What if, baseball version

I just finished reading "The End of Baseball," an interesting baseball novel. There always have been stories about how Bill Veeck planned to integrate the 1944 Philadelphia Phillies in large numbers and take on the rest of the National League. The novel speculates how that move would have worked out.

I saw my friend Tim Wendel's name in the credits at the end of the book. He asked me what else might make for a good novel in baseball history along those lines. I came up with this plot line while running; all I need now is someone to help write the thing. It starts, naturally, with a true story.

Jackie Robinson was just finishing up a tryout in Fenway Park in front of some Red Sox scouts in 1945. Even though he had put on an impressive show, lining hits off every corner of the ball park, owner Tom Yawkey had told his employees in profane terms to get him off the field. And then Yawkey went to his office and had a drink or four. He knew Robinson represented the future of baseball in some way, and the South Carolina native didn't like it one bit.

It was opportune timing then, when one of Boston's most well-known figures paid a visit to the office that night. Yawkey started complaining about the state of baseball, and the visitor said, "Well, why don't you sell the team to me?" And an intoxicated Yawkey signed an agreement to do just that, which is how Joseph Kennedy came to buy the Red Sox that day in 1945. Kennedy thought it would go over well with wife Rose, whose father, John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, was mayor of Boston during the Red Sox's big years in the 1910's. Besides, as Joe put it, "I got a son coming out of the Navy soon, and he needs something to do."

With John F. Kennedy installed as club president, the Red Sox signed Robinson as well as Sam Jethroe quickly and cleaned house. Anyone who didn't want to work for the integrated team was sent packing. It turned out that list included the player-manager, Joe Cronin. While managers were a dime a dozen, the Red Sox did have a great shortstop waiting in the wings. Pee Wee Reese was already in the organization, although Cronin had seen him as a threat and advocated dumping him to another team. Reese stayed and thrived. As for the manager, well, Casey Stengel had been a popular manager with the Boston Braves for six years. Maybe he could do better if he had just a little more talent.

The Red Sox, armed with Robinson and returning veterans from the war, won the pennant in 1946. And 1948, and 1949. Not only were they a good team, they were good copy as well. Robinson provided endless fodder for the toughest newspaper town in America. Ted Williams quickly adopted Robinson as a virtual brother, and the two of them attracted crowds wherever they went. What with Robinson, Williams, Reese, Dom DiMaggio, and Bobby Doerr, it was a thrilling team to watch. Kennedy was quickly dubbed the boy wonder of baseball, putting together a dynamic team at such a young age.

But while the Red Sox had enough pitching to win three pennants, they never could win the World Series. The Brooklyn Dodgers kept getting in the way, as Branch Rickey had followed the Red Sox lead and scooped up some of the best black talent in the business. Roger Kahn, the beat writer of the Boston Globe, called the Red Sox team "The Boys of Summer," and the description stuck.

In 1951, the Red Sox dominated the league from start to finish, leaving the Yankees and the rest of the league in their wake. Most of the attention was on the National League, as the Giants blew a 13 1/2 game lead to the Dodgers and lost the pennant in the third game of the best-of-three playoff on an unlikely homer by Johnny Pesky, who was traded by the Red Sox to make room for Robinson. Pesky's homer wrapped around the foul pole in Ebbets Field, which was forever known after that as the Pesky Pole. "The Dodgers win the pennant!!" Red Barber told his listeners in Brooklyn.

The Dodgers, though, were too exhausted to do much in the Series, though, and the Red Sox won in five games. Watching the clincher were a certain Mr. and Mrs. Dan Shaughnessy; the wife was pregnant with a young son who would become Dan Jr., who later became well-known for his lyrical, romantic books about that baseball era and kept that lack of cynicism throughout his literary career.

There was quite a party in Boston after that, as you could imagine. The Curse of the Bambino had been lifted after 33 long years. Williams went off to Korea to fight there. Robinson retired after a couple of more years, as did Stengel. DiMaggio made it to the Hall of Fame, right next to brother Joe.

As for the Red Sox team president, John Kennedy never really liked baseball all that much anyway. He retired right after winning the World Series in '51, and ran for Senator in 1952. He stressed civil rights in his platform. You know how the story goes from there.

Ma Chase

(What started out as a simple blog entry concerning the passing of Marjorie Chase turned into a eulogy a few minutes before the memorial service began. I was honored to be asked to speak. I thought you'd like to learn more about a remarkable woman.)

There's only one person I've ever called "Mom" over the years, not counting my real mother. That would be Marge Chase. Over the last couple of decades, when I'd call her up at home for one reason for another, I'd always say "Hi, Mom" when she answered, and she'd always reply, "How are you doing, Sonny boy?"

