Predicting Other than the World Cup

Posted on March 12, 2011 by rightoffthebatbook

Ladies and Gentlemen, and All Ships at Sea. (And hold your breath all fans of Right Off the Bat.) I just sent Tipsy in Toluca Lake  my 2011 predictions. Of course, “predicting” is ridiculous. Some highly touted free agent in the first year of his gigantic contract suffers a concussion. A little-heralded phenom comes out of nowhere to set the baseball world on fire. Another plays for one season like Ty Cobb and disappears. And there is always the star-crossed-star-caught-injecting-applying-or-ingesting-HGH/chemical-enhancements. (“You mean it wasn’t Ovaltine?”)

Anyway (as poor transitionists say: an editor-professor friend of mine enjoys noting this from his study on Moot Point), here goes:

American League

Indians, Red Sox, Athletics, Tigers Wild Card

National League

Brewers, Phillies, Rockies, Marlins Wild Card

(What Baseball Folk Seriously, and Cricket Folk Laughingly, Call) The World Series

Phillies defeat the Red Sox

The Respective Home Fields of these great clubs are in: Cleveland, Boston, Oakland, Detroit; Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Denver, Miami (though let the record show the Rockies are claimed by the entire state of Colorado and the Marlins are known as “the Florida Marlins.” So much for so-called small-market teams that really represent entire states or regions. The only listed place that could be identified as “small market” is Oakland.)

I’ll elaborate on these perhaps-on-the-surface unusual selections in the near-future.

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The World Cup So Far

Posted on March 11, 2011 by rightoffthebatbook

So, we’re just over half way through the global one-day cricket shindig known as the World Cup, and there have been few surprises. The Associate Member nations—the second-tier cricketing teams that once every four years get to play with the big boys—have been a disappointment, except for the Irish, who are looking better and better. India is looking strong, the Australians are just warming up, and the South Africans need to wake up. The Pakistan side is, as always, bursting with talent but combustible, and the Sri Lankans are purring along nicely. Meanwhile, the England team looks as though it needs a good, long rest, and the West Indies are playing it cool when they need to turn up the heat.

So, who’s going to win? The odds must still favor India, with their dynamic and formidable batting line up. Australia will move into a higher gear when they need to, and Sri Lanka are (like India) playing on home soil, and have very strong batsmen. It seems very unlikely that a winner won’t emerge from these three.

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What Could Be Less Complex than Baseball?

Posted on March 10, 2011 by rightoffthebatbook

Baseball complex?

Some endeavors among the sporting world are easier to comprehend than others. Kick the Can, a great New York street game, may be the ultimate easy-to-follow, easy-to-play sport. I may have invented an even easier one in 1962. Co-devised by my friend Brian Limitone and named after another friend and classmate whose uncle was at the time an Assemblyman shortly to be the Bronx District Attorney, Merola consists of two people coming up to the prescribed line, shouting “Merola!,” and kicking off a sneaker or shoe (or boot). The player owning the foot-covering that sails farthest wins.

Merola took two people to invent, whereas baseball only took one: Abner Doubleday (a canard of course, but I’m trying here for a cheap laugh). It lay mostly dormant for nine years till it became something of a (foot) fetish (by the way, fetishes are now referred to by sexologists as paraphilias, I’m not sure if spelled with one “L” or two) among the 1971 senior(itis) class at the Bronx High School of Science. I was verklempt when our thirtieth-anniversary reunion included memorabilia Merola Mugs for each of several-hundred attendees, excluding significant others, who walked away scratching their heads even harder: Why did I bother to come? And what’s the deal with the Converse sneaker-on-the-mug “gift”?

Cricket complex?

One “school” says yes. Certainly, cricket is not easy to follow in the scoring: four runs if the ball bounces over the distant line; six runs if it leaves on the fly. Batsmen at both sides of the pitch running back and forth, touching the ground with their sticks. It’s difficult to follow. There is also far more strategy involved in the use of the bat.

