The History of Baseball (Cont.)

 

The End of the American Game

In the first century of the new millennium, baseball's American era came to a squalid, inglorious end. The game had begun its life as all lives begin -- fresh-faced, raw with promise -- and American baseball ended its life as so many American people end theirs, in a final orgy of indignities -- belly-up and naked in a room much too bright, pumped full of unreality, planted with gizmos and doodads and add-ons, trailing tubes and wires, while the high-priced professional fixers shamble away, muttering to the bewildered widow and children that they've tried everything, just everything. . . .

 

Changes in the Game

The beginning of the end came, of course, with somebody's bright idea, and in hindsight, no one should be surprised that this happened in Cleveland, Ohio. For decades the local nine (first as the Indians, and then, after all the protests, the Rustbelters) had found themselves stuck in the basement floor of the league standings, as though cemented there by a negligent contractor. A new ownership consortium retained a consultant, Enwright Pfau, who determined that the 'Belters would probably never compile a winning record against the rich-and-getting-richer big-market teams in Los Angeles and New York. A better strategy than trying to win games, he reasoned, was to set records, and no record captured the imagination of fans (and advertisers) more than the yearly homerun sweepstakes. Let the Dodgers and the Yankees yawn through the yearly autumnal ritual of the World Series (they had appeared, after all, in eighty-five of the last ninety-three championships). Instead, the 'Belters would become their name. They would belt homeruns -- lots of homeruns.

   Pfau's genius wasn't simply to lower the Cleveland outfield fence to waist height and move it to within one hundred and forty feet of home plate -- anybody could have thought of that, even the half-wit owners of the Minnesota Twins -- but also to bring the fans into the game in a unique and fearsome way. Here's the "modest proposal" Pfau made to his corporate clients:

The homerun is the biggest letdown in baseball. A moment of action, and then, suddenly, no action at all, just the unrolling of technicalities as the hitter and any other runners trot around the bases with happy but somehow puzzled looks on their faces. All the intensity and concentration evaporate; you half expect the players to reach for cigarettes and ask one another, in a bored voice, "Was it good for you?"

Instead, let's really make the fans part of the game. Let's eliminate the notion that the ball is out of play just because it goes over the fence. Let the fans pounce for joy on the homers of their heroes, let them hoist the ball in triumph while the opposing team, below in the outfield, can either cower or else leap up into the stands to fetch the ball back, if they dare . . . and let the fans race to the ball when it comes from an opposition bat and toss it helpfully back to the field, even as the hitter is barely rounding first. "Home field advantage" . . . yes! Make it count! Let the Minnesota Twins be the harbingers of the game to come! Why should baseball be fair? Bring the fans and the park into the game!

   The corporate freebooters who had bought the Rustbelters as a tax dodge were enchanted -- they were kids again, baseball would be fun again. They immediately fired all their players and managers and even the batboys and the hotdog vendors, and fielded an all-slugger roster devoted only to popping horsehide over the fence. One after another of the beefy, beer-swollen 'Belters would lumber up to the plate and spank the ball smartly over the fence, as low as a tennis net and nearly as close. With each long ball the stands detonated with telegenic chaos. Opposing teams declined to exercise their right to hop the fence and wrestle the ball from the howling local crowd.

   Of course, the opposing teams were invariably better all-rounders, and so the 'Belters still lost most of their games, but hey -- who wanted to argue with baseball scores of 73 to 54, or Cleveland's premier 'Belter, Ned-the-Hammer Pooty, who set an all-time one-season homerun mark of 813? In the final home game of the season, Pooty pounded a homer into the gigantic electronic scoreboard that loomed just behind second base. Right there on national TV, a massive neon image of Pooty himself erupted in an explosion of light and noise and shards of hot glass; three spectators and the Boston third baseman were killed, and dozens more were injured. The Cleveland fans loved it.

   Outside of Cleveland, of course, nobody loved it. From the halls of Congress to the Sunday morning pundit shows, experts clucked and nattered about this "new threat to the American spirit of free trade and fair play." A Time magazine cover story lamented, "A Whole New Ballgame?" Other teams threatened to follow suit with special rule changes of their own. The San Francisco Giants, for example, wearied by a century of complaints about the weather at Candlestick Park and plagued with eternally rotten pitching, decided to solve both problems at once by installing massive wind baffles directly behind the pitcher's mound in order to channel the Bay's chill breezes into a howling, hurricane-force airstream. San Francisco pitchers would no longer have to throw the ball at all; simply tossing it up into the icy blast would send the ball jetting over the plate at over 150 miles per hour. (The device would be turned off or perhaps even reversed when the home team was at bat.) The Giants would have to develop new catcher's equipment, naturally, but that seemed a small enough price to pay.

