Boners At The Ball Yard

Last Friday night, I had the weirdest deja vu moment. I was at the local ball yard, seated up in the third deck behind home plate, watching our Seattle Mariners nurse a 2-0 lead. But in the seventh inning, the visiting Minnesota Twins loaded the bases with one out. The Mariners' pitching coach came out to talk to the pitcher and catcher, then returned to the dugout.

A moment later, the batter hit a comebacker to the pitcher. Hallelujah. The pitcher would throw the ball to the catcher, who had one foot planted on home plate, one out; then, the catcher would relay the ball to the first baseman. A one-two-three double play, inning over.

 But the pitcher wheeled around and threw the ball toward - not to, toward - the shortstop, who was covering second base. No outs were recorded, and the game was lost (or from the point of view of the Twins, it was won).

Once upon a time, I coached my son's, then my daughter's, Little League teams, and as I saw the Mariners' pitcher pause and start to turn, I was suddenly on the sideline of a neighborhood baseball diamond, cupping my hands around my mouth to call to a confused ten-year-old pitcher, "Home! Throw it home!" "Throw...the...ball...HOME!"

 What on earth had possessed a big-league ballplayer to pull off a doozie like that? It got even more confusing next day, when I read in the paper that the pitching coach had told the pitcher, "If they hit anything back to you, throw it home." After the game, Eric Wedge, the tough Seattle manager, told reporters, "I'm sure he'll learn from this," which made me think that if I were that pitcher, I might keep my back firmly to the wall till I could jump on the next plane to Japan. The pitcher was quoted as saying that with the ball in his hand, he could think only of getting two outs, second to first. "I had a brain fart," he explained.

Well, brain farts do occur in baseball games, often enough that there should be provision for them in the official scorer reports. Back in the 1930s, a Brooklyn Dodger named Frenchy Bordagaray was picked off second base because the fielders were aware of his tendency to tap his foot, and he got tagged out, as he put it, "between taps." This was the same Frenchy Bordagaray who once became so angry at an umpire that he spat on him. For that, Frenchy was fined $500, which he said was more than he'd expectorated.

Not only players have brain farts. One day in 1942, Lou Boudreau, the manager of the Cleveland Indians, had a bad cold, and during the game, with his team at bat and its two slowest runners on base, blew his nose. Unfortunately, a towel over the face was the signal for a double steal, which ended in a unique double play.

 These events used to be called bonehead plays, or boners. The term goes back to 1908, when Fred Merkle, a young player for the New York Giants, did not run all the way to second base on a walk-off single in a crucial game against the Chicago Cubs. One of the Cub infielders noticed, got hold of a ball that may or may not have been the game ball, tagged second base, and Merkle was called out. As the result, the Cubs beat out the Giants for the pennant, and then won the World Series, which they've not done since. Maybe it was Merkle who put the curse on them. In any event, poor Fred was known the rest of his life as Bonehead Merkle. "I suppose that when I die, the epitaph on my tombstone will read: 'Here lies Bonehead Merkle,'" he once said.

It could've been worse. What if Merkle had done his deed 100 years later? Brainfart Merkle all his life, then on the tombstone?

Nah.

Yeah.

Movin' On

My office walls are covered with artwork and photographs which represent a number of my interests. There are music boxes and organ grinders, early twentieth-century sheet music, the wrapper from a giant chocolate bar, some beautiful Origami flowers made by the mother of a Japanese friend, and a photo of my son Casey and me at a ball game, wearing matching T-shirts with a big, blue PUTZ emblazoned across the front. (Mr. J.J. Putz once pitched for our Seattle Mariners). I've been a baseball fan since I was nine, so it stands to reason that some of my office wall decorations have been posters handed out by the Mariners over the past fifteen years.

But baseball ain't what it used to be. (I know, nothing is, but still). What I miss most about the baseball of sixty years ago is the loyalty and affection that grew between fans and the players who spent their entire career with one club. Joe DiMaggio wasn't called the Yankee Clipper for nothing. Jackie Robinson retired rather than accept a trade to his Dodgers' hated crosstown rival, the New York Giants. And if the Giants had ever traded Willie Mays, the fans would've demolished the Polo Grounds.

