Texas Rangers? "The team’s name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen."

Something else I've learned today. The argument is convincing. Just call the team the Texas Horny Toads from now on, and be done with it.

The Texas Rangers’ team name must go, by Karen Attiah (The Washington Post)

As the Washington football team finally gives up its racist slur of a name, there is one major sports team that has avoided the spotlight and resisted meaningful engagement with the violent and racist implications of its name. To know the full history of the Texas Rangers is to understand that the team’s name is not so far off from being called the Texas Klansmen.

I grew up in Dallas, raised on myths about Texas Rangers as brave and wholesome guardians of the Texas frontier, helping protect innocent settlers from violent Indians. At church, boys could sign up to be Royal Rangers, the Christian equivalent of the Boy Scouts. I still remember the excitement when Chuck Norris himself, star of the television show “Walker, Texas Ranger,” came to visit my elementary school class.

My dad sometimes took my younger siblings and me to Arlington Stadium to watch the Rangers play. No state mythologizes itself quite like Texas, so of course, it made sense to have a team name that embodied that gauzy, self-regarding history. At the same time, being from a Ghanaian immigrant family, we weren’t that invested in baseball, or the team name. I just liked going because my dad would sometimes let me take sips of his Coca-Cola mixed with beer.

What we didn’t realize at the time was that the Rangers were a cruel, racist force when it came to the nonwhites who inhabited the beautiful and untamed Texas territory. The first job of the Rangers, formed in 1835 after Texas declared independence from Mexico, was to clear the land of Indian for white settlers.

That was just the start. The Rangers oppressed black people, helping capture runaway slaves trying to escape to Mexico; in the aftermath of the Civil War, they killed free blacks with impunity. “The negroes here need killing,” a Ranger wrote in a local newspaper in 1877, after Rangers fired on a party of black former Buffalo soldiers, killing four of them and a 4-year old girl. A jury would later find that the black soldiers “came to their death while resisting officers in the discharge of their duty,” an unsettling echo of the justification for modern-day police killings ...

A wrong, finally righted: Marvin Miller has been voted into baseball's hall of fame.

It's about damn time.

Here is the NAC post of November 27, 2012. I was mistaken; it took another six years for the honor to at last arrive.

---

Marvin Miller, RIP.

Next year, Marvin Miller again will be eligible for the Hall of Fame.

I suspect he'll get the nod, because the very same detestable Seligites who kept Miller out while he was living will find it sufficiently sophomoric to give in to inevitable enshrinement following his death.

Marvin Miller, The Man Who Reinvented Baseball, by Keith Olbermann (Baseball Nerd)

... In that he utterly reshaped the way the game was played on the field, Babe Ruth probably reigns supreme on the list of those who changed baseball most. In that they reshaped its color (and our nation’s attitude – and laws), Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson probably share second place. But only they can even be considered above Marvin Miller as men who had greater influence on the history of baseball.

Late note: Only after posting this did I see Charles P. Pierce's piece about Marvin Miller at Esquire, and his sentiments parallel mine:

He is not in the Baseball Hall Of Fame because the voting process is completely corrupt and needs to be blown up and rebuilt from scratch. (My prediction is that they will vote him in posthumously, just to be nasty about it, because Miller already told them not to bother.)

Pierce gets the last word: "(Miller) had a positive genius for making all the right enemies."

Another day-late note: There's a great interview with Miller at The Nation.

My beloved Oakland A's play tonight in the AL Wild Card game, and you're sentenced to the chronology.

It might last only one night, so ...

These days I try to keep to a bare minimum the sheer wastage of time required of sports viewing. Cutting the cable has helped, and reducing the frequency of the games I do watch makes these fewer opportunities better ones, as in 2018 when we watched basketball in Portugal, Poland and Germany, as well as two baseball games in Baltimore.

I still enjoy the essence of the games, especially baseball, and regular readers know that I've been a fan of the Oakland Athletics since around 1970, when I was 10 years old. Below you'll find the explanation of how my A's fandom came to be, but first, Oakland hosts Tampa Bay on Wednesday in the American League Wild Card playoff game.

The starting pitcher for the A's is Sean Manaea, who pitched a no-hitter for the A's in 2018. Manaea, whose father is Samoan, was born and raised in Wanatah, Indiana (near Valparaiso). He played baseball at Indiana State, and during the summer following his sophomore year in college, pitched for the Dubois County Bombers.

The Dubois County Bombers are a summer college league team in Huntingburg, and the team's home park is the refashioned film set from the movie A League of Their Own. Manaea played in Huntingburg in 2011, during the period when the New Albanian Brewing Company was selling beer at the ballpark!

What's more, as my friend Rick reminds me, Manaea's battery mate tonight also is a Hoosier. Catcher Josh Phegley is from Terre Haute and played at Indiana University (he's a 2010 IU graduate).

And so, if you're wondering how a Hoosier hick from the general vicinity of French Lick became an A's fan in the first place, here's a column from 2012, edited and updated for topical accuracy.

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ON THE AVENUES: It no longer keeps me waiting.

At some point around 1970, when I was ten years old, family finances were at last sufficient to purchase a subscription to the recognized Bible of athletic endeavors in America, enabling the weekly arrival of The Sporting News to our home in Georgetown, as facilitated by that quaintly geriatric institution known as the US Mail.

It was a cause for great joy.

It also signified a certain rite of passage, although the rite’s precise definition proved to be a matter of mild dispute. While my father generally would leaf through an issue, he surely hoped The Sporting News would inspire me to spend more time practicing baseball and basketball, so as to achieve his cherished goal of his son growing into a ballplayer.

As usual, we were on divergent paths. What quickly came to interest me as much as the games and athletes therein was the publication itself, the way The Sporting News was organized into recurring coverage and special features. Moreover, I read above my weight and was drawn to the regular columnists, who had their own distinct styles.

Unless one of these writers happened to be interviewed on the NBC Game of the Week (that’s right, the solitary baseball game shown on television every seventh day), I had no idea how they spoke, but owing to the way their written words were conveyed, distinctive vocal inflections and regional accents might yet be perceived. The New York writers sounded exactly as one might imagine, as did the fellow from Alabama.

Most importantly, The Sporting News was just about the only way for sports fans in the hinterlands to comprehensively follow America’s major league teams, which amounted to baseball, basketball, football and ice hockey, in order of my personal interest at the time.

Sports Illustrated? Too many photos, and too few statistics.

The two (that’s right, two) Louisville newspapers covered the Cincinnati Reds on a daily basis during the season, and provided random highlights from elsewhere in baseball, but where else than The Sporting News to read the beat writers, review the box scores and scan updated statistics?

In addition, the invaluable presence of The Sporting News helped me transcend the limited boundaries of my upbringing and arrive at one of the single most telling decisions any boy of the era was compelled to make.

What’s your favorite baseball team?

In elementary school, all my friends cheered for teams from the senior circuit, otherwise known as the National League. It was purely geographical, with the nearby Reds ranking first in allegiance, along with a sprinkling of St. Louis Cardinals fans.

The American League was an under-valued stock, ripe for the plucking, and perfect to capture a fledgling contrarian’s attention. Owing to family ties in Detroit -- and especially after his idol Ted Williams retired from the Red Sox -- my father was a Tigers fan of sorts. I resolved to follow suit, and to choose my team from the “other” league. With the assistance of The Sporting News, considerations commenced.

