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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