   This plan, like the dozens of others that soon sprang up around the league, never came to fruition, as the distant rumble of lawsuits engendered by the curious events in Cleveland grew to a withering daily bombardment. With so many lawyers tied up in baseball-related legal wrangling, the economy of the nation simply couldn't function. Who would keep the oil companies afloat, for example, or insurance conglomerates? Why, without proper counsel, the heads of major corporations would soon be sobbing their nolo contenderes on The People's Court.

   "A nation divided against itself," intoned the head of the American Bar Association, "thus constituted cannot, in a manner deemed suitable by the inhabitants of the heretofore-mentioned nation, stand." He went on to warn that only martial law could preserve baseball and the republic. Just as the California Angels were about to trade the entire San Fernando Valley and Santa Catalina Island to St. Petersburg, Florida, for two utility infielders and an undisclosed sum of cash, the Supreme Court of the United States intervened. All play and all courtroom activity were suspended for an entire month (in the midst of spring-training, yet) while a special ad hoc committee of senators, governors, several former presidents, five Hall of Famers, and the Commissioner of Baseball convened in Washington to amend the Constitution of the United States -- no other remedy could be found. Their efforts were codified in the elegantly concise Seventy-Eighth Amendment: "The rules of the game known as Baseball shall be held as binding upon all players, litigants, and advertisers, and shall not be infringed." The lawyers were now firmly in charge, as it were.

   For a time, calm prevailed over the national pastime. Fences were returned to their accustomed locations, and the strange new constructions at Candlestick Park were summarily dismantled. The tenor of the game, though, was forever changed by the injection of the legal system into all aspects of baseball. Nearly every game, and sometimes every call, every ball and every strike, was contested by batteries of lawyers who became as famous as the players themselves. (But of course: gigantic salaries were calibrated according to players' accumulated statistics, and it got to the point that hundreds of thousands of dollars hinged on each pitch, on each crack of the bat, on each cry of the umpire.) A commodities market sprang up, and jobbers screamed shortstop futures as though they were pork bellies.

   There shortly followed the fad of the flamboyant umpires. This was probably inevitable, now that the attention of the fans was less on how the game was played, and more on how the game was policed. The godfather of the movement was Walter "Blind Boy" Jesperson, who developed the wild rituals of calling a batter out on strikes that made him a household name -- in fact, the first umpire most people could name, the first to step out from behind the plate, the first to host a Bud commercial, the first to become a regular fixture of the talk show circuit. In his wake were such madcaps as Reddy McMaitlin, who sported a raccoon tail (faux, of course) on the back of his black britches, and Oliver Dritt, "the Schoolmarm," who began as a slavish imitator of Jesperson but soon developed a whole shtick of his own around the idea of "disciplining" the players in song. At one point, even, there were not two but three officials done up in full clown gear crouching behind various major-league home plates, with enormous shoes and tufts of scarlet hair sprouting from under their plastic helmets. A cover of Newsweek featured a poor photograph of "Bozo" Bob Mangione's red rubber nose pressing tightly against the bars of his faceguard -- "Baseball's Men Behind the Iron Mask."

   After months of dark murmurings, Jesperson was undone by a TV magazine exposé piece that confronted him, on camera, with video clips showing him time and again making extravagantly terrible calls of strike three, and then immediately doing the Budweiser Beer "Godzilla Dance" just before the network broke to a commercial, invariably a Bud spot. After four and a half minutes under the excruciating glare of TV lights, "Blind Boy" crumbled, and between sobs yammered something half coherent about his wife's illness and another well-known official's connections to the mob and never really wanting any of that "damn dirty beer money anyhow." At last he cried out, "But I love this game!" before collapsing into the arms of a lovely sheriff's deputy.

   The era of the flashy umpires was over.

 

Between the Acts

In baseball's next incarnation, after a hiatus of about ten years, the game reappeared as a staged event, in the manner of All Star Wrestling. The hucksterism was too much for the old fans to endure. Baseball buffs formed an amateur rival association, The Old Time Major League, in which games were no longer played, but rather were re-enacted, just as groups like the Twisted Knot re-enact battles of the Civil War.