The damned Yankees could be ruled out from the start. I admired the traditions of teams like the Red Sox, Orioles, Senators, White Sox, Indians and Tigers, but overall, they seemed too stodgy and old-school. What on earth was a Twin, if not a truncated Twinkie? The expansion Kansas City Royals made my short list, and the Milwaukee Brewers (formerly Seattle Pilots) surely would have been a finalist a bit later in life ... but in the 4th grade, I hadn’t started drinking beer (yet).

My gaze extended to the West Coast. As a heretic even then, the name Angels did not excite me; had it been the Devils, we might have been in business. This left Oakland as the final team to be scrutinized, and the advantages of the Athletics soon became apparent to an aspiring contrarian.

• American League, not National League.
• As far away from Georgetown as a team could be.
• Long and noble history as a franchise, first in Philadelphia, then Kansas City.
• An outspoken, lunatic owner in Charlie Finley.
• Players clad in green and gold – fashionable, and also the colors of Floyd Central High School, which I’d be attending in due course.

The A’s became my team, and Reggie Jackson my favorite player. Unbeknownst to me, the A’s also were about to become quite good, winning five divisional titles in a row from 1971-1975, and three consecutive World Series crowns in 1972, 1973 and 1974. The players grew outlandish mustaches and beards during this period and wore white shoes, all of which outraged the older generation, endearing the team to me even more strongly.

There have been good times since, along with the wretched. By my reckoning, 2019 is my 50th year of being an A’s fan. The team is closer than ever to a new stadium in Oakland, a city deserted by the Golden State Warriors (to San Francisco) and the Vegas-bound Raiders. I reckon on remaining in harness. By now, it’s a family tradition.

---

In those earliest days, The Sporting News was my vital link to the Oakland A’s. It served as a weekly summary of the team’s season, because otherwise, virtual blackout conditions prevailed. Games played in California missed the morning Courier-Journal’s deadline, and might be in the afternoon edition of the Louisville Times.

If neither, I’d be two days behind on the scores. The three local commercial television channels sometimes read American League scores if air time allowed; presumably, a coin was flipped to determine the decision.

If the A’s played in Chicago or Detroit, game snippets could be overheard on the 50,000 watt AM radio stations, at least until overtaken by sleep or static. By 1978, the AM station in Jeffersonville had a phone number to call for tape-recorded results of the previous day's games, and it was the most timely link ever.

A few years after that, there was cable television, but only in the city at first. When the Loma Prieta earthquake brought the 1989 World Series to a halt, I was in Ireland. It took ten days for the series (won by the A's over the Giants in a sweep) to resume, and by that time, I'd transitioned to Spain, eventually catching up on events with the help of the International Herald Tribune newspaper.

These days, I begin most mornings with a glance at the news headlines from The Guardian and BBC World service, then proceed to ESPN or the Yahoo sports app for scores, all via my iPhone. In mere seconds, the ballgame scan is finished, verifying that the ketchup advertisements and even Carly Simon turned out to have been wrong: Anticipation, at least in the sporting sense, no longer exists.

It's far better, although it's not quite the same.

More about the late Jim Bouton: "Hey, it’s O.K. to be on the outside."

The striking part about Ball Four's appeal that Jim Bouton's critics routinely missed is perfectly stated by Charles P. Pierce in one succinct sentence at Deadspin.

Jim Bouton made it acceptable -- even, maybe, cool -- to love baseball again.

As usual, baseball's current ownership cadre is working overtime to miss this lesson. Meanwhile Pierce's tribute to Bouton is spot on, as usual, though not to ignore Tyler Kepner's fine thoughts in the New York Times.

In particular this passage from Kepner turned my head. As always when it comes to writing, if you can find the words that hit your reader in the gut, you've won the game -- then you start all over again, next time.

I had first talked to Bouton 25 years earlier, in 1992, when I was a teenager and had just read “Ball Four” for the first time. I was an aspiring sportswriter but also a frustrated high school pitcher — a warm-up guy. When I read his book, Bouton seemed like a friend. It was good to know there was someone like him out there.

“I don’t think any teenager feels comfortable in his group,” he told me then, when I mentioned how deeply I connected with the book. “You’re trying to figure out how the world works: ‘How do you get from here to there, who am I and how do I fit into things and what the hell am I going to do with my life? I don’t have any answers.’ And so to read a book by a guy who’s in the same situation, who’s 30 years old, they have to say to themselves, ‘Hey, it’s O.K. to be on the outside.’”

On the outside, forever and always; I'll be 59 in August, and yep, that's me.

I'm still unsure about who I am, still trying to figure out the world and determine how I might fit into it, still completely baffled as to what I might do with my life, and still reacting viscerally to Quadrophenia by The Who because after all, I've no more clue than the protagonist Jimmy as to why this uncertain feeling is still here in my brain.

Pierce again, grasping fundamental points.

Ever since Bouton passed on Wednesday at the age of 80, of a particularly vicious form of amyloid dementia—Americans of a certain age have been dropping lines from Ball Four as though it had been published last week, instead of nearly 50 years ago. Many of the primary reactions on the electric Twitter machine to Bouton’s death was some variation of Seattle Pilots manager Joe Schultz’s philosophical pondering—“shitfuck” or, alternatively, “fuckshit.” Friends consoled friends, advising each other to smoke ‘em inside and then go pound some Budweiser. There were some mournful renditions of “It Makes a Fella Proud To Be An Astro.” Ball Four did more than sell a lot of books and corrupt a million young American baseball fans. It implanted a conception of being a fan that was totally different from anything that had come before it, a strange but hilarious commingling of unbridled affection and informed cynicism that mirrored Bouton’s own, a love for the game energized by an enthusiastic disrespect for the people who run it, and for some of the “unwritten rules” that had deserved to be mocked for decades.

Perhaps I've never realized the extent to which Bouton was a role model for me. Lest we forget, in Ball Four writer Bouton reminds us that a college term paper written by fellow pitcher Mike Marshall was called "Baseball Is an Ass" -- not the game itself, but the authority figures attached to it. 

“With (Steve) Hovley gone, Mike Marshall is probably the most articulate guy on the club, so I asked him if he had as much trouble communicating as I’ve had and he said, ‘Of course. The minute I approach a coach or a manager, I can see the terror in his eyes.’ ”

Just like in Nawbany when they see you coming and cross the street to walk on the other side.

Let's conclude with these words by Bruce Markusen in 2015, and the two retrospectives he composed.

"All these years later, many of us still care about the characters of Ball Four. And I suspect we always will."

“Ball Four’s” Characters Revisted: The Seattle Days

“Ball Four’s” Characters Revisited: On to Houston

R.I.P. Jim Bouton: "After Ball Four, sports hagiography was never the same."

Jim Bouton has died at 80.

Long live the memory of Ball Four's author. On Twitter and later at The Nation, sportswriter Dave Zirin recalled an epic meeting of the minds.

After Ball Four, sports hagiography was never the same. I was fortunate enough to speak on several panels with Bouton — including one in Boston with historian Howard Zinn, where Bouton and Zinn, longtime admirers of each other, met for the first time.

Bouton with Zinn?

How could I avoid being a Jim Bouton fan?

In my experience, Jim Bouton wasn't just the quirky character who wrote "Ball Four," the book that opened the door on what really goes on behind the curtain in Major League Baseball. To me, he was more of an anarchist. (The Village Voice even referred to him once as "Baseball's Bolshevik.") He didn't just like to challenge authority, he reveled in it. He loved throwing grenades into foxholes to see what would happen and where the debris landed.

The preceding excerpt is from a column by Tony Dobrowolski in the Berkshire Eagle from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, a city that figured prominently in what I believe was Bouton's final book, FOUL BALL: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save an Old Ballpark."

In his first diary since Ball Four, Jim Bouton recounts his amazing adventure trying to save Wahconah Park, in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. Host to organized baseball since 1892, Wahconah Park was soon to be abandoned by the owner of the Pittsfield Mets who would move his team to a new stadium in another town---an all too familiar story.

Coincidentally, we drove through Pittsfield in route to Northampton MA on June 29, at which point we were only twenty miles away from Bouton's home in Great Barrington.

How influential has Bouton's Ball Four been in my life? Well, it's been 45 years since the first time I read it, and numerous anecdotes not only are fresh in my mind, but remain part of my daily repartee.

One of them is about a Seattle Pilots teammate who had a particularly vehement spat with the umpire behind home plate. Weeks passed, stars aligned, and this hitter again came to bat, with the same umpire calling balls and strikes.

The first pitch was ridiculously far outside, and the umpire decisively called it a strike. Bouton's teammate stepped out of the box, but said nothing. The next pitch was two feet high, and the batter somehow tommy-hawked it off the outfield wall for a double.

The umpire turned to the Pilots bench and said, "See? It makes him a better hitter."

Then there's the one about Bouton's former teammate, the legendary superstar Mickey Mantle.

It was the mid-1960s, and the Yankee dynasty was beginning to fade. The aging slugger Mantle arrived at the ballpark massively hungover and was given the day off by the team's sympathetic manager, but late in the game, with the Yanks behind, Mantle was needed to pinch-hit.

Half-blind with pain and the effects of the previous evening's dissipation, "The Mick" lofted a majestic game-winning home run.

He slowly circled the bases and returned to the dugout to greet his cheering teammates, saying to no one in particular: "You have no idea how hard that really was."

The following dates to 2016.

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Cultural education: Jim Bouton's landmark book, Ball Four.

John Thorn is the Official Baseball Historian for Major League Baseball, and as Thorn rightfully gushes, Jim Bouton is the author of Ball Four, one of the most influential books of my reading life. In the early 1970s, my copy looked just like the one pictured here.

Not unexpectedly, an overview of Ball Four by Mark Armour at the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) website is among the most complete that I've seen.

Today’s fans and writers, children or young adults when they first devoured the book, re-read it every two or three years. The book is universally viewed as well-written, provocative, thought-provoking, and funny. It is difficult to imagine that such a book could be controversial, that its author would be shunned by people within the game for many years, and in fact is still shunned. It is so.

Thorn takes the story from here.

Jim Bouton: An Improvisational Life, by John Thorn (Our Game)

... What emboldened me to approach (Jim Bouton) was my knowledge of his ongoing efforts to bring baseball back to Wahconah Park in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, which had hosted baseball on this same spot since 1892.

“It might interest you, Jim,” I offered, “that baseball was played in Pittsfield a full century earlier, and I have evidence of a prohibition against its play anywhere near a newly erected church. The actual document, I was told by the town clerk, survives.”

This stunned him. It was a great way to promote Pittsfield and his campaign. We became fast friends. He and his colleagues went on to scour the town’s archives and unearthed two manuscript copies of the “Pittsfield Prohibition” of 1791 and, barely a month after our conversation in Hackensack, we held a press conference. Because the ban placed baseball — as played by that name — in 18th-century America, the discovery turned out to be an international event. (For more about the Pittsfield story and what it means, see: https://goo.gl/BH9nOc) ...

There have been a couple "vintage" baseball games played in metro Louisville during recent years, and I've always been out of town, which is frustrating.

... A Vintage Base Ball Federation followed, with games in a number of locations for several years. I was involved in all of it, but for me the principal benefit of reviving the old ball game was the friendship with Jim that continues to this day. Though we get together with our wives regularly for dinner at a favorite neighborhood restaurant, I confess to being star-struck still — and not because Jim won twenty games for the Yankees a couple of times before I went off to college.

He is the man who wrote Ball Four.

I will not detail Jim’s life here. His biography is wonderfully sketched by Mark Armour in an entry for SABR’s Baseball Biography Project (https://goo.gl/Xre4Gs). Permit me to focus now on Ball Four: its landmark place in history; the revolution it inspired; and the importance of the impending sale at auction of its underlying notes, drafts, audiotapes, and related materials, whose very survival was largely unknown.

---

There's also this:

On the Seattle Pilots, George Brunet and the lives of journeymen.

80 years after Lou Gehrig's famous goodbye, Dave Zirin examines baseball's declining popularity.

Photo credit.

It's been 80 years since Lou Gehrig made his famous closing remarks, and the contemporary game seems so far removed from Gehrig's era that we might be speaking of different planets.

I've changed, too. Sporting endeavors mean far less to me now than before, and these days I seldom allot time to watch games of any sort. They all take too damn long; there are books to absorb and words to write, and whatever little contribution I can make toward refusing to view advertisements, it's an easy call to opt out. I can always read about the games.

Thus noted, the ongoing NBA free agent sweepstakes have been fascinating. The Clippers, contenders?

Of course I'm monitoring the major league baseball results, and with the season half finished, Oakland remains in contention. At the same time I'm not enthused enough to actually devote three and a half hours to watching a game. We saw one in April in Cincinnati, and that's enough for now.

Dave Zirin is one of the few sportswriters who genuinely matter, and he's pretty much on target here, noting that the human element seems to be disappearing from baseball.

Analytic approaches to hitting have now become conventional wisdom, with players trying to extend pitch counts, draw walks and swing for the fences, going for a home run or a strike out. The first-ball hitter or the sacrifice bunt are considered antiquated. This slows the game down. It also decreases the number of fielding possibilities, which not only grinds the game down, but makes it more—and here is that word—boring.

There'll be a counterrevolution. There always is. I'll just curl up in the corner with a good book and wait for the pendulum to swing back.

Why No One Watches Baseball Anymore, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

The sport is experiencing its lowest levels of support since 1937. The reasons are obvious, but owners and executives have no incentive to look for answers.

The New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox just played a historic series in London, bringing the national pastime across the pond. Two of the greatest rivals in the history of sports competed in two games over the weekend, and it felt like much of the sports world barely noticed. There has been far more buzz about the US women’s national soccer team, currently advancing to the semi-finals of the World Cup in France, and the wild and wacky NBA free-agency period. People—particularly young people—appear to be more interested in where NBA players are going than what Major League Baseball players are doing.

As someone who grew up loving baseball (tragically, as a diehard Mets fan) and whose own kids would sooner make their beds than go to a game, I feel like I have an answer to the question of why young people want no part of this. The games are too damn long. On Saturday, the Red Sox-Yankees contest, for example, lasted four hours and 42 minutes. The Sunday game was a brisk four hours and 24 minutes. Though a typical game falls more in the three-hour range, this is too damn long. Last year Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Kenley Jansen scoffed at this notion, saying, “The Super Bowl is four and a half hours.” That is undoubtedly true. The Super Bowl is also once a year. It is not part of a 162-game dirge, many of the games played outdoors in a summer heat that—thanks to climate change—isn’t getting any cooler ...

It isn't so much that we don't have baseball players like Gehrig nowadays. We don't make people like this.

Eighty Years On, Lou Gehrig’s Words Reverberate, by Richard Sandomir (New York Times)

There is little record of the speech known as baseball’s Gettysburg Address, but there is that movie.

Lou Gehrig had finally made it to the Yankees’ clubhouse that afternoon, drained and drenched with perspiration, having delivered a speech of such simple eloquence that it would one day be called baseball’s Gettysburg Address.

Lou had wept as he spoke — as did many of the nearly 62,000 other people in Yankee Stadium on that Fourth of July 80 years ago.

Back in the comfort of the clubhouse with teammates and friendly reporters around him, he asked, “Did my speech sound silly?” It was a humble man’s question with an easy answer: it did not.

Much of the speech no longer exists as an intact recording; poor preservation of newsreels has left only four known surviving lines ...

ON THE AVENUES: Let's lift our voices for another verse of "Talking Seventh Inning Blues."

On the Avenues will move back to Thursdays, beginning next week.

World Cup soccer star Megan Repinoe's principled decision to refrain from singing the "The Star Spangled Banner" prompts one of those questions we ask the friendly 800-lb gorilla in the corner.

In short, why do we play the national anthem before a sporting event, but not prior to opening the doors at a frilly boutique, muffler shop or dive bar?

Imagine the plight of the 24-hour mini-mart, forever unable to to find an opportunity to play the national anthem, and settling instead on an endless loop of Lee Greenwood songs.

The 800-lb gorilla isn't finished.

Why do we insist on patriotic rituals attendant to the airing of the anthem alongside overt displays of nationalism merely to sanction throwing a football and shooting hoops, not to mention taking slap shots?

(As an aside, these questions were of relevance long before Repinoe chose silence and football’s Colin Kaepernick took a knee.)

According to writer Richard C. Crepeau in an essay from the mid-200s, the answer is that rote patriotism featuring "The Star Spangled Banner" became a feature of baseball games during World War II.

In 1940, with the fighting underway in earnest and America becoming more conscious of the possibility of war, there was increased talk of the need to hear the national anthem before all baseball games. This was suggested by The Sporting News in June, while at the same time the president of the International League called for the anthem to be played in U.S. league cities, as was already being done in Canadian cities. By 1941, the practice of playing the anthem before sporting events had achieved nearly universal status. At some games the pledge of allegiance was added, and, by 1941, "I Am an American Day" became a feature at major league parks.

It would be nice to say that all of this was due to pure patriotic expression, but of course much of it was created by PR-conscious owners who wanted to make sure that no one would question the patriotism of athletes who played games during World War II while others went off to serve their country. Four years of war, followed by the Cold War and the emergence of the American Empire, solidified the practice and made it into a national ritual.

Since September 11, 2001, another ritual has come into fashion in baseball. Nowadays the seventh inning stretch often is devoted to a commemorative performance of “God Bless America,” for which I’ll soon be suggesting an alternative with less proselytizing. As a long-ago Internet analyst once wrote:

“‘God Bless America’ rings a false note now, as it did when the song was first written (by Irving Berlin, 1939). Woody Guthrie, wrote the song ‘This Land is Your Land’ in 1940 after hearing Kate Smith sing ‘God Bless America’ one too many times.”

But first, since I’m perfectly willing to be the iconoclast in this particular hometown locker room, another question: Is it really necessary to bring religious devotion into the seventh inning stretch?

Or: Where is the imperative for a deity to “bless” America in the first place, quite apart from sports?

Perhaps a better question is this: If we deploy societal peer pressure to encourage a conditioned response by requiring people to participate in a ritual intended to remind them of a noteworthy event, aren’t we trivializing the event?

Shouldn't folks remember on their own?

To be sure, the events of September 11 are an indelible memory for current generations. Furthermore, and on a far less savory note, the invasive logic of the security state arising in America since 2001 has affected our lives more deeply than we realize.

Still, active memories of 9-11 will fade, just as recollections of human slavery's toll, the efficacy of vaccination and a merits of a living wage have disappeared into the mists of rear-view mirrors.

In my world, instead of mandating participation in sing-alongs during sporting events, a better way of understanding history’s lessons is to take an interest in historical facts. Some sweet day we all may rise as one from the bleachers, precariously cradling ours beers and brats, and listen as local actors and television luminaries read relevant passages from Howard Zinn.

Too few of us can sing well, anyway.

---

At this point the hackles of some readers surely are popping to life: “What -- don’t you love your country?”

Well, this depends on what the meaning of “love” is.

Speaking only for myself, I cannot regard the word “love” as a concept applicable to one among many nation-states into which I was serendipitously deposited by the fickle finger of fate. Rather, during my adult life the extent of my personal attachment to the concept of the United States of America has been conducted in a cerebral way, not in terms of blind allegiance.

(I do love my wife, but each year at tax time my feelings take a back seat to hard mathematics and fluency in bureaucratese; lacking both, I immediately hand the dossier to my accountant to be assured it's done right.)

Somewhat amazingly my teachers succeeded in convincing me that to be an American bears an intimate connection with an intellectual process, not an emotional one. I accept that a philosophy of governance came first, this being a rational undertaking incorporating thoughts, ideals and the historical record, not misty eyes, the fevered thumping of a chest or identification with a piece of cloth.

At the same time, my acknowledgment of this political construct does not imply acceptance of its imperfections. As Tina Turner might have asked, “what’s love got to do with it?” The Constitution as a document is a starting point, and it is to be regarded as a work in progress, not another gilded icon to be revered sans examination with a critical lens.

Because how could the nation's founders have devised perfection when Walt Disney had yet to be born?

All of these considerations matter owing to one’s personal conscience, and the minute we seek to align the conscience of the many individuals into the potential blunt instrument of the one, it’s time to be vigilant.

A brief survey of history reveals that soldiers on all sides have consistently marched off to war in the patriotic belief that God is on their side, and when one considers the catastrophic results of war, it should be obvious that this equation is irreparably skewed, as is any other pertaining to the abstract entity of nationhood -- especially as such abstractions come from hearts and not heads.

My views in this context understandably aren’t mainstream. I think love for other persons can be crazy, blind, binding and inexplicable. Beyond that, brains are there to be used, not lobotomized.

There weren't any weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, were there?

---

Returning to what it means to be a baseball fan, "Take Me Out to the Ballgame" is the only patriotic song we've ever needed. For decades a staple of the seventh-inning stretch at ballparks large and small, from California to the New York island, this music was most delightfully defined by the late Harry Caray’s boisterous press box version.

Baseball possesses its own sort of quasi-religious faith; if not, why would Baltimore Orioles fans buy a single ticket in 2019?

For me the substitution of “God Bless America” for “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” is like inserting an advertisement for organized religion where it doesn't belong, whatever the variety.

Of course I’ve nothing whatever against the old-school songwriter Israel Beilin (Irving Berlin), who died a famous, feted American in 1989 at the age of 101, this wonderful and welcoming country having provided a beacon to his family of immigrants escaping nasty pograms in Tsarist Russia.

Among Berlin’s hit songs I prefer “Cheek to Cheek” or even “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” to “God Bless America,” in which Berlin appealed directly to a simple love of country with groundless theism, prideful chest-thumping and a mawkish sentimentality, neither of which suits my cosmopolitan (read: cynical) internationalism.

---

Conversely, if we simply must have a 7th-inning tune other than the historically correct one, why not sing “This Land Is Your Land,” Woody Guthrie’s far superior response to Berlin?

Why not sing it instead of the national anthem?

“This Land Is Your Land” is sublimely ecumenical, addressing the natural and human wonders of America without resorting to the divisiveness of those many supernatural elements.

I suppose the drawback is that when it comes to the imperative of emotional manipulation required by engorged corporate capitalists, Guthrie’s work isn’t as simplistic as Berlin’s schmaltzy paean to blind obedience.

Better yet, we might all wear “This Machine Kills Fascists” t-shirts whilst happily harmonizing from the third base side. It is through Guthrie’s legacy that this phrase has become immortalized. For many years my former brewing company used “These Machines Kill Fascists” as our motto, alongside a graphic of brewing vessels, and even today, with me being long gone from NABC, I never tire of telling the story of its origin.

Woodrow Wilson Guthrie (1912-1967) was an iconic American folksinger. He was born in Oklahoma and came of age during the twin pre-WWII crises of national economic collapse (the Great Depression) and regional environmental catastrophe (the Dust Bowl).

Musically inclined from childhood, Guthrie followed the westward drift in pursuit of work, eventually landing in California alongside numerous other Okies. In doing so, he played a living, breathing part in novelist John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath,” and as a direct result of what Guthrie experienced during these troubled times in America, his political views evolved in progressive, leftist directions.

Many of Guthrie’s subsequent songs -- he wrote thousands -- chronicled the hardships of ordinary people, expressing empathy for their lot and support for what he saw as curatives: Worker rights, unionizing, and racial and gender equality.

Guthrie eschewed the feel-good and the flag-waving, both so often deployed to mask deprivation and trivialize injustice. His annoyance with “God Bless America” spoke to this feeling.

For all of Guthrie’s leftist tendencies, he remained a staunch patriot as well as a firm, committed believer in the potential of America, albeit a more idealistic and hopeful vision of the American experiment, one not defined entirely by wealth and privilege. The Second World War put his beliefs to the test, and he responded admirably.

It is instructive to remember that during World War II, the United States (a democracy -- of sorts) aligned with a hereditary monarchy (Great Britain) and the USSR’s Communist gulag against the military aggression of Germany, Italy and Japan. Such was the greater threat posed by fascism.

Guthrie viewed his music as an integral part of the war effort, and so he scrawled “This Machine Kills Fascists” on his acoustic guitar, meaning that music and ideas were as much weapons against fascism as guns and bullets. Guthrie enlisted in the Merchant Marine, and whenever performing, he used his own machine, one that he considered vital in killing fascists.

The same phrase was written on machinery in factories throughout the United States, as those millions of people in America’s industrial work force made a similar point: The person operating the machine that makes the supplies used to defeat fascism are helping to kill fascists, too.

Co-opting religious imagery to further the imperatives of a war machine driven by wealthy elites, or returning to the egg and reminding us that “we the people” might yet resemble universalism and in self-governance?

I appreciate Irving, but I vote for Woody -- now and always.

---

As a postscript, the lyrics.

This land is your land This land is my land
From California to the New York island;
From the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters
This land was made for you and Me.

As I was walking that ribbon of highway,
I saw above me that endless skyway:
I saw below me that golden valley:
This land was made for you and me.

I've roamed and rambled and I followed my footsteps
To the sparkling sands of her diamond deserts;
And all around me a voice was sounding:
This land was made for you and me.

When the sun came shining, and I was strolling,
And the wheat fields waving and the dust clouds rolling,
As the fog was lifting a voice was chanting:
This land was made for you and me.

As I went walking I saw a sign there
And on the sign it said "No Trespassing."
But on the other side it didn't say nothing,
That side was made for you and me.

In the shadow of the steeple I saw my people,
By the relief office I seen my people;
As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking
Is this land made for you and me?

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.

---

Recent columns:

May 28: ON THE AVENUES: Challenges are forever, but downtown New Albany's food and drink purveyors keep on keeping on.

May 21: ON THE AVENUES: "Pints&union, where the classic beer hits keep right on pouring."

May 14: ON THE AVENUES: Where do we go from here?

May 6: ON THE AVENUES REWOUND: Ghosts within these stones, defiance in these bones (2018).

ON THE AVENUES: After 49 years, two more reasons to be an Oakland A's fan.

ON THE AVENUES: After 49 years, two more reasons to be an Oakland A's fan.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

If we're fortunate, there'll be a couple of beautiful days before the hurricane, so let's watch two.

Baltimore Orioles vs. Oakland Athletics, at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, September 11, 2018 Matchups, Preview

Baltimore Orioles vs. Oakland Athletics, at Oriole Park at Camden Yards, September 12, 2018 Matchups, Preview

The East Coast likely will be inundated by bad weather as the week concludes, but what can a poor boy do 'cept score some cheap seats on Southwest and take his wife to the yard - Camden Yards, to be exact, for Tuesday and Wednesday evening games between the surprisingly successful A's and a woebegone Orioles squad on the rebuild.

After all, it was her idea. That's why we fit.

As for Baltimore's catastrophic season, I refuse to gloat. Jeeebus knows Oakland has been there, too. When we made these travel plans, there was little sign of the A's surging to a probable play-in slot, which has occurred with more wounded starting pitchers in hospital than tropical IPAs on tap at the neighborhood barber shop.

If you're wondering how a Hoosier hick from the general vicinity of French Lick became an A's fan in the first place, here's a column from September 8, 2016.

ON THE AVENUES: It no longer keeps me waiting.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

At some point around 1970, when I was ten years old, family finances were at last sufficient to purchase a subscription to the recognized Bible of athletic endeavors in America, and the weekly arrival of The Sporting News to our home in Georgetown, as facilitated by that quaintly geriatric institution known as the US Mail, was a cause for great joy.

It also signified a certain rite of passage, although the rite’s precise definition proved to be a matter of mild dispute. While my father generally would leaf through an issue, he surely was hoping The Sporting News would inspire me to spend more time practicing baseball and basketball, so as to achieve his cherished goal of his son growing into a ballplayer.

As usual, we were on divergent paths. What quickly came to interest me as much as the games and athletes therein was the publication itself, the way The Sporting News was organized into recurring coverage and special features. Moreover, I was drawn to the regular columnists, who had their own distinct styles.

Unless one of these writers happened to be interviewed on the NBC Game of the Week (that’s right, the solitary baseball game shown on television every seventh day), I had no idea how they spoke, but owing to the way their written words were conveyed, distinctive vocal inflections and regional accents might yet be perceived. The New York writers sounded exactly as one might imagine, as did the fellow from Alabama.

