HEADS UP – MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL IS NOT RACIST AND DOESN’T NEED A WALKER

Tags

African Americans, Baseball

I’m a baseball fan. Several myths have developed about baseball that need to be challenged. Baseball announcers and sports media personalities in general tend be bandwagon hoppers. One guy says that the average age of a baseball fan is somewhere in the fifties (pick a number, it changes), and that becomes a Greek chorus. A recent poll asked people what sports they were fans of. The NFL led with 60%, then MLB with 47%, then college football, ice skating, and the NBA. So baseball is still a very popular sport. What is true is that the average age of a person who watches a baseball game on TV is in the mid fifties. You can tell that by the Viagra commercials. I’m an old retired guy. I potter around in the garden or run errands most mornings, and then watch baseball in the afternoons and evenings. There are about 20 games per week on my TV, and maybe I watch 10 of them. A kid in school with tons of homework or a young professional with a full time job, a wife, and young kids, might be able to watch a game or two per week. Yet we are each one fan. I’m not ten fans. All you have to do is watch the camera pan the stands at an MLB game or a spring training game. There are a lot of kids there, even babies and toddlers. Half the stadium would have to be occupied by people well into their eighties to average out in the mid fifties. Another point often made is that baseball fans, presumably we are still talking about TV watchers, are skewing older. When I was a kid there was one game per week on TV, often watch by the whole family back when most people had Saturdays off. The number of games has increased steadily over the years. So the same logic applies to that as well. I think the number of games has probably reached its max at about twenty. So the skewing older should level off.

Another myth is that fewer blacks are playing in the majors. There are far and away more black players in the majors than there ever have been, just most of them are Hispanic, which isn’t a race last time I checked. And yes I know many Latinos are not black. It is the participation of African Americans that has declined dramatically, and that is a real shame, but it is not a race thing per se, but rather the result of socioeconomic factors and the difficulties of evaluating and predicting talent development. It will not be solved by allowing home plate shimmy dances or any number of crazy ideas to make the game more attractive to young African Americans. However they could speed things up some by conducting the play review process on site with an official in the booth. That official should start reviewing any close play immediately and not wait for a challenge. If there is no challenge, he/she doesn’t interfere. If challenged, she/he is already half way there. Another idea is reduce the number of relief pitcher changes by making a rule that if a pitcher is changed in the middle of an inning after facing only one batter, then that pitcher is ineligible for the next game. The manager could still do it but not without penalty, and I doubt he would do it three or four times in a game. It would be an added element of strategy.

Predicting whether a kid fresh out of high school will be a star in the majors is a total crap shoot, more than any other major sport. There are big fat guys and five foot two guys that are stars in the majors, guys drafted way down there who are in The Hall of Fame, and many a can’t miss guy who missed badly. There is rarely a sure thing player at the age of eighteen. Also potential injury is a larger concern in baseball than other sports. A kid right out of high school might take four or five years to reach the majors, if they reach it at all. Those are all non-remunerative injury risk years that the NFL and the NBA don’t encounter. I believe the NBA does have a development program for younger guys, but we are still talking a year or two with a far greater degree of certainty. So it is hard for kids just out of high school to demand huge signing bonuses from major league teams. That organic uncertainty makes baseball a less attractive choice for top young athletes who are now specializing in one sport at a younger and younger age. Frankly there is no solution for this problem that I can see. It is just the nature of things.  For the Latino players from the Caribbean, Mexico, and the northern rim of South America, baseball and in some countries soccer hold the only tickets out of poverty.

Because of the uncertainty factor in signing young kids, as well as great improvements in the quality of college baseball, increasingly the majors are signing players out of college. They are more mature with their talent further developed, and they are playing against high level completion in college these days. Baseball in the better conferences has been compared to double-A minor league baseball. It is at the college level that the majors could make an impact. Back in the sixties when I went to college, baseball was a sleepy side sport with rudimentary facilities. It was viewed as a summer sport which didn’t really fit the college agenda. Since then it has grown by leaps and bounds to become a big time college sport, but one still hampered by its small time past. The average college football team has 114 players and is allotted 85 full time scholarships. The average baseball team has 34 players and is allotted a maximum of 11.7 scholarships. Percentage wise quite a difference. As a result full time scholarships in college baseball are rare. Scholarships are divided up into halves, thirds, and even smaller proportions. It is not uncommon for the best player on a team to be a two-sport athlete with a scholarship in the other sport. It is easy to see why a great athlete pressured in junior high or even earlier to pick a sport to concentrate on might give baseball a pass. A half scholarship to Vanderbilt doesn’t do a poor kid any good. The initiatives undertaken by MLB to increase participation by inner city youth are commendable, but absent a solution to the scholarship problem, they will have limited impact.

