My (Martin’s) friend and fellow publisher Bob Kalechovsky of the estimable and pioneering Micah Publications asked me yesterday whether I might be related to Lynwood “Schoolboy” Rowe, who was the star pitcher for the Detroit Tigers in the 1930s. I’m sad to say that—given his golden arm and good looks that drove the ladies wild—I’m not. On the other hand, the fact that he died of a heart attack aged 50 offers one pause. I wish I could return the favor, but as of yet I have not found a Lomke who played cricket—at least at a high enough level to appear on the Internet’s search engines.
Fie to thee, New York Times; avaunt ye, Washington Post; get behind me, O Guardian: Right Off the Bat has finally been reviewed where it counts: the Old Bradfieldian, Martin’s alumni magazine. Well, “reviewed” might be too strong a word, since the words on the page that accompany a photograph of book’s cover are more than reminiscent of those sent with a copy of the book to the editor. Now Martin’s fellow students will have to think of an excuse other than “I didn’t see it in Old Bradfieldian” to ignore the book. So, what’s your excuse?!
“Time past and time present”: Baseball’s most feared competitor, Ty Cobb
We have recently blogged on violence in cricket and baseball. In Right Off the Bat (page 47 ff.) Martin and I discuss the early 1930s-conceived strategy of “Bodyline,” whereby the batsman almost literally has to be on his toes. The baseball equivalent, less organized-strategic but certainly effective, is the brush-back pitch (a.k.a. “a little chin music” or “get out of my office”), wherein the pitcher sends a less-than-friendly message, with his thrown ball, to the batter regarding his crowding home plate. When such gets out of hand, when the batter is actually struck by a pitch, mayhem ensues in a tit-for-tat fashion. The Tampa Bay Rays and Boston Red Sox are presently locked in a series that features this unwanted and dangerous game-within-a-game.
More appropriate for this solemn holiday of Memorial Day (once known as Decoration Day), the unofficial start of summer with all this implies for the Boys of Summer, is an exhibit of rare, old-time baseball cards, the Benjamin K. Edwards Collection, at the U.S. Library of Congress. Check it out.
Today’s the 60th birthday of the great West Indian batsman Sir Vivian Richards. Fiercely proud of his heritage, swaggering and nonchalant at the crease, and impossible to stop when in full flow, Richards was probably the most exciting and charismatic batsman of his era (1976 to 1992). Even today—perhaps especially today, he exerts a fascination: the coolest dude in the room. Why especially? Because he evokes an era when the West Indies were simply the best team in the world, as imperious and devastating as Richards was as an individual batsman. These days, the West Indies is a shadow of its former self. Below you can see him in his prime.
Interesting conversations are taking place in the comments sections to various threads on this site on just how violent both sports are—and the rights of players to earn as much as they can. I think it’s fair to say that both sports cultivate an identity of skill over brute force and style over strength—even though physical and psychological intimidation are part and parcel of every individual game. As we talk about in Right off the Bat, they’ve also developed the myths of playing for honor over money and team over personal gain. Both sports, however, have hard balls being delivered at pace directly at the body of another person, and while both games have done much to protect the guy with the piece of wood in his hands, incidents still happen when somebody gets hurt. Baseball and cricket players have been hit and have died on the pitch, although thankfully very few.
Both cricket and baseball have long histories of men with money and position exploiting talent for their own ends and not paying players their fair dues. Both sports’ establishments have played on notions of patriotism, loyalty, and the cultus of the amateur to make their case to keep their players under their thumb; and both sports in their histories have seen periods where the players have revolted, sometimes successfully, and got more of their fair share. We may be in a similar moment in cricket today. It’s also true that both sport tend to cultivate the idea that the game was purer, better—the men tougher, the standards higher, the games more epochal—in days gone by. This is nonsense, of course—a function of seeing one’s heroes when you were young and the dispiriting facets of growing old. But it makes for great arguments for fans of different generations in either sport!