Most Seattle fans will never stop booing Alex Rodriguez for swearing fealty to the Mariners, then jumping ship to grab an unprecedented package of Texas simoleons. But Albert Pujols' defection to Los Angeles this past winter was worse. When he sailed southward, A-Rod was still a green kid, susceptible to the blandishments of a megalomaniacal team owner. But all it took for Pujols, a grown man in the prime of his career and an idol in St. Louis, to blow off his adoring multitudes of fans was a few pieces of Disneyland silver. His statue could've stood next to Stan Musial's forever. How many millions of dollars does anyone need?

 I have no particular attachment to the St. Louis Cardinals, but Pujols' flight to the coast was a spit in the face of every baseball fan everywhere. Last week, I cast a jaundiced eye at my walls, then pulled down the baseball posters, and put up the ragtime memorabilia I accumulated over the past several years, as I wrote my ragtime-based historical mysteries. Scott Joplin replaced Alex Rodriguez, a better trade than any the Mariners ever pulled off. Joe Lamb's "Nightingale Rag" replaced the Mariners' flamboyant proclamation, "You Gotta Love These Guys."

Well, no, I don't gotta. Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

You Gotta Have Heart

Our Seattle Mariners started their baseball season with two wins, then lost seven games in a row, and fell behind 7-0 in their next game. Fans and sportswriters agreed - might as well call off the season. This team is going nowhere, certainly not to the playoffs. We're looking at a summer of pain and frustration.

But I remember the best baseball season ever, 1951. My New York Giants lost eleven games in a row out of the gate, and started the year 2-12. Things looked so bad, they called up a young outfielder named Willie Mays. After 20 at-bats, Willie had one hit, a batting average of .050. On August 11, the Giants were thirteen games behind the hated Brooklyn Dodgers, and Chuck Dressen, the Dodgers' manager told reporters, "The Giants is dead."

Not quite. The Jints ran off a sixteen-game win streak, caught the Dodgers during the last weekend of the regular season, then won the pennant in a playoff, when Bobby Thomson hit the most famous home run in the history of the game. That team had heart. Miles and miles and miles of heart.

What's that got to do with writing? Writers gotta have heart, too. So many ink-slingers become instant successes only following years of frustration, having doggedly refused to give up even when everything and everyone seemed to be telling them that would be the reasonable move.

After some thirty years of trying and failing to write a novel and get it published, I left my day job to go at book-writing full time. Three years of scribbling produced a novel and twenty-odd rejection slips. Then, a writer-friend volunteered to give my book a once-over. He told me my voice was great - for nonfiction - and suggested I rewrite the book "as if you're telling someone a story, for crying out loud." I listened to my batting coach, spent a half-year adjusting my stance, then hit it out of the park. The first publisher who saw the reworked book bought it, and it became THE MUSIC BOX MURDERS, my first published mystery novel. My eighth, A PERILOUS CONCEPTION, will come out this December. That's twelve years in the majors for me, and if I've never made an All-Star team, it's OK. I just love to play the game.

And oh yeah. The Mariners scored one run in the seventh inning, five in the eighth, and two more in the ninth to win that game. No, they probably won't make it to the postseason, but all right. I'll cheer them on through the summer anyway. They've got heart.

A Wednesday Doubleheader - Yankees Suck, Mariners Rock & A Ragtime Urban Legend

YANKEES SUCK, MARINERS ROCK
      To follow up on last week's post, I got a nice phone call Saturday from Randy Adamack, the Seattle Mariners' Vice-President of Communications. Mr. Adamack told me that ever since the original brouhaha over the Yankees Suck T-shirts in 2002, the official club policy has been that fans may wear a 'Yankees Suck' T-shirt (or any T-shirt they'd like) to Safeco Field, and specifically, the alcohol enforcement officer should not have ordered me to remove my shirt and turn it inside out. As part of the apology, Mr. Adamack invited my wife and me to a game of our choice this month, on the Mariners, something not requested, but gratefully accepted. 
      There always have been and always will be people who set themselves up as guardians of public morality. They need to be opposed vigorously. I'm gratified that the Mariners have taken a clear stance against censorship.

