Baseball

The Games We Play, and What they Say about Us

Hank Garfield

Major League Baseball’s playoff games begin at around three in the morning, Bulgarian time, and as far as I can tell, no one here is paying much attention.

The Red Sox and Yankees are squaring off again. To tell the truth, I’m glad to be away from all the hoopla. Of course, anyone who knows me knows which side I’m on: the side of truth, justice, beauty, long hair and beards. But in the grand scheme of things, does it really matter? No, but that doesn’t stop me from checking the scores when I get out of bed.

I’m especially glad to be missing the American football season. I stopped watching American football – as opposed to real football, the game the rest of the world watches and that we call “soccer” – a long time ago. I stopped watching not because of the protests during the national anthem, but because the game is faux war, and what kind of society regards war as fun, as entertainment, as an ongoing means of addressing world problems?

Though my international students are only passingly familiar with either sport, I ran the late George Carlin’s famous football vs. baseball routine by them, and they appreciated its implications. Carlin made his comedic career by telling the truth in such an unvarnished way that people laughed, because they thought he had to be kidding. His assessment of the two sports is dead on:

“In football, the object is for the quarterback, also known as the field general, to be on target with his aerial assault, riddling the defense by hitting his receivers with deadly accuracy in spite of the blitz, even if he has to use the shotgun. With short bullet passes and long bombs, he marches his troops into enemy territory, balancing this aerial assault with a sustained ground attack that punches holes in the forward wall of the enemy’s defensive line.

In baseball the object is to go home! And to be safe!”

You can find sexologists & sexologist doctors offering their consultation & treatment services in your local http://robertrobb.com/to-what-extent-is-ducey-the-boss-of-us/ orden 50mg viagra area. You can create more nerve stimulation in her genital passage and put more contact in the vagina with harder strokes for more than five minutes. india viagra generic People who have had heart attack, stroke and those who take any form of nitrate medications should seriously avoid this medication. check my storefront cheap viagra in uk In situations where sexual longing is restrained because of enthusiastic or mental components, a viagra rx online arrangement may not be material. Europeans, with their history of egomaniacal conquerors, prefer their version of football, the game actually played with the feet. It’s sort of communist, or at least collectivist – it’s hard to imagine a soccer player taking control of a game like a Tom Brady, Bobby Orr, Michael Jordan, or Pedro Martinez. Baseball, in particular, emphasizes the individual. Perhaps that’s why it became our national pastime.

But George Carlin was right. America began to lose its soul when its militaristic version of football supplanted baseball as its most popular sport. The only thing good to come out of American football in recent years is the long-overdue discussion about law enforcement and the mistreatment of minorities, spurred by players taking a knee during the national anthem.

This sort of protest – peaceful, public, provocative – is explicitly protected by the U.S. Constitution. It’s one of the reasons we havea constitution. The right to redress the government for grievances is fundamental to a free society. Communist countries do not allow their citizens to openly display dissatisfaction with the unjust use of official force, but the right to public protest is woven into the fabric of American life. Those who call the kneeling players anti-American are themselves engaging in anti-Americanism.

I love baseball. I appreciate a leaping catch in the outfield or a well-placed sacrifice bunt as much as I do a great song or painting or book. I’m not sure I’m on board with the mass commercialization of professional sports, but I’m glad that the athletes are at long last making as much money as the advertisers.

But I’ve grown weary of watching recent post-seasons. I love baseball for its heroic individual performances: Jack Morris going the distance in a ten-inning shutout in the 1991 World Series, Dave Roberts stealing second base in 2004 when everyone in the ballpark knew he was running, Fernando Valenzuela gutting out a 5-4 victory in 1981 with his team two games down and turning around the whole Series. I’m sick of managers pulling their starters when they get into trouble in the third inning. If I wanted to watch a faceless, collectivist battle of attrition, I’d turn on a European football match.

Funny thing, though – I’ve watched some European football lately, and found myself enjoying it. Fans call it “the beautiful game.” And there is something sublime about watching a group of people work patiently toward a goal that is difficult to achieve. Like, say, world peace, racial and gender equality, that sort of thing. It’s only a game, of course, but the games people play say something about their dreams.

