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Category: baseball

  • Choose-Up Games from the Sandlots of Jamaica, Queens NY

    Field of Dreams

    When I was about seven years old I used to play a “let’s pretend” baseball game in our backyard. I laid out 4 rags I’d gotten from the garage and placed them in a diamond form which represented the bases. The bases were about 20 feet apart. Then I looked at our house and took my batting stance and let my imagination take over. The imaginary scene is no doubt familiar to many of you. It is the last of the 9th inning, we are losing by three runs. The bases are loaded and there are two outs. Then I swing and hit the ball – tsssssch! As Mel Allen was saying in my head “there is a high fly ball deep to right center. The center fielder is at the track. It is going, going, gone”. Then I would trot around the bases. As I got older, I played a great deal of hardball and I hit home runs, but never quite experienced the situation I imagined when I was seven until the end of my playing days.

    Coming Through the Hole in the Fence
    Around the same time, my father used to take me across the street in the woods to play catch and bat. It was a good scene because the weeds would always stop the ball from going too far. In addition, I always hit with a tree in back of me so that if my father’s pitches were outside the strike zone or I missed or fouled it back, the tree stopped it. Then about a year later my father initiated me into the mysteries of the multiple baseball fields at Jamaica, Queens High School. Officially you had to go through a gate way at the end of the field to get in. But the local kids weren’t having it. They used cutting wires to pry open a hole in the fence. My father and I climbed through the fence and set up. He would pitch to me even though we only had one or two balls. If I hit it past him, he had to get it.  But as happens often in these kind of situations, other kids or even adults are around, size up the situation and volunteer to catch or play the field. Willie came by and volunteered to be a catcher. He was an older kid, maybe 14, and looked like he could be a soccer player from South America. If I hit a ball past my father, I would run around those imaginary bases again. My father would retrieve the ball and throw it to Willie to try to get me out at the plate. Willie would make believe he missed the tag or the throw so I could hit a homerun. I was at the age where I couldn’t quite figure out if this was intentional not. Even then, I appreciated his kindness

    Geographical Constraints of Choose-up Games in the Corner
    Our house was only 2 long blocks away from Jamaica High School so I went past the school for many reasons other than baseball. One time I noticed in the distance a group of kids playing baseball in the corner of the park. The actual baseball field for high school games was only part of the park. Surrounding the field was a track and beyond the track was a corner where the kids were playing. The “bases” were old rags of some sort that were laid out maybe 60-70 feet apart (as opposed to the official high school field which was 90 feet apart). These distances were decided long before I began to play. In part it was determined by the fact that our throwing arms weren’t strong enough to make a throw from third base to first, or short to first with the bases 90 feet apart. Also, the pitcher’s mound was only about 45 feet from the plate as opposed to 60 feet for the same reasons.

    Adapting to Inadequacies in Numbers and Positions
    Our games never had 18 players. Mostly we had maybe 10 or 12. That meant that any kid who wanted to play could. We would adapt our rules to accommodate them. For example, we might decide that right field was in foul territory to shorten the distances to be covered by the outfielders. In addition, we might only have one outfielder to cover center and left. That wasn’t a big deal because most of us were not strong enough to hit it to the outfield. If you hit one on the other side of the high school track it was a home run. In right field there was large tree. As we got older and could hit the ball to the outfield more consistently and the right fielder had to play the ball off the trees. If someone hit a fly ball into the trees and the right fielder could catch the ball bouncing off the trees the batter was out. Needless to say, no one wanted to play right field! The pitcher and the catcher were not specialized positions. The catcher might not even be on the team on defense. It might be a player on the offensive team that was just backing up if the batter missed the ball or it was too far out of the strike zone. While the pitcher was on the defensive team, there were no balls and strikes. The pitcher’s job was to just get the ball over the plate so everyone could hit. There was no standing around. If you struck out it was because you missed the ball on the 3rd strike after either missing or fouling off the first two. Our fields had pebbles and sometimes rocks in the infield. There were many bad hops, but you just took it in stride. In the outfield you had to look out for potholes, mole hills and gravel.

    Choosing Up Sides
    Choosing up sides was an opportunity to feel proud or humiliated depending on when you were picked. The best players were usually the ones who picked the teams. The better players were chosen first and players with less skill picked later. In those days, Brendan and Owen were two of the best as was Tony Cirillo and I. We could all hit homeruns. Tony and I played shortstop on opposite teams. The shortstop position was usually the best fielder on the team and got the most action. Tony had a great arm. My arm was average but I covered a lot of ground. Brendan and Owen were close friends and always wound up on the same team. I don’t know why. They were both big guys and it might have been the case that we were too afraid to get them on opposite teams. How was it determined who picked first? Well, some neutral player would hold a bat out and grip it tightly. One of the guys who wanted to be captain had three chances to kick the bat out of their hands. If they were successful, they got to pick the first player

    Culture and Class
    Most of these kids were working class Irish and Italian. Here is a list of the players I remember. Brendan Rice, Owen Brennan, Chris Green, Tony Circillo, James (Head) Circillo, Abe Circillo, Ronnie Christian, Billy Smolin, James Sheehy, Georgie Robles, Bernard Rubino, Evan Munkmeir; Danny Mettines , Billy Insulman, Kenny Lowe, and  Frankie Majori. Once in a while a tall lanky guy would slither thorough the hole in the fence on his way to the library. What was odd was that this guy (I think his name was Luke) wanted to be the Pope.  As you can imagine, he was mercilessly teased. We’d say “there goes the Pope!”. Our neighborhood was very unusual. Within an area of about a mile and a half we had three social classes represented. From Parson’s boulevard to Jamaica high was a working-class area. The closer you got to 168th Street the houses were lower middle class attached houses. Our block, 168th Street was middle class. I would say there was subliminal tension between us around social class which I will get to later.

    What to do About Close Plays
    Those adults and kids who were involved in Little League have no idea how easy they had it. The teams had coaches who determined who was going to play what position, and they had umpires who determined who is safe and who is out on close plays. In the sandlots we had to figure this out for ourselves. For us the captains determine the battling order and the positions. But the captain of a team was the first among equals. By a long process of trial and error we learned who was the best in each position so the captain barely had to say a word about who was going to play where. Also, the players themselves got to know who was a weak and a strong hitter and they would self-organize themselves accordingly. No one kept personal records of performances. We just knew what the score was and what inning we were in. To this day I cannot imagine how we kept track of close plays at home, first, second or third base. Our arguments were never technical or legal. They were always matters of who beat the throw and who didn’t. What was interesting as I remember it, is the arguments never lasted very long. We just wanted to keep playing. Our games were usually high scoring so a game was usually never determined by a single call.

    The Passing of a Comet: Danny Mettines
    My father never liked the kids I played ball with. He grew up very poor. His mother raised seven kids and they were “on the dole”. He was an artist who rose out of poverty to become a commercial artist. We lived in a middle class neighborhood (one square block) and he was afraid my baseball friends would be a bad influence on me. He was always trying to get be to play for church teams as an alternative. I never gave up my friends but I did play on one church team in grammar school. I could never get enough of baseball. At St. Nicholas of Tolentine the teams were organized with the names of native American tribes – The Mohawks, Algonquins, Iroquois, Cheyannes. One day the Mohawks showcased a pitcher who was a real phenom, Danny Mettinis. Danny just towered over us in terms of skill. As a left-handed pitcher he could strike out anybody. As a first baseman he could scoop the ball out of the dirt and do splits to sweep up errant throws from the infield. Danny ran like the wind and as a hitter he could hit the ball 100 feet further than any one else. He wasn’t a big guy but he was built like a tank. He was charismatic, funny and sarcastic. I prayed that he’d never find out about our games in the corner, but that day came.

    When Danny came to participate in our games, he revolutionized the existing hierarchy. Brendon, Owen, Tony and I were all knocked off of top ranking. Danny was in a class by himself. Danny was a lefthanded power hitter who would not only hit balls into the trees but over them. He would regularly hit homeruns over the track. It was hard to lose a game if Danny was on your side. Danny was charismatic, funny and sarcastic. You didn’t want to get on his bad side.

    For the Love of the Game: Joe Austin
    On the actual playing field of Jamaica high, sometimes games and practices would be going on that were not connected to the actual high school baseball team. The players were older, maybe 15-17 years old. The person who was coordinating their practices was an old guy who I eventually came to know as Joe Austin. Joe was an ex-minor league baseball player who worked with kids in the neighborhood and eventually took them into leagues. Joe had skills way beyond any coach I had seen. If you happen to go to a baseball game early and watch the infield and outfield practices, that was the routine Joe would go through with his players. He would provide bats and balls for the players and when they were old enough to go into leagues, he would buy the uniforms. Joe worked at night in a brewery and then five days a week he would take the bus from his house on Sutfin Blvd about a mile to 168th Street. He would then walk 4 blocks to the field carrying bats, balls and gloves in a duffle bag. He was on the field from about 9AM to 3PM. When he went into leagues he named his teams Irish names. Like the Lepricons  leprechaun? , Blarney Boys and Shannons.

    When Joe thought we were old enough, he started coming to our choose-up games in the corner. He was not pushy at all. He provided bats and balls for us regularly and offered to umpire our games. This was a great relief for us as time wasn’t wasted arguing. He started to make lineup cards for us that he would draw on the back of a paper lunch bag. When we got a little older, maybe 11 or 12, he moved us to another part of the high school park, which had more room. Then he offered to pitch for both sides. This was a boom for us because he got the ball over the plate virtually all the time which speeded up the games. Joe had skills that in retrospect no other coach could ever come close to let alone match. He started to pitch us knuckleballs and curve balls us to get us used to hitting pitches other that weren’t straight. He also worked with kids who seemed to want to become pitchers and he taught them not only to throw curves, but sliders, screwballs, and forkballs. One kid, Joey Fitzgerald made it as far as the Mets farm system. Little did we know Joe was grooming us to be his next team, the Emeralds.

    “Yaw wanna play ball, play ball! Ya don’t? Get the fuck off the field”
    Joe always welcomed new players so that once we transitioned to a bigger field, more boys came to play. Now the teams each had 9 players on a side. We were bigger, stronger and we could hit the ball further. Younger kids started coming including Jesse Braverman (with whom I’m still friends), Joey Fitzgerald, Bobby Saca, John Brennan, Ritchie Ames. While Joe was very inclusive, he was also very demanding. Once you started playing in the games, Joe expected you to be there every day. Some of the guys I started with stopped coming to the choose-up games probably because they got tired of it. Their skills had leveled off or they got involved in other activities (some activities like drugs or stealing cars). But one player, a catcher by the name of Davey Heckendorn, made a conscious choice to stop playing, told everyone about it   and he paid for it.

    One day Davey came to the field with someone I had never seen before. I later found out his name was Joe Trapp. Davey started to cry as he announced he wouldn’t be coming anymore. His music teacher told him that if he continued catching, he would ruin his hands by digging the balls out of the dirt. Joe Trapp and David Bernstein were there to support him. As I recall, Joe cursed him out for quitting. If you can imagine what a response was like from a group of 15 predominately Italian or Irish boys hearing this, it wasn’t pretty. We mocked him for crying and I’m sure we threatened Joe and David with a good beating for even daring to come to our turf again. I spoke with him years later, and this is the first topic we discuss. In retrospect, this was one of many miserable things I did as a 12-13 year old.

    The lazy hazy days of summer pick-up games with Joe
    In spite of the intensity that Joe demanded I would say the two years we spent on the big field were the happiest of all my 13 years of baseball. I loved playing against people I knew and because there were no crowds, uniforms, bells or whistles it was easy to relax. During the course of a summer’s day we would have two games. One in the morning, starting about 9:30 and one after lunch. After the first game I would rush home for lunch, eat quickly and then run back to the field. As I remember it, we let Joe pick the teams instead of us choosing up. Joe had a very good sense of how to pick combinations of players who would make the teams evenly matched. As I recall it most of our games were close. I switched over from shortstop to second base because as the field was larger I couldn’t make the throw from short to first very easily. I started secretly keeping records of my hitting statistics – batting average, homers, RBIs, doubles and triples. Because we were bigger now and could hit the ball further the outfield became more attractive to play rather than a sentence of banishment.