Historically the majors have enjoyed a maximum participation rate among African Americans somewhere in the 15-18% range. Currently it stands at around 7.5%. Baseball will probably never again be the most popular sport among African Americans, but I have an idea that I think over time would restore that rate to historic levels. Baseball should negotiate a match grant program with the NCAA that would work as follows. Get the NCAA to increase its baseball scholarships to 13.7 per division one school. That works out to four additional half scholarships, which is the most common form for college baseball. Those four half scholarships would be match granted by the majors so as to provide full scholarships that would be limited to incoming freshmen and continuing as they matriculate. There are 240 division one baseball teams. The scholarships would be staggered in, one a year for each team over the first four years. After that you would just keep filling slots as they become available. Staggering would guarantee that each year there would be a pool of full scholarships available. The schools would administer the program. I estimate the cost at $5,000,000 – $6,000,000 the first year, increasing by the same amount each of the next three years until reaching a fully vetted total of $20,000,000 – $24,000,000 per annum, which is not peanuts but certainly doable by major league baseball, around $800,000 per team per year. The scholarships should have a need based qualification, not race based. Nevertheless, the certainty of 240 full scholarships available every year over time would attract the participation of some top young African American athletes and their parents.  Baseball does have some career advantages that should appeal to a growing African American middle class, such as less serious injury risk than football, and the contracts are guaranteed. Also longevity is a positive factor. You can collect big money into your late thirties and even early forties in baseball. I’m convinced that this or a similar program would make a difference over time in African American participation and interest in baseball. It would certainly be excellent PR, well worth the investment.

 

 

 

THE LAST OF THE DRAWING ROOM AUTHORS, JAMES BRANCH CABELL, AMERICA’S OSCAR WILDE

Tags

Essay, Fantasy, James Bransch Cabwll, Nonfiction

“It is my foible, one among a great many, to be a devotee of the niceties, of the overtones, and of the precision of very often rewritten and suitably colored prose.” (All JBC quotes are in italics)

This is not a scholarly essay, but rather a reader’s and in a small way fellow writer’s homage to a unique American literary figure who deserves better than to lie almost completely forgotten, at least by the general public, in a Richmond grave. Perhaps with the exception of his home state, since VCU has a James Branch Cabell Library. In the 1920’s he was one of the most popular authors in America. The decadence and desperate frivolity of that era suited him; however his star quickly faded in the pregnant gloom of the 1930’s. In the words of Alfred Kazim: “Cabell and Hitler did not inhabit the same universe.” I have been unable to find the source or the exact quote, but someone wrote that he painted exquisite miniature portraits in an age of industrial murals. Twain and Mencken were fans, and Heinlein consciously patterned Stranger in a Strange Land after Jurgen, himself calling it “Cabellesque.” Mencken disputed the common belief that Cabell was a romantic, claiming that Cabell was the ultimate anti-romantic: “Cabell’s hereos hunt dragons … as stockbrokers chase golf balls.”

“Tell the rabble my name is Cabell.” The first Cabell settled in Virginia in 1664, and the family remained prominent throughout the history of Virginia. James was born in 1879 and died in 1958. For an American his blood was the bluest of blue, a true southern aristocrat. At the age of fifteen he matriculated at William and Mary, and later still as an undergraduate he taught Greek and Latin there, until he was suspended for having a “too intimate” relationship with a professor. He was later readmitted and subsequently graduated in 1898. In 1901, the year in which his stories were first published, he was suspected of murdering a prominent Richmond man, John Scott, who was rumored to be romantically involved with Cabell’s mother. Whatever his other proclivities, and as vividly indicated by his writings, it is evident that he enjoyed women. In addition to rumored escapades, he married and when his first wife died in 1949, remarried within a year. Between 1905 and 1955 he published some fifty books. He is often described as an author of satirical fantasy fiction and belles lettres. I confess that I’ve only read six or seven of his books, the reason being that, although well written, for a modern reader the novelty of his once shocking sexual innuendo wears a bit thin after awhile and his themes become repetitive. And I’ve only reread two of his early novels, the ones that I and most people consider his best and most important works, Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice and Figures of Earth, A Comedy of Manners. Also noteworthy are The Silver Stallion, a sort of sequel to Figures of Earth, and The Cream of the Jest: A Comedy of Evasions, both of which I intend to reread un de ces beaux jours.