Baseball is less complex . . . on the surface. But scratch a little deeper (reunion significant other or not) and one finds “the game within the game.” We talk about this at a certain (but not boring I hope) length in Right Off the Bat. Baseball is a sport that ought to appeal to Umberto Eco since, among other things, it is a game of signs. While nothing much seems to be happening, except for players scratching themselves or spitting, the manager is sending hand signals to his coaches who is conveying signals to batter, pitcher, and fielders as applicable. Semiotics is a complex field.

Should someone say to you baseball is less complex than cricket (or vice versa), think. It may be “a sign” that he or she ought to get a shoe right to the head.

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Right Off the Bat URL

Posted on March 8, 2011 by rightoffthebatbook

Notice anything about our URL? Yes, it just got a whole lot easier to remember. Instead of http://www.rightoffthebatbook.wordpress.com., all you have to do is type in rightoffthebatbook.com and you’re there. We make it so easy for you, it would be a crime not to buy the book. Coming soon!

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The Hat Trick

Posted on March 8, 2011 by rightoffthebatbook

It’s no big deal for a pitcher to strike out three batters in succession in baseball. However, to get three batsmen out in three successive deliveries in cricket is, and it’s called a hat trick. It occurs about as often as a solar eclipse, and it’s always an occasion for mad celebrations—not least from the commentators if you happen to be watching it on TV. Below is one such example, from the redoubtable Harbhajan Singh—the first Indian ever to take a hat trick in a Test Match. The commentator, by the way, is Tony Greig, who can be, ahem, a little excitable at times.

Now the question for all you baseball aficionados out there is: Has anyone in Major League Baseball ever got three batters out in three consecutive balls without anyone reaching first base? Remember: no balls, no strikes; just hit, out; hit, out; hit, out.

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First Pass Proofs Arrived

Posted on March 8, 2011 by rightoffthebatbook

Well, we’re pretty darn excited. We just saw the first pass proofs of Right Off the Bat—i.e. the first time we’ve seen the book typeset and laid out all pretty—and it looks very handsome. The illustrations came out just dandy. All looks to be on schedule for a May launch.

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The Color of Cricket and Baseball

Posted on March 8, 2011 by rightoffthebatbook

As we argue in Right Off the Bat, the image of cricket as an English game or of baseball as an American pastime is deeply inaccurate. Both are global sports, attracting people from all corners of the world, whether to play in the United States or for their own countries. People of African descent have played major roles in both games as they’ve developed, and have produced some of the greatest players ever to grace the green sward. However, it has not gone without notice that, in the last decade or so, the color of baseball and cricket has, as it were, lightened.

During the 1980s and 1990s, English cricket boasted some excellent black players: the fiercesomely fast Devon Malcolm, the stylish Mark Butcher, the accurate Gladstone Small, the all-rounder Phil DeFreitas, and many others were regular fixtures in the team. Perhaps not coincidentally, these decades coincided with the era when the West Indies cricket team was the greatest in the world: young Afro-Caribbean men could look at their charismatic and brilliantly talented heroes from the islands and dream of playing of their adopted or native country. Since then, however, while the number of players of African descent has remained the same, it’s only because a number of white South African–born players have qualified to play for England. These days, players of color (with the exception of Michael Carberry) are likely to be of South Asian descent.

Baseball has suffered a similar drop-off in the number of young black players moving up into the major leagues. In a recent article in Salon, Roy Ruck notes that “more African-Americans were elected to Congress as Republicans last November than appeared in the [2010] World Series.” He cites more opportunities for black athletes to excel in other sports, and the increasing amount of money and resources needed within communities to nurture urban talent.

Although the lack of black baseball players and black English cricketers should definitely be a cause for lamentation and concern, it should be noted that baseball and cricket are now profoundly colorful, in ways that wouldn’t have been thought imaginable by the grandees of either sports half a century ago. Baseball is huge in Latin America and East Asia; cricket is enormous in the Indian subcontinent. The result is an incredible repository of talent and background that only lends our favorite sports glamour and richness.  Here’s Devon Malcolm at his most destructive:

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Who Is Doris from Rego Park? What Is She that All Our Fans Commend Her?

Posted on March 6, 2011 by rightoffthebatbook

The New York Times has a wonderful tribute to Doris Bauer. Who she? For the rest who don’t follow New York City-sports call-in radio, Doris from Rego Park, who died in 2003 (Could it be that long?), was the staunchest of New York Mets fans. She may have had a Bat Phone to the radio station WFAN 66 on AM radio within the Tristate area for all I (Evander) know, since it was a wonder how regularly she was able to get thro the typically busy (at all-hours certainly) phone-lines.

Her timing was always impeccable. Doris’s m.o. was the wee-hours call to ubiquitous WFAN original the Schmoozer, following either a spectacular loss or win. As the Times article and reader reactions attest, Doris, with her distinctive cough, was a fount of baseball wisdom.

As noted, Doris mostly would phone in the heat of midsummer. But she might chime in during the deep-night of winter, when the snow was “as high as an elephant’s eye,” and the players she loved were hibernating between season past and season to come.

If any über-fan’s deserving of her or his own melody, it’s Doris from Rego Park.

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The Japanese Jackie Robinson

Posted on March 5, 2011 by rightoffthebatbook

Wally Yonamine: pathbreaker

Who has heard of Kaname (Wally) Yonamine? He is the surprising Jackie Robinson of Japanese baseball.

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The Cleveland Kafkaesque Indians

Posted on March 5, 2011 by rightoffthebatbook

Bob Feller

Franz Kafka‘s poor, more-acted-upon-than-acting, Gregor Samsa woke up one morning after a night of bad dreams to find he had been been turned into a giant crawling insect. I know how he feels. I woke up this morning to find myself believing the Cleveland Indians will be on top of the baseball world in November.

Cricket readers: we baseball fans know spring training is into only its second or third week, three more to go before the season begins and all the pundits (I’ll be joining that misguided chorus soon enough, stay tuned) start badgering us: it’s the Phillies, it’s the Red Sox, it’s surely another Yankees season, and let’s not forget the Giants that stormed to a World Series victory in 2010.

What about “The Indians of Cleveland” as Hemingway‘s old man amid the fish, Santiago (see earlier post), might call them? A little Instant Karma (chameleon) anyone? If the Giants could do it for the first time since 1954, why not Cleveland, which has been in a World Series drought since 1948?

Cleveland! Home of Bob Feller (who died in 2010: RIP Rapid Robert), Herb Score (cricket fans and younger baseball lovers, nota: Score, who lived into 2008, might have been the greatest left-handed pitcher ever if not for really bad luck, speaking of karma), Satchel Paige, Rocky Colavito; and way more recently CC Sabathia, 2011 Hall of Fame inductee Roberto Alomar, Albert Belle, Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome, Omar Vizquel (a wonder of a shortstop at something like 44, I’m not sure where he’s plying his trade this season), Cliff Lee, and others.

Here I am gazing at the Cleveland roster in these preseason days, and I discover only two Indians born in the 1970s: 1977 and 1979 to be exact. I see 1987s, 1988s, a bunch of 1985s. Under the ebullient Manny Acta, Cleveland is, in fact, the youngest team in Major League Baseball. Average age: 26.

When he’s healthy, center fielder Grady Sizemore is an elite player. You gotta be “strong up the middle,” so joining Sizemore I find Luis Valbuena (OK, “good field, no hit”) at second base and Carlos Santana behind the mask. Pitchers Fausto Carmona and Justin Masterson are top of the line, and there is hard-throwing 25-year-old Chris Perez as the Closer of the Present and Future.

It was no bad dream. I may not be a giant crawling insect, but I’m getting in on the ground floor and looking up to the Cleveland Indians in 2011.

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