    Poetry in motion
    One of my favorite activities was having Joe hit fungoes to me in the outfield. He would stand at home plate and I would be stationed in center field. With the wave of his hand, he would motion to me to run from center to right center. He would hit the ball to me perfectly, neither too far to make it uncatchable nor too easy where I would stand still and wait for it. I always had to catch it on the run. Then he would motion me to run to left-center back to right center field and the same thing would happen, back and forth for maybe 30-45 minutes. I loved to fact there was no fence to worry about crashing into. Playing the outfield really developed my arm so by the time I started playing that position I developed a really strong arm. Also, I was a very fast runner but you would never know it with me playing second base. Playing center field, I could utilize my speed to the max. I loved center because, like shortstop, it’s a position where you see the whole field at once.

    Joe had nicknames for some of the players. He called me “Lash LaRue” after a movie he had seen where the cowboy used to strip a gunslinger’s gun out of his hand with a whip. Because my arm was pretty wild in center field when it was still developing, my throws home were often way off. He once yelled at me, “hey Lash, the backstop is 18 feet across. Do you think you get that shotgun within that range?  I never took it personally. I was flattered that I had enough standing for him to tease me.

    Crossing the Rubicon
    We did not always just play games among ourselves. Occasionally we would get a challenge from a group from another neighborhood to play a game. The game was not slow pitch. It was with pitchers pretty much throwing fast balls as hard as they could with someone calling balls and strikes. These games were harder for everyone because we had to hit pitches coming at us at much greater velocity. Some of our better players stopped coming. Billy Smolin and Bernard Rubino didn’t return. Tony Circillo stopped being the power hitter he was, but hung on as a pitcher. Brendon Rice was not a good hitter once we switched to fast pitch but continued as a catcher. Chris Green and I made the transition as did Danny.

    Our entry into organized leagues as the Emeralds
    It was in 1961 when I was 13 that Joe moved us to play on the actual Jamaica High School field. It was around the same year that Joe prepared us to play in the Queens-Nassau League. We stopped playing pick-up games and when we were together it was strictly infield and outfield and  batting practice. Joe bought all uniforms. He never made any cuts (telling players they didn’t make the team). I think in our first year we had close to 30 players on our team. I believe it was in 1962 that we had our first team. The league had players that could be up to the age of 17. Our oldest players were 14. Joe wanted to play in a league with older players because the competition would be good for us. In retrospect I think it was a mistake. Before we got into the league, we knew that we were much better than kids our own age. But playing against teams with players who were 2-3 older than we were was demoralizing. I think in the first year in the league we were 4-16. The next year we did better. I think we played about .500 ball. Our last year in the league we thought we could compete for the championship. I think we won more than we lost but we never won anything.

    A taste of the East Side kids
    Our team was a rough team, kind of like the East Side kids. We got into some fights with the other teams and probably the organizers of the league warned Joe. When we played occasionally in the suburbs we could feel the class tensions and this would carry over to Joe and his relationship with the other players. Joe would coach first base. Sometimes he’d get into razzing with opposing teams’ first baseman. One time
    Joe told me to spike the first baseman. I said no. Joe took me out for a pinch runner.
    Our team did not have good team spirit. We teased each other almost as much as we teased the other team.

    Who’s in and who’s out?
    Soon before our first year in the league two players we had never seen before started to come to our practices: Mark Kenny, Ronnie Gerreki. They were not from our neighborhood and naturally enough that challenged the existing pecking order. As I recall Mark Kenney’s father talked to Joe about taking Mark on the team. His father had professional aspirations for Mark and his father knew Joe would develop his talents. I think the same thing happened with Ronnie. Both Mark and Ronnie were very good. Probably the only player we had better than they was Danny. But there was a problem. Mark played short-stop and Ronnie played second. What was going to happen to the existing people we had to play short and second?

    There were a number of tension points. One was the fact that Mark and Ronnie did not come up from the ranks. They just appeared, so naturally those who played with Joe for years would feel pushed aside. I was a good hitter and Joe still wanted me in the line-up so he moved me into center field where I had been practicing for a year or two. But we already had a center fielder, Frankie Majori. I was a much better hitter than Frankie and so because of me, Frankie was on the bench. This caused tension between some of Frankie’s friends and I who were also on the team. This was amplified by class conflicts. Frankie, Brendan and Bernard were working class. I was middle class and they knew it because they knew where I lived. I started to feel more isolated than I ever had.

    My distance from others on the team was aggravated by the differences in where we went to school. Many of the Emeralds were also playing ball for Jamaica High School, a working class public school. My parents did not want me to go to Jamaica High. It was too rough and they thought I would get a better education at a Catholic school. So instead of going to a high school with my friends which was 2 blocks away, I was shipped off Holy Cross High School, three or four miles away. I was very angry at my parents for this and I had  a major rift with my them that never really healed completely. Meanwhile the players who went to Jamaica high noticed my absence and probably concluded that I was spoiled, being shipped off to a private school. After I got home from school in high school, I would walk over to Jamaica High to watch my old friends play, hoping to find some solidarity and imagining I was in center field there. But my old friends rarely acknowledged me. I was an outsider. After a while I stopped going. It was too painful. I never even tried out for the Holy Cross baseball team. I hated going there and didn’t want to spend any extra time there.

    My father coming to my games
    Despite my father’s disapproval of Joe and the Emeralds, he came to the games. From his point of view it was a natural thing to want to watch your kid play ball. But with rare exceptions, none of the kid’s father’s came to the game, so he stuck out like a sore thumb. In addition, being Italian he would yell when I did something well. It was humiliating. I asked him not to come but he didn’t, telling me that the other kids were jealous because their fathers didn’t come to the game. He didn’t understand that for a 15-year-old teenager living in the United States in the early 1960s, the last thing they wanted was to be seen with their parents. One time we had a Saturday afternoon game in which the field we were supposed to play on was waterlogged by the previous days of rain. I got word that we would switch fields. I called my father to tell him not to come to the waterlogged field and that we were playing somewhere else. He asked me where, and I made believe I couldn’t remember it. Well, I was very happy to know I wouldn’t have to deal with him for a day. However, when I stepped up leading off the game in the new location, Tony Cirillo says to me from the bench, “hey Bruce, guess who’s here?”. It was my father, who must have made some phone calls and found the field.

    My performance
    I didn’t do nearly as well as I did in the pick-up games. In my three years with the Emeralds I think I hit about .260 or so. I was a streak hitter and better with runners on base. I was a good left-handed drag bunter so Joe translated that as my being a good leadoff batter. I wasn’t. I didn’t like taking pitches and my main goal was to get my cuts in. In retrospect, my best position was batting fifth, after Mark and Danny. That way I could hit with runners on base. The only reason I liked hitting lead-off was I would come to the plate more. Our home field was the 201st Street field which had a short rightfield fence. It was a great experience to hit a ball over the fence and trot around the bases. Until then if I hit one deep over the outfielders I had to run it out as it was it was an inside the park homer. I hit some homers but I also had bad streaks. I once struck out six times in a double-header, four in the first game and two in the second. By the end of the game, Jesse’s brother Roger was pointing out what I was doing wrong in front of a small crowd. He meant well, but it was humiliating.

    By my seventeenth birthday my time with the Emeralds was up. I either had to find a new team or stop playing. I had been playing ball for 10 years and wouldn’t know what to do with myself, so I played on. I played three more years, one with the Dukes in South Zone Park; one was with a team in Forest Hills and one with a team from South Jamaica. I will focus most on my crazy year with the Dukes. I learned more about myself and life than I ever dreamed of in all my years with Joe. I had to face my shadow side.

    From Joe Austin to Ray Church and the Dukes
    The shadow side of my baseball life
    In all my years with Joe I was a very good player all around. I could hit for power, I was a very good center fielder, I had a good arm and I was fast. I started every game and finished every game That meant I could count on:

    • never being pinch-hit for;
    • never pinch-hitting;
    • Never being pinch run for
    • never pinch running; and
    • never going into the outfield for defensive purposes

    Doing any of these things was a sign you were not a complete player and only had part-time status. Yet when I played for Ray Church, I had to learn to accept all these roles. But what I found was that as I rose to the occasion and in the process formed at deeper relationship with a coach that I ever dreamed of.

    Who was Ray Church?
    Ray Church was no Joe Austin. He could not hit fungoes like Joe. He couldn’t curse like Joe and he never played minor league baseball. I later found out the Ray worked at the LaGuardia airport in some administration capacity, he had been in the Air Force, and like Joe, he was single. What Ray had that Joe didn’t have was he was natural psychologist and social psychologist. Ray was very even-tempered and he seemed to have emotional relationships with most of players who were all about 17-18 years old. Ray was about 45 years old. My friend Jesse who used to represent Joe at the league meetings told me that Ray had coached the South Ozone Park Dukes for many years.

    My introduction to Ray and Dave Laney
    Dave Laney was a well-built, good looking, tall Irish kid with a mass of bleached blond hair and a red face. I never knew whether his face was red because he had been surfing or drinking. I later found out it was both. I played against Davey when I was with Joe. He was a good left-handed pitcher and first baseman with power. One day he showed up at our Jamaica high field to pitch informal battling practice. I didn’t know why he was here, given South Ozone park was about five miles or so from Jamaica. However, Joe remembered him, let him pitch to us and Dave fit right in. I happened to be hitting well in batting practice and remember hitting everything he threw – line drives. I hit one over the wall. The next pitch he just rolled in like he was bowling. “Try to hit that one” he said. We had a good laugh. I liked his spirit. So I asked him about playing for the Dukes. As if he had rehearsed ahead of time he gave me Ray’s phone number. It was only later that I suspected that Ray had sent him over to recruit me. Anyway, two days later I called Ray and asked him if I could play for him. He said “any one of Joe’s boys can play for me”. I asked him when the first practice was and we were off.

    From center field to the bench
    I got a late start in the Spring of 1968. The snow was slow to dry and so I wasn’t able to work out with Joe as I usually had (his “Spring training” began March 15th). Also I had put on some 10 pound, possibly from drinking in the woods with friends. We had some practices but I was struck by how rudimentary the practices were compared to Joe. However, the players were very good. The Dukes started me in center field but after three games or so I think I only had one hit. Meanwhile a center fielder named Wally Shultz was tearing up his high school league hitting .500. So, by the fourth game Wally was in center and I was on the bench. Ray seemed to understanding how disheartening this way for me. Without too much prodding sitting in his car after a game I blurted out how my father was driving me nuts, trying to control me. Before the next game Ray, came to pick me up along with some other guys and drive us to the field. I invited him to come in and meet my parents, which he did. Soon after he told me how much he understood about my situation of being controlled after meeting my parents.

    As the season went on I played some of the time but never constantly. The players were much more supportive of me than anything I had experienced with Joe and all the guys I grew up with. One thing I noticed is that whenever I started a game I was never pinch-hit for, even if I wasn’t doing well. I think Ray understood that would be more painful for me to start and be taken out than not starting at all. Ray had a couple of coaches who were more impatient with me than Ray and I felt Ray was defending me.

    One time after another fight with my father, I called Ray and asked him to come get me. He did and we spent a long time talking at his house until about 1 in the morning. I was becoming more and more attached to him and the more I wanted to show him I was a better player than what I had shown so far.

    I hit a pinch-triple
    That summer I had been working at UPS unloading trucks. I dropped a 50-pound box on my foot so my toe was bandaged for a while. However, I didn’t want to miss our night game we were playing so I went to game. I could still hit but I couldn’t run very fast. In about the 8th inning of a game, Ray told me to pinch hit for a player. The first pitch was a high fastball which I fouled back. I thought to myself I would have creamed that in any other year but this one. Well, lo and behold the pitcher threw me the same pitch. This one didn’t get away from me. I tomahawked to straight away center. It must have been 100 feet over center fielder head. I lumbered around to third with triple. Ray called time out and took me out of the game for a pinch runner. This was so weird. I had never been pinch-run for before. But then again, I probably never pinch hit before starting to play with Ray. After the game I sat in Ray’s car crying. I was so happy I contributed something. We hugged.

