This article first appeared in Talking Writing on June 9, 2011.

By Jeremiah Horrigan

“If the Mets can win the World Series, the United States can get out of Vietnam.”
      — New York Mets pitcher  Tom Seaver

Some still call it the National Pastime, but I’d say baseball is something closer to the National Religion. That revelation came to me after a few hours spent poring over a summertime favorite of mine: a 500-plus-page tome called “Baseball’s Greatest Quotations,” by Paul Dickson. It’s become a catechism of the game for me — a pain-free, smile-inducing way to rediscover a love of baseball I hardly knew I had.

Like other religions, baseball has seen better days. It’s under siege, even on the sports pages, which sometimes read more like the financial pages these days. Or the police blotter, with headlines about grand juries, not grand slams.

Make a pilgrimage to one of baseball’s storied cathedrals, and you’ll find that corporate grandees have paid far more than most of us can earn in a lifetime to secure the pews with the best sight lines. And then there’s the six bucks you’ll pay for a cup of baseball’s holy water: body-temperature beer.

Do I sound like a believer? A defender of the faith? I’m not. I grew up in the ‘50s and ‘60s and hated playing baseball more than doing long division. More even than mowing the grass.

But baseball was the faith of my father and his father before him, although both men saved room in their hard-working lives for the more traditional forms of worship.

Over the years, I’ve argued with and turned my back on both types of religion, but I know I’ll never completely say goodbye to either. Nor do I really want to. Both are too tightly entangled — for good and ill — in a remembered time that gives me great pleasure.

Which is why “Baseball’s Greatest Quotations” is sitting, Gideon-like, beside me on a hotel nightstand as I write these words during a weekend vacation. No longer in danger of being struck out, chosen last, or beaned by one of Tommy Corcoran’s famous fastballs; no longer forced to learn humiliating life lessons by shagging grounders or losing pop flies in the hot summer sun; in short, no longer having to practice the religion all the other guys loved so much, I find one of my greatest summertime pleasures to be this: reveling in the words of baseball’s most notorious characters.

An extremely partial and necessarily random list of these characters — whose nicknames even Damon Runyon couldn’t improve upon — would include Jim “Baby Cakes” Palmer, Kenny “The Incredible Heap” Kaiser, “Marvelous” Marv Throneberry, “Say Hey” Willie Mays, and Enos “Country” Slaughter.

These names are but the wispiest helix of baseball’s indestructible DNA, as evidenced by the book’s subtitle: “From Walt Whitman to Dizzy Dean, Garrison Keillor to Woody Allen, a treasury of more than 5,000 quotations plus historical lore, notes, and illustrations.”

The book is a century-spanning sampler of mots both bon and not-so-bon, requiring no great familiarity with the quotees or the particulars of the game. Its appeal is, quite simply, nostalgic, hearkening back to the storied “simpler times” that all nostalgia encompasses. And you needn’t have lived in those times to delight in them.

You want simplicity? Here’s the great DiMaggio, looking back on his first days in the majors: “I can remember a reporter asking for a quote. I didn’t know what a quote was. I thought it was some kind of a soft drink.”

Keep in mind that the gifted rube who said those words went on to marry Marilyn Monroe.

You want some more? Here are a very few of the choicest bits:

• “You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat.” — author Roger Kahn.
• “No, why should I?” — pitcher Don Larsen, when asked if he ever got tired of speaking about his World Series perfect game.
• “Finley is a self-made man who worships his creator.” — sportswriter Jim Murray, describing A’s club owner Charlie Finley.
• “If the Mets can win the World Series, the United States can get out of Vietnam.” — New York Mets pitcher Tom Seaver, circa 1969.

I could go on, but, as the great A. J. Liebling would have said, it would explode me.

The ultimate baseball quote belongs to Philip Roth (whose best and funniest work, “The Great American Novel”, is a baseball saga, natch). Here’s his description of what baseball meant to him as a kid growing up in New Jersey, a gem plucked by Dickson from the pages of The New York Times, circa 1973: “… baseball — with its lore and legends, its cultural power, its seasonal associations, its native authenticity, its simple rules and transparent strategies, its longeurs and thrills, its spaciousness, its suspensefulness, its heroics, its nuances, its lingo, its ‘characters,’ its peculiarly hypnotic tedium, its mythic transformation of the immediate — was the literature of my boyhood.

“Literature of my boyhood.” Wish I’d said that. But I’ll stick with my religious metaphor and recommend Dickson’s book to true believers and old apostates everywhere.

And, don’t forget, if memories of that centerfield sun get to be too much for you, quench that thirst with an ice-cold can of Quote — the drink of champions!

• Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, by Paul Dickson, published by HarperResource, January 1991 (revised edition published by Collins Reference, September 2008).            

By Bob Gaydos

Alex Rodriguez … why?

I woke up the other morning with a tantalizing thought: Why do people who don’t have to cheat, cheat? I later posed the question to some friends and much of this column is the result of one such conversation.

It seems I had been dreaming about Alex Rodriguez and all the other steroid/performance-enhancing drug users in major league baseball, but apparently mostly about A-Rod, given the question that greeted my morning. Among other things, this tells me I have had it with the juicers. Especially A-Rod.

I’m a lifetime baseball fan, grew up playing it, loving it. Framed baseball cards of Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle share a spot on my bedroom wall. Willie was the best, in my view, Mickey second best, probably because he wrecked his legs early in his career. Mickey was a well-known juicer, but it was booze, not steroids he ingested. No way it improved his performance on the field.

They did not cheat. Alex Rodriguez came to the majors leagues at 19. Many touted him as a can’t miss superstar. He did not disappoint. His numbers — baseball, if anything, is a game that reveres numbers — started good and  steadily improved. If he stayed healthy, baseball people started to say, he would surpass all the batting records of Ruth and Aaron. Just keep doing what he was doing, and stay healthy.

A-Rod hasn’t been healthy the past couple of years with the Yankees. His body seems to be breaking down, a symptom of, among other things, steroid abuse. So I asked myself: Why? He was already the highest paid player in the game, with a guaranteed contract worth close to $300 million. Surely, even in an era of more, more, more, money could not be the goal. He was regarded by many, if not most, as the best in the game. He would assuredly be the game’s all-time homerun hitter if he stayed healthy. Why would he feel the need to cheat?

I can understand why other, lesser, players might have felt they needed to use steroids or other substances to improve their performances. Major league ballplayers are paid extremely well. Overpaid, in truth. Bigger numbers bring bigger paychecks. So a Sammy Sosa or Mark McGwire had plenty to gain by cheating. Players of lesser skills could guarantee a career in the majors, well-paid and pampered, so long as they could live with themselves and the knowledge that they were cheating and most of their teammates were not.

Now, understanding why players cheat is not the same as condoning it. Those who used steroids or growth hormones have created an indelible stain on the game. They have left a cloud of doubt over every player who has followed the rules (and who, incidentally, said nothing about the cheaters for many years, thereby enabling the abuse.) The juicers have also made a shambles of the game’s reverence for numbers. Whose numbers count? Whose are juiced? The questions are not so easily answered today.

Back to A-Rod. The questions continued. What was his motivation when, as he has admitted, he took steroids a few years ago when he played for Texas? Did he really not use them in ensuing years? Why should we believe him? Was he using performance-enhancing drugs in recent years with the Yankees — as has been charged — because his body was breaking down from previous steroid use? There’s the Catch-22. Abuse of steroids will break a body down and an athlete expected to perform at the highest level might feel the need to take more steroids to try to “repair” his body.

Did A-Rod do this? I don’t know, but I suspect he did. If so, it’s a self-destructive cycle he created himself. Like drug addicts, perhaps, he (and others) grew to like the way they felt on steroids and didn’t have the confidence any longer to play without using some drug. Without cheating.

The ego is a fragile thing. It can ignore reality. (You’re the best player; just do what you do naturally and you’ll be OK.). It can create intense pressure. (The fans will only love you if you continue to be the best every day.) It can buckle under pressure, as A-Rod did in so many post-season series. (Don’t fail; don’t fail; they’ll know you’re a fraud.) A self-fulfilling prophecy.

I toy with these thoughts because, as I said, I have trouble understanding what Rodriguez had to gain by cheating. He had the talent, the money, the fame and the superstar name. Yes, he obviously has always had an intense interest in maintaining a certain image of himself. In fact, it has seemed throughout his career that it has always been about him and his accomplishments. He’s never been regarded as a great teammate.

So maybe it’s that simple. Alex Rodriguez cheated because he has always been more interested in appearing to be the best, rather just doing his best. He either doubted he could live up to the designation, or just didn’t care what he did to make sure people continued to think of him that way. He was totally wrapped up in himself, yet never totally believed in himself. It’s not an uncommon phenomenon, even in superstars. None of it in any way justifies what he has done.

And what he has done is make a sham of a game I used to love. Yes, there are still superstars whose names remain untainted by the steroids users. A-Rod has two such teammates on the Yankees in Derek Jeter and Ichiro Suzuki. But you know, because of the juicers, there will be some people who doubt that even those two, future hall-of-famers never used something a little extra to improve their play. That’s  they never cheated.