Most importantly, The Sporting News was just about the only way for sports fans in the hinterlands to comprehensively follow America’s major league teams, which amounted to baseball, basketball, football and ice hockey, in order of my personal interest at the time.

Sports Illustrated? Too many photos, and too few statistics.

The two (that’s right, two) Louisville newspapers covered the Cincinnati Reds on a daily basis during the season, and provided random highlights from elsewhere in baseball, but where else to read the beat writers, review the box scores and scan updated statistics than The Sporting News?

In addition, the invaluable presence of The Sporting News helped me transcend the limited boundaries of my upbringing and arrive at one of the single most telling decisions any boy of the era was compelled to make.

What’s your favorite baseball team, eh?

---

In elementary school, all my friends cheered for teams from the senior circuit, otherwise known as the National League. It was purely geographical, with the nearby Reds ranking first in allegiance, along with a sprinkling of St. Louis Cardinals fans.

The American League was an under-valued stock, ripe for the plucking, and perfect to capture a fledgling contrarian’s attention. Owing to family ties in Detroit – and especially after his idol Ted Williams retired from the Red Sox – my father was a Tigers fan of sorts. I resolved to follow suit, and to choose my team from the “other” league. With the assistance of The Sporting News, considerations commenced.

The damned Yankees could be ruled out from the start. I admired the traditions of teams like the Red Sox, Orioles, Senators, White Sox, Indians and Tigers, but overall, they seemed too stodgy and old-school. What on earth was a Twin, if not a truncated Twinkie? The expansion Kansas City Royals made my short list, and the Milwaukee Brewers (formerly Seattle Pilots) surely would have been a finalist a bit later in life ... but in the 4th grade, even I hadn’t started drinking (yet).

My gaze extended to the West Coast. Heretical even then, the name Angels did not excite me; had it been the Devils, we may have been in business. This left the Oakland as the final team to be scrutinized, and the advantages of the Athletics soon became apparent.

• American League, not National League.
• As far away from Indiana as a team could be.
• Long and noble history as a franchise, first in Philadelphia, then Kansas City.
• An outspoken, lunatic owner in Charlie Finley.
• Players clad in green and gold – fashionable, and also the colors of Floyd Central High School, which I’d be attending in due course.

The A’s became my team, and Reggie Jackson my favorite player. Unbeknownst to me, the A’s also were about to become quite good, winning five divisional titles in a row from 1971-1975, and three consecutive World Series crowns in 1972, 1973 and 1974. The players grew outlandish mustaches and beards during this period and wore white shoes, all of which outraged the older generation, endearing the team to me even more strongly.

By my reckoning, 2018 is my 49th year of being an A’s fan. The team may someday be located in San Jose, but I reckon on remaining in harness. By now, it’s a family tradition.

---

In those earliest days, The Sporting News was my vital link to the Oakland A’s. It served as a weekly summary of the team’s season, because otherwise, virtual blackout conditions prevailed. Games played in California missed the morning Courier-Journal’s deadline, and might be in the afternoon edition of the Louisville Times.

If neither, I’d be two days behind on scores. The three local commercial television channels might read American League scores if time allowed; presumably, a coin was flipped to determine the decision.

If the A’s played in Chicago or Detroit, game snippets could be overheard on the 50,000 watt AM radio stations, at least until overtaken by sleep or static. By 1978, the AM station in Jeffersonville had a phone number to call for tape-recorded results, and it was the most timely link ever.

A few years after that, there was cable television, but only in the city at first. When the Loma Prieta earthquake brought the 1989 World Series to a halt, I was in Ireland. It took ten days for the series (won by the A's over the San Francisco Giants in a sweep) to resume, and by that time, I'd transitioned to Spain, eventually catching up on events with the help of the International Herald Tribune newspaper.

These days, I begin most mornings with a glance at the headlines from the New York Times and BBC World Service, and then proceed to ESPN for scores – all by means of apps on my iPhone. In mere seconds, it is finished, verifying that the ketchup advertisements and even Carly Simon turn out to have been wrong: Anticipation, at least in the sporting sense, no longer exists.

Does The Sporting News have an app?

(Originally published in 2012; only time-sensitive changes have been made)

---

Recent columns:

September 9: ON THE AVENUES: May, Kennedy, wigs and prayers, but where's the delightful infidel gardening column?

August 30: ON THE AVENUES: From Baltic to Mediterranean, the diary of an unrepentant New Albanian Europhile.

August 23: ON THE AVENUES: The "downfall" occurs when we all fall down.

August 20: Non-learning curve: This ON THE AVENUES column repeat reveals that since 2011, we've been discussing the safety hazards on Spring Street between 10th and 9th. Too bad City Hall is deaf.

Baseball fandom broken down by zip code and Facebook preference, and my Oakland Athletics lose almost everywhere.

As a Twitter pundit presciently notes, "If you are looking for a wonderful time-waster, you can’t beat this interactive map of baseball fandom."

Up Close on Baseball’s Borders, by Tom Giratikanon, Josh Katz, David Leonhardt and Kevin Quealy (New York Times)

Fans may not list which team they favor on the census, but millions of them do make their preferences public on Facebook. Using aggregated data provided by the company, we were able to create an unprecedented look at the geography of baseball fandom, going down not only to the county level, as Facebook did in a nationwide map it released a few weeks ago, but also to ZIP codes. We can now clearly see that both Hartford and New Haven are in fact Yankee outposts. We can also determine the precise Chicago neighborhoods where White Sox jerseys stop being welcome and the central California town where the Dodgers cede fan favorite status to the Giants.

It comes as little surprise that the Reds come out on top in Floyd County, or that the Yankees have fans all across the country.

Taking the analysis a step deeper, 1117 East Spring Street Neighborhood Association results show a clear split:

TEAM                   PERCENTAGE
Boston Red Sox              50%
Oakland A's                    50%

That's right: the wife is from Maine and the husband yearns for the People's Republic of Berkeley but is marooned in New Albany.

However, this constitutes a far better percentage score for the A's than any of the zip codes in or near Oakland. Similarly, the New York Mets finish second to the Yankees everywhere in New York City. 

And BOOM, a whole half an hour wasted.

Go Astros!

SHANE'S EXCELLENT NEW WORDS: Talking baseball.

I'm taking a few days off to escape the intensity of the recurring civic soap opera we know as New Gahania.

If everything goes as planned, there'll be baseball later today, and so in the spirit of the game, here are baseball expressions defined:

"Outside baseball: 20 words & expressions that came right off the batting field" (Glossophilia)

There's even one about our favorite councilman. Who knew Dan Coffey played baseball?

6) Grandstanding (or to grandstand):

Seeking to attract applause or favorable attention from spectators or the media, often in a political setting.

“New Yorkers can rest assured that even as heated negotiations over rent control regulations continue in the assembly, some elected officials are still finding time to demonstrate the true purpose of government — scaring voters with meaningless, symbolic grandstanding.” — Village Voice

(A player who shows off or showboats to win the favor of the fans in the grandstand).

"The Baltimore Orioles COO has had enough of racism at the ballpark and enough of a society that is breeding more and more hate."

Fenway Park sure isn't unique in this regard, although Boston's franchise in the American League has struggled mightily to exorcise a few past ghosts (it was the last to integrate, in 1959).

