Liotta as Shoeless Joe Jackson
Sports Saturday
My son Tobias, a devoted Baltimore Orioles fan, alerted me to this passage in an article about Orioles manager Buck Showalter. The passage doesn’t refer to baseball but the story is still nice to know:
Showalter may remember his youth in Century [Florida] as idyllic, like Mayberry, but Century was still the Deep South in the ’60s, more like the fictional Maycomb in To Kill A Mockingbird, with his father as the town’s Atticus Finch. “My father was ahead of his time when it came to race,” Showalter told me. “He had relationships in the black neighborhood. My dad went on strike with the teachers, which was a no-no for principals back then,” Showalter said. The family phone began ringing late at night. Gruff voices threatened William Nathaniel Showalter II. “A lot of prominent people in town warned him he’d never work again in the school system. And when they integrated the schools after the strike, they came to him on bended knee, because of his relationship with the black community and the mutual respect he had from their leaders ‘across the pond.'”
So, one Sunday morning, Showalter’s father took his wife, three daughters and son to the black church in town. They walked down the center aisle past disbelieving but appreciative eyes. His father had agreed to be principal of the newly integrated middle school. “I’ll never forget that Sunday morning,” Showalter said. “Walking down that aisle made me so proud of my father. He asked the preacher there to be his guidance counselor, Willie Carter … What a friendship they had through the years. Very impactful for me.”
Reading about Showalter’s ups and downs in the world of baseball–his obsession with detail apparently leads both to him winning and to him getting fired–reminds me of this old baseball poem, written in 1912. It deals with the intense mood swings that accompany each swing of the bat. The author, newspaper columnist Franklin Pierce Adams, is most famous for his line, “Tinkers to Evers to Chance,” about the fabled Chicago Cubs double play combination.
A Ballad of Baseball Burdens
By Franklin Pierce Adams
The burden of hard hitting. Slug away
Like Honus Wagner or like Tyrus Cobb.
Else fandom shouteth: “Who said you could play?
Back to the jasper league, you minor slob!”
Swat, hit, connect, line out, get on the job.
Else you shall feel the brunt of fandom’s ire
Biff, bang it, clout it, hit it on the knob—
This is the end of every fan’s desire.
The burden of good pitching. Curved or straight.
Or in or out, or haply up or down,
To puzzle him that standeth by the plate,
To lessen, so to speak, his bat-renown:
Like Christy Mathewson or Miner Brown,
So pitch that every man can but admire
And offer you the freedom of the town—
This is the end of every fan’s desire.
The burden of loud cheering. O the sounds!
The tumult and the shouting from the throats
Of forty thousand at the Polo Grounds
Sitting, ay, standing sans their hats and coats.
A mighty cheer that possibly denotes
That Cub or Pirate fat is in the fire;
Or, as H. James would say, We’ve got their goats—
This is the end of every fan’s desire.
The burden of a pennant. O the hope,
The tenuous hope, the hope that’s half a fear,
The lengthy season and the boundless dope,
And the bromidic; “Wait until next year.”
O dread disgrace of trailing in the rear,
O Piece of Bunting, flying high and higher
That next October it shall flutter here:
This is the end of every fan’s desire.
ENVOY
Ah, Fans, let not the Quarry but the Chase
Be that to which most fondly we aspire!
For us not Stake, but Game; not Goal, but Race—
THIS is the end of every fan’s desire.