I’m not losing any sleep over this and I still enjoy baseball. I just want A-Rod to go away and for Major League Baseball to finally be serious about ending the juicing. And no, I will not put a framed Alex Rodriguez card on my wall. I don’t even want one.

bob@zestoforange.com

Willie Mays, "the catch," 1954 World Series, the Polo Grounds.

By Bob Gaydos

I wasn’t planning to write for the Zest blog this week because I had other stuff on my mind and nothing about which I felt a need to expound. That wasn’t good enough for my fellow Zester, Mike Kaufman.

He felt a need to call me out in a column he wrote — he actually did two of them — on whether it’s OK to let your dog pee on a neighbor’s mailbox post. Really. Even did a poll on it. Since I thought this question was covered by the “do unto others” credo by which we all aspire to live, I ignored it. But he insisted. Yes or no, Bob, pee or no pee. Exasperated, I answered: No pee! No pee! Never let your dog pee on my or anybody else’s mailbox post! Yucch.

But the pee question turned out to be a straw dog. Mike, a former sports writer, was really calling me out on the designated hitter in baseball, which I had supported in one of my previous posts. At the end of his dog pee column, he added: “NOTE TO BOB GAYDOS: Ron Blomberg of the New York Yankees was the American League’s first designated hitter on Opening Day 1973. Thirty years later he expressed regrets: ‘I screwed up the game of baseball. Baseball needed a jolt of offense for attendance, so they decided on the DH. I never thought it would last this long.’ If even Blomberg can recant, it is not too late for you, Bob. Please come to your senses. Come home to the real game of baseball.”

First of all, Ron Blomberg is one of those Old Timers Day “Oh yeah, he was a Yankee, too“ guys. He had a couple of decent years and faded fast. He was never big enough to screw up the Yankees, let alone the whole game of baseball.

But Blomberg and Kaufman miss the point. There is simply no going back to anything. Baseball has evolved over the years, becoming more attuned to what fans like, which is more offense. It’s why they lowered the pitching mound. Sure, everyone can appreciate a good pitching matchup and no-hitters are special. But a whole season of teams batting .256 facing each other and watching opposing pitchers avoid number eight hitters with .230 averages to get at a pitcher who is an almost sure out is not fun. Nor does it necessarily win games. Good pitching always trumps all else. But when all else is equal, the teams that can hit — and that means mostly American League teams with designated hitters — will prevail. Look at the inter-league games records. The American League destroys the National League

I don‘t know what happens to pitchers when they leave high school. Until then they are usually the best players all around on all their teams. That means they could hit, too. But even before the DH, major league pitchers were no longer feared hitters. Players can’t bunt anymore. It’s a disgrace. The hit and run is almost obsolete. Baseball went bonkers with steroids for a while, and everyone was a home run threat. Now, things are back to seeming normalcy, but next year teams are going to play teams in the other league every day. That’s not fair to American League teams whose pitchers will have to bat. National League teams will gladly find a guy on the bench to add some punch to their anemic lineups.

The point is, the players union will never give up the jobs and the fans who see the DH every day will never go back to so-called “real baseball.” Not that long ago, baseball players used to leave their gloves on the field and wearing a batting helmet was unknown. But once upon a time, in the 1860s, nobody (not even the catcher) wore a glove, the ball was pitched underhanded from 45-feet from home plate, the ball could be caught on a bounce or on the fly for an out and you couldn’t overrun first base. In addition, foul balls were not strikes and if the umpire, standing to the side of the batter, didn’t happen to see the pitch, it didn’t count.

Now, that’s old time baseball, too, and they still play it in Cape May County, N.J., Michael, if you’re interested. For a whole season, I’m sticking with the current version.

* * *

While I’m at it, I might as well take care of all the dog-eared baseball questions. In response to my own poll (“Where Have You Gone, Joe DiMaggio?”), my colleague Jeffrey Page responded: “Bob, What about the Question of the Eternal Triangle: Mantle? Mays? Snider? My heart says Duke. My head says Willie. Mantle? He was pretty good, too.”

OMG, Brooklyn, get over yourself. Yes, New York City had the three best center fielders in baseball in the 1950s, but the Duke was always number three and you know that in your head, if not your heart. Mantle could have been the best ever but he drank like a fish and wrecked his leg and was still an all-time great and notches above Snider. But Willie Mays had it all, including a flair for the dramatic. I watched him rain triples and chase down fly balls all around the Polo Grounds and my head and heart have never doubted his preeminence. Best ