Baseball

My Baseball Back Pages

Hank Garfield

Fans of my transportation pieces and followers of my Bulgarian sojourn will have to forgive me for writing about baseball again so soon. And I will have to forgive myself for being overseas during the most compelling World Series of my lifetime.

Red Sox-Dodgers: it doesn’t get any better than this.

My earliest memories of baseball fandom are of being a severely left-handed little kid, in an elementary school with many Jewish classmates, at a time when Sandy Koufax was the best pitcher on the planet. I didn’t see much baseball on TV, but I did watch the last game he ever pitched, when the Dodgers made six errors behind him and lost in the World Series to the Baltimore Orioles.

Koufax was to Jews what Muhammad Ali was to black Americans. He is also one of only two ballplayers (Babe Ruth is the other) whose name has become an adjective. When a pitcher is particularly unhittable, we say that he is “Koufaxian.” More than fifty years after his sudden and premature retirement, he remains the gold standard by which pitchers are measured.

The next year we moved to Maine, just in time for the Impossible Dream, the wild, multi-team pennant race won by the Red Sox on the last day of the season. I’ve been a Red Sox fan ever since.

For the first forty-two years of my life, the Dodgers had exactly two managers: Walter Alston and Tommy Lasorda. They were, of course, the first team to integrate (the Red Sox were the last). And they always had great starting pitching, from Koufax and Drysdale to Valenzuela and Hershiser, and now, Clayton Kershaw. They won 1-0 games with an infield hit, a stolen base, a bunt and a sacrifice fly, backed by a complete-game shutout from their ace of the moment.

Dave Roberts, the current Dodger manager, will deservedly get a lot of love from the Fenway crowd for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World in 2004. It’s the single most important baseball moment in the new millennium. For, like the first piece of concrete chiseled from the Berlin Wall, it was the first blow in bringing down an evil empire.

But Roberts lost me as a manager when he pulled a rookie pitcher from his first game with a no-hitter in progress. It’s never been done before: a no-hitter in a major league pitcher’s first game. In 1967, a Red Sox lefty named Billy Rohr came within one strike. Dick Williams, his manager, not only left him in the game until he gave up a hit with two out in the ninth, he let him retire the next batter to complete the shutout. I can’t even remember the name of the kid whom Roberts denied a shot at history. It’s a shame and a travesty.

If Roberts had been managing the Yankees in 1956, he would have pulled Don Larsen after six perfect innings, and cobbled together the last nine outs with four relievers.

So it will be poetic justice if Kershaw pitches six or seven brilliant innings, and then the Red Sox jump all over the bullpen.

Then again, the Red Sox have looked like the best team in baseball all year long. Unlike the Yankees, who lived and died by the long ball, the Red Sox hit singles and doubles and triples, ran the bases, and got production from the whole lineup. Their worst hitter in April and May, Jackie Bradley Jr., was the star of the American League championship series. Even the substitutes contributed.

The Red Sox have always had great outfields: Yaz, Reggie Smith and Conigliaro; Rice, Lynn and Evans. But the current trio of Andrew Benintendi, Bradley, and Mookie Betts may be the best of them all. This may, in fact, be the best Red Sox team I’ve ever seen. Since blowing the first game of the season, as I watched with increasing disgust in Paddy Murphy’s Pub in Bangor, Maine, some seven months ago, they’ve won 115 times.

Though television has done its best to ruin the World Series, by shoehorning what should be America’s premier sporting event around the college and professional football schedules, I’m still sorry I won’t be able to watch. But I’ll be keeping close tabs on events at Fenway Park, where I saw my first big-league ballgame, and Dodger Stadium, where my two children saw theirs.

When I feel bleak about the world and my country, I’m grateful for the balm of baseball, the made-in-America game that’s still the best team sport ever invented.

And go Sox.

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The Games We Play, and What they Say about Us

Hank Garfield

Major League Baseball’s playoff games begin at around three in the morning, Bulgarian time, and as far as I can tell, no one here is paying much attention.

The Red Sox and Yankees are squaring off again. To tell the truth, I’m glad to be away from all the hoopla. Of course, anyone who knows me knows which side I’m on: the side of truth, justice, beauty, long hair and beards. But in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter? No, but that doesn’t stop me from checking the scores when I get out of bed.

I’m especially glad to be missing the American football season. I stopped watching American football – as opposed to real football, the game the rest of the world watches and that we call “soccer” – a long time ago. I stopped watching not because of the protests during the national anthem, but because the game is faux war, and what kind of society regards war as fun, as entertainment, as an ongoing means of addressing world problems?

Though my international students are only passingly familiar with either sport, I ran the late George Carlin’s famous football vs. baseball routine by them, and they appreciated its implications. Carlin made his comedic career by telling the truth in such an unvarnished way that people laughed, because they thought he had to be kidding. His assessment of the two sports is dead on:

“In football, the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.

In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe!”

 Europeans, with their history of egomaniacal conquerors, prefer their version of football, the game actually played with the feet. It’s sort of communist, or at least collectivist – it’s hard to imagine a soccer player taking control of a game like a Tom Brady, Bobby Orr, Michael Jordan, or Pedro Martinez. Baseball, in particular, emphasizes the individual. Perhaps that’s why it became our national pastime.

