nedick's tasty orange drink,/ It's cool refreshing flavor you'll adore"-- to five or six games, one of which might be a double-header.)

How can I emphasize this sufficiently?:  Don Newcombe spoke directly to me.

Another event of titanic importance:  in the last innings of a game, when the guards who policed the bleachers were too bored to pay attention, kids would sneak down into the good seats.  In Ebbets Field, the Dodgers' bullpen was along the right-field foul line, so it was possible to sit just behind the relievers and try to engage them in intimate conversation.  One day I was involved in an exciting unidirectional chat with Hal Gregg, then on the downside of his career (he had won 18 games in 1945) when the frustrated reliever impatiently swung himself around and said to me, and once again I quote absolutely verbatim, "What are you, kid, a magpie?"

As long as I'm in full bragging mode, I should also boast that I once possessed, on a treasured scrap of paper, the penciled autograph of Bob Ramazzotti, a Dodger infielder, who, in 1949, batted .154 with one home run and three rbi's.  Let me also add that it was the utmost pinnacle of schoolyard wit to sit in the front seats of the Ebbets Field upper deck and drizzle sticky orange Nedick's upon the spectators beneath.   

Life versus Art

According to A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax (Bogart [William Morrow, 1997] p. 474), during the filming of Beat the Devil in 1954, legendary tough guy Humphrey Bogart (Duke Mantee, Sam Spade, Phillip Marlowe) was beaten three consecutive times in arm-wrestling by legendary limp-wrist Truman Capote. 

Annoying Locutions: "Within"; "Beg the Question"

Why in the living heck do they say that the Nuggets are "within" two points of the Lakers?  "Within" means less than than the proclaimed margin -- 1.9 points perhaps. Why not say that the Nuggets are two points behind? Or trailing by two points?  But not -- goodness gracious -- "within."  It's a perpetually annoying piece of basketball-announcer slang and a good reason to keep the TV sound muted. Moreover, why, given everything that I know about language change and about prescription versus description, does such an ugly locution fill me with grievous indignation?

And by all that's holy, "beg the question" does not mean "raise the question" or "leads to the question." "Beg the question" is a term in logic which means that the conclusion is implicit in the premise. It's a form of circular argumentation. Aristotle first defined petitio principii and his analysis served until a dozen or score of years ago, when, for some reason, "beg" became confused with "beget." Let's try to hold the line on this one-- we need all the logic we can muster in these perilous times. 

Hoop Words

Now that "March madness" is nearly upon us, it's appropriate to reflect on basketball jargon, which is distinguished by its many colorful monosyllables:  hoops, hops, bigs, stuff, slam, jam, slash, dish, board, glass, dunk, pick, screen, paint, lane, point, wing, trey, rim, post, trap, "D", roll, box, press, tip, swish, bank, brick, feed, stroke, hole, "J", rock, range. 

But down-home slang is not basketball's only linguistic register. Curiously, there's a contrary tendency toward polysyllabic words of Greek and Latin origin. Some teams, for example, are said to be "physical." "Physical" (from Gr. physicos = nature) means, in basketballese, "rough" and does not imply that the other team plays either an ethereal or spiritual game. Until recently, a guard played on the "outside" and the center on the "inside"; nowadays they've become "perimeter" (Gr.) and "interior" (L.) players.  A fast break has become "transition offense." A player doesn't drive to the basket; he "penetrates."  Players no longer jump; they "elevate";  they don't block a shot, they "reject" it.

In an odd linguistic development, a point guard no longer passes the ball; he "distributes" (Latin: distribuere, to allot) it. In its ordinary meaning, to "distribute" a basketball would be to cut it into pieces like a loaf of bread and give each teammate a slice. Only a few years ago, it was still possible to "switch" from guarding one man in order to guard another; now players "rotate."  "Rotate," derived from the Latin word for wheel, means "to turn on an axis, to spin."  A defender who did not switch but rotated would pirouette, and pirouetting is not an effective defensive strategy. (A better classical equivalent for switch would be "revolve.")  Even sillier than rotate: "rotate over"  or "rotate around"-- a usage that evokes the grotesquerie of a big guy in a tutu pirouetting across the baseline -- a vision that is all the more picturesque now that traditional basketball shorts have been replaced by big ol' bloomers.

March 5:  Last night I heard a TV announcer say that a seven-foot tall player had "a lot of verticality."  If he fell to the floor, would he have "horizonality." March 27: Also, "convert" for score, as in, "they had a transition opportunity  but failed to convert."