The shape of things to come

This was a baseball-themed card I got this week (nominally for Christmas), made for me by my youngest daughter. Big Papi has apparently lost a lot of weight this offseason, but more importantly I'm delighted to see the score on the board (click to enlarge):

God, Pt II

I don't know if he's the nicest human being in the world, but we know he's a pretty good guy.

When Big Papi kissed her twice, her eyes lit up brighter than the lights of Estadio Quisqueya, where the local stars play.

She said it was the first time she was kissed by a boy. A very big boy.

I think we can safely call him Papi Christmas for the duration of the holidays.

Being friends with God

If you've stopped by here looking for baseball, then I have a little Christmas gift for you: another excerpt from the Bill Bryson book.

Once agan, he's writing about "a simpler world", but what I really love is the voice of the young baseball fan still hiding just below the surface of the witty, well-traveled writer:

In the late 1950s the Royal Canadian Air Force produced a booklet on isometrics, a form of exercise which enjoyed a short, but devoted, vogue with my father. The idea of isometrics was that you used any unyielding object, like a tree or a wall, and pressed against it with all your might from various positions to tone and strengthen different groups of muscles. Since everybody already has access to trees and walls, you didn't need to invest in a lot of costly equipment, which I suspect was what attracted my Dad. What made it unfortunate in my father's case was that he would do is isometrics on airplanes. At some point in every flight he would stroll back to the galley area or the space by the emergency exit and, taking up the posture of someone trying to budge a very heavy piece of machinery, he would begin to push with his back or shoulder against the outer wall of the plane, pausing occasionally to take deep breaths before returning with quiet, determined grunts to the task. Since it looked uncannily – if unfathomably – as if he were trying to force a hole in the side of the plane, this naturally drew attention. Businessmen in nearby seats would stare over the tops of their glasses; a stewardess would pop her head out of the galley and, likewise, stare, but with a certain hard caution, as if remembering some aspect of her training that she had not previously been called upon to implement.

Seeing that he had observers, my father would straighten up, smile genially and begin to outline the engaging principles behind isometrics. Then he would give a demonstration to an audience that swiftly consisted of...no-one. He seemed curiously incapable of feeling embarrassment in such situations, but that was alright, because I felt enough for both of us, indeed enough for us, and all the other passengers, the airline and its employees and the whole of whatever state we were flying over.

Two things made these undertakings tolerable: the first was that, back on solid ground, my Dad wasn't half as foolish most of the time; the second was that the purpose of these trips was always to go to a major league city, stay in a big downtown hotel and attend ballgames. And that excused a great deal. Well, everything, in fact.

My Dad was a sportswriter for the Des Moines Register, which in those days was one of the country's best papers, and often took me along on trips through the Midwest. Sometimes these were car trips to smaller places like Sioux City or Burlington, but at least once a summer, we boarded a silvery plane – a huge event in those days – and lumbered through the summery skies, up among the fleecy clouds, to St. Louis or Chicago or Detroit, to take in a homestand.

It was a kind of working holiday for my Dad. Baseball, like everything else, was part of a simpler world in those days, and I was allowed to go with him into the clubhouse and dugout and onto the field before games. I've had my hair tousled by Stan Musial, I've handed Willie Mays a ball that had skittered past him as he played catch, I've lent my binoculars to Harvey Kuenn – or possibly it was Billy Hoeft – so that he could scope some busty blonde in the upper deck.

Once, on a hot July afternoon, I sat in a nearly airless clubhouse under the left-field grandstand at Wrigley Field beside Ernie Banks, the Cubs' great shortstop, as he autographed boxes of new white baseballs, which are, incidentally, the most pleasurably aromatic things on earth and worth spending time around anyway. Unbidden, I took it upon myself to sit beside him and pass him each new ball. This slowed the process considerably, but he gave a little smile each time and said “Thank you”, as if I had done him quite a favour. He was the nicest human being I've ever met. It was like being friends with God.