[wpdevart_like_box profile_id=”slowertraffic” connections=”show” width=”300″ height=”550″ header=”small” cover_photo=”show” locale=”en_US”]

Opening Day for Baseball and Bicycling

Hank Garfield

Opening Day is upon us, and my friend and colleague Cyrus “Moondog” Nygerski, who wrote an annual baseball column for several small California newspapers in the 1980s and 90s, is once again picking the Red Sox to win the World Series come October. A man ahead of his time, Moondog has been right three times so far this century, and I have no reason not to get back on the bandwagon this year.

More importantly, the sun has crossed the celestial equator, the clocks have sprung forward, and my bicycle awaits its spring tune-up in anticipation of the Kenduskeag Canoe Race.

On the first warm day after the time change, I donned my cross-country skis for what may have been the season’s final outing on the trails behind the University of Maine. Hatless, I skied a long loop over packed snow melting into mini-rivers in the low spots. Later, as I sipped a beer in a local watering hole, one of my students came in with a baseball and two gloves, looking for someone to play catch. Both gloves were right-handed, unfortunately, and though it was warm enough to ride the bicycle home, it wasn’t ready. But: skiing, baseball, and bicycling in the same day strikes me as the essence of spring in Maine.

In my last post, I wrote that walking, bicycling, driving, and flying embody separate orders of magnitude, in terms of speed and perception. As orders of magnitude rise linearly, the difference between them escalates exponentially. Driving is four times faster than bicycling, but sixteen times faster than walking. Driving is also much more regulated, as it should be. Most of us are licensed to drive a car. You can apply for a pilot’s license, but I imagine that the process is an order of magnitude more difficult.

This concept also applies to baseball. Anyone can play in Little League, but by high school the competition gets a bit more serious. The curve steepens through semi-pro leagues, college ball, and the minors. At the major-league level there are fewer than a thousand jobs for the best ballplayers in the world. As Jim Bouton wrote in Ball Four: “The biggest jump in baseball is between the majors and triple-A. The minor leagues are all very minor.”

The jump between bicycling and driving a car is just as dramatic. Bicycling is closer to walking than it is to driving. No one blamed Stephen King for the accident that nearly killed him. He was walking along the side of a road reading a book, minding his own business, completely within his rights. Nobody said that King should have been paying more attention. Yet the victim is often blamed when a driver, distracted or otherwise, runs down a bicyclist.

As a bicyclist, it is my responsibility not to run down pedestrians. They are an order of magnitude slower and more vulnerable. I’m subject to more rules than they are, but to far fewer rules than the driver of an automobile. Again, this is as it should be.

The letter of the law says I’m supposed to come to a complete stop at every stop sign and red light. Nobody rides a bike that way, but the “Idaho stop” (allowing a bicyclist to yield, rather than stop) is illegal in most states. Yet some people want to go even further, requiring bicyclists to get licensed and pay excise tax, as if bicyclists were a danger to drivers, and not the reverse.

Since cars are an order of magnitude more powerful than bicycles, it stands to reason that the onus for safety falls primarily on the driver of the car. This does not give bicyclists carte blanche to ride any way that want to, but it does mean, for example, that drivers need to respect the three-foot rule and a bicyclist’s right to control a lane of traffic when necessary. Bicyclists aren’t absent of responsibility. It’s a good idea to wear bright-colored clothing, and it’s the law to use proper lighting at night.

But I balk at the suggestion that bicyclists be licensed and taxed, and so should the parents of every ten-year-old who wants to ride to the ice cream stand on a warm summer evening.

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating: it takes seconds, not minutes, out of a driver’s day to slow down for a bicyclist or a group of bicyclists, to wait for a safe place to pass. Given the order-of-magnitude inequalities involved, thinking up new rules for bicyclists is like invoking the infield fly rule in a picnic softball game. It misses the point.

[wpdevart_like_box profile_id=”slowertraffic” connections=”show” width=”300″ height=”550″ header=”small” cover_photo=”show” locale=”en_US”]

Decision time in Bangor and Baseball

Hank Garfield

Let’s see… do I write about the Bangor City Council election, or the World Series? Which is more important?