The face that launched 729 home runs (15 of them in World Series play)
Get a good look at that face. It is Babe Ruth, in a WPA photograph from 1936, taken at the Polo Grounds before or during the World Series, September 30. The year after Ruth called it quits was Joe DiMaggio’s rookie season: Lou Gehrig had a typical monster campaign. Although “King” Carl Hubbell, a.k.a. “The Meal Ticket”, and the New York Giants bested the Yankees in the first game, the Yanks won the second by a record 18-4 score, and went on to capture the title in six games. Ruth sits beside glamorous wife Claire, to his right (our left); and that’s Kate Smith in (our) left foreground (looking as if she could belt a few round-trippers herself, before the moon comes over the mountain).
You may have read my (Martin’s) post about the relative merits of West Indian batsmen Shivnarine Chanderpaul and Chris Gayle. Well, their contrasting skills and chosen cricketing pathways were brought into the sharpest of reliefs a couple of days ago. Gayle slammed an astonishing 128 off only 62 balls for the Royal Challengers Bangalore in the slugfest that is the Indian Premier League. Meanwhile, in a much colder climate and in more challenging conditions, Shiv carved out a typically nuggety 87 not out to prevent the West Indies team from total humiliation on the first day of the first Test match against England at Lord’s. Gayle was all imperious brute strength and clean hitting; Shiv was all impervious chivvying and poking.
The crazy situation is that, as far as I’m concerned, Chris Gayle should be representing the West Indies in England and not playing in the IPL. Sure, Gayle likes playing the short boom-boom form of the game more than Test cricket. He prefers being paid a lot of money to entertain tens of millions of adoring fans in a warm climate more than being paid peanuts to stand around in front of thousands of murmuring spectators in the cold of an English spring. But, boy, the West Indies could use his style and skill right now.
Gayle isn’t wholly to blame. The West Indies Cricket Board (WICB) have been in a power struggle with Gayle and a number of West Indies players for a good while now. Several of them are playing in the IPL instead of representing their region in England. Once the IPL is over, Gayle may arrive for the one-day tournament that follows these Test matches and wow the crowds in England as he did in India. But I won’t be the only one that questions his priorities; just as I’m not the only one who recognizes that professional sportsmen are entertainers who are going to make decisions about where their market strengths lie.
Something odd happened on the actual anniversary last night, at Citi Field, in Flushing. Ryan Braun, about whom I (Evander) have also opined in this blog, was plunked. In a preemptive move that I do not ever recall having seen, Mets manager Terry Collins, fearing retaliation, removed his sore-pinkie, .400-hitting third baseman, David Wright—lest the Milwaukee brain-trust retaliate with a little chin music of their own.
The game had got out of hand just in terms of the score. But does anyone remember seeing such a late-inning benching before?
Trajectory of a true Ballantine Blast. Another photo re-creation (below) shows the moonshot (yes, it was a night game) soaring, wafting a little, bending to the right of the lights (if not bending the light itself, even in the dark of night), which would not have been cleared in the present photo. A launch angle of 50 degrees is considered extraordinary (90 degrees would be a home run in an elevator-shaft).
May 22, 1963, Yankee Stadium (the original of course), a night game, batting left-handed, switch-hitter Mickey Mantle almost bombs a home run clear out of the park. In subsequent interviews, Mantle considered this the hardest he ever hit a baseball. (He said the same about one in 1956, a six-of-one-thing-half-a-dozen-of-another surely: see below.) Bill Fischer was the pitcher off whom the satellite was launched, long before analytics, before Launch Angle was a gleam in Sabermetricians’ eyes.
Eyewitnesses agree: the ball hadn’t reached its apex when it struck the Stadium facade.
Magically this evening followed, by almost exactly seven years (May 30, 1956: though this date and aspects of “the tail” become questionable, in the telling, in several ways), an afternoon featuring a similar wallop that clipped the iconic facade on its descent. Billy Crystal—who quips that, out of his Mantle-fandom, he’d read from the Torah in an Oklahoma drawl at his Bar Mitzvah a handful of years after 1956—recounts being at that game with his dad.
According to Mantle himself in My Favorite Summer 1956, during the fifth inning of the first game of a Memorial Day (May 30: yes, a Wednesday, a practice ended in 1971) doubleheader, with the score tied 2-2, he smacked “the best ball I ever hit left-handed [see the first paragraph, above]. It was a high drive that came eighteen inches away from going out of the Stadium. Nobody ever hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium and the reporters made a big deal of the shot I hit off [Pedro] Ramos.”
Other sources indicate the spectacular home run was knocked off Camilo Pascual, though in his book Mantle places Pascual in the dugout waving a towel at Ramos (who’d memorably “save” a Yankees season eight years later).
Here’s the box score, which substantiates Mantle’s memoir. (He was batting .430 [!] at the time and even stole a base during that game.)
Surely announcer Mel Allen, the Voice of the Yankees, would have almost fallen out of the broadcast booth. Both times.
Again in My Favorite Summer 1956, Mantle notes that the 1963 ball cleared the wall 370 feet away from home plate, and that the Stadium roof was 117-feet high.
The so-called tape-measure home run had already followed Mickey Mantle. Washington, D.C., April 17, 1953: This time batting right-handed as he would against a southpaw like Chuck Stobbs, and using a bat borrowed from Loren Babe, Mantle connected with a self-described “chest-high fastball.” The baseball sailed over the left-centerfield wall, 391 feet from home plate, over the 55-foot-high leftfield bleachers, first time that had happened since these stands were built almost twenty years before. The ball’s also described nicking the National Bohemia Beer sign, fifteen feet higher. Only 4,206 fans are recorded in attendance. But the press corps made much of “the tape-measure” batted-ball.
Various other Mantle homers were also “like a shot off a shovel.” A 1987 book, Explosion! The Legendary Home Runs of Mickey Mantle, by biographer Mark Gallagher, covers all the bases.
Back to May 22, 1963: Estimates of a 600-foot or even 734(!)-foot blast had the Stadium facade not got in the way as the ballwas still rising are possibly “over the top.” But this certainly was a shot heard round the world—or at least The Bronx. It is the stuff Legends (and Dreams) are made on.
Sandy Koufax, 1963: about to blow away the mighty New York Yankees. “Koo-foo” tipped the balance away from 1950s A.L. dominance.
I (guest-blogger Bill Van Ornum) just finished reading Jane Leavy’s bio of Sandy Koufax. He had initially told her that he didn’t like the idea of the book, and wouldn’t be interviewed; but all along the way, he helped by letting friends and peers know the book would be all right.
The structure of the book borrows from the sport itself: chapters on Koufax’s unfolding life are interspersed, respectively, among nine chapters that chronicle the perfect game he threw versus the Chicago Cubs on a hot 1965 Saturday night in Chavez Ravine.
The lovely stories from Koufax’s Brooklyn childhood are a delightful book on their own. Leavy’s crystal prose targets the public side of Koufax: no gossip or innuendo. She hits this place as powerfully and accurately as Sandy got those corners of the strike zone. We see her subject’s integrity from boyhood; its deepening character becomes profoundly heroic when he skipped a World Series game for solemn Yom Kippur; the integrity of the man stands in high relief throughout his long retirement years.
I recall a non-perfect Cubs game from April 26, 1962—spring break, the Chicago public schools were not in session, and my mom took me to Wrigley Field for one of the first of many trips there. We sat in the freezing, wind-swept first-base-side bleachers. I can see the brilliant red-and-blue ink on the cover of the 15-cents scorecard. I learned how to put 18 “K’s” (a record Sandy tied with Bob Feller) next to names of the home team. Gosh, those Cubs were BAD! But Koufax was great in that (ultimately injury-shortened) season, fifty years ago at this writing, when he would come into his own. Thanks, Sandy.
Leavy’s earlier book, The Last Boy, leaves me with sadness. So much pain in Mickey Mantle’s life, and maybe the emotional pain, hidden by pranks and booze, eclipsed even the agonies of his injuries and his later liver-disease. There was sexual abuse in his youth. This is another bio to read…carefully.
Right Off the Bat 