    A late inning defensive replacement
    A little later in the summer when my foot healed and I lost the weight I had gained I found myself still on the bench. In the eighth inning of a game in which we were barely ahead, Ray called on me to replace Al Locaccio, a catcher who was only in left field because we needed his bat in the line-up. I hated left field because there was so little room to run. However, I was in no position to move Walley Shultz out of center. The field we were playing at was Rosedale. This field was notorious for fog. So sure enough, a right hand batter hits a long high drive towards me but curving foul. I keep on running  into and through foul territory. I lose the ball in the fog but then it comes out of the fog and I snag it. I must have been 50 into foul territory. Our bench explodes with cheering. Mike Dunn, the other coach who was sympathetic to me looked at Ray in disbelief. Ray taps his forehead with his finger three or four times. I am fighting back the tears.

    Ray confides in me he is gay
    My relationship with Ray was obviously deepening. He invited me to his place on Friday nights a couple of times just to visit. I asked him questions about himself because I thought it was selfish of me to keep the focus on myself. He  told me he wasn’t looking forward to going to his sister’s house on Sunday because they kept asking him when he is going to get married. He then said something to me like, “Bruce, I have to tell you something. I’m gay.” I didn’t have an adverse relation other than sympathy for the situation he was in with his sister. I asked him why he didn’t just tell her. He said he wasn’t ready to do that. It would send shock waves through his family. I understood. I was very pleased that I built up a relationship with him such that he didn’t have to say “don’t tell anyone”. He just knew I wouldn’t. I was proud of that.

    Pinch hit double and score the winning run
    We were a pretty good team and at the end of the year we were in contention to go to the playoffs. Maybe we were about 12-8. Our game was being played at my old 201st street field where I played with the Emeralds. In our last game which was to determine if we were going to the playoffs or not I came up to pinch hit to start off the bottom of the 9th inning of a game that was tied. Before I stepped to the plate Ray motioned to me to come towards him where he was coaching third base. He looked me straight in the eye and said “look, this is your turf. Act accordingly”. I went back to home plate looked it him. He always gave me a sign to hit line drives, and not to try to hit everything out of the park. I stepped in. The first pitch was a fastball right down the middle. I blasted it over the right field fence and over the Long Island Railroad tracks for a ground rule double (it wasn’t a homer for reasons I won’t go into.). As I look my lead off second, I noticed that instead of pitching from a stretch, the pitcher went into a full wind-up. I broke for third. I got such a great jump I was less that 10 feet from third base when Sandy Ameroso lined a single to right. It reached the right fielder in two hops. I paid no attention to any signals from Ray, I just instinctively thought I could beat the throw. I turned on the jets and slid safely underneath the throw which reached the catcher on a hop. Our dugout exploded from the bench to greet me at home. It was hard for me to cry in front of other boys. They didn’t seem to understand what I was crying about. But coach Mike Dunn and Ray knew what I was crying about.

    Our end of the year party
    Every year some sandlot baseball teams have a dinner in which the coaches give speeches and awards to the players. I was sitting at a table with one of some of the players I felt closest to. Since I batted .206 for the season, I was confident I wouldn’t be standing up for anything. So along with many other 18-year-old boys at a table, I started to drink. I was never much good at holding my liquor so after 3 beers I was pretty high and the room seemed foggy. Then out of the fog I hear my name. “For sportsmanship award, Bruce Lerro”. What the fuck”  I think to myself. I don’t even know what the award is for.  The people at my table already started laughing at the prospect of me walking to the front of the room. As I was making my way to the front, Ray, said “and to present him with this award, the only and only, Joe Austin” Now, Joe himself was known to drink a bit and it seemed like he too had been drinking. I got the trophy and wobbled back to my table. the players at my table were fighting off laughing until I was respectfully seated. Then they burst out full flush.

    My happy ending with my Forest Hills team
    I was done with the South Ozone park Dukes because I was too old. So the next year I hooked up with another team in Forest Hills Queens. I had a very good year with this team. I played center every game and I hit consistently throughout the year. But the climax came at the end of the year when we made the playoffs. This section has been taken from my article Facing the Music: Religion, Nationalism and Sports Have Enchanted the Working Class; Socialism Hasn’t

    Making my dreams come true
    In 1968 our team from Brooklyn got into a playoff game at Victory Field which was one of the fanciest fields around. My girlfriend, Rose Nuccio, let it be known to me that this was the last time she was coming to my games. Sunday was her only day to sleep in. “Besides” she said, “you are 0-8” (referring to my performance in the last two games.) She brought her sister Miriam along with her for this game. In the top of the first inning, I was up with two guys on base and two outs. The left-handed pitcher, Rick Honeycutt, threw me a high inside curve ball.

    “Tshrush”! I tomahawk the pitch and the ball really does head for the right center field fence just like in my fantasy 13 years ago. As I watch the ball head for the fence time and space seem to contract. It’s as if I were in my backyard 13 years ago. The ball lands on the tennis courts on the other side of the fence scattering everyone. I am so out of it that as I make my rounds of the bases, I miss first base. The coach has to get me to touch the base. As I round second, I see Rosie and Miriam jumping up and down screaming like two young Italian gals will. The look on Rosie’s face as our eyes met was like a melting ray of sunlight that united our eyes. I missed third base, too. Finally, as I headed for home most everyone on our team came out to home plate to meet me. It was as if we won the World Series. I disappeared in a mass of teammates at the plate.

    A thirteen year life cycle is complete dialectically. I returned to my fantasy of thirteen years ago, on a higher level, deeper, richer more real. I tell this story in my Brainwashing Propaganda and Rhetoric class to point out the Propagandistic power of Sports. There is rarely a dry eye in the house.

    The post Choose-Up Games from the Sandlots of Jamaica, Queens NY first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Baseball Owners Blow Off Fans in Favor of Streaming Dollars

    Major League Baseball adopted some significant rules changes this past season, the biggest by far being the introduction of a pitch clock—an electronic countdown limiting the time between pitches to 15 seconds with nobody on or 20 seconds with a runner on.

    The changes were aimed at speeding up the game and boosting attendance, and they were a smashing success on both counts: the average game time for the 2023 season was the shortest in 38 years, and attendance rose by the highest percentage in 30 years.

    Now let’s turn to a change that’s been introduced gradually, almost sneakily, a change that should itself be smashed. Jimmy Traina writes a column for Sports Illustrated, cleverly titled “Traina Thoughts.” This one is easy to follow:

    Major League owners are selfishly committing an egregious error. Throughout the regular season and even into the playoffs, they’re putting dollars ahead of fans by selling exclusive television rights to streaming services. Early in the 2022 season, a Traina Thought called the error “The Terrible Marriage Between Baseball and Streaming.”

    It was terrible because pitching great Max Scherzer was set to make his first start for the New York Mets—but the game wouldn’t air in New York, and it wouldn’t be called by the regular Mets’ announcers Gary Cohen, Keith Hernandez and Ron Darling. Scherzer’s debut with the Mets had been picked as the Friday Night Baseball game, and it was showing only on Apple TV+.

    Traina spoke up for the masses: “Baseball fans already pay around $100 for a local cable or satellite package. Some baseball fans pay extra for the MLB TV package….When is enough enough?”

    For Mets’ Hall of Famer-turned-announcer Darling, his personal had-enough moment came this August. The Mets were playing on the road against the Los Angeles Angels. Darling planned to watch the telecast but found himself with a problem: the TV rights had been sold to the streaming channel Peacock, and Darling wasn’t a subscriber.

    He wasn’t about to become one, either: “It was a protest. I said I’m not getting another one. I’m not spending another $5.”  (Darling, in fact, has free access to Peacock, but he didn’t know it at the time.)

    New York has two major league baseball teams, and the Mets aren’t alone in trivializing the fans who don’t have streaming services, or haven’t mastered the challenges of using them (or, saddest of all, can’t afford them in the first place). The New York Yankees televise most of their games on their own widely-available cable channel, but they too have taken to selling exclusive rights to streaming services. Friday night Yankee games have been appearing only on Amazon Prime, and designated games only on Apple TV+.

    There’s a dissing here that deserves more mention and attention.

    Today’s major league baseball fans are paying extra-major league prices for their fandom. It’s really Yankee fans, not the owners, who’ll be paying Aaron Judge $40 million in 2024 and $360 million over nine years. It’s Yankee fans who’ll be paying an average ticket price of $188 in 2024, approaching $800 for a family of four. It’s Yankee fans who’ll be paying up to 10 percent more in 2024, despite the Yanks having just racked up their first losing season in 30 years. (To be fair, not all Yankee prices are in the stratosphere: beers and hot dogs went for $6 and $3 this past season, far below the major league-leading $10.50 and $6.25 charged in Fenway Park by the Boston Red Sox.)

    These days there’s a new and hidden price that fans have to pay, and it discriminates hugely. Streaming channels get exclusive TV rights for select days and times, shutting out everybody who doesn’t have access to those outlets.  Nobody seems to care about the fans who won’t get to see the games; they’re an afterthought (if they’re thought about at all).

    What Thomas Paine said long ago has come around again:  We’re living in times that try men’s souls. For millions of baseball fans, particularly tech-challenged, older and poorer fans, showing games only on streaming services is something they do not need—anytime, especially at playoff time, and extra-especially in times like these.

    Baseball moguls should be focusing on doing everything they can to attract new fans. What they’re doing instead is anti-fan, and dumb besides. Traina has a thought: “[P]ut games on channels where more people can see them,” not on streaming services.

    What a refreshing, right-side-up idea: counting fans instead of counting streaming dollars.

    The post Baseball Owners Blow Off Fans in Favor of Streaming Dollars first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Everyone needs a union—even MLB baseball players

    This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

  • Oakland A’s Vegas move shows Rob Manfred hates baseball | Edge of Sports


    This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by The Real News Network.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • My Love Affair with Print Newspapers

    It all began with baseball. I was growing up in the 1940s in Rochester, N.Y., a farm team for the St. Louis Cardinals. I couldn’t get enough of them in the first newspaper I ever read, the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. The instant it came I grabbed the sports pages, flopped myself down on the living room floor, and lost myself at the ballpark.

    Eight decades later the Cardinals are still my favorite team, but my heart has moved on. These days I’m clinging to a deeper love: print newspapers.

    We’ve lost more than 2,500 since 2005. They’re currently dying at the rate of over 100 a year. My heartthrob The New York Times has metamorphosed into a print/digital hybrid, testing my loyalty to print like never before.

    Back to the early days. My family moved to Erie, Pa. For years the Erie Daily Times tutored me in how the world turns—including the world of the Cardinals and their superstar, Stan (The Man) Musial. The Times also gave me my first real job, tossing newspapers onto lawns and front steps, knocking on doors once a month to collect from subscribers.

    Another move, to Jamestown, N.Y., put the bloom on my newsprint romance. I became a sports writer at the Jamestown Post-Journal. It was intoxicating: phones forever ringing, heads bent over typewriters, magic moments when each day’s paper was raced upstairs from the press room. I wrote articles, headlines, a column that included my picture. It couldn’t possibly get any better.

    And then it did. I took a new job writing for a bigger paper, the Syracuse, N.Y. Herald-Journal. I covered the Cornell-Syracuse football game. The star that day would be a star forever: the late Jim Brown, possibly the greatest football player of all time. I covered the Hall of Fame baseball game in Cooperstown, N.Y. My first-person story ran under the headline “Writer in love with slowed-up copy of ‘The Man’”.

    The draft intervened. The Army took me away for two years. It taught me, among other things, that sports weren’t the most important thing in the world.

    Home again in Jamestown, I switched from sports writing to cityside reporting. It pumped me up even more than before. I wrote about City Council meetings and the police department, crafted offbeat pieces for a feature called Talk of the Town. I loved print newspapers from two sides now, and I’ve never really stopped.

    I came to New York City with dreams of writing for a big-city daily. I remember seeing the city’s skyline for the first time, feeling the city’s energy for the first time.

    So much for my dreams. In December of 1962, a 114-day strike by the printers’ union shut down all seven of the city’s dailies and ultimately killed four of them. They were icons and then they were gone: the Herald Tribune, the World-Telegram & Sun, the Journal-American, the Mirror.

    Vanity Fair wrote this epitaph 50 years later: “As a newspaper town, New York was never the same again.”

    The union struck because the new technologies of offset printing and cold type were beginning to replace linotype presses and “hot” type. Today the new technology of digital printing is replacing type itself: instead of words on paper, we’re getting images on a screen.

    In my dinosaur world, digital newspapers are imitations of the real thing.

    The real thing is what my wife and I sit down to at the dining room table every morning. The New York Times comes in sections, which we swap back and forth until we’ve gone over all of them. We tell each other what looks most interesting or enlightening, what makes us laugh or touches our hearts. In other words, we communicate with each other while being communicated to; it gets our days off to a super-sweet start.

    Maybe not for much longer, though. The reasons just keep piling up, pushing a newsprint lover in the digital direction.

    The Times long ago stopped printing stock market tables, box scores, anything and everything with lots of numbers. TV watchers have been shorted as well: no more daily listing of the programs that are airing, on what channels, at what times.

    IMHO, I’m also seeing overlong stories over-illustrated with over-large photos. The baseball coverage comes up short in the opposite direction: there are days when The Times doesn’t print a word about the Yankees or the Mets or anybody else, throwing a shutout at all fans. (Note: In early 2022 the corporate New York Times went sports-digital as well as news-digital, buying out the online The Athletic for $550 million cash.)

    Lastly, the print Times is regularly being scooped by its digital offspring. Print subscribers get access to the digital version too, so of course I log in now and then. Time and again, I’ll read stories online that won’t appear in the paper for days. (Recent example: A June 8 piece about the author Joan Didion didn’t show up in print until June 17.)

    I cherish the old Times. We’ve had it home-delivered to our apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side for decades. Inflation has seriously upped the price, pushing it into four figures for the year—and it’ll likely go even higher.

    My head and my heart are locked in a one-on-one. My head is urging me to live in the 21st century. My heart, long in love with print, wants to keep having those sweet Times mornings.

    In the end my heart and my head will probably keep playing one-on-one. They’re torn by two very different newspaper worlds. Very torn.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Gerald E. Scorse.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Minor League Baseball Players Poised to More Than Double Pay With First Union Contract



    Major League Baseball and recently unionized minor league players working for MLB team affiliates reached a tentative deal Wednesday on a historic first collective bargaining agreement.

    The pending five-year contract is set to more than double the pay of athletes who currently receive poverty wages even though the average MLB team is worth more than $2 billion. It comes just months after the MLB Players Association, the union representing major leaguers, successfully organized highly exploited minor leaguers who are striving to join their ranks into a new collective bargaining unit.

    “Nearly a decade of fighting has led to this, and players have achieved what was once thought undoable.”

    MLB recognized the union’s minor league unit in September, paving the way for negotiations that wrapped up on the eve of opening day in the majors and two days before opening day in the minors.

    Citing unnamed sources, ESPN‘s Jeff Passan reported Wednesday night:

    After years of disillusionment among future major leaguers about paltry salaries forcing them to work offseason jobs—and coincidentally on the day a judge approved a $185 million settlement the league will pay players who accused it of violating minimum wage laws—the parties agreed on a deal that went out to a vote among the union’s rank and file and that will need to be approved by owners, as well, before it is formalized. The agreement could be announced officially as early as Friday, the first day of games in the minor leagues.

    The deal was confirmed by numerous other reports citing league and union sources.

    Unlike now, minor leaguers are set to be paid “for most of the offseason as well as spring training, including back pay for this season,” according to Passan. He detailed the annual pay increases on social media.

    In addition to pay hikes, players “emphasized better housing and transportation as a matter of import,” Passan reported. “Starting in 2024, those at Triple-A and Double-A will receive their own bedroom, and players with spouses and children will receive special accommodations. In rookie ball, Single-A, and High-A, teams will provide transportation to stadiums, where they’ll eat meals provided under rules negotiated by a joint clubhouse nutrition committee.”

    As More Perfect Union detailed on social media, harsh living conditions on the road between games prompted players to organize for better accommodations and nutrition. Thanks to this effort, MLB began requiring its minor league teams to provide housing to players in 2022. The pending agreement seeks to secure additional improvements.

    While name, image, and likeness (NIL) rights are currently controlled by MLB, the pending agreement grants full NIL rights to the union, which can use them to strengthen group licensing deals. In addition, it expands players’ medical rights, including covering post-injury health expenses for a longer period of time.

    “Among those not included in the deal are players at teams’ complexes in the Dominican Republic,” Passan reported. “The minor league unit of the MLBPA includes only players on teams’ domestic rosters—and players from the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and other foreign countries will still reap the benefits when stateside.”

    In a concession to owners, “the deal includes the reduction of the maximum Domestic Reserve List, which governs the number of players a team can roster outside of its Dominican Republic complexes, from 180 to 165 starting in 2024,” Passan noted. “The union had previously fought MLB’s efforts during the lockout last year to reduce the reserve list, which teams had identified as a priority.”

    Nathan Kalman-Lamb, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of New Brunswick, wrote on social media that “Minor League Baseball players were perhaps the single most exploited group of men’s athletes in North America other than college basketball and football players.”

    “Now they have a new (good!) collective agreement,” he added. “No better evidence of why college athletes need unions.”

    “For the those who passed a hat around for diaper money for newborns… This is for you.”

    Garrett Broshuis, a former minor league pitcher who spearheaded early organizing efforts, celebrated on Twitter.

    “This is big,” Broshuis wrote. “Nearly a decade of fighting has led to this, and players have achieved what was once thought undoable.”

    “Is the deal perfect? No, but every negotiation ends in compromise,” he continued. “This will truly better the lives of thousands of players and their families. And that is what this fight has always been about.”

    Broshuis concluded: “For the those who passed a hat around for diaper money for newborns. For those who grinded away at two or even three offseason jobs. For those who skipped breakfast or even lunch to pinch pennies. For those who have [given] up the game not for a lack of talent but for a lack of funds. This is for you.”

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Baseball Strikes Out

    In the early 2000s, rampant steroid use across Major League Baseball became the biggest scandal in the sport’s history. But fans didn’t want to hear the difficult truth about their heroes – and the league didn’t want to intervene and clean up a mess it helped make. 

    We look back at how the scandal unraveled with our colleagues from the podcast Crushed from Religion of Sports and PRX. Their show revisits the steroid era to untangle its truth from the many myths, examine the legacy of baseball’s so-called steroid era and explore what it tells us about sports culture in America.

    We start during the 1998 MLB season, when the home run race was on. Superstar sluggers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa battled to set a new single-season record, and McGwire, the St. Louis Cardinals first baseman, was portrayed as the hero baseball needed: part humble, wholesome, working man and part action hero, with his brawny build and enormous biceps. So when a reporter spotted a suspicious bottle of pills in his locker in the middle of the season, most fans plugged their ears and refused to acknowledge that baseball might be hooked on steroids.

    Joan Niesen, a sportswriter and host of the podcast Crushed, takes us on a deep dive into an era that dethroned a generation of superstars, left fans disillusioned and turned baseball’s record book on its head. The story takes us from ballparks and clubhouses to the halls of Congress to explain how baseball was finally forced to reckon with its drug problem.

    This is a rebroadcast of an episode that originally aired in July 2021. 

    Connect with us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • A Celebration of Baseball Rebel Jim Bouton



    Amidst the current upsurge of social activism among professional athletes, it is worth recalling the enormous contribution of Jim Bouton, one of the most politically outspoken sports figures in American history. Among professional team sports, baseball may be the most conservative and tradition-bound, but throughout its history, rebels and mavericks have emerged to challenge the status quo in baseball and the wider society, none more so than Bouton.

    During his playing days in the 1960s, Bouton spoke out against the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, the exploitation of players by greedy owners, and the casual racism of the teams and his fellow players. When his baseball career ended, he continued to use his celebrity as a platform against social injustice. He also worked as a newscaster, a movie and TV actor, and an advocate for restoring old baseball parks. He died in 2019 at age 80.

    Bouton’s baseball memoir, Ball Four—published in 1970—may be the most influential sports book ever written. It was the only sports book to make the New York Public Library’s 1996 list of Books of the Century. Time magazine listed Ball Four as one of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time.

    Bouton wrote Ball Four after his best days as a hard-throwing All-Star pitcher with the New York Yankees were over and he was trying to make a comeback as a knuckleball pitcher. He wanted athletes to speak out for themselves, to refuse to conform, and to defy complacency. Following his own advice, he was an early supporter of anti-Vietnam War presidential candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy in 1968 and he served as a Democratic Party convention delegate for anti-war presidential candidate Senator George McGovern in 1972.

    In Ball Four, Bouton accused organized baseball of hypocrisy: portraying a squeaky-clean image while ignoring burning social issues. Bouton condemned baseball’s support for the Vietnam War. He attacked icons such as the Reverend Billy Graham, disputing his claim that communists had organized anti-war protests. While Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn said he couldn’t remember any players being ostracized for anti-war statements, Bouton recounted being repeatedly heckled for his anti-war views by players and fans: “They wanted to know if I was working for Ho Chi Minh.”

    On Saturday, September 18, 2010, Bouton came to the Burbank Public Library from his home in New Jersey to discuss Ball Four, which had been published 40 years earlier.

    A standing room-only crowd of 175 attended the event. Fortunately, award-winning documentary filmmaker Jon Leonoudakis was there to record Bouton’s remarks. In fact, it was Leonoudakis’ idea to celebrate the book’s 40th anniversary. As a result, the rest of us can imbibe Bouton’s wisdom, insights, and humor about his 10 years in the big leagues and his much longer career as a writer, newscaster, and social critic.

    Bouton, who was among few big leaguers who went to college, joined the New York Yankees in 1962. The next year, he had a sensational season, going 21–7 with a 2.53 ERA plus 10 relief appearances. He emerged as one of baseball’s top young pitchers and appeared in that season’s All-Star Game. In 1964 he was 18–13 with a 3.02 ERA, led the league in starts, and won two World Series games.

    That’s when Bouton began speaking out on social issues, and his teammates and Yankees management began regarding him as a flake. They found him too intelligent and outspoken for his own good, an outside agitator disturbing the status quo. He typically sat at the back of the team bus, reading! He was considered a free thinker, “which in those days was one step away from being a Communist, to conservative sports minds,” observed sportswriter Ron Kaplan.

    The Yankees tolerated this until Bouton suddenly became a marginal performer in 1965. Probably from overuse the previous two years, Bouton began having arm problems and slipped to 4–15 with a 4.82 ERA as the Yankees dropped to sixth place. His ERA bounced back in 1966 to 2.69, but poor run support held his won-loss record to 3–8.

    Bouton and his liberal opinions had become expendable. He stayed with the Yankees for a few more uneventful years until 1969, when he was traded to the lowly Seattle Pilots, in their first year as a major league team.

    Ball Four is ostensibly a diary of his 1969 season as a pitcher with the Pilots and the Houston Astros, but the most memorable and controversial parts of the book deal with his years with the Yankees. Decades before baseball was rocked by scandal over steroids, Bouton disclosed players’ widespread use of amphetamines (aka “greenies.”). One of the most controversial parts of the book was his revelation that his Yankees teammate Mickey Mantle, whom sportswriters viewed as baseball’s golden boy, was an alcoholic who often blasted towering home runs while nursing a hangover. As Bouton told Fresh Air host Terry Gross during a 1986 radio interview, his portrayal of Mantle “wasn’t really even so much as a put-down of Mickey Mantle as it was a story of what a great athlete he was.”

    Leonoudakis had read Ball Four when it first hit the bookstores. He was 12 years old, and, like many baseball fans, it forever changed his view of the sport.

    “I learned about the unfair business of the game, the hypocrisy, the pettiness, the struggles, the failures, and that the guys on my baseball cards were real people,” Leonoudakis explained. “No one had ever presented the national pastime this way before, because it was taboo.”

    He kept the book with him through high school, college, and adulthood, re-reading it and its various updates. When the book’s four-decade anniversary appeared on the horizon, Leonoudakis pitched the idea to celebrate the book to Terry Cannon, executive director for the Baseball Reliquary, a Pasadena-based group that celebrates baseball’s renegades and iconoclasts.

    Bouton, who in 2001 had been inducted into the Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals – what he called “the people’s Hall of Fame” – accepted the invitation to participate in the gathering, which would reunite him with Greg Goossen and Tommy Davis (his teammates with the Pilots, a one-year wonder as a team). Ron Shelton, a former minor league player best known for writing and directing the 1988 film, “Bull Durham,” which earned him an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay, joined the discussion about the often-invisible aspects of pro baseball.

