This is a short post, to break up the gloom of the Holocaust series, but on a subject near and dear to my heart….baseball.
After all, this week is Opening Day. My two favorite teams go into action on Thursday, March 28: the Giants in San Diego, with Blake Snell, the Yankees in Houston without Gerrit Cole, but with rental Juan Soto. The Yanks open at home on Friday, April 5, against the Toronto Blue Jays, and I will be there to belt out both national anthems, purchase my souvenir hat and t-shirt, and exhort the Bronx Bombers on to victory.
I’m hoping that Ruppert the Red-Tailed Hawk, who stood guard on flagpoles and foul poles to deal with pigeons and rats, makes his return.
I got a note from an angry reader, who used an obscenity to tell me that I had no business writing about the Holocaust when the Israelis are practicing genocide in Gaza. He blocked me, of course, being a coward, so he will never find out my view of his opinion and him.
On the opinion: first, Hamas started this by killing 1,500 Israelis and kidnapping 130 more as hostages. Second, they are very sharp at playing political cards, as they knew that they would play the “provocative bully” game from middle school. Those folks push and nudge their target into a rage so that he throws the magical “first punch.” Then the bullies stomp the victim senseless. When the assistant principal arrives on the scene, he asks, “Who threw the first punch?” The bullies point at the bleeding hulk on the floor, and the bleeding hulk draws the suspension. The bullies get a win-win and give each other high-fives. Third, while the Israeli leadership of theocrats doesn’t have the good sense God gave squirrels, they are trying to prevent further attacks on their soil. The United States went to extreme measures on that subject 80 years ago. It was called the “atomic bomb.” Fourth, as I say, while the Israeli theocrats are not my first choice to run that nation, unlike the Nazis they are being compared to, their leadership did not sit down in a conference room in a mansion, where the leader said, “We have a storage problem in our concentration camps,” and “There are 12 (or whatever number) million Arabs living in the world today. The ‘Final Solution’ will ‘re-settle’ them all. From Vladivostok to Dublin, not a one. The Nazis did just that.
And I will go back to that subject next week.
But for now…baseball and the Bloated Yam.
I saw the Bloated Yam’s Dayton, Ohio, rally highlights on the Lincoln Project. It was his speech before the Ohio Primary. He was as wacky, demented, and scary as ever.
Among his bizarre apercus was calling for the Cleveland Guardians baseball team to revert to their old name of Cleveland Indians.
They took up the new name after the George Floyd horror and after decades of pressure from Native Americans, who heartily disliked both the name and their mascot, “Chief Wahoo.”
Chief Wahoo was and is a smiling Native American with red skin and a face that is clearly offensive to Native Americans and many other folk.
As a decent guy, I saw their point. As a third-generation baseball fan, I admired how Chief Wahoo could maintain his toothy grin in the face of the often appalling and sometimes hilarious stream of disasters that defines the history of the team — they have not won a World Series since 1948, and fell in 2016 in seven games to an even more cursed team: the Chicago Cubs.
Some of their failures:
1920: Star shortstop Ray Chapman comes to bat against Yankee pitcher Carl Mays in New York’s Polo Grounds. My grandfather is present. Mays fires an underhand (style) pitch at Chapman. The ball is filthy from endless use. Chapman can’t see it. It slams into his cheek.
Chapman staggers out of the box to “take his base,” and falls down on the first-base line. His teammates and trainer leap to his side. The guy with the megaphone asks “Is there a doctor in the house?” Three doctors are and run onto the field. Chapman begs to have his wedding ring (in the clubhouse locker) placed on his ring finger, and a teammate does so. He dies en route to the hospital. His eight-month pregnant wife is devastated. She dies a number of years later. Their daughter dies right after that.
The incident likely kept Carl Mays out of the Hall of Fame.
1926: Former Boston Red Sox pitching star Dutch Leonard accuses Indians playing manager and Detroit Tigers playing manager of conspiring with pitcher-turned-outfielder Smokey Joe Wood to fix games in the late 1920 season, so that the Indians finish second. Leonard also accused the trio of getting profitable bets down on the games.
Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis — named for a Civil War battle — orders both fired from their jobs, or face banishment. They resign to avoid that. However, next year, Cobb surfaces with the Philadelphia Athletics and Speaker with the Washington Senators. Both finish their careers with those teams and go to Cooperstown when the Hall of Fame is opened.