A RAGTIME URBAN LEGEND
      I keep coming across a word-for-word story about Scott Joplin, my latest encounter being at this site. The account holds that Scott Joplin was the "first music teacher" of Rollin Rodgers, a young white boy in a "small town" in Texas. Years later, Rodgers was offered the opportunity to sing at the Met, but insisted on bringing his old teacher to hear him. The Met refused to allow a black man in, so Rodgers went back to Texas and never did become a star opera singer. Joplin, so touched by Rodgers' sacrifice, decided to take up the composing he'd abandoned because of "money problems, health problems, and a messy divorce." So, Rodgers allegedly was in large part responsible for our having Joplin's ragtime to hear today.
      What really happened: in about 1880, in Texarkana, young Scott Joplin, recognized through the town as a prodigy, came to the attention of one Julius Weiss, a German immigrant employed as a tutor for the children of the wealthy Rodgers lumber family. One of the Rodgers children was Rollin, so he and Joplin were contemporaries. Weiss arranged to give young Joplin free lessons in piano, sight-reading, and harmony, and may also have tutored the boy in academic subjects (which might account for the fact that Joplin, as an adult, was so well-spoken, and moved comfortably in white society). And since Weiss' music lessons focused on European music, Joplin got a healthy exposure to that, and came to know classical and operatic music well.
      Joplin studied with Weiss until 1884, when Mr. Rodgers died, the family cut expenses, and Weiss had to leave town. Joplin, then 16, left Texarkana as well, and became an itinerant pianist in the midwest, finally settling in Sedalia MO in the mid-1890s, where he became a central figure in the city's music communities, and began to write the ragtime music that would make his reputation. He (and his publisher, John Stark) called his music "classic" or "classical" ragtime, since Joplin wanted to make over the rough, raucous folk ragtime of the day into a respected and respectable form of classical music.
      I can find no evidence of any operatic performances by Rollin Rodgers, only that he played the violin, and had a "lifelong interest in opera." Joplin's not-very-messy divorce was in 1903, before he ever went to New York, determined above all else to compose a ragtime opera. During his subsequent health and money problems, he never stopped composing; by all accounts, he was a tune-writing machine. 
      And just for the record, Weiss' appearance in my book, THE RAGTIME KID, is pure fiction. Once he left Texarkana, there is only sketchy information of his whereabouts and activities; he may have been in Houston for a while.

The most comprehensive reference on Julius Weiss is: Julius Weiss, Scott Joplin's First Piano Teacher, by Theodore Albrecht, College Music Symposium 19 (2), Fall 1979, pp. 89-105.

Censorship Sucks

      Several years ago, vendors outside Safeco Field in Seattle sold "Yankees Suck" T-shirts, which caused a stir inside the stadium. Management of the Mariners baseball team decided that message ran counter to its Family-Friendly Policy, and under threat of expulsion, forced people wearing the shirts to remove them. Some of those people objected, the ACLU entered the fray, and the Mariners finally decided they would "not ask ticket-holders to remove or cover up any T-shirt."

      I'm a Yankee hater from way back in 1949. It fried me, the way the Yankees always stripped the one good player from the Washington Senators or the St. Louis Browns every August, then snatched the pennant, and in the World Series, ran over my Giants or the otherwise-detested Brooklyn Dodgers. As time passed, I gnashed my teeth at George Steinbrenner, who seemed to think that a World Series title was a Yankee birthright, and failure to claim it constituted grounds to sacrifice a manager or a fat toad of a player. And when A-Rod, Seattle's most-despised ex-player, decided that his interests would best be served by pinstripes, I rejoiced. Now, I could hate the Yankees with previously-unimagined passion.

      My daughter bought me a Yankees Suck shirt back in the day, and I've worn it ever since to Mariners-Yankees games. I had it on this past July 8, when an alcohol enforcement officer stopped me on the concourse behind Section 333, and demanded I remove my shirt, then and there. She told me that in accordance with the Mariners' Family-Friendly Policy, I should have been stopped at the gate and refused admittance, and that I would not be allowed to stay in the stadium with the shirt on. Since it was a hot night and I wore nothing under the shirt, she settled to have me strip to the waist and turn the shirt inside-out. Because I did not want to create a public disturbance, I complied, never mind the distress that the sight of my paltry corpus must have caused passers-by.

      During the game, I'd been sitting among groups of Yankee fans. None were offended by the shirt; in fact, they thought it was funny. It served as an icebreaker, and we were all enjoying the game together. When I returned to my seat with my shirt reversed, one of the fans – a man with two small children – asked whether I'd been compelled to turn my shirt inside out. When I said I had, his comment was, “That's ridiculous. He didn't seem to think his kids had been traumatized.

     This is not an earthshaking issue. I know that. Around the world, people are starving, drowning in floods, dying of preventable diseases, being slaughtered individually and wholesale. But as a professional writer, I need to complain about censorship. The actions of the alcohol enforcement officer are insupportable. I'm pretty sure the sentiment expressed on my shirt would get by all three prongs of the Miller Test for Obscenity, but the point seems moot. The expression has long since lost any sexual implication. I see it repeatedly in The Seattle Times and other mainstream publications; I hear it on the radio. If that word, used in that context, can get by the FCC, how can it stick in the throat of Mariners' management?    

     When I told a friend, a much-published writer of books for children, and a winner of many state librarian awards, what had happened to me at Safeco Field, her reaction was, "Unbelievable.   Walk into any elementary school in the country, and you'll hear kids saying that something sucks."      

      I sent a letter to the Mariners' Director of Community Relations, asking that she clarify whether the alcohol-enforcement officer acted on her own initiative, or whether she was in fact following stated company policy. As a long-time 16-game planholder, I thought I was owed that much in courtesy, But more than five weeks later, now, I've heard nothing.

      Local sportswriters have complained in print about the Mariners' overzealous Family Friendly Policy, and I couldn't agree more. One thing to be hassled by drunk and aggressive fans, another to be forced to disrobe so as not to possibly offend someone with an antediluvian acquaintance with American slang. Sorry, Mariners, but censorship sucks.    

      Unfortunately, on the field, unlike another team I could name, the Yankees don't suck. Still, win or lose, the Ms have been my team since 1977, and I'll continue to go regularly to their games, and cheer for them, even during massacres that would've turned ancient Romans pale. I admire Jack Z as a person and as a G.M., and think he's building a team that one day will make it realistic for me to wear a T-shirt saying, "Send 'em back to New York with their pinstriped tails between their legs." I just hope the Safeco Booze Bouncers won't tell me that reference to what's between legs is not Family-Friendly, and pitch me out onto Edgar Martinez Way. 

Get That Worm Out Of My Ear

      An earworm is a tune that goes round and round in your mind until you manage to drive it out with another one. It's a translation of a German word, ohrwurm, which means "earworm," and it has the same sense in Berlin as it does in Seattle. People with characteristics of O.C.D. are more likely to have frequent and severe earworm infestations, and yes, I've harbored the little critters all my life. Guilty as charged. The shoe fits.
      What may be odd about my earworms is that many of them are induced by dreams, then rage between my ears for hours after I wake up. Some of them are (as best I can tell) original compositions; some are ragtime melodies; some, themes from pieces of classical music. Some are operatic. Wagner seems to over-represented. I wonder if the Master of Beyreuth suffered from ohrwurmen.
      Yesterday morning, I woke up with what might have been my most unusual earworm ever. I'd been dreaming I was watching a Seattle Mariners baseball game, and the players in the dugout were singing a chorus about Ichiro's skills. The only line I remember was, "He's a real...cool...cat; he's the King-of...the Bat." And then, Ichiro sang the verse, but I can't tell you how it went, because he sang in Japanese. How do I know it was Japanese, and not just some gibberish my subconscious cooked up? Because I knew. The subconscious is often wrong, but never in doubt. Whether Japanese, Japlish, or junk, the tune stuck in my mind in Ichiro's voice nearly the entire day. I could actually hum it aloud.  
      I guess it could've been worse. I could've been stuck all day in a stadium-full of old-time Yankee fans chanting, "Joe, Joe, DiMaggio, we want you on our team," while their Red Sox counterpoints bellowed, "He's better than his brother Joe, Dominic DiMaggio." Or Teresa Brewer, singly coyly, "I love Mickey. Mickey Who? Mickey Mantle." There was also a song about Willie Mays from those years, but I think I'm safe from that one: all I can remember of it is Willie's boyish countertenor breaking in every now and again with a loud, "Say Hey!"
      I once woke my wife by sitting bolt-upright in bed at three AM, and shouting, "Null and void!" at the top of my lungs. She wanted to know what I'd been dreaming, but I had no idea. Maybe I'd stumbled on an auditory vermicide. If so, it's probably suitable for use only by solitary sleepers.