Our local newspaper, the Bangor Daily News, seems impartial on that score. They didn’t send a reporter to the recent candidate forum, and I doubt they’re sending anyone to Los Angeles for Tuesday night’s Series opener, either.

I was gratified that the Community Connector bus system got a lot of love from the potential city councilors. Five of the six candidates for three seats showed up, and all expressed varying levels of support for extended bus hours.

I’m also happy that the Houston Astros eliminated the Yankees, even though a Dodgers-Yankees World Series would have had interesting historical implications.

If you don’t like baseball, I’m sorry for you. Stanley Cups and Super Bowls and whatever the other championships are called come and go, and I’m challenged to remember many of them, but I can mark my life by the World Series.

The last time the Yankees and Dodgers met in the Fall Classic, in 1981, the Yankees took a two game lead before Fernando Valenzuela, that year’s rookie of the year and Cy Young Award winner, gutted out a 5-4 complete-game victory that propelled the Dodgers to three more wins and the championship. The only other time the Astros made the Series, they were in the National League, and were swept by the White Sox in 2005.

As a little kid, the Dodgers were my first team, even before we moved to Maine during the 1967 Red Sox Impossible Dream season. The Dodgers had no hitting to speak of, but they had Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, and they won a lot of 1-0 games.

“Someone would beat out a hit, be sacrificed to second, steal third and score on the overthrow,” Koufax recalled in his autobiography (as told to Ed Linn). “Then we would gather the wagons into a circle around the dugout.”

This strategy came back to bite them in the 1966 World Series, when they scored two runs in the first three innings of the first game against the Orioles, and no runs at all for the next three games. The last two games were 1-0 losses decided by solo homers.
A chiropractor can also help generika cialis 20mg direct lifestyle changes for patients suffering with PMS through diet and exercise to improve blood circulation is needed. Taking the medicine without prescription can be harm patients going through http://appalachianmagazine.com/author/appalachianmagazine/page/46/ viagra on line certain health problems like cardiovascular diseases, kidney problems, high blood pressure, high blood sugar level, vascular diseases, anemia etc. There are a number of options available to people all over the Find Out More tadalafil pills world. They help in enhancing the male power and increase the vigor and vitality of cialis low price the sperm.
Within the next year, we’d moved to Maine, Sandy Koufax had retired, and the Red Sox had captured hearts all over New England, including mine. I didn’t pay attention to the Dodgers again until I lived in California, during the Tommy Lasorda years. I took my kids to their first big-league game at Dodger Stadium, traveling by train from Oceanside and then by bus to the ballpark, to see Valenzuela pitch on a Sunday afternoon.

It should come as no surprise that someone who remembers watching Sandy Koufax’s last game on a black and white TV is older, in some cases substantially so, than all of this year’s Bangor City Council candidates. Steve Harrison, who was not present at the October 18 forum, is the oldest of the group at 50.

The other five candidates expressed support for extended bus hours. Laura Supica has made later bus service a centerpiece of her campaign. Incumbent Ben Sprague, running for a third term, said, “It’s gonna happen.”

Whatever the outcome, this will surely be one of the youngest councils in years. I’m encouraged that a new generation of local politicians is embracing the idea of public transportation, walkable communities, and alternatives to the automobile.

Sprague seemed like the elder statesman of the bunch last week. I’m inclined to vote for him because of his intelligence and seriousness. Supica will likely get my second vote for supporting the bus system so ardently.

As for the others, I haven’t decided on my third vote. But I’m leery of anyone who can turn a question about sidewalks into a call for “social revolution.” Good grief.

I’m agnostic in this World Series, too, despite my loose history with the Dodgers. I revere Dave Roberts, their manager, for The Stolen Base Heard ‘Round the World in 2004. But he lost me as a manager when he pulled a rookie pitcher from a no-hitter in his first game. Did Dick Williams do that to Billy Rohr in 1967? Unthinkable.

The Astros, in baseball time, are a young franchise. They’re younger than I am. They have pitchers who can throw complete games. They have Jose Altuve, who is the shortest and may be the best player in the American League. It’s a team full of new faces. Perhaps this is their time.