    “I smile a lot when I think that people are still talking about the book 40 years later,” Bouton said in his opening remarks at the “Ball Four Turns 40” event. “I caught lightning in a bottle. I was in the right place at the right time.”

    Bouton credited his Pilots teammates for providing many of the stories he recounted in the book.

    “They were veterans. They’d been around. They were great storytellers. All I had to do was listen, and watch, and write it all down,” which he did, on the backs of envelopes, on hotel note pads, on airplane barf bags, and even on toilet paper.

    “Ball Four Turns 40” is Leonoudakis’ love letter to his hero Bouton. It is a fascinating one-hour tour of Bouton’s mind. With remarkable honesty and humor, Bouton describes his up-and-down career, his colorful Pilots teammates (cast-offs at the end of their careers), how he wrote Ball Four from notes scribbled on scraps of paper in dugouts, hotel rooms, and airplanes, and the controversy that surrounded the book.

    Funny, honest, and well-written, Ball Four revealed aspects of major league baseball that sportswriters and previous ballplayer memoirs had ignored. Bouton expressed his outrage at owners who exploited players and at players who showed disrespect for the game he loved. He didn’t hold back naming names or describing the lives and antics of ballplayers both on and off the field. It portrayed laudable characters and accomplishments, but also aspects of players’ heavy drinking, crass language and behavior, pep pills and drug use, conservative political views, questionable baseball smarts, anti-intellectualism, womanizing, voyeurism, and extramarital affairs.

    Ball Four described boys being boys: human, fun-loving, vulnerable, and sometimes immature. That is, ballplayers were normal young men, with some special skills, but otherwise not necessarily idealistic heroes, as they had been portrayed by most sports reporters. Exposing what had always been under wraps generated a firestorm of protest from players, management, and sportswriters.

    By today’s standards, the book is quite tame. But at the time, it was shocking. As Mitchell Nathanson explains in his 2020 biography, Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original, Bouton’s fellow ballplayers were outraged that he had broken the code by revealing stories from the locker rooms and hotel rooms. Many fans were upset by Bouton’s revelations about the private lives of their favorite players.

    Bouton was attacked by sportswriters, who viewed their job as protecting the integrity of the game and the private lives of the players whom they relied on for interviews and stories. In three successive anti-Bouton articles, the New York Daily News influential sports columnist Dick Young portrayed Bouton as a “social leper” and a “commie in baseball stirrups.”

    The book’s critics focused on how it assaulted the sanctity of the locker room. But for MLB owners, Bouton’s real threat was challenging their economic power and, more broadly, America’s unequal economic system and the undue influence of big corporations. Bouton loved baseball, but not the baseball establishment which, he believed, took advantage of powerless, unorganized, and under-educated athletes.

    In a clubhouse discussion one day when Bouton was still with the Yankees, his teammates claimed a fair minimum salary should range between $7,000 and $12,000. Bouton was scolded when he proposed $25,000, but he pointed out that: “…everyone in this room has a PhD in hitting or pitching. We’re in the top 600 in the world at what we do. In an industry that makes millions of dollars, and we have to sign whatever contract they give us? That’s insane.”

    Playing before the ascendancy of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), Bouton revealed in Ball Four that major leaguers led lives with little financial or professional security. The owners cared about nothing except their profits. They kept salaries indecently low, and traded or demoted even the most loyal players. At the time, under the reserve clause in every major league contract, ballplayers were little more than indentured servants, with no ability to negotiate with their team owners for better salaries, benefits, or working conditions. Salary negotiations were a farce, and most players couldn’t make a living on their baseball pay, despite generating millions in profits for owners. Except for the superstars, ballplayers led a vagabond, insecure existence.

    By disclosing these conditions, Bouton thought fellow ballplayers would appreciate him blowing the whistle. Instead, they complained about him violating their privacy and tarnishing their reputations.

    By the late 1960s, however, the MLBPA was beginning its assault on players’ peonage. In 1968, two years after Marvin Miller joined the union as executive director, the MLBPA negotiated the first-ever collective-bargaining agreement in professional sports. By 1975, the union had overturned the reserve clause. Miller claimed that Ball Four “played a significant role in the removal of baseball’s reserve clause,” which led to better working conditions, pensions, health care, and salaries.

    “When people complain about the big salaries that players now make, I tell them that for 100 years the owners screwed the players. For the past 30 years, the players have screwed the owners,” Bouton said at the Burbank gathering. “The way I look at it, the players have 70 years to go!”

    Not surprisingly, Bouton was excoriated by baseball officials, including Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who called Ball Four “detrimental to baseball” and demanded a meeting with Bouton. Miller and union attorney Richard Moss joined Bouton at the meeting. The commissioner claimed that Bouton was undermining baseball, but Bouton responded: “You’re wrong… People will be more interested in baseball, not less… People are turned off by the phony goody-goody image.” Kuhn said Bouton owed “it to the game because it gave you what you have,” but Bouton protested: “I always gave baseball everything I had. Besides, baseball didn’t give me anything. I earned it.”

    Kuhn ordered Bouton to release a statement saying he falsified or exaggerated his stories, but Bouton refused. When Kuhn told him to regard the meeting as a warning, Miller shot back: “A warning against what…against writing about baseball?… You can’t subject someone to future penalties on such vague criteria.” Kuhn told Bouton that he was going to issue a statement threatening players with punishment for any further writing like Ball Four. He told Bouton that he should remain silent. Again, Bouton refused.

    As Bouton explained at the 2010 symposium, the controversy helped turn the book into a bestseller.

    “The publisher originally only printed 5,000 copies,” Bouton said. “But when Kuhn attacked the book, lots of baseball fans were curious about what he didn’t want them to read. Sales really took off.” Since then, over 5.5 million copies of Ball Four have been sold.

    The book’s success, Bouton told the crowd at the 2010 event, was “all about perspective.” He couldn’t have written the book, he explained, if was still an All-Star pitcher with the Yankees. But when he played with the ill-fated Pilots – a team of cast-offs from other big-league teams – he joined the ranks of the marginalized, which shaped his standpoint.

    “If a president writes a book about life at the White House, and a doorman writes a book on the same subject, read the doorman’s book,” Bouton said.

    Bouton’s book helped change sports writing. While the old-timers condemned Bouton, a new wave of writers abandoned the deification of ballplayers and instead looked for unconventional angles. George Foster of the Boston Globe called the book a “revolutionary manifesto.” New York Times writer David Halberstam observed that Bouton “has written… a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book….. [A] comparable insider’s book about, say, the Congress of the United States, the Ford Motor Company, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be equally welcome.” According to Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard paleontologist and baseball writer, Ball Four inaugurated a “post-modern Boutonian revolution,” revealing that “heroes were not always what they were thought to be, questioning the masculine ideal in the professional game, and encouraging the reader to look beyond the media’s interpretations.”

    As MLB historian John Thorn later observed, Ball Four was “a political work, and a milestone in the generational divide that characterized the 1960s. It is the product of a widespread rebellion against both authority and received wisdom.”

    In “Ball Four Turns 40,” Leonoudakis has fully captured Bouton’s spirit. The film is filled with 1970s images and music. The filmmaker appears as a newscaster explaining the historical context of Bouton’s life and times.

    The film is Leonoudakis’ love letter to Bouton, who reciprocated in Ball Four’s final printing (in 2014) where he thanked Leonoudakis and the Baseball Reliquary for organizing the event.

    Leonoudakis is more than a fan. He’s a fanatic. Eight years ago he started a Facebook page called “Ball Four Freaks.” Membership is like an exclusive cult. You have to pass a baseball test to join.

    “Ball Four Turns 40” is just the latest of Leonoudakis’ baseball documentaries. He’s produced “Not Exactly Cooperstown” (about the Baseball Reliquary), “The Day the World Series Stopped” (about the 1986 Bay Area earthquake that interrupted the fall classic between the San Francisco Giants and Oakland A’s), and “Hano! A Century in the Bleachers” (about 90-year old sportswriter Arnold Hano, author of the classic “A Day in the Bleachers”).

    Curious baseball fans can watch “Ball Four Turns 40” by subscribing (for $8) to Leonoudakis’ Patreon page and stream the film by joining the “Fan Zone” tier (there’s instructions pinned to the top of the home page for those wishing to see “Ball Four Turns 40”). This also gives them access to another 20 of his films as well as his monthly interviews with experts like baseball writers Marty Appel and Jean Hastings Ardell, Negro Leagues historian Phil Dixon, and pioneering female umpire Perry Barber.

    This post was originally published on Common Dreams.

  • Know Your Enemy: Why Conservatives Love Baseball, with David Roth

    A conversation on the MLB playoffs, baseball’s place in American history, varieties of conservative baseball fans, and more.

  • Minor League Pay

    From the Frisco RoughRiders to the Dayton Dragons, minor league baseball teams are a classic American tradition. But their players are not covered by some classic American laws: Players can earn less than the equivalent of minimum wage and don’t get paid overtime.

    We explore how that’s even possible with the podcast The Uncertain Hour from our colleagues at Marketplace. This season, they’re looking at how certain companies – and whole industries – maneuver around basic worker protections.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Baseball’s Labor Wars

    MLB owners’ recent lockout was an effort to reverse the gains that players had won over decades of labor struggle. The owners failed.

  • The Joys and Sorrows of Being a Celebrity Fan: James Dean, Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Mantle

    No one who frequents the dark auditorium is really an atheist
    — Edgar Morin, Marxist Movie Critic

    Orientation

    Cross-cultural uniqueness of celebrity culture

    If members of a tribal society during Paleolithic or Neolithic times, or even members of Bronze Age Egypt or Mesopotamia had heard about the United States population’s devotion to celebrities, they wouldn’t believe it.  How could you become attached to a person you will never meet, whose shelf life might be five to 10 years and who doesn’t know or care about your life? How can it be that during a period of adolescence these celebrities might be more important than one’s family, relatives, friends? What if we told these ancient peoples that these celebrities came to be seen as more interesting than religious or political authorities? Again, disbelief. This article is partly experiential description of how that process of creating and sustaining celebrities came to be.

    Questions about the differences between fame and celebrity

    Is it possible to be famous without being a celebrity? Is it possible to be a celebrity without being famous? What is the place of mass communication in developing notoriety? Can a person be famous without the presence of mass communication?

    What about the place of fans? Can you be famous without having fans?  What is the relationship between charisma, sex appeal, and competence? Is it possible to be famous and not have charisma? Is it possible to be a celebrity and be incompetent?

    Is there any difference between the psychological health of people who are famous as opposed to those who are celebrities? How relevant is capitalism to notoriety? Can there be celebrities without capitalism?

    The place of celebrity in adolescent socialization

    Every young boy or girl is socialized by different forces. Sociologists name at least seven sources of socialization: the family, the state, and religious authorities are usually the most conservative of forces. Liberal forces of socialization include education, friends, advertising, and celebrity culture (including movie heroes and heroines, sports figures and movie stars).  Contrary to what you might expect, sociologists have found that neither advertising nor movie stars, sports figures nor musicians could compete with the more long-standing sociological forces of family, religious organizations, the state or education in terms of the internalization of values. However, this celebrity culture could definitively involve sidetracking the individual.

    When I was about ten years old, like most middle-class kids of the late 1950s, I had my own room, and I could hang any pictures on the wall that I wanted. Who was on that wall? Was it a picture of my parents, grandparents or other relatives? Are you crazy? Were there pictures of the American flag or a crucifix? Not on your life! Were there pictures of my teachers? My teachers were nuns. If I ever got hold of a picture of them, it would be used as a dart board. My friends? We are getting closer, but friends were to be played with, not frozen into photographs. I had three huge posters on my wall. One of a sullen James Dean looking down; another of Jerry Lee Lewis burning down his piano, and the last of Mickey Mantle connecting for another long home run (the picture at the beginning of this article). What the movie stars, musicians, and baseball players meant for my socialization is also the subject of this article. 

    Fame vs Celebrity

    From my research into two books, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History by Leo Braudy and Celebrity by Chris Rojek, I found some interesting differences between what it means to be famous, what it means to be a celebrity. What both forms of notoriety have in common is their relationships with the public:

    • have a lopsided epistemology with the notorious person knowing nothing about those who follow them; or
    • what relations exist are thin, lack any thickening or deepening of communication.