Season's greetings

Whatever you worship - Buddha, Allah, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, trees, mushrooms or Isadora Duncan - and wherever you may be celebrating, the Baseball Desert would like to wish you all the best for the holiday season.

2006 holiday wishes: Peace on earth, goodwill toward men and a championship for the Boston Red Sox.

Born in the 50's

Winter - outside of occasional mad Matsuzaka-themed breaks - is always a time for catching up on some reading. In this case, reading actually means listening, but the principle is the same, and this week's offering is one that lends itself well to the audiobook format: Bill Bryson's memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, read by the author.

If you don't know Bill Bryson, I don't really have much to say, except "Why not?" He is a writer with a gift for acute observation on life, the universe and everything and, almost as importantly, the ability to translate that into funny and interesting writing. It wasn't until I started reading his memoir that I realised that the gift for writing might be something in his genes. Bryson's father was a sportswriter - apparently a very good one - who covered many sports, but principally baseball. As a result, the book contains a number of baseball references. In the midst of the craziness of $51m posting fees and 6-year mega-contracts, I thought it might be refreshing to take a walk with Bryson down memory lane to a simpler time, when baseball ruled America:

Every year for nearly forty years – from 1945 until his retirement – my father went to the Baseball World Series for the [Des Moines] Register. It was, by an immeasurably wide margin, the high point of his working year. Not only did he get to live it up for two weeks on expenses in some of the nation's most cosmopolitan and exciting cities – and from Des Moines, all cities are cosmopolitan and exciting – but he also got to witness some of the most memorable moments of baseball history: Al Gionfriddo's miraculous catch of a Joe DiMaggio line drive in 1947; Don Larsen's perfect game in 1956; Bill Mazeroski's Series-winning homer of 1960. These may mean nothing to you – they would mean nothing to most people these days, I suppose, but they were moments of near ecstasy that were shared by a nation.

In those days World Series games were played during the day, so you had to play hooky, or develop a convenient chest infection – “Geez, Mom, the teacher said there's a lot of TB going around...” – if you wanted to see a game. Crowds would lingeringly gather wherever a radio was on or a TV played. Getting to watch or listen to any part of a World Series game – even half an inning at lunchtime – became a kind of illicit thrill. And if you did happen to be there when something monumental occurred you would remember it for the rest of your life. My father had an uncanny knack for being there when such moments were made, never more so than in the seminal – and what an apt word that can sometimes be – season of 1951, when our story begins.

In the National League the Brooklyn Dodgers had been cruising towards an easy pennant when, in mid-August, their cross-town rivals, the Giants, suddenly stirred to life, and began a highly improbable comeback. Baseball in those days dominated the American psyche in a way that can scarcely be imagined now. Professional football and basketball existed, of course, and were followed, but essentially as minor spectacles that helped to pass the colder months until the baseball season resumed. The Superbowl was years from its invention. The only sporting event that gripped the nation, the one time in the year when even your Mom knew what was going on in the sporting world, was the World Series. And seldom did the race to reach the World Series hold America more firmly in thrall than in the late summer and fall of 1951. After months of comatose play the Giants suddenly could do no wrong. They won 37 of 44 games down the home stretch, cutting away at the Dodgers' once-unassailable lead, in what began to seem a fateful manner. By mid-September people talked of little else but whether the Dodgers could hold on. All across the nation fans were dropping dead from the heat and excitement. When the dust cleared after the last day's play the standings showed the two teams with identical records, so a three-game playoff was hastily arranged, to determine who could claim the pennant. The Register, like nearly all distant papers, didn't dispatch a reporter to these impromptu playoffs, but elected to rely on wire services for its coverage until the Series proper got under way.