Ma Chase and I went way back. She remembered the start better than I did. Ma said to son Kevin at a Clarence basketball game one night in 1973, "Who is the guy walking around with a tape recorder?" That would be me, practicing for some sort of career in journalism. I believe Kevin was ordered to make an introduction that night.

I probably made my first visit to Clarence Center shortly after that. I always felt comfortable whenever I dropped by. Husband John, by acclimation the nicest guy on earth, and Marge always seemed to welcome the company. They were genuinely interested in what Kevin's friends were doing, as opposed to merely tolerating the kids like most of the other parents did.

Ma Chase worked on the schools' board of education for many years, rising to president at one point. While she didn't personally hand me my diploma, I remember the way she asked me a string of questions about my educational experience after I had graduated. I think I was the only graduate that year to receive an exit interview. It was nice to have my opinion taken so seriously at the age of 17.

Once Kevin went off to college, the number of visits to the Long St. address started to drop off. First they were limited to holidays and summer vacations. Then as Kevin settled down in Connecticut, I'd only see him on Long St. once or twice a year ... but I stopped by every so often anyway, just to get a friendly greeting from the Chases and perhaps consume one of Ma Chase's famous Mexican sundaes.

One visit in particular stands out. Two friends and I dropped by to say hello, and Mr. and Mrs. Chase were entertaining the Burkes. Mr. Burke had just been named the President of American Steamship, I believe. Some would have politely chased us away. Some would have had us stay a while. Only Ma Chase would order us into the den and have us write a musical tribute to Mr. Burke's promotion. I believe the first two lines were, "God bless our President, he's king of steam." We all were given a couple of beers for our efforts, which probably was more than the song and our singing deserved.

John passed away about 11 years ago, but there was no worry that Marge would be lonely from that point. She had a huge network of friends in Clarence. Indeed, she often told you what they were doing ... if you knew them or not. Ma certainly had a more active social life than almost anyone I knew. We'd exchange post cards from our trips, and I think she sent more than she received.

In the past eight years, my most important role in her life was that of providing free technical support for computer problems. Kevin gave her a desktop around 2001, and she took to it quite well. It was another way to keep up with everyone from friends around town to grandchildren. When something went wrong, I got a frantic call from her, saying she had been on the phone for an hour with someone from Dell and couldn't solve the problem. Usually the problem was a simple one, making me look smart when I fixed it in 10 minutes. Based on her experience, she thought that if this journalism gig didn't work out for me, there would always be a job waiting in the computer service business.

My favorite story about Ma Chase came fairly recently. I was working at the newspaper earlier this year when I heard about a plane crash in Clarence Center. I called her at about 11:30 at night and she answered the phone -- that old rotary phone in the kitchen was still working -- and said she was all right. I asked her if she had called Kevin in Connecticut to tell him she was fine. She said no, it was kind of late and he'd be sleeping. After I hung up, I asked myself, "How close does a plane have to crash before she would call Kevin to let him know she was O.K.?" When I asked Kevin that question the next morning, he said he wasn't sure where the line was -- whether it was Erie County, or Clarence, or Clarence Center -- but he was pretty sure Long Street was within that radius.

Ma had a massive stroke on Wednesday morning, and she was taken off life support and died on Wednesday night. It was a peaceful, quick ending; we all should be so lucky. I have no doubt that she would have been the most miserable physical therapy patient around. As another of Kevin's close friends, Glenn Locke, said, when you've lived independently until the age of 90, you don't go asking for a do-over. And when Kevin and I drove past the cemetery in Clarence Center where John is buried late Wednesday night, I said, "John, don't expect to do any talking until about, oh, May. Marge has a lot to tell you about."

It's difficult to sum up Ma Chase in a word or two. Energetic? Dynamo? Force of nature? The best way might be to do it this way: Most of your friends' parents over the years are merely your friends' parents. Ma Chase became a friend, period. We celebrate a life well spent.

Marjorie Chase's obituary can be read here.

Auto-Tune the News

My thanks to Greg Connors for finding this series on You Tube; I decided to take this one:



You can find others with a simple search.

Old Time Radio

A few weeks ago, I was talking to someone from the Buffalo Broadcasters Association about a story. The group tries to preserve the area's broadcast history; it has a Hall of Fame induction dinner every year, and is currently trying to save some television news film from the Sixties and Seventies.

He made a remark that has stuck with me a bit. He said that no one wants to be in radio anymore.

And that's something of a shame.