    What is fame?

    There are four elements of fame according to Leo Braudy: a person, an accomplishment, the immediate publicity that surrounds the event or person, and posterity (how they are thought of beyond their lifetime). For most of human history, fame existed without celebrity. Fame was based on legitimate social sources. For example, religious authorities like popes or cardinals could be famous. Political authorities like Solon, the Athenian statesman, lawmaker and poet, or Pericles were famous. Lastly, military heroes could be famous. Beyond the ancient world, competing Renaissance artists became famous. One of the characteristics that creates a celebrity is mass media, which was absent for most of human history. Without mass media, the public was reminded of famous people through the minstrel storytelling, literature, and by attending theater or by being forced to look up at towering monuments. Lastly, fame could be spread by the circulation of coins with the emperor’s picture on them.

    How did the person become famous? This occurred as the result of great deeds, by the spreading of their reputation among elites, or through rumor or gossip. Fame did not easily spread to faraway places until the rise of the printing press, newspapers, and the telegraph. The status of famous people could be either ascribed or achieved. Ascribed status such as the divine right of kings or a religious authority who inherited their office, or an aristocrat passing down his land to his son. Achieved fame can be fame that came to an individual because of their skill. A religious, political or military authority could become famous because of religious reforms, outstanding political maneuverings, or military strategies or tactics.

    The percentage of people who became famous was minuscule compared to the size of their populations. People who were famous had next to no interaction with the public except to pass by them as part of a military parade or a pageant. Their social interaction was limited to other elites. In other words, there were no fans of famous people. Fans are a product of celebrity culture, as we will soon see. The power bases of famous people were either legitimacy or competency, with charisma or sexual power being a secondary source.  Force, coercion or economic power are usually not ingredients in becoming famous. Famous people offer blessings (the magic touch of the king) or healings. Famous people have nothing to do with impacting the personality of the people who admire them, as happens with celebrities. People are famous for generations. There are no flash-in-the-pan famous people. Religious, political and military elites live in little worlds of their own. With rare exceptions, the overwhelming majority of famous people were men, and they were subject to neither fads nor fashions, as was the case at the beginning of the 18th century.

    What is a celebrity?

    At the end of the 19th century a new kind of notoriety appeared, celebrity. Celebrity grew from the ashes of the decline in respect for religious and political authorities. Celebrities are not members of traditional elites. There are no such things as ascribed celebrities, as the competition to be in the movies, sports or music is fierce. Unlike famous people, celebrities are extremely well-known and this is due to the presence of mass media. National newspapers, magazines, movies, radio, and later television gave new celebrities an instant and expanding audience. However, unlike famous people, the life of celebrities is very-short lived. The shelf-life of movie stars is relatively brief, especially for women. It is rare for movie stars to capture the public’s attention for more than a few years, if that. When I think of Rhythm and Blues musicians, their hits won’t last more than about five years. People like Ray Charles or Van Morrison are the exceptions. After that, musicians go on the road as nostalgic acts, if they are lucky. When it comes to baseball, the time for the stars might be a little longer – ten to fifteen years. After that, fans are on to new flames. Unlike as with famous people, the power bases of movie stars are charisma and sexual attractiveness, in addition to competency. While most famous people were overwhelmingly men, there is more of a balance between men and women in the life of a celebrities.

    Celebrities also developed as the U.S. population searched for a new kind of transpersonal identity that was necessary as the industrial revolution ran roughshod over urban communities. It is no accident that sports teams and the cinema were both product and producer of public needs beginning at the end of the 19th century. Famous people did not have fans. Fans are a product of the public’s ongoing vicarious involvement with the movies and their stars, musicians and their bands, and sports superstars and their teams. All this could not be possible without mass media. Celebrities have a special kind of relationship with their fans that famous people did not have with their public.

    Fans help to make celebrities larger than life with their turnouts at the Academy Awards, ball games and concerts. However, fans can make the lives of celebrities a living hell, allowing them no private life. It is not surprising that celebrities acquire psychological disorders like narcissism, paranoia, or drug addiction disproportionate to the population (Chris Rojek).  Magazines like People keep tabs on celebrities and hold interviews in which the stars “open up” about their traumas, disappointments, and recoveries. There were no fashions prior to the 18th century. Before then, people simply wore the clothes of their social class. It wasn’t until advertisers got control over newspapers, magazines, and radio that they were able to suggest that the public has the right to wear whatever they want. Furthermore, that clothing could be rotated with the changing of the seasons. As for fads, they are the product of mass communication and where trends begin. Celebrities are both producers and products of fads and fashions.

    Theories of celebrity

    Chris Rojek reviews at least five theories of celebrity. The first theory is subjectivist, claiming that celebrity status is the product of the celebrity’s personality, their possession of charisma. This is a cultural version of the “great man” theory of history. The second theory is that of the Frankfurt School. This sees the function of celebrities and star culture as a means for socially controlling the masses. For example, it is no coincidence that there are rarely celebrities in movies or music who aspire to group emancipation. Celebrities promote individualism.

    For Edgar Morin, French philosopher and sociologist of the theory of information, celebrities are not under the control of elites but rather they are the projection of the pent-up needs of the audience themselves. For Morin, celebrities are the transformers, accumulating and enlarging the dehumanized desires of the audience. For D. Marshall and J. Gamson, the main emphasis is neither the charisma, the social control of elites, nor the needs of the audience. Rather the mass media itself is a force to be reckoned with as they have their own capitalist interests for keeping celebrity culture alive.  Lastly, the foundational types of character theory of Orrin Klapp argue that audiences don’t just have individual needs, but group needs as well. The audience is made up of members of social groups that develop character types that have an impact on the kind of roles that appeal to audiences. For example, the “good Joe”, the villain, the tough guy, the snob, the prude, and the love queen are both the result of the audiences’ private life that are projected on to the characters, as movie makers have learned to adapt their movie characters to these expectations.Hollywood Movie Stars

    Brief evolution of the star system

    According to Edgar Morin in his book The Stars, the first movie stars in silent films participated in very simple movie plots which were a combination of fantasy and melodrama. The first stars resembled a kind of distant royalty. The mood of the early movies was pessimistic and tragic with the audience mostly composed of popular and juvenile audiences. After 1930, plots became more complex and realistic. There was less reliance on occult causes of events and the appeal was more psychological. After the Great Depression in the 30s, movie producers felt pressure to make movies that had happy endings. Movies lost some of their bad associations with burlesque and started to appeal more to a middle-class audience. The gap between the movie stars and the audience began to shrink as audiences wanted their star gods, but still wanted them to have at least some of the same types of personal problems that they had. Stars were still viewed as considerably above audiences, but Morin now called them a “constitutional monarchy of lesser stars.” The stars greatly resembled the gods and goddesses of classical Greece. They were not of a higher moral order. They had the same problems as the audience, except on a higher larger scale. The gods and goddesses had affairs and there were scenes of betrayal, war, peace, and adventure.

    One interesting side effect was that the presence of movie stars on the big screen impacted the expectations the public had about their criteria for dating. As people went to movies and bought up movie magazines with touched-up pictures of the stars, boys and girls started expecting their dating partners to measure up to their movie idols, both physically and emotionally. Fans were less interested in dating people like themselves.

    Four types of audience-star relationship

    In his book Stars, Richard Dyer cites the work of Andrew Tudor, Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of York, who suggested four types of audience-star relationships:

    • Emotional affinity – this is the most common and involves a loose attachment between the star, the storyline, and the personality orientation of the audience.
    • Self-identification – the audience places themselves in the same situation as the star. They imagine themselves on the screen, experiencing what the stars are experiencing.
    • Imitation – most common among young teenagers and takes the relationship beyond cinema, with the star acting as a life-model for the audience. Fans mimic the star’s clothing, hairstyle, and leisure activities.
    • Projection – “star-struck” – the public lives their life as if they were the star. The real-world and the star-world gets reversed. The fans ask themselves “what would the star do?”, before swinging into action.

    Idol 1: Movies, James Dean

    The process by which I found out about James Dean is embarrassing. It wasn’t that I had watched the movie, Rebel Without a Cause, and fell in love with him. It was a large poster-sized picture of him in a music store that caught my eye. He was looking down and brooding. I think I also saw a picture of him in a motorcycle jacket, which I think was the clincher.  Years later I watched the movie and while I liked it, I couldn’t identify with it. His family was upper-middle class and they lived in a big house. Dean was very inarticulate, and I couldn’t understand what he wanted from his father. I was mad at my parents for sending me to a Catholic school, but I didn’t feel they misunderstood me. Still the theme of rebelling against the authorities – in my case the Catholic Church – was good enough for me. When my parents saw the larger-than-life poster on the wall, they didn’t like it. They may have understood what the picture meant better than I did.  Naturally enough, their disapproval reassured me I was on the right track!

    Why did I idolize him?

    What did it mean to idolize him? For one thing, he let me know that I was not alone with my problems. Also, these problems had to do with my age. Teenagers were supposed to be unhappy. The fact that he was a movie star, plastering his unhappiness in interviews, photographs, and newsreels, let me know this was a national problem. Now I certainly had friends who were unhappy like I was, but why wasn’t knowing and talking to them enough? It’s because friendships required work. You had to listen to them, and many could not really appreciate my problems. With a movie star, not only did I not have to listen to him, but I could project the image of a perfect older brother, a teen-age listener who understood everything. No matter what problems I was having with my parents or teachers in school, I could always come home from school, go in my room, close the door, and James would be there, reassuring me that everything was bullshit.

    Application of theories of celebrity to James Dean

    In terms of theories of celebrity, James certainly had charisma, but I don’t think that the function of his stardom was for social control as the Frankfurt School argues. Being a rebel against the conformity of the early 50s was cutting edge. Sure, it was about individual not social rebellion, but the social movements of the 60s were just getting started. I didn’t feel Morin’s theory applied either. I did not feel Dean was an expression of some pent-up dehumanized life I was leading. I’m sure that Dean would have fit into Orrin Klapp’s social type as an outsider. But the problem is that if these types are always operating as Klapp claims, what were the conditions of the early 50s that made these rebel movies such hot items? After all, Marlon Brando and others were selling rebel movies as well. Klapp has no answer for this. Besides Dean’s charisma, Marshall ‘s and Gamson’s mass media self-interest was very present. It was the bombardment of Dean’s image, not just in movies, but on billboards and posters that drew me in. Perhaps the biggest favor that no theory covers was the close relationship of our ages. I must have been about 16 and Dean must have been about 25, still within the range for me to identify with him. He was a perfect rebel for me because I was at an age when rebellion was starting to almost be expected.

    What kind of fan attachment to Dean did I have?

    Relative to the types of audience attraction, my connection to Dean was mild emotional affinity. I did not know about his personal life, let alone try to imitate it. I can say that I copied his hair and clothing that was uniquely his. Having a pompadour and wearing motorcycle jackets was a dark, but attractive side of the late 1950s culture. So it wasn’t because of James Dean alone that I dressed like him.

    Idol 2 Music: Jerry Lee Lewis

    Musician celebrities had a much more powerful impact on me than movie stars, because listening to music is the most powerful of all the arts in altering states of consciousness for me. Jerry Lee appealed to me because of his raw rebelliousness. Whether it was Great Balls of Fire, Whole Lotta Shakin Going On or Breathless, this seemed like a guy who didn’t give a fuck. Jerry Lee was everything the Catholic Church was opposed to. Wild hair, oozing sexuality, surely on a path to Hell. Jerry even admitted that during different parts of his career that he played “the Devil’s Music”. What more can a 10-year-old boy want! But beyond Jerry Lee all the other musicians, whether it was rhythm and blues or rock and roll, music offered me a temporary ticket out of the life I was living. I cannot say that they opened my horizons because the music was so trite that it was hardly beyond the “Flatland” life I was leading. It was more of a hope that someday I could get away from my parents and live a life as exciting as musicians, and not at all like my parents’ lives.

    Application of theories of celebrity to rock and roll and rhythm and blues

    It is hard to imagine a musical celebrity without charisma, so part of the attraction has to be that. Again, the Frankfurt theory about social control doesn’t apply for the same reasons I gave in my section on James Dean. Even if we take the rhythm and blues scene into the sixties, with the exception of the early 60s, most rock and rhythm and blues supported the anti-war civil rights movement. It was not a distraction or an escape.