The playoffs added three days to the nation's exquisite torment. The two teams split the first two games, so it came down to a third, deciding game. At last the Dodgers appeared to recover their invincibility, taking a comfortable 4-1 lead into the ninth inning, and needing just three outs to win. But the Giants scored a late run and put two more runners aboard when Bobby Thomson stepped to the plate. What Thomson did that afternoon in the gathering dusk of autumn has been voted many times the greatest moment in baseball history.

"Dodger reliever Ralph Branca threw a pitch that made history yesterday," one of those present wrote. "Unfortunately it made history for someone else. Bobby Thomson – the flying Scotsman – swatted Branca's second offering over the left-field wall for a game-winning home run so momentous, so startling that it was greeted with a moment's stunned silence. Then, when realization of the miracle came, the double-decked stands of the Polo Grounds rocked on their 40-year-old foundations. The Giants had won the pennant, completing one of the unlikeliest comebacks baseball has ever seen."

The author of those words was my father, who was abruptly, unexpectedly present for Thomson's moment of majesty. Goodness knows how he had talked the notoriously frugal management of the Register into sending him the 1,132 miles from Des Moines to New York for the crucial deciding game – an act of rash expenditure radically out of keeping with decades of careful precedent – or how he had managed to secure credentials and a place in the press-box at such a late hour. But then he had to be there – it was part of his fate, too. I'm not exactly suggesting that Bobby Thomson hit that home run because my father was there, or that he wouldn't have hit it if my father had not been there. All I am saying is that my father was there, and Bobby Thomson was there, and the home run was hit, and these things couldn't have been otherwise.

My father stayed on for the World Series, in which the Yankees beat the Giants fairly easily in six games – there was only so much excitement the world could muster, or take, I guess – then returned to his usual quiet life in Des Moines. Just over a month later, on a cold, snowy day in early December, his wife went into Mercy Hospital and, with very little fuss, gave birth to a baby boy: their third child, second son, first superhero. They named him William, after his father. They would call him Billy, until he was old enough to ask them not to.

It was indeed, as Sinatra said, a very good year.

The new Yankees

There's a lot of talk going around about how the Red Sox are turning into the Yankees, most of it focusing on the $51, 111, 111.11 the Sox spent just to be able to negotiate with Matsuzaka. Now that he's finally here, we have proof that the Sox front office has officially become the same kind of corporate Evil Empire they have criticised the Yankees for being:

(photo: AP)

John Henry: "We just paid $110m for a pitcher who's never pitched in the major leagues. I don't think it's too much to ask him to pitch in a suit, at least until he's proved himself."

One louder

So last year I battled the Virtual Waiting Room for tickets to four Red Sox games. This year I managed to go one better: tickets to five consecutive May games (Baltimore and Detroit). YES!

All that remains now is to actually put another trip across the Atlantic together. A minor detail, right?

Headline news

Sun Rises In East
Rain Makes Things Wet
Manny Not Traded

Of course, as everyone who is anyone has pointed out, the real news is here.

After weeks of fairly pointless speculation as to what the Sox would or wouldn't do at the Winter Meetings, Tito summed it up pretty well:

"It's the most important thing that could happen at the Winter Meetings," said Francona. "So from where I sit, the meetings are already a success. Pretty amazing news."

'Nuff said...

Alive and kickin'

Dear reader,

I thank you for your concern regarding my well-being. Contrary to what the wild rumours out there on the Internet would have you believe, I am not dead, nor hiding from the French tax authorities nor holed up in some remote farm writing the Great English-Baseball-Fan-Living-In-France Novel. I'm just doing the whole 'real life' thing, which involves fun things like work - lots of it.

The only upside to four days at an IT seminar in Brussels at the end of November is that Manny trade talk actually comes as welcome relief, rather than a reason to start wondering about the most effective and least messy way to shoot yourself in the head.

Anyway, my incoherent musngs on what is happening in Red Sox Nation normal service will resume shortly. Stay tuned, as this whole hot stove thing seems to be warming up.

Thanks a lot.
Iain