Baseball: The National Pastime in Art and Literature
by David Colbert (ed.)
By Michael Finley
Copyrght (c) 1881 by michael Finley. All right reserved.
When I was a kid things mattered more. Like baseball. You listened to the radio hopefully, anxiously, as each inning drew you closer to life, closer to death. Of course, my team was Cleveland, and this was the late 1950s, so we're talking death here more often than life. And as my heroes fell, one after the other, it was like something from the House of Atreus, something out of scale to my own life in small-town Ohio, a sense of the annihilation of the valiant in plain view of their loved ones.
In Cleveland, that's just the way things were. We'd look at our roster and match it against the opposing teams, and we'd think that man for man, on an excellent day, we could beat anyone. I recall Rocky Colavito, Larry Doby, Tito Francona, Jimmy Piersall, Herb Score, Minnie Minoso -- demigods, all right, but no cigar.
We should have won lots of games, and I guess we did win sixty or seventy every year out. We were passionate, and good, we burned with the pure flame. But sooner or later the drone of the New York Yankees charter plane would sound overhead, and a terrible shadow would pass over the city.
The Princes of Death, that's what they were, the dark side of Nature, in gray visitors' pinstripes. Mantle and Maris, Larson and Ford, Lopez, Kubek, Richardson, Skowron. Gray knights, extinguishers -- their killers could kill our killers.
As a child I blamed the city. My family visited New York when I was four, and I screamed when my father held me aloft from Rockefeller Center's observation deck, and I gaped at the magnitude of that city of spires and obelisks. It went on, forever, and up, forever. All we had back home was the tower over the train station. Power resided here, as Pluto did in Dis.
They even made our aches and pains seem pale and puny, or silly. We had Jimmy Piersall, tortured by life's competition and unfairness, biting his glove, scaling the backstops and calling out for pity. Whereas they had Mantle, broken and bruised from head to toe, wrapped like the Cid, playing beyond life, beyond any earthly need for victory. We wept because we lost, they wept and they won.
They say children have unfettered imaginations, but that's not so.
Laws bound me -- I could no sooner imagine Mantle playing for the Indians than I could imagine Cleveland itself tearing free from the lakebed and rising to join once again with the planet Jupiter. I could no easier imagine Johnnie Antonelli just winning a game in 1959 than I could imagine all the stars we had traded away or given away returning to Cleveland out of loyalty to the town, to me, for all I had given them -- my unsullied panache.
Now, as a grown up, I do think of Mantle in red and white. How we would have celebrated him. We would not have held him up against Dimaggio or Ruth for comparison. We would never have booed him as he faltered in his bandages and splints. We would have hailed him daily with trumpets and timbrels. He would have been the greatest player to ever don the Indians uniform.
Instead, in New York, he's a curious half-finished figure, swathed in ambiguity and misgivings. When he took a job as gladhandler at Atlantic City, he was banned from baseball. We think of him, perhaps thanks to Jim Bouton, who could not have sold his book unless he had once been a successful Yankee, as the first superstar we knew the unglorious truth about.
Up and down the roster, the greatest stars are seen in subdued light. Dimaggio -- should he have played in Boston instead, with its looking left field fence? Maris -- would he have been better off in Kansas City or St. Louis for the entirety of his career? Gehrig -- so durable he was utterly leveled by the disease that takes its name from him. Thurmon Munson -- he was flying into Cleveland when his small jet splattered on the runway, killing him.
The Truth of Ruth -- only he could taste of the Big Apple and not be poisoned. The day after the Bellyache Heard Round the World, with its two dozen hotdogs plus umpteen sodas, beers, etc. ad nauseam, he rose again. The magic was at it most powerful at that moment.
I believe it was a deal with the devil which lifted New York to its level of play, and of being. I am thinking of the year 1920. New York had never won a pennant then. Neither had Cleveland. In the final weeks of the season the two teams were duking it out for all they were worth. It was hit and run baseball all the way, with all stars like Cleveland's scrappy Ray Chapman leading the way in a scramble for life.
In the final series of the season, the two competitors squared off for the killing round. And New York turned to its most lethal weapon, pitcher Carl Mays. Mays has been called "the most underhanded pitcher of all time," which you could take either of two ways. One was, that's how he threw the fall, underhanded and with great wickedness.
The other was, he was a crook -- he could throw a whole baseball game as easily as a baseball, and was reputed to do it regularly, for cash. Years later he would take bribes in a World Series game.
And he was the king of the beanballers -- "No Mercy Mays" they called him. So picture this figure taking he mound, tweaking his mustache. He will be the priest. And for a pure sacrifice, put Ray Chapman into the batter's box. A Hall of Fame candidate by any measure, Chapman had been tearing up the league with his steady glove and with his spray-style of singles hitting.
Why Chapman dug in against Mays as the low pitch rose and headed toward his temple is a mystery no one has answered, not those in the Polo Grounds stands that day or in the history books since. But the ball found its target, Chapman crumbled and was borne away, and died shortly.
He was the only fatality in the millions of professional baseball games ever played. At the hands of a team which would go on not only to win that pennant, but dozens and dozens over the next sixty years. Cleveland would never again, except for a pair of uprisings in the '40s and '50s, be much more than the pale corpse of the fallen shortstop Chapman. Our future would be to forever stand in against the riser, coming at us. Mays would always have two Manichean meanings for baseballers -- that of the giver of life (Willie) and that of the taker away.
And the Yankees, who would the following year buy outright a big pitcher from Boston named George Ruth, a messiah who would build a new temple in the Bronx, in and of himself, had offered up the pure oblation, a blood object.
I was just a boy, and could not fathom that deals could be cut involving seven generations, that the gods were so interested in the affairs of men, that the heavens would appoint Exterminating Angels here on earth, and fly them to our cities to put us and our boyish hopes to the sword.
A few years ago word circulated that Joe Dimaggio had discontinued sending his daily rose to the grave of his wife. We winced. Just as tragedy was the price of godliness, so was the rose an atonement to the world -- not for Marilyn but for all the rest of us who had also brushed too close against the power of the contest. Baseball had been the game, but mortality was its outcome.
Michael Finley grew up in Amherst, where he played Little League
for Harry Robinson's "Houston" team.
Copyright © 1991 by Michael Finley. All rights reserved.
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