Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (29 page)

There is another reason for singling out this change as especially significant—one that transcends the parochialism of baseball and speaks to a fundamental issue at the heart of any general discussion about the quality of life in modern America: regional differentiation vs. commercially driven standardization.

Regionalism is a wonderful thing, provided that each person has a region and that no one is thereby excluded or downgraded. I relish the fact that we New Yorkers talk funny, and that art deco skyscrapers symbolize our city. I am glad that one shot of different buildings, and one sentence from the local cop, conclusively identifies Chicago as the locale of Harrison Ford’s
The Fugitive
. But we must set boundaries to this love of variety. I accept the need, even the blessings, of standardization in practical matters: we require a worldwide telephone dialing system and a network of national highways; we cannot move entirely on picturesque one-lane roads passing through every village and hamlet.

We should try to conceive a set of Deuteronomy-like rules about separation: where we will allow standardization, and where we must preserve the key notions of distinctive locality, and of neighborhood. We need domains of standardization, and realms of regionalism, each in its appropriate place, and linked in mutual respect and recognition. I accept and even want McDonalds at the highway interchange—drive-thru and all—but not in my little neighborhood of ethnic restaurants, and not next to the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota.

The voluminous commentary on baseball’s last pennant races has not generally linked our loss to this key issue of regionalism and its virtues; yet, surely, the wider significance lies squarely in this vital debate. I cannot think of a more important or more pervasive example of precious and legitimate regionalism than the traditional structure of baseball’s regular season. No one is excluded; everyone has a regional team, now that baseball has expanded throughout the nation and into Canada. The traditional system works; nothing is broken. The local rivalries animate schoolyards, living rooms, and bars; teams—especially the older ones—define a major part of the soul and substance of cities and regions. Why would we surrender something so valuable?

The regular season represents regionalism; postseason play is national. The traditional balance has been just right—a long time of local sharing, followed by a short and intense national contest. Why are we about to downgrade the regional part (while perversely retaining its admirable length after eviscerating the meaning)? I want to travel on the subway to Fenway Park, argue and kibitz with my seatmates Jay, Jenny, and Jeff, follow games in the morning paper; I don’t want to spend a month in front of my TV screen watching round after round of eliminations in an ascending series labeled like laundry soap. The elimination of a meaningful pennant after a 162-game struggle, and the addition of a new round of playoffs, is like installing a Pizza Hut in my corner grocery store—and I resent it.

2.

Arguments about historical loss suffer a grave difficulty in any attempt to persuade. How can anyone know what they haven’t experienced? Why should younger fans feel an attraction for something they cannot know, especially when most social trends threaten regionalism and boost commercial standardization? Our hope can only lie in testimony from people who have experienced the pleasures of regionalism as fans and players. We can identify a key time and place for the best of a better way (though I will admit to a certain unfairness for the rest of the nation)—New York baseball during the late forties and fifties, when my native city boasted three of the greatest teams that ever played our game, a unique confluence that continues to produce a substantial literature of remarkable quality and variety. I dedicate this year’s review to the best years of New York baseball—a symbol for a preservationist battle no less important than any fight ever made to save a building. New York lost its soul when the Dodgers and Giants moved, and when Pennsylvania Station died in wreckers’ rubble.

Wilfrid Sheed,
in his introduction to
My Life as a Fan
, recounts an intellectual’s lament about time spent on sports:

I am delighted that Sheed, a marvelous writer well known to readers of this publication, has decided to join passion with profession—for I regard his book as the best testimony to baseball’s hold upon us, and to its frequent (if threatened) internal beauty, since Roger Angell started writing his incomparable prose.

Sheed entered the world of baseball as a double outsider in childhood—first as a foreigner with Australian and British roots, and second as a proto-intellectual who discovered (as I did) that sports knowledge gives you a niche (marginal perhaps, but still a niche) in boy culture:

Sheed came to Philadelphia in 1940, as a nine-year-old refugee from the Blitz of London. His memories are therefore ten years older than mine, and begin with the bittersweet experience of rooting for a truly terrible local team (the old Philadelphia Athletics). But Sheed soon traded up: “Thank God I had balanced my portfolio with the Brooklyn Dodgers.” He therefore knew, as a young man, the joys of New York baseball at its best, including the transcendent moment for his guys (not for mine), when the Bums beat the Yanks for their only World Series victory in 1955, and he (but not I) experienced “the unholy glee that exploded in a million bars and living rooms and offices and came pouring into the streets of Brooklyn on a wave of pure happiness.”

Personal testimony provides us with the best way to convey the appeal and value of regional, regular season sport; and Sheed’s memories are more telling than most because of his good writing and gentle humor. Consider this description of his first major league game, at the old bandbox of Shibe Park, Philadelphia:

Or this anecdote, about Father Felix, one of Sheed’s teachers at his Catholic school, and an avid racing fan:

Newspapers and radio
supplied the continuity for daily play during the great years of New York baseball. Today, most announcers are interchangeable—little personality and less opinion (though with copious facts dredged from computers about such meaningless arcana as the number of doubles Mr. X hit to the opposite field off Mr. Y in night games at Field Z during 1992). But announcers, particularly on radio where more color and information must be supplied, were once as distinctive and as regionally differentiated as the teams they represented.