‘We Must Actively Stand Up’: John Angelos’s Response to Racism at Fenway Park, by Dave Zirin (The Nation)

The Baltimore Orioles COO has had enough of racism at the ballpark and enough of a society that is breeding more and more hate.

On Monday night, a large group of “fans” at Boston’s Fenway Park called Baltimore Orioles All-Star outfielder Adam Jones a n—– from the outfield seats, and one threw a bag of peanuts at him. The incident has provoked widespread uproar. Here is an exclusive comment about the incident from Baltimore Orioles COO John Angelos. People may remember Angelos from his intensely just and political response to the killing of Freddie Gray while Gray was in police custody in 2015. The below needs to be read and reread.

For what it is worth and since you asked, and speaking as one man and for myself here, my thoughts on incidents of this sad and tragic kind, and what they represent today are the following:

It is a tragic reflection of the sickness that today afflicts aspects of our society that we are reminded seemingly every day now of the demented hatreds, prejudices, and biases expressed in certain circles of our community around race, sex, national origin, ethnicity, religious following, sexual orientation, and other coincidences of birth and of living life. The increasing frequency with which these individual incidents spew forth into our public domain and the increasing number of newly formed hate groups that echo these individual episodes and their themes strongly suggests the rise of an increasingly militant and unrestrained sect of our citizenry emboldened in expressing publicly their private contempt for our neighbors, friends, and family members ...

Finally, an uplifting sports story: "The Oakland A’s are reducing beer prices."

Photo credit (uniform and team history).

The new beer price structure is less expensive than in Cleveland, where we saw the Indians play last year.

ON THE AVENUES: It no longer keeps me waiting.

I've been an A's fan for 46 or so years, and haven't seen the team play even once in Oakland.

The Oakland A’s are reducing beer prices, by Craig Calcaterra (NBC Sports)

Pop quiz, hot shot!

Your team isn’t very good, your stadium situation is in flux for the umpteenth year in a row and you’re coming off a year in which your were 29th out of 30 in average attendance. What do you do? WHAT DO YOU DO?

You lower beer prices ...

Flight documentaries: "Fastball" -- the pitch, not the band.

Nine hour flights home from Italy are a bummer. You can read, nap and drink as many free adult beverages as they'll keep feeding you, but that's about all. The good news is that these days, the in-flight entertainment offers more options than ever before. The bad news: Most of these options include the usual array of wretched mass market films and television series.

On our most recent flight from Rome in November, at least there were a few good documentary films on tap. They paired well with cans of a beer I'd never expect to see on an international flight: SweetWater 420 Extra Pale Ale. Corporate placement or not, it was a welcome change from the usual Heineken.

The third of four documentaries I watched in November is an appropriate delaying tactic pending the beginning of spring training, when at long last life will make sense again. It's called Fastball.

While players, historians, and scientists might disagree on who was actually the fastest pitcher in history – and yes, the film does the math and seems to come out with a very clear verdict that might come as a surprise – FASTBALL tells the story of the game itself. Filmed at baseball’s most hallowed grounds, from the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown to Yankee Stadium to the sandlot field in Weiser, Idaho, where Walter Johnson's fastball changed the game over a hundred years ago, the film provides unparalleled insight into both the mechanics and the mythos of our National Pastime.

Previously:

Flight documentaries: "All Things Must Pass," or the rise and fall of Tower Records.

Flight documentaries: "Steve McQueen: The Man & Le Mans."

Sad but compelling baseball reading: "The tortured life of Eric Show."

"Show sat down after Rose's famous hit" (ESPN)

The World Series was enjoyable. As an A's fan and a history buff, it didn't matter to me which team came out on top. Either way, "old school" values were being served -- except when Jon Lester refuses to throw to first. That's just bizarre, and it's something John McGraw wouldn't have tolerated.

Sitting at home, drinking beer and watching the games, there was plenty of time to kill, and one of the joys of being a baseball fan in the electronic era is instant recall, statistically speaking. In spite of being mathematically challenged, I've always loved looking at baseball stats.

Full disclosure urges me to reveal that when it comes to baseball statistics, I'm a proud and unrepentant Luddite. WAR is where my dad was from 1942 - 1945, not "wins above replacement," the calculation of which I'd be unable to explain with the proverbial gun held to my temple.

It's unclear to me how a break in the action led me to Baseball Reference Dot Com, though it's probably because the San Diego Padres famously defeated the Chicago Cubs in the playoffs in 1984. Whatever the reason, soon I was scanning rosters from 32 years ago (say it ain't so), and there was the name of Padres pitcher Eric Show (pronounced Schau, if memory serves).

Show?

He died young, didn't he?

I had no idea just how young, or knew anything about the back story. It's a long, sad read, which begins with Show surrendering Pete Rose's career record-setting hit.

The tortured life of Eric Show, by Tom Friend (ESPN; September 11, 2010)

SAN DIEGO -- Back then, the news came in on Teletype, not over the Internet. Pete Rose had just slapped two hits at Wrigley Field, bringing his career total to 4,191, and somewhere up there, Ty Cobb was fidgeting … or having a gin and tonic. One more base hit and Rose would break Cobb's all-time hits record, a mark that had stood for nearly 60 years. Everyone in baseball wanted a bird's-eye view, but one team in particular was about to see it up close and maybe too personal: the woebegone 1985 San Diego Padres.

A year after reaching their first World Series, the Padres had gone into something of a tailspin. On Sept. 8, the day Rose tied Cobb, a talented San Diego club that featured Tony Gwynn, Steve Garvey and Goose Gossage was in third place, 10 games out. The team was toast. The only good news, depending on how you looked at it, was that the Padres were headed to Cincinnati for three games with the Reds. They'd probably get to witness history, although, on the other hand, one of their pitchers would have to serve up history. One of them was going to live in infamy.

Who was it going to be? As the team dressed in its home clubhouse that Sunday -- about to board a flight to Ohio -- all eyes turned to the next three men in the starting rotation. One of them was a left-hander, Dave Dravecky, his hair slicked back after a shower, his pulse strikingly calm. Another was LaMarr Hoyt, a former Cy Young Award winner who already was planning to jam Rose with inside fastballs. But a third pitcher sat disconnected at his locker, eyes darting, frown palpable. On his shelf were a book by Ayn Rand and a cassette player full of American jazz. His clothes were black and purple. He carried a guitar. He looked out of place. His own catcher, Terry Kennedy, liked to call him "Angry Young Man" to his face, partly to get under his skin, but also because Kennedy sensed "bad s--- always seemed to follow him around."

So this was what the Padres were going to throw at Rose the next three days in Cincinnati. And as the team bus pulled out of Jack Murphy Stadium, the players couldn't help but think of Jack Murphy's Law: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong for Eric Show.

"It can be difficult to separate fact from myth regarding the House of David and its baseball history."

1927.

I could have sworn that I'd mentioned the House of David's barnstorming baseball cultists previously. Evidently not.

Ryan Ferguson's piece is a good introduction to the hirsute, pepper-playing celibates of yore, although I must concede to a measure of annoyance that the author is seemingly unaware of the Oakland A's of the early 1970s. Long before Boston's "idiots," the Swinging A's pioneered bearded and mustachioed modernity in baseball.