But George Carlin was right. America began to lose its soul when its militaristic version of football supplanted baseball as its most popular sport. The only thing good to come out of American football in recent years is the long-overdue discussion about law enforcement and the mistreatment of minorities, spurred by players taking a knee during the national anthem.

This sort of protest – peaceful, public, provocative – is explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution. It’s one of the reasons we havea constitution. The right to redress the government for grievances is fundamental to a free society. Communist countries do not allow their citizens to openly display dissatisfaction with the unjust use of official force, but the right to public protest is woven into the fabric of American life. Those who call the kneeling players anti-American are themselves engaging in anti-Americanism.

I love baseball. I appreciate a leaping catch in the outfield or a well-placed sacrifice bunt as much as I do a great song or painting or book. I’m not sure I’m on board with the mass commercialization of professional sports, but I’m glad that the athletes are at long last making as much money as the advertisers.

But I’ve grown weary of watching recent post-seasons. I love baseball for its heroic individual performances: Jack Morris going the distance in a ten-inning shutout in the 1991 World Series, Dave Roberts stealing second base in 2004 when everyone in the ballpark knew he was running, Fernando Valenzuela gutting out a 5-4 victory in 1981 with his team two games down and turning around the whole Series. I’m sick of managers pulling their starters when they get into trouble in the third inning. If I wanted to watch a faceless, collectivist battle of attrition, I’d turn on a European football match.

Funny thing, though – I’ve watched some European football lately, and found myself enjoying it. Fans call it “the beautiful game.” And there is something sublime about watching a group of people work patiently toward a goal that is difficult to achieve. Like, say, world peace, racial and gender equality, that sort of thing. It’s only a game, of course, but the games people play say something about their dreams.

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Opening Day for Baseball and Bicycling

Hank Garfield

Opening Day is upon us, and my friend and colleague Cyrus “Moondog” Nygerski, who wrote an annual baseball column for several small California newspapers in the 1980s and 90s, is once again picking the Red Sox to win the World Series come October. A man ahead of his time, Moondog has been right three times so far this century, and I have no reason not to get back on the bandwagon this year.

More importantly, the sun has crossed the celestial equator, the clocks have sprung forward, and my bicycle awaits its spring tune-up in anticipation of the Kenduskeag Canoe Race.

On the first warm day after the time change, I donned my cross-country skis for what may have been the season’s final outing on the trails behind the University of Maine. Hatless, I skied a long loop over packed snow melting into mini-rivers in the low spots. Later, as I sipped a beer in a local watering hole, one of my students came in with a baseball and two gloves, looking for someone to play catch. Both gloves were right-handed, unfortunately, and though it was warm enough to ride the bicycle home, it wasn’t ready. But: skiing, baseball, and bicycling in the same day strikes me as the essence of spring in Maine.

In my last post, I wrote that walking, bicycling, driving, and flying embody separate orders of magnitude, in terms of speed and perception. As orders of magnitude rise linearly, the difference between them escalates exponentially. Driving is four times faster than bicycling, but sixteen times faster than walking. Driving is also much more regulated, as it should be. Most of us are licensed to drive a car. You can apply for a pilot’s license, but I imagine that the process is an order of magnitude more difficult.

This concept also applies to baseball. Anyone can play in Little League, but by high school the competition gets a bit more serious. The curve steepens through semi-pro leagues, college ball, and the minors. At the major-league level there are fewer than a thousand jobs for the best ballplayers in the world. As Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four: “The biggest jump in baseball is between the majors and triple-A. The minor leagues are all very minor.”

The jump between bicycling and driving a car is just as dramatic. Bicycling is closer to walking than it is to driving. No one blamed Stephen King for the accident that nearly killed him. He was walking along the side of a road reading a book, minding his own business, completely within his rights. Nobody said that King should have been paying more attention. Yet the victim is often blamed when a driver, distracted or otherwise, runs down a bicyclist.

As a bicyclist, it is my responsibility not to run down pedestrians. They are an order of magnitude slower and more vulnerable. I’m subject to more rules than they are, but to far fewer rules than the driver of an automobile. Again, this is as it should be.

The letter of the law says I’m supposed to come to a complete stop at every stop sign and red light. Nobody rides a bike that way, but the “Idaho stop” (allowing a bicyclist to yield, rather than stop) is illegal in most states. Yet some people want to go even further, requiring bicyclists to get licensed and pay excise tax, as if bicyclists were a danger to drivers, and not the reverse.

Since cars are an order of magnitude more powerful than bicycles, it stands to reason that the onus for safety falls primarily on the driver of the car. This does not give bicyclists carte blanche to ride any way that want to, but it does mean, for example, that drivers need to respect the three-foot rule and a bicyclist’s right to control a lane of traffic when necessary. Bicyclists aren’t absent of responsibility. It’s a good idea to wear bright-colored clothing, and it’s the law to use proper lighting at night.

But I balk at the suggestion that bicyclists be licensed and taxed, and so should the parents of every ten-year-old who wants to ride to the ice cream stand on a warm summer evening.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: it takes seconds, not minutes, out of a driver’s day to slow down for a bicyclist or a group of bicyclists, to wait for a safe place to pass. Given the order-of-magnitude inequalities involved, thinking up new rules for bicyclists is like invoking the infield fly rule in a picnic softball game. It misses the point.

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