1954: The Indians win an American League record 111 games, breaking the Yankee streak of five consecutive World Series appearances and wins, and face Leo Durocher’s New York Giants in the World Series. In the first game, Willie Mays makes “The Catch,” which “seemed to have been an optical illusion to everyone watching,” and Dusty Rhodes hit a pinch-hit home run that won the contest in extra innings. Their energy sucked out of them, the Tribe lost the Series to the Giants in four straight.
1957: Yankee shortstop Gil McDougald lashes a line drive right into the face of Indian pitching ace Herb Score, ending his great career before it starts. Score never recovers, and becomes a broadcaster. A devastated McDougald retires early.
1959: The Indians trade fan favorite, slugger Rocky Colavito. Disaster ensues. When they get him back, his career is nearly over.
1960s: Sam McDowell becomes the ace of the staff. He promptly dominates the American League with his high heat and drinks his way through the league. Unable to cope with his alcohol addiction, they trade him to the San Francisco Giants in despair.
1960s: Outfielder Walter Bond slugs home runs in all directions, but is wound tighter than a clock. One night in Municipal Stadium, he asks Yankee pitcher Steve Hamilton to hurl his “folly floater” at him. Hamilton does. Bond swings and misses. Hilarity ensues, especially when Bond crawls back to the Tribe dugout. Things are less funny after the game, when Bond tries to kill himself, ending his baseball career.
1970: Catcher Ray Fosse is named to the All-Star team. In a play at the plate, Pete Rose charges into Fosse, knocking the ball out of the catcher’s hands and breaking most of his bones. Fosse’s career never recovers.
1974: Frank Robinson becomes the first African-American manager in baseball, leading the Indians. He posts a slightly sub-.500 record that year, getting into arguments with his pitcher, Gaylord Perry (who has to be traded), and posting a batting order with two different lineups. Next year, in an exhibition game with the Tribe’s Triple A Club, the Toledo Mud Hens, Robinson gets into an argument with the Mud Hens’ pitcher and charges the mound. That’s all for Robinson.
1975: Star first baseman Andre Thornton’s wife and daughter are the fatal victims in a car crash that leaves him injured.
1970s: Ace pitcher Dennis Eckersley fires a no-hitter, turns into a drunk, and does not realize that his best friend, Rick Manning, is having an affair with Mrs. Eckersley. To add to the insanity, the Indians cut Manning’s salary too much after a sub-par year. Under the rules, that makes Manning a free agent. Manning’s agent alertly whips out a negotiating pistol and pen and forces the Tribe to give him a massive raise. Manning goes out and doesn’t earn it. However, the Indians trade Eckersley to the Red Sox for four players who do very little for the Tribe. Eckersley gets an intervention on his alcoholism, divorces his adulterous wife, finds a new one, and goes to the Hall of Fame as a superb reliever.
1980: The colorful Joe Charboneau smacks home runs in all directions, becomes a hero, and the subject of an instant biography. Next season, he can’t hit water if he falls out of a boat. He re-surfaces in a cameo in “The Natural,” and never achieves the hype.
1981: The All-Star Game is set for Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium! It’s delayed two months by the baseball players’ strike.
1983: After telling his players they need to tighten their focus on the field, first baseman Mike Hargrove assumes that the second out of the inning is the third out of a double play, and leads the players off the field.
1993: Indians ace pitchers Steve Olin and Tim Crews are killed when they drive their boat into a pier in Florida, during spring training. Crews, a new acquisition from the Los Angeles Dodgers, never fires a pitch in a regular season game for his new team.
1997: The Indians lose the World Series to the expansion Miami Marlins in seven games on sloppy defense in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game Seven.
2016: The Indians lose the World Series to the Chicago Cubs — who have not won a World Series since 1908 — in seven games.
So I see Chief Wahoo and say: “Why is this man smiling?”
Anyway, the Bloated Yam promises to revert the Guardians to the Indians.
That, more than his other routine nonsense, caught my attention. I’ve heard his lies, egomania, dementia, self-absorption, and narcissism all before.
But re-naming a baseball team? The Cleveland Guardians?
How’s he going to do that? Tell a private corporation how to run its business?
Send a dozen Proud Boys to the Guardians’ offices in Cleveland to seize the cashbox in a coup d’etat?
Well, I think that’s likely the case. We’ve all seen the Bloated Yam’s free-floating fury at everything that does not go his personal way, and we know that he intends to run the United States as an extension of the Trump Organization. Our alliances will become protection rackets. Our civil service employees and system will be replaced by obedient loyalists. He has told us he will “tear up” the Constitution.