New York was fortunate to have two of the greatest announcers, both southerners with deeply distinctive accents, during the glory years—Mel Allen (from Alabama) with my Yankees, and Red Barber (from Mississippi) with the enemy Dodgers. They differed so sharply, and came to define their teams so intently, that when the Bums fired Barber and the Yankees promptly grabbed him, I just couldn’t adjust. Barber announcing for the Yanks sounded like Tokyo Rose singing “God Bless America.”

Think of any great rivalry between wonderful talents who basically appreciate and admire each other—Pavarotti and Domingo, DiMaggio and Williams. Allen’s style was pure corn. He rooted with gusto. (Who can forget his home run mantra of “going…going…gone”?) He touted his advertisers at any opportunity—home runs were “Ballantine blasts,” and near misses were “foul by a bottle of Ballantine beer.”

Barber, by contrast, was as cool and even as could be: when Bobby Thomson hit his immortal home run to wrest the flag from the Dodgers in 1951, Barber just stated the fact and then let crowd noises fill the air for a full minute—while Giants announcer Russ Hodges babbled with incoherent joy and, in Barber’s opinion, totally unprofessional favoritism. He had more useful information in his head than any modern computer and he made the right connections. He may have spoken without overt passion, but he was a master of words and their uses (including impeccable grammar), and his down-home sayings and phrases illuminated the airways. A wet ball that eluded an infielder was “slicker than oiled okra.” As the Dodger starting pitcher began to falter one day, Barber announced: “There’s no action in the Dodger bullpen yet, but they’re beginning to wiggle their toes a little.” I loved both men.

The very best professionals have such love for their work, and such dedication to their calling, that they cannot stop while life and opportunity remain. Much as I admired Mel Allen and Red Barber in their spring and summer, I think that I appreciate them all the more for their work during their eighties, the winter of their lives. Mel Allen now announces for the major league’s official television journal
This Week in Baseball
—and how I still look forward to hearing his animated voice. Red Barber died in October 1992, after twelve years as the star of the most popular program ever to run on National Public Radio—his four-minute weekly chat on Friday morning with Bob Edwards (“Colonel Bob” to Red after Barber learned that Edwards, who comes from Kentucky, had officially received this title, one readily conferred upon natives of the state).

Red treated Bob like a son. They talked about flowers, cats, and the weather in Tallahassee, where Red had retired. They usually (but not always) got around to sports. Red charmed millions of listeners with his courtliness, his civility, his urbanity, his professionalism, his stubbornness in conducting each conversation on his own terms, and his immense knowledge. I admired all these traits, but I listened because I so loved to hear that wonderful voice from my youth. I will also confess to an experience worthy of the old cartoon series, “The Thrill That Comes Once in a Lifetime.” Red spent one of his broadcasts correcting me for misidentifying the last pitch of Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series (I had called it low and outside, but the pitch was high). What a pinnacle: to be corrected by the Old Redhead!—like learning that God himself, or at least the chief rabbi of all history, deems your work worthy of improvement!

Of course
Fridays with Red
is a good book; nothing filled with long excerpts from Red Barber could possibly be bad. But Colonel Bob could have done so much better. He has composed the equivalent of a testimonial or long promotional pamphlet, when be could have written a book about that most elusive, precious kind of relationship, a genuine friendship between men. On the air, Edwards was unassuming, letting Red talk and gently nudging him from topic to topic, and this book contains long and enjoyable extracts from their programs. But I guess the Colonel has been saving his own words for years, and his book contains many editorial statements at too great a length. Moreover, Edwards disrupts his book with long lists of quotations from others, including page after page of eulogistic letters received after Red’s death, with testimonials to Red’s excellence and his own. Red Barber, a man of consummate form and timing, would surely have cut these lines.

Roger Kahn calls
the great era of New York baseball “the most important and the most exciting years in the history of sport.” As a sportswriter for the
Herald Tribune
, Kahn covered all three teams during these years; he described more than 750 daily and postseason games, and knew all the players. Kahn has also written many fine baseball books, including
The Boys of Summer
, his affectionate and incisive portrait of the men who played for the Brooklyn Dodgers, considered by many as the finest baseball book ever written.

Kahn’s new book—
The Era: 1947–1957: When the Yankees, the Giants, and the Dodgers Ruled the World
—wisely violates the conventions of sports writing: the accounts of one game after another interspersed with anecdotes about extracurricular adventures in bars and hotel rooms. Instead, drawing on the technique of the best of TV soaps (and I do not say this at all disparagingly, but in praise), Kahn ties together the three basic stories for the three teams, while also including several interesting subplots and tales about particular players and managers.