   Rival Babe Ruth impersonators vied for the chance to waddle grimly to the plate, point majestically at the centerfield stands, and then calmly swat the ball over the fence for a bullseye. (The ball was wire-guided, of course, but still. . . . )

 

The Second Era

Baseball's great "second inning," as it became known to historians, the game's international phase, was strangely parallel in its development and decline to the "first inning," the American era. One of the few happy results of the political shenanigans of the "American Century," as it so happened, was the popularizing of baseball from Havana to Moscow to Yokohama. The game just got bigger and bigger, it grew beyond the human scale, beyond the comprehensible. It was all so big and crazy there at the end -- the money, even the players' bodies, pumped and sculpted as they were by steroids and contraband meats.

   It was true: around the world, professional baseball training tables sagged under piles of costly illegal steaks, and certain athletic body types became associated with the various sorts of meat. Those players who dined on dolphin tail, for example, grew sleek and fluid, while devotees of panda loin were hulking, imperturbable giants. (Many of these latter were abandoned by their wives, who complained of a certain lost virility.) A popular Nigerian right fielder grew massive and brutish on rhino livers. Meanwhile, the most feared pitcher in all of India was Jiddaharu Singh, whose long, whiplike arm was said to be nourished on a cold stew prepared by Tibetan slaves out of yeti and snow leopard. He denied it, of course . . . but then, he would, wouldn't he. That was his mystique.

   Singh became the first true World Star, the first to achieve a record of truly Ruthian proportions: he was the first to crack the legendary billion-dollar barrier for moneys earned in a single season. About half of this was salary, and half part of an exclusive endorsement agreement with a well-known manufacturer of cosmetics. No sooner did tabloids around the world trumpet his feat, than he approached the owners of his team, the New Delhi War Elephants, and demanded a more princely and metaphorically pleasing salary -- he wanted to be paid his own weight in the finest diamonds, all of his own choosing . . . and his own choosing proved very discriminating indeed. He had earmarked every major diamond in every major collection or museum in the world, and there was outrage and widespread rioting throughout the Subcontinent when the War Elephants refused to comply. Defiant, he staged an abrupt "retirement" to his palais on the Loire. After three years of muttering darkly about the Masons and the Mafia and the Trilateral Commission and the Vatican, he disappeared. His limousine was later found far far away, in Lapland of all places, riddled with bullet holes and crudely spray-painted with the words, "Big Leegue" [sic]. Rumors flew, but no suspects were detained.

 

The Great Schism

The dominance of the two North American Major Leagues was soon to end. The whole edifice, rotting from within and under siege from without, began to crack when proponents of the Asian leagues (in Japan, Korea, the Philippines, and especially Vietnam) demanded that their stars be taken seriously -- stars such as slugger Nguyen "The Duke" Duc Le, of the Hanoi Hornets, the hated "Ho-boys" of the so-called "Paddy-Cake League." Redneck American purists cried, "No! It doesn't count! 915 home runs in Hanoi means nothing, you don't even dare eat a damn hotdog over there, crimoney!" The United Nations became a forum for ugly slurs and wild threats. Politicians were visibly tense as they marched from podium to podium and straightened their ties for the electronic soapbox. The storm had to break.

   Historians still cannot determine who flinched first. All at once the Americans announced their refusal to host any more Asian Little League teams, and the Asians demanded that the World Series be truly that, a World Series like soccer's World Cup, in which comers from all over the world gather somewhere to duke it out under the sun, and the African champions would be there, and the Russians, and Caribbean League champs, and the Euros (Northern, Southern, Western, Eastern, and Central Divisions), and the South Americans and the Central Americans. And this "somewhere" would not necessarily be in the USA, not at all, it would rotate around like the World Cup or the Olympics. . . . Sure, the Americans could apply for the World Series, and might even get special consideration for such historical, backward-looking occasions as, say, the 150th anniversary of the Series, or the Abner Doubleday Sesquicentennial. Of course, first the gringos would have to submit to some reconfiguration. Henceforth there would be a single North American League, with three divisions: American, National, and Mexican.

   The gringos howled No! No to your world and no to your meddling and no to your Little Leaguers too! But what could the Americans do? The Asians had only to twitch their economic muscles to bring the holdout Americans and Canadians to their knees.

 

The End

   "And then

   "And then

   "And then there was no war, for a time, until baseball games got ugly, with losers often killed by the beer- and sun-maddened local crowds armed with deadly graphite bats. . . .

   "And then

   "And then

   "And then at last a child with a face glowing like a cherub Willy Mays took up a ball and a glove and a bat and joined some of the other local farm kids in a clearing, and they began to play -- "

   (Time and Newsweek both missed the story.)

 

 

© Michael Fleming

Berkeley, California

November 1992

 

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