Many of his supporters feel the same way. The only portion of the Constitution that interests them is the Second Amendment. Certainly not the First, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, or Eighth. Or the 13th, 14th, 15th, or 19th. They don’t know what the Third says and are very glad the 18th was repealed.
The only time these clowns are interested in any Amendment outside the Second is when THEY get arrested for storming the US Capitol. Then they stand on their Constitutional rights, including the Third Amendment.
That’s the one that bars quartering troops in private homes, by the way. The closest we ever had to case on it was during the New York State Prison guards’ strike. Governor Hugh Carey ordered the State National Guard to replace the guards for the duration of the work stoppage, and put them up in the guards’ barracks in the prisons. The union filed suit on Third Amendment grounds. The court noted that the barracks were not “homes” in the traditional sense, but state property in the first place. The whole nonsense ended when the strike was settled.
Anyway, there’s no doubt in my mind that the Bloated Yam will use his increased powers to address this important issue…his base will demand it.
It makes you wonder what other team names he’ll change…maybe the Washington Commanders NFL franchise will become the “Redskins” again, for example. And all those other high school and college teams that use Native American symbols and mascots. University of Mississippi might bring back Colonel Rebel in his planter’s uniform and Stars and Bars flag.
Doubtless he’ll go further: restoring Confederate-style state flags, Confederate monuments that were moved to private property, and remove those of Civil Rights figures.
We already know that he wants American history taught as it was even when I was growing up, with textbooks that gave the story as a procession of inevitabilities in which the good guys — invariably bearded white men — won every time. That only succeeded in boring students and making them cynical about the whole exercise.
Just to make life annoying, my high school final examination in the whole subject of history was about my rights and responsibilities as an American citizen and the system of federal government.
Nothing in there about the two World Wars (and one World Cup) in which the British defeated Germany, the Tulsa Massacres, the US rigging elections in the Caribbean, the Sand Creek Massacre, Helen Keller being a Communist who denounced capitalism for child labor and kids dying in horrific industrial accidents, Warren Harding joining the Klan, “The Lost Cause” deserving to be lost, or how Andrew Jackson was a genocidal maniac who hated paper money (so why is he on the $20?).
I wrote my final essay on how the duties of American citizens were to cheer the President, vote for the local political machine’s chosen candidate (several times a day, if necessary), support large corporations and their vicious anti-environmental and union-busting tactics, applaud the CIA’s coup attempts in democratically-elected nations (Iran and Chile), accept conscription without question, go off to fight that stupid war, and, if ordered machine-gun civilians and the nun leading them in protest.
Oh, and the fascist principal should be appointed Chancellor of the Board of Education.
I got a 97 on the test anyway. Everybody there saw my sarcasm, and knew that I could rattle off the details of the fall of Singapore at 3 a.m. from memory.
So it doesn’t surprise me that the Bloated Yam wants to continue the march to the past, and re-name Cleveland’s baseball team. That issue is a lot more important to him and his followers than the manifold personal, political, and national crimes he’s committed. More important than the lies he’s told, most notably turning traitors who stormed the US Capitol into revolutionary heroes.
Eventually January 6 will be “Heroes Day,” and the veterans of that event will be feted in their home towns, unveiling gigantic and realistic statues honoring them for their valor in storming the Capitol.
“Who controls the present, controls the past. Who controls the past, controls the future,” George Orwell wrote, and he isn’t wrong.
As for the Cleveland baseball team and our Native Americans, they’re going to once again be the subjects of opprobrium. It only took 100 years of that little affair on the Greasy Grass in Montana to go from being “Custer’s Last Stand” to the “Battle of the Little Bighorn.”
During that century, a ghastly painting that was viewed by more lowbrows than art critics hung in every bar in America, depicting Old Yellow Hair (the Sioux name for Custer), in his doe skins, as the last man standing as those dreadful Injuns wiped out the 7th Cavalry. I don’t know if those paintings are gone now, but I can’t see them hanging in more modern watering holes.
Now it’ll be back, along with heaps and heaps of other lies.
However, I do wonder what the Bloated Yam will do if the Cleveland Indians finally break “The Curse of Rocky Colavito” and finally win a World Series.
HE'S A ROTTEN SLAB OF PUTREFIED BLUBBER. DON'T INSULT A YAM~
I HAPPENED TO LIKE YAMS. TO ME HE'S JUST A ROTTEN SLAB OF BLUBBER.