    My reservations about Morin’s and Klapp’s theories apply for the same reasons as they do for movie stars. Again, mass media was crucial to my attachment to rock and roll and rhythm and blues. The music was on the radio, on TV, in live concerts, and in the movies. All these media sources saw lots of money to be made. Furthermore, as in my commentary on James Dean, I listened to this music when I was between 10-20 years old, which is prime time for rebellion. Had I been forty years old and digging this movement, we would need a different explanation.

    Type of fan attachment for rock and roll and rhythm and blues

    What kind of fan attachment did I have to rock and roll and rhythm and blues?

    It was deeper than my movie attachment (see my article My Love Affair with Rhythm and Blues). I didn’t just listen to the music. I sang along and I also sang into a tape recorder. I really worked at imitating my favorites – Buddy Holly, Elvis, the Drifters. Going into my room and closing the door, I would go “Up on the Roof” just like the Drifters invited me to do. These musicians were my gods and goddesses. I memorized their songs, showed up at their concerts, bought their records, found out about their lives, rooted for them to have hits and cried when they faded or died. I cried when Sam Cooke died and I cried when Elvis made his comeback. I see my attachment as a combination of self-identification and imitation. I bought the same kind of clothes they had and styled my hair like theirs. As I said in my Rhythm and Blues article, they were my gods and goddesses. Given how much I still listen to their music, they still are.

    Idol 3 Sports: Mickey Mantle

    Being a participant deepens attachment as a fan

    As I hope I demonstrated in this last section, the degree to which we become involved with a single or multiple celebrities also depends on our own willingness to move beyond being a spectator and become a participant. My relationship with a movie star celebrity will intensity if I act myself. In music, if I play an instrument myself, I will feel more involved with the musician. In the case of sports, I played baseball (hardball) myself. As a fan, I started to follow the Yankees at about the same time my father and I used to play catch and hit the ball around. In both cases, I was about 7 years old and the time was 1955.

    Like many New York kids at that time, the ultimate choices of idols came from the New York teams – Willie Mays, Mickey Mantle or Duke Snider. One of the reasons I think I loved Mickey Mantle was that his plate appearances were so dramatic – he either hit tape measure home runs or struck out or he walked. There was always controversy around him because many New Yorkers insisted he could never replace Joe DiMaggio. Mantle was often booed by the fans. Because he was a country boy from Oklahoma, he was not articulate with the press which made things worse.

    As I was playing stick ball in the streets and hard ball in the sandlots, I used to imitate Mickey, copying his batting stance. I became a good drag bunter, in part from knowing and copying Mickey. I mostly used to try to hit home-runs and was proud that I could do this, even though I was not especially big physically. From the time I was seven to eleven years of age, I played shortstop. But once the batters were strong enough to hit the ball to the outfield, I switched positions. I was naturally drawn to centerfield, because, as in shortstop, you can see the big picture. I was also suited to the position because I was fast, graceful and had a good arm. But there was part of me who wanted to play center because that was Mickey’s position.

    In my sandlot career, there were two or three guys in the lineup who were better hitters than I was and they hit more home-runs, so typically I batted fifth. I liked this position because I was a better hitter with runners on base and I liked being in a position to drive in runs.  But when I played with other teams who weren’t as good, I batted third or even fourth. It sent shivers up my spine to see the line-up card with me batting third or fourth and playing center field. That was Mickey’s position in the batting order. A couple of times we had games in upper middle-class neighborhoods where the fields actually had announcers telling the fans the lineups. “Batting fourth, playing centerfield, Bruce Lerro”. I imagined I was at Yankee stadium and Bob Scheffing would announce the batting order. “Battling fourth, playing centerfield, Number 7, Mickey Mantle”, and the crowd would roar. No crowd roared for me, but my imagination did the rest.

    When I was growing up there was no free agency for the players. That meant that being traded from one team to another was rare. Whoever your favorite player was, you could count on them always being there, barring injuries. Good players could last between 10 and 20 years. Mickey’s career lasted about 17 years, which was the same duration as my interest in baseball as both a fan and a player. Both ended in 1969. To give you a sense of how the fans felt about Mickey, I shall share a link with you. About 15 minutes in, you will see Mel Allen’s introduction along with a standing ovation which lasted at least seven minutes.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z2HnZi0Ad-Y

    Sports celebrities were loved and hated by their fans and in New York the fans did not save their boos only for the opposing team.  When I would go to ballgames, I would boo some of the home team players. I would wait with my friends for the players after the game to see them come out. Two of my friends and I snooped around a hotel that we heard Mantle and Roger Maris were staying at in Queens. I knew the statistics of the players, which was good evidence for arguments about who was the best player. I watched the full ball games about three times a week and I would go in person to games, maybe once a month for six months. I cried when the Yankees lost the world series to the Braves in 1957 and celebrated when they won in 1958.

    Fortunately for me, I never got so carried away as some fans do. I remember in the 1993 World Series when Mitch Williams gave up a three-run homer to Joe Carter to end the series. He received numerous death threats from Philadelphia fans. I think that actually playing the game as a participant, and being relatively successful helped to ground me, but not completely.

    Application of theories of celebrity to sports

    Unlike movie stars and musicians, it is possible not to be charismatic and be a professional baseball player. Charisma is not a major factor that draws fans to a particular player. In addition, the Frankfurt School theory about celebrities being a form of social control for capitalists definitely has truth in relation to sports. Noam Chomsky famously puzzled over the fact that so many people in the United States were ignorant about politics, social class, and economics. Yet these same people could make very sophisticated comments about their favorite teams’ strategies and tactics, in addition to knowing the player’s batting average, runs batted in and homeruns. Sports is definitely a diversion.  Edgar Morin’s argument about the stars being a compensation for fan’s deadened lives also has merit. Many Americans are way out of physical shape, and a good case can be made that they are living vicariously through the well-trained magnificent specimens of working-class men. Again, the power of the mass media capitalists has done a great deal to spread sports. Like music, sports is on TV, the radio and in stadiums regularly. Sports’ stars for the most part do not fit into Klapp’s theory of social type. Sports writers attempt to categories players into “Good Joes”, “Rebels”, and other types in the hopes that this will make their fans read their articles. But the best fans know that the personalities of the players cannot be reduced to cartoon characters.

    Type of fan attachment to sports

    The level of my fan attachment was deeper in sports than it was with either music or movie stars. One reason for this was that I became relatively good for a non-professional participant. This deepened my appreciation of the players. Also, sports are much more continuous  and intense than the movie or music industry. The timing in the fields of both the hit movies or hit songs and who sings them is unpredictable. But in baseball you have predictability. You have six months straight to follow a team and your favorite players.  In addition to the self-identification and the mimicking, there were elements of projection in my involvement as a fan.

    I played hardball till I was 20 years old, which was pretty old to play if you aren’t going to do it professionally. Partly I did this because it was the only thing I was relatively good at, but partly because I was stupidly waiting to be discovered by scouts. Some adult should have read me the riot act and insisted that I cultivate other skills for future work. For whatever reasons, no one did. I don’t know if that would have mattered. I doubt I would have listened to anyone anyway. The following is an example of how being enthralled with sports and celebrities sidetracked my development as a worker.

    My last baseball game was at a softball game in 1998. It was a game between the faculty and the students at a liberal arts school where I had been teaching for seven years. We won the game 15-7. I hit a three-run home run and two three -run triples, driving in nine runs. The fact that I can still remember these numbers 23 years later says a great deal about how, for better and for worse, baseball has swept me away. I wasn’t star-struck, but I was pretty close. Below is a picture of me hitting a three-run triple in first inning of that game.

    Conclusion

    The purpose of this article is to give the reader an experiential sense of what it was like for me to be a celebrity fan in three different genres of movie stardom, music stardom and sports stardom. I began the article by arguing how celebrities are unique to industrial capitalist countries. I then make a key distinction between people who are famous and people who are celebrities. I then proceeded to describe my experience with three stars: James Dean (movies), Jerry Lee Lewis (music), and Mickey Mantle (sports). For each genre I described:

    • which theory of celebrity works best;
    • which of the four kinds of audience participant I was.

    I have made the argument that, for me, sports were the most powerful form of celebrity and why. But I also justify it by claiming that the consistency with which sports is played throughout the year makes it likely the most intense form of socialization for the population of the United States, should they choose to become a fan.

    • First published in Socialist Planning Beyond Capitalism

    The post The Joys and Sorrows of Being a Celebrity Fan: James Dean, Jerry Lee Lewis and Mickey Mantle first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • An American Landscape

    In 1943, Ansel Adams traveled to the base of the Sierra Nevada to photograph Manzanar—one of the ten internment camps that together detained 120,000 Japanese Americans during the Second World War.

    This post was originally published on Dissent MagazineDissent Magazine.

  • Lament of a Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio Yankee Fan

    Another World Series – the twelfth in a row – without the New York Yankees, the richest franchise in the Major Leagues. The reason for this fall of the once formidable Yankee baseball dynasty is not difficult to discern. It is inept, smug management starting with the 23-year reign of General Manager Brian Cashman, to the amiable but overwhelmed manager, Aaron Boone. Against other baseball managers, Mr. Boone is out of his league. Competitors with far less money – think Tampa Bay – have teams that have run circles around the Yankees with better, faster, younger talent and greater drive to win.

    Until recently, the Yankees’ management strategy has been self-defeating. For years they traded their minor league talent for over-the-hill, injury-prone MLB stars. Some trades worked out, but most loaded the Yankees’ treasury with huge financial obligations for very little return on the field. The result is that they strip-mined their farm teams and rejected the historic winning formula of growing their own talent that brought them 27 World Series championships until 2009. Joe DiMaggio, Yogi Berra, Derek Jeter, and scores of others made their way to the fabled stadium directly from Yankee Triple A teams.

    Although recently, the Yankees are respecting the importance of their farm team players – Aaron Judge is an example – their trading acumen is almost non-existent. Just this year, two players on the Boston Red Sox – Eovaldi and Whitlock – gave the Yankees fits. These former Yankees were traded to Boston for no talent in return.

    Moreover, the Yankees have been hobbled with so many injuries that their radio broadcasters, John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman started a regular Injury Report. True, it included players from other teams, but the Yankees seem to win that dubious race with missing games totals. Our LeagueOfFans.org has vainly tried to seek an explanation of this unprecedented injury epidemic but to no avail. Our letters have gone unanswered. (See: “When It Comes to Injuries MLB Teams Remain Clueless” A League of Fans Special Report).

    The Yankees have set another record. No baseball team announcers on radio have to narrate so many advertisements, not even close. Not only are these torrents of commercial pitches between innings and within innings of play, but I’ve heard ads by one announcer stashed inside the description of an ongoing play. Each significant move it seems – homers, calls to the bullpen, double plays, stolen bases are “brought to you” by some corporation. Kia brings you homers; Geico brings you change of pitchers. It is so irritating to listeners that one wonders why the advertisers pay top dollar to irritate the listeners and ruin their potential customers’ enjoyment of play on the field. No comment from the Yankees’ head office when such an inquiry was made.

    See our list of some leading irritating advertisers:

    1. Geico Insurance
    2. Barnes Law Firm
    3. Kia Auto Dealers
    4. “Drive-by Jeep”
    5. Mutual of America Financial Group
    6. Spectrum Mobile
    7. Nissan auto mfg.
    8. DuckDuckGo
    9. Centric Brakes
    10. Chock Full o’Nuts coffee
    11. Honda
    12. Hyundai
    13. Wendy’s
    14. Indian Point Nuke
    15. Audi

    The sports media seems to fall all over the Yankees. The post-game meeting between Aaron Boone and the reporters exhibits an all-time low in patsy questions. Here’s one: “How did you feel watching Stanton’s home run?” Never any criticism, challenge or revelation by these reporters clutching their pads and wondering why there is reduced coverage in the media of their submissions. (At the least, asking why Boone took out Domingo German, pitching a no-hitter with one out in the 8th inning after giving up a double with a lead of 4-0. German’s successor proceeded to give up five runs in a 5-4 loss. Afterwards, German told a reporter he was feeling stronger in the 8th than earlier in the game).

    The New York Times sports editors, infatuated with European soccer and its managerial jostlings off the field, cut back Major League Baseball coverage, with few exceptions, to a column of tiny print conveying scores and upcoming games. Forget the box-scores or the reporting on yesterday’s games. No time for the nation’s pastime for still millions of fans.

    What should fans do? Demand a changing of the guard by the Steinbrenner brothers whose father would not have tolerated such unsuitable management, quite apart from his public outbursts. The Yankees are not keeping up with the rising youthful talent on other teams, many of them spectacular Hispanic “super-stars” in their early twenties. Historically, Yankees also have been very tardy recruiting Black players and the team has lost out from that indifference.

    The biggest surprise in this saga of a fallen baseball empire has been the reticence and the passivity of the Yankee fans who made the Bronx cheer a mark of their displeasure from the stands. They have been given losing teams shaped by failing management that also overcharges their fans. From their homes, bars and vehicles, they are treated as advertisement bait with the play-by-play of the game as a secondary consideration by the Yankee profiteers.

    Gone are the days of Mel Allen when the ads were only between innings, when players suffered very few injuries despite inferior safety equipment and field conditions (as with no helmets, gloves or padding on the walls) and fans were more respected. Sure, there is now free agency for the players, but how about some relief and smart leadership from new management for the Fans, especially those bypassed lower-income aficionados.

    Fans of the Yankees, arouse, you have nothing to lose but your team’s losses as far as you can see.

    Image credit: Lou Gehrig, PBS

    The post Lament of a Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio Yankee Fan first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Reporter’s Alert: Part VI

    Reporters at major newspapers and magazines are hard to reach by telephone. Today it is increasingly hard to converse with them about timely scoops, leads, gaps in coverage, and corrections to published articles.

    We started an online webpage: Reporter’s Alert. From time to time, we use Reporter’s Alert to present suggestions for important reporting on topics that are either not covered or not covered thoroughly. Reporting that just nibbles on the periphery won’t attract much public attention or be noticed by decision-makers. Here is the sixth installment of suggestions:

    1. More states are recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ Day, giving rise to the need for a broad report on all the treaties tribal nations signed with the U.S. government that are still intact and that are still violated by the U.S. government. Recall for example, on Thursday July 9, 2020, the U.S. Supreme Court had occasion to recognize the Muscogee (Creek) Nation’s rights to the land in much of Tulsa and eastern Oklahoma as being part of their reservation. (See, https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/19pdf/18-9526_9okb.pdf). There will be fascinating revelations from a report on this topic.

    2. Numerous people have been asking me “What’s happened to all those lawsuits against Trump?” Trump has escaped the grips of the law for years, most recently the stalled civil justice (tort law) suits by several women claiming sexual assaults, by prosecutors in New York, Washington, D.C., and Georgia. Trump has even managed to escape, so far, depositions under oath, including one that Robert Mueller should have demanded. This is so remarkable that there should be a seminar at Harvard, Yale, and Georgetown Law Schools about how Trump has escaped, with all the ways his lawyers have shielded this serial outlaw from federal, state, and local laws.

    To make his escapes more current, since Trump is a clear-cut violator of criminal statutes, including the Hatch Act and the Anti-Deficiency statute, obstruction of justice, again and again, brazenly and openly, one might expect the Justice Department should be readying some law enforcement. See letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland recounting the DOJ’s avoidance of its duties vis-à-vis Trump’s sexual violations, thus demonstrating that Donald J. Trump is indeed repeatedly ABOVE THE LAW. Also remarkable is that this topic has to be suggested to the Fourth Estate as a major, comprehensive inquiry.

    3. State legislatures and governors in many states are using “pandemic” pretexts to eliminate rights and democratic procedures. In California, which has one of the more liberal legislatures, lawmakers are taking bills to the floor discarding past rules providing every bill have committee staff analysis and a legislative hearing with questions from legislators, and testimony from citizens. Assembly Bill 2167 is one such example, favoring the insurance industry. Imagine what more conservative state legislatures are doing. Also, the California State Assembly voted to allow votes on bills without members being present in the chamber, despite an opinion from the state’s legislative counsel that it likely violates the state Constitution.

    Governors, citing the pandemic, have issued dubious executive orders that let vendors in healthcare avoid the tort laws for their negligent (or worse) injuries to innocent persons. For reporters, the quest is to find out how widespread these strictures have become and how permanent.

    4. Sports injuries are more prevalent than ever before. Despite, more advanced knowledge, training, and self-care by athletes, professional teams are experiencing so many recurrent injuries that some sports announcers have started a regular “Injury Report” on sports radio. In baseball, injuries have become epidemic, when in the 1950s and 1960s they were quite rare. It is not a candidly discussed subject among the sports media and fans receive few if any explanations. The injury epidemic is so pronounced that the Yankees baseball radio announcer has started a daily Injury Report brought to you by an orthopedic practice ad in New York.

    Some reasons suggested are (1) the players are bigger, and (2) the play is more strenuous. In baseball, pitchers’ arms start getting strained in their teenage years, given the dreams about throwing 100 miles per hour fastballs in the major leagues. These days after every pitch announcers note what the mph was. Tommy John operations are numerous every year. With the ever-greater emphasis on home runs, players are becoming muscle-bound with added risks of straining a ligament. Certainly today, baseball professionals have better equipment – helmets, gloves, safer shoes, and they are protected by padded walls in the outfield. These advances prevent injuries, yet today’s players are placed on the injury list far more than those in the past. What with the many years of covering up concussions in football etc., it seems important to look into this broad area. (See, leagueoffans.org). Sports reporters take note!

    5. What’s happened to NASA? It has increasingly become an agency that outsources or contracts out, losing the technical and scientific capacity to better pay offers by the contractors. The brain drain is rampant: nearly 80% of NASA’s budget is contracted out. The Old NASA did far more things itself and kept its intellectual property close to the vest. NASA is now a shadow of itself, a trademark on press releases; so much so that it is losing control over policy and other matters to the contractors. A reporter should get copies of these contracts and see the extent of the multiple giveaways, corporate welfare, and undue influence taking the search all the way to congressional committees.

    P.S. Next week from October 22-23, 2021, corporate crime specialists from around the world will attend the symposium at Georgetown Law Center titled, Imagining a World Without Corporate Criminal Law (Register for the event here).

    The post Reporter’s Alert: Part VI first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Ralph Nader.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • A DIY Little League Story (we’d all be canceled today)

    Yours truly, at maybe age 6, in Long Island City High School schoolyard

    Growing up in a working-class, blue-collar neighborhood — long before there was an internet — often left kids like me to our own devices. We found myriad ways to amuse ourselves and also, to play sports. We were troublemakers, sure, but athletes above all. One time, however, it was my uncle who made the whole sports thing possible. That said, the story you’re about to read would be impossible in today’s world.

    My family was living on the fourth floor of a five-floor walk-up at the time. I was maybe 10 or 11. One flight down from us lived my maternal grandpa and his son, Bernard. To me and my cousins, he was (and still is) Uncle Butch. He got me into baseball at a very young age — including some awe-inspiring trips to Yankee Stadium. Upon returning home from serving in Vietnam, Uncle Butch decided he wanted to do more.

    He created a batch of hand-made signs and hung them all over the neighborhood. The basic idea was to invite local boys to meet at the P.S. 4 schoolyard that Saturday at 10:00 AM. Let’s pause and recap: A single man in his late 20s who was sharing an apartment with his father was asking young boys to meet him in a park at a time when few other people would be around. No one involved in this venture thought anything of it at the time… and I’m not sure if that’s a good or bad thing. 

    When me, my Dad, and Uncle Butch walked to the concrete baseball diamond at P.S. 4 that Saturday morning, we were astonished to see a park full of baseball glove-wielding boys ranging from 10 to about 12 years old. My eyes bulged when I noticed how many of the cool crowd was there. We all went to the same grammar school and, at the time, none of these dudes knew I was alive. They were wise asses, tough guys, and excellent athletes. I was more than a little scared to test myself against them but it all went smoothly.

    I should note that not a single parent showed up with their sons (except my father). To this day, it’s unclear if any of the other kids even told their parents where they were going so early on a day off from school. Uncle Butch didn’t bother with such details. There were no insurance forms or liability waivers. He didn’t even need to know anyone’s last name. What mattered at the moment was dividing the boys into two evenly matched squads and getting a game started as soon as possible. The boys had a blast. They appreciated my good-natured uncle but had fun razzing him, too. One boy, Danny (the son of a made man, btw) was the ringleader for the teasing but never took things too far. 

    That Monday at school, I was suddenly part of the in-crowd — and I’ve never looked back. In a bizarre way, my uncle’s impromptu baseball league gave me entry into the scene that made so many of my recent memoir-style articles possible. I went from shy, super-smart nerd to part of a wolf pack in the blink of an eye. With each passing Saturday, more boys showed up. The games got super competitive and Uncle Butch decided we needed a bigger field. One week, he spontaneously marched us all through the Queensbridge projects to River Park to play on a real field — dirt, grass, actual bases, and all that.

    Once again, societal “rules” were broken. Queensbridge was known as “dangerous” and no one would enter that turf unless they were looking for trouble. Here we were, a group of mostly white boys trusting the adult in charge, and guess what? It was fine. We ended up playing against some Queensbridge kids and sometimes returned to River Park to keep the rivalry going. In 2021, Uncle Butch would have probably been brought up on charges for some #woke offense! But there’s one more it-would-never-happen-today chapter to this story… and it involves The House That Ruth Built.

    Back in those days, Con Edison partnered with a non-profit called The Fresh Air Fund. Here’s their motto and mission: “Transforming Lives. One Summer at a Time. Since its founding in 1877, The Fresh Air Fund has provided life-changing summer experiences for children from New York City’s underserved communities.”

    Uncle Butch decided that we underserved youths needed some of the “fresh air” you’d find in the fabled Yankee Stadium bleachers. He contacted Con Ed, did all the paperwork, and got us a big batch of tickets for some unimaginably low cost (maybe 50 cents each?). So, there we went on another adventure that would be unthinkable today. My uncle and my Dad unofficially chaperoned about two dozen pre-teen punks on the long subway ride (complete with transfers) from Queens to the Bronx and back — for a night game no less! Yet again, I doubt most of the boys even bothered to tell their parents where they’d be that evening. We had the time of our lives, I further bonded with my new friends, and everyone made it home in one piece. 

    Here’s to breaking rules and to defying societal conventions in the name of creating some community on your own terms.

    The post A DIY Little League Story (we’d all be canceled today) first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Baseball Strikes Out

    In the early 2000s, rampant steroid use across Major League Baseball became the biggest scandal in the sport’s history. But fans didn’t want to hear the difficult truth about their heroes – and the league didn’t want to intervene and clean up a mess it helped make. 

    We look back at how the scandal unraveled with our colleagues from the podcast Crushed from Religion of Sports and PRX. Their show revisits the steroid era to untangle its truth from the many myths, examine the legacy of baseball’s so-called steroid era and explore what it tells us about sports culture in America.

    We start during the 1998 MLB season, when the home run race was on. Superstar sluggers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa battled to set a new single-season record, and McGwire, the St. Louis Cardinals first baseman, was portrayed as the hero baseball needed: part humble, wholesome, working man and part action hero, with his brawny build and enormous biceps. So when a reporter spotted a suspicious bottle of pills in his locker in the middle of the season, most fans plugged their ears and refused to acknowledge that baseball might be hooked on steroids.

    Joan Niesen, a sportswriter and host of the podcast Crushed, takes us on a deep dive into an era that dethroned a generation of superstars, left fans disillusioned and turned baseball’s record book on its head. The story takes us from ballparks and clubhouses to the halls of Congress to explain how baseball was finally forced to reckon with its drug problem.

    This post was originally published on Reveal.

  • Minor League Pay

    From the Frisco RoughRiders to the Dayton Dragons, minor league baseball teams are a classic American tradition. But their players are not covered by some classic American laws: Players can earn less than the equivalent of minimum wage and don’t get paid overtime.

    We explore how that’s even possible with the podcast The Uncertain Hour from our colleagues at Marketplace. This season, they’re looking at how certain companies – and whole industries – maneuver around basic worker protections.


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    This post was originally published on Reveal.