“If we assiduously cultivate our power of exaggeration, perhaps we too shall obtain the Paradise of Liars. And there Raphael shall paint for us scores and scores of his manifestly impossible pictures … and Shakespeare will lie to us of fabulous islands far past ‘ the still vex’d Bemooths,’ and bring us fresh tales from the coast of Bohemia. For no one shall speak the truth there, and we shall be perfectly happy.”

 

 

 

A genetically inclined iconoclast, Cabell described WWI as having been fought “to make the world safe for hypocrisy.” The setting for most of his novels is the Province of Poictesme,  inexactly located in the south of a France that never was in a world that never was. His protagonists tended to be solipsistic, morally ambiguous men who, having made largely implied Faustian bargains, set out on fantastic quests, some of cosmic scope, to renew their youth or gain fame and fortune, goals which they usually obtained in one form or another. However,  they also sought the eternal love of the perfect woman, which being unobtainable, of course they never obtained. “The transfiguring touch was to come, it seemed from a girl’s lips; but it had not; he kissed, and life remained uncharmed.”

“Some few there must be in every age and land of whom life claims nothing very insistently save that they write perfectly of beautiful happenings.” And after the subdued receptions for his first few books, that seemed to be his preordained fate. However he also wrote: “Time changes all things and cultivates even in herself an appreciation of irony.”  Time’s sense of irony was evidently at play when Cabell published Jurgen: A Comedy of Justice in 1919, and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice moved quickly to block publication, seizing the printing plates in January 1920, which resulted in one of the first famous court cases concerning free speech and the definition of obscenity. The Society was a private institution which became charted by the state, and whose members in almost Taliban-like fashion were granted broad powers of search, seizure and arrest, also receiving 50% of any subsequent fines levied by the state. They are most famous for the many books they had banned, including Ulysses. Members patrolled the streets making sure the newsstands didn’t sell girly magazines. They devoted particular attention to the suppression of anything concerning homosexuality or birth control. They were fond of raids on bath houses, which was a bit ironic too, since The Society’s founding members were prominent in the YMCA movement. The case went on for two years, eventually being decided in Cabell’s favor. Interestingly the prosecutor seemed more incensed by the book’s mocking of papal infallibility, several popes were guests of the Devil, than he was about the book’s alleged obscenity. In his ruling Judge Charles Cooper Nott, Jr. said: “It is doubtful that the book could be read or understood at all by more than a very limited number of readers.” Of course in that he was wrong. The publicity surrounding the case made it a favorite in ladies’ drawing rooms. It was the Fifty Shades of Grey of its day. When Cabell published a revised edition in 1926, he exacted the perfect author’s revenge. He added  a chapter in which Jurgen is put on trial by the Philistines and the prosecutor is a giant dung beetle. Later in a book he thanked The Society for the publicity.

Another thing that made Cabell’s novels popular, especially with the ladies, at least once they wet their beaks with Jurgen, is that his novels are filled with sexual innuendo, double entendres, wordplay, anagrams, puzzles and codes, all of which made for fun group discussion. Many of the strange names he gives people and places are anagrams. The castle Storisende in Poictesme is a simple anagram for “stories end.” The decipherable Sigil of Scoteia is a prime example of one of his codes.

 

“The optimist believes this is the best of all possible worlds; and the pessimist fears this is true.”  I was not a literature major, so I am uncertain as to where the border between satire and allegory lies. To me Jurgen is decidedly Swiftian, and I believe that it is as allegory that it has true literary merit. In it Cabell assails the cultural, religious, and political beliefs of his time. Jurgen, who considers himself “a monstrous clever fellow,” regains his youth via a not clearly described Faustian bargain and sets out on grand adventures to find, not for altruistic purposes of course, the true creator and ruler of the universe, seducing women all along the way. He first stumbles through a twisted version of the Arthurian Legends, while greatly entertaining The Lady of The Lake and Queen Guinevere. Throughout the book there is a lot of him unsheathing his long gleaming sword for various ladies to admire. He visits Heaven and Hell. Heaven turns out to be an exact replica of an elderly church lady relative’s vision of what Heaven should be — a place of strict rules and no freedom governed by a despotic patron God. When she died, she never stopped complaining that the afterlife was simply not up to snuff, so the Powers That Be created Heaven just to shut her up. By contrast Hell is a democracy with the Devil as President. However Hell is engaged in an eternal war with Heaven to make the world safe for democracy, and during the duration of the war, namely all eternity, democratic privileges are suspended. And of course Jurgen seduces the Devil’s wife. Eventually Jurgen discovers the true ruler of the universe, Koshchei The Deathless — a disheveled, overworked and underappreciated bureaucrat in a small, document strewn, windowless office, whom Jurgen is quick to flatter.