Ever get an old-timer going on the magic of the radio? The role of imagination for the listener? The thrill of hearing a great song on the air for the first time?

Radio has gone through a few phases over the years. When it first became a commercial product in 1920 (many of our readers no doubt stayed up late to hear the Harding-Cox election returns on KDKA in Pittsburgh that year), it quickly became an important part of daily life. I guess it resembled network television in its mixture of entertainment and news.

When television came along for good in the Fifties, radio had to adapt. And it did so brilliantly, catching the wave of the music revolution that was just coming in. The disk jockeys seemed hip, and the music they played seemed to explode out of the speakers of your car radio or of that "tiny" transistor radio you carried everywhere.

But Top Forty radio essentially blew up in the early 1980's. The idea of everyone listening to the same music -- more or less -- became antiquated, and the audience fractured into several pieces.

The landscape today isn't so pretty. AM radio is mostly news/talk, with callers and hosts providing more heat than light (in Bob Costas' phrase). The news aspect of the business is disappearing quickly, except in cities big enough to support an all-news operation. Over on FM, music is still played, but most people can only stand the format of a station or two. And overshadowing it all is the relentless cost-cutting of station ownership, which has brought satellite programming to many stations and thus eliminating any local flavor entirely.

Someone once told me in the mid-1980's that anyone who could get out of radio did so by the time they were 30. There are a few mature voices still on the air, thankfully, but they are difficult to find.

I still listen to the radio in the car. A local alt-rock station keeps me a little bit current on music, and a baseball game at night still sounds good while driving. But I do wonder if radio will have a third act of relevance in the near future.

Way back when

I just finished reading a book on the 1912 World Series (check out the review here), so the pre-1920 baseball days are on my mind. Then today, I stumbled on a link (thank you, Buster Olney of ESPN) to some video of that same era:



I thought it was pretty entertaining to see footage of the 1919 World Series. You wouldn't know the games were fixed.

The Decline and Fall

Every once in a while, Sports Illustrated comes through with an unusual article that demands to be read.

Such was the case this week, when it had a story on that great American institution, the baseball card.

It seems business is less than booming in the card business. Shops have been closing across the country for years, and interest is dropping in the same proportion.

It's pretty easy to easy to determine the problem: greed.

Way back in the 1980's, Topps lost its monopoly rights to baseball cards, which because of a variety of factors but mostly tradition is the only type of card that has really mattered to most. Other companies such as Fleer, Donruss, Score and Upper Deck jumped into the card business. So after 30 years of needing to buy one set of cards per year (if you tried to buy the cards through packs, it took about 400 nickel packs and your teeth were ruined by the enclosed bubble gum in the process), suddenly a collector needed three or four full sets a year.

Then came the extra sets -- speciality sets, traded sets, minor league sets, Olympic sets, etc. And card values became closely watched, printed every place but in the Wall Street Journal. The concept of a 12-year-old as a day trader became commonplace.

Sure enough, with billions of cards printed every year, the bubble inevitably burst. (See tulips, comma, Holland in 1624.) No one could collect all the cards, so many stopped buying any. That's where we are today, with Michael Eisner, of all people, hoping to guide Topps back into its traditional place in the market.

There's still a soft spot in my heart for those pictures and statistics on cardboard. I used to own more baseball cards than anyone you knew back in the 1960's, pestering my parents for a dime every time we visited a store that sold them. The card shown above is Carl Yastrzemski's rookie card in 1960, even though he didn't reach the majors until 1961. (Yaz just turned 70; happy birthday to my favorite player as a kid.)

By the time I was 11 I had gotten smart and bought sets. Yes, they'd be worth plenty in mint condition now, but there was no good way to store them back then and they mostly were thrown into a big box with a few thousand other cards. You can guess about the crease damage.

Then in the early 1980's, nostalgia washed over me and I started buying sets again. They had invented plastic sheets and specifically shaped cardboard boxes for storage at that point, so I stocked up. After some years, though, I sold off some of them when the opportunity came -- mostly on eBay. Then a few years ago, I looked in my upstairs closet and said, "Would I rather have these pieces of cardboard, or a new set of irons?" My golf game won; I got $600 for most of the cards. I made some money but hardly got rich.

I still saved a couple of sets from the early 1970's, though. They aren't in great shape so they aren't worth much, but it's still fun to look them over once in a great while. Seeing them is a throwback to a simpler time in my life, and in America's.

Just another reason to hate the Yankees...

You put a Yankee uniform on someone, and they start acting badly. Even if they are the coach of eight-year-olds.

That's the morale of the video clip presented here:



For more on the story, click here.