Ironically, I wrote about it only recently.

ON THE AVENUES: It no longer keeps me waiting.

1974.

The A’s became my team, and Reggie Jackson my favorite player. Unbeknownst to me, the A’s also were about to become quite good, winning five divisional titles in a row from 1971-1975, and three consecutive World Series crowns in 1972, 1973 and 1974. The players grew outlandish mustaches and beards during this period and wore white shoes, all of which outraged the older generation, endearing the team to me even more strongly.

Oddly, I cannot recall my father expressing an opinion either way about the House Of David. At the same time, he wasn't much of a churchgoer.

The religious sect that became baseball's answer to the Harlem Globetrotters, by Ryan Ferguson (The Guardian)

The House of David was an Adventist cult that banned alcohol, sex and shaving. But it also loved baseball – and its teams toured the country to enraptured crowds.

In recent years, extravagant facial hair has become increasingly popular in Major League Baseball. The fad likely began with the 2004 Red Sox, as Johnny Damon and other self-proclaimed idiots wore flowing manes in contrast to the clean-shaven Yankees, who they eventually toppled to win the pennant.

Since then, many players have gained attention for creative beards, with former Giants closer Brian Wilson perhaps the most famous. Yet while these modern exponents are perhaps more recognizable, the art of fine baseball beards can be traced back over a century, to the House of David, a virtuoso team of religious believers that toured the country for almost five decades. Theirs is a compelling tale.

ON THE AVENUES: It no longer keeps me waiting.

ON THE AVENUES: It no longer keeps me waiting.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

At some point around 1970, when I was ten years old, family finances were at last sufficient to purchase a subscription to the recognized Bible of athletic endeavors in America, and the weekly arrival of The Sporting News to our home in Georgetown, as facilitated by that quaintly geriatric institution known as the US Mail, was a cause for great joy.

It also signified a certain rite of passage, although the rite’s precise definition proved to be a matter of mild dispute. While my father generally would leaf through an issue, he surely was hoping The Sporting News would inspire me to spend more time practicing baseball and basketball, so as to achieve his cherished goal of his son growing into a ballplayer.

As usual, we were on divergent paths. What quickly came to interest me as much as the games and athletes therein was the publication itself, the way The Sporting News was organized into recurring coverage and special features. Moreover, I was drawn to the regular columnists, who had their own distinct styles.

Unless one of these writers happened to be interviewed on the NBC Game of the Week (that’s right, the solitary baseball game shown on television every seventh day), I had no idea how they spoke, but owing to the way their written words were conveyed, distinctive vocal inflections and regional accents might yet be perceived. The New York writers sounded exactly as one might imagine, as did the fellow from Alabama.

Most importantly, The Sporting News was just about the only way for sports fans in the hinterlands to comprehensively follow America’s major league teams, which amounted to baseball, basketball, football and ice hockey, in order of my personal interest at the time.

Sports Illustrated? Too many photos, and too few statistics.

The two (that’s right, two) Louisville newspapers covered the Cincinnati Reds on a daily basis during the season, and provided random highlights from elsewhere in baseball, but where else to read the beat writers, review the box scores and scan updated statistics than The Sporting News?

In addition, the invaluable presence of The Sporting News helped me transcend the limited boundaries of my upbringing and arrive at one of the single most telling decisions any boy of the era was compelled to make.

What’s your favorite baseball team, eh?

---

In elementary school, all my friends cheered for teams from the senior circuit, otherwise known as the National League. It was purely geographical, with the nearby Reds ranking first in allegiance, along with a sprinkling of St. Louis Cardinals fans.

The American League was an under-valued stock, ripe for the plucking, and perfect to capture a fledgling contrarian’s attention. Owing to family ties in Detroit – and especially after his idol Ted Williams retired from the Red Sox – my father was a Tigers fan of sorts. I resolved to follow suit, and to choose my team from the “other” league. With the assistance of The Sporting News, considerations commenced.

The damned Yankees could be ruled out from the start. I admired the traditions of teams like the Red Sox, Orioles, Senators, White Sox, Indians and Tigers, but overall, they seemed too stodgy and old-school. What on earth was a Twin, if not a truncated Twinkie? The expansion Kansas City Royals made my short list, and the Milwaukee Brewers (formerly Seattle Pilots) surely would have been a finalist a bit later in life ... but in the 4th grade, even I hadn’t started drinking (yet).

My gaze extended to the West Coast. Heretical even then, the name Angels did not excite me; had it been the Devils, we may have been in business. This left the Oakland as the final team to be scrutinized, and the advantages of the Athletics soon became apparent.

• American League, not National League.
• As far away from Indiana as a team could be.
• Long and noble history as a franchise, first in Philadelphia, then Kansas City.
• An outspoken, lunatic owner in Charlie Finley.
• Players clad in green and gold – fashionable, and also the colors of Floyd Central High School, which I’d be attending in due course.

The A’s became my team, and Reggie Jackson my favorite player. Unbeknownst to me, the A’s also were about to become quite good, winning five divisional titles in a row from 1971-1975, and three consecutive World Series crowns in 1972, 1973 and 1974. The players grew outlandish mustaches and beards during this period and wore white shoes, all of which outraged the older generation, endearing the team to me even more strongly.

By my reckoning, 2016 is my 47th year of being an A’s fan. The team may someday be located in San Jose, but I reckon on remaining in harness. By now, it’s a family tradition.

---

In those earliest days, The Sporting News was my vital link to the Oakland A’s. It served as a weekly summary of the team’s season, because otherwise, virtual blackout conditions prevailed. Games played in California missed the morning Courier-Journal’s deadline, and might be in the afternoon edition of the Louisville Times.

If neither, I’d be two days behind on scores. The three local commercial television channels might read American League scores if time allowed; presumably, a coin was flipped to determine the decision.

If the A’s played in Chicago or Detroit, game snippets could be overheard on the 50,000 watt AM radio stations, at least until overtaken by sleep or static. By 1978, the AM station in Jeffersonville had a phone number to call for tape-recorded results, and it was the most timely link ever.

A few years after that, there was cable television, but only in the city at first. When the Loma Prieta earthquake brought the 1989 World Series to a halt, I was in Ireland. It took ten days for the series (won by the A's over the San Francisco Giants in a sweep) to resume, and by that time, I'd transitioned to Spain, eventually catching up on events with the help of the International Herald Tribune newspaper.

These days, I begin most mornings with a glance at the headlines from the New York Times and BBC World Service, and then proceed to ESPN for scores – all by means of apps on my iPhone. In mere seconds, it is finished, verifying that the ketchup advertisements and even Carly Simon turn out to have been wrong: Anticipation, at least in the sporting sense, no longer exists.

Does The Sporting News have an app?

(Originally published in 2012; a couple of time-sensitive changes were made)

---

September 1: ON THE AVENUES: Complete ventriloquism, or the stagecraft of "throwing" your two-way streets.

August 25: ON THE AVENUES: You won't believe what happens next.

August 18: ON THE AVENUES: There has never been a better time for an Independent Business Alliance in New Albany.

August 11: ON THE AVENUES: DNA, National Main Street, the Four Points, and how it might yet be possible to get this thing right for once.