“Good and evil keep very exact accounts … and the face of every man is their ledger.”

When I was fresh out of college and very pleased with myself for “discovering,” with the assistance of Ballantine Books, several great fantasy authors, including Cabell, I wrote in simple rhyming verse a synopsis of Figures of Earth that cherrypicks a couple of the plot lines. It has no literary merit, and I had no intention of including it here, but I chuckled a couple of times while rereading it, and that is good enough to conclude with. Please note that Manuel the pig tender later became Dom Manuel, also known as Manuel The Redeemer.

CABELL’S REDEEMER

Young Manuel in his sty,
he seemed so free of care,
and the odd squint in his eye
gave him an impish air.
But his dear mother was firm
before she passed away,
charging him to make for her
a fine figure one day.
Manuel pondered her geas,
just how best to take it,
then he went down on his knees
to sculpt a statuette.

A fine self-image he formed,
from the clay around him,
with but a single small flaw,
a shortness in one limb.
Now there were those who counseled
that he had missed her gist,
but he would squint and tell them
she'd meant precisely this.
Now some thought the boy insane,
while others thought him sly,
because how could someone so inane
sport such a squinty eye.

For in day a warm sun shone on him,
and at night the stars above,
and although his life was easy,
the boy still longed for love.

Then a stranger came to visit
with aim to titillate,
asking him to quit his pigs
and chance a greater fate.
Manuel just shook his head,
displaying soiled attire,
claiming one from his estate
should not aspire higher.
Then the black clad man stared
deeply into his soul;
then smiled a secretive smile,
a glimpse of something droll.

"Once a cradled babe squalling,
now a boy drowsing in the sun.
Soon you'll be a young hero;
there's a fair maid to be won.
Miramon, The Lord of Madness
And The Nine Kinds Of Sleep,
abides in a mountain mansion
and emprisons her in his keep.
I'd undertake this quest myself,
but the prize, you see, is her hand,
and I already have a wife
who would not understand."

For in day a warm sun shone on him,
and at night the stars above,
and although his life was easy,
the boy still longed for love.

"Fair Gisele pines for justice,
pacing those dream misted halls.
My magic sword will suffice.
Take it boy! Destiny calls!"
So Manuel took the magic blade
and climbed up daunting tracks,
where he braved perilous falls
and mythic beasts' attacks.
When he reached the castle high
and faced his foe with steel,
it looked to be the same guy
who'd set up the whole deal.

The wizard seemed delighted,
as he wore a toothy grin.
Then he bowed with regal grace
and invited Manuel in.
"No one can best that blade.
By now that must be plain.
So then, I concede. You win!
A fight would be in vain.
A point I failed to mention,
fair Gisele is my wife,
and it is my intention
to try the single life."

They lead shadow-haunted lives,
these fashioners of dreams.
Once you dip your hands in fantasy,
then nothing is what it seems.

Then Manuel understood
the motives of the man,
but wondered why he'd formed
so intricate a plan.
"Lord, you're a famous wizard,
Yet before Gisele you balk,
helpless before this mere woman
whose only barb is talk."
Miramon stroked his forehead,
as on his magnificent throne he sat.
Then gazing downward at Manuel:
"Yes unmarried men do wonder about that."

Miramon sat deep in thought,
then spoke most plaintively.
"For all the husbands that were
and for all there ever will be,
where is the girl I married,
bright of smile, flowing hair,
and who is this woman beside me,
meddling in my affairs?
Love of a sort I have still,
but not that magic state
that transformed her might to will,
once touched that dissipates."

Young Manuel in his sty,
he seemed so free of care,
and the odd squint in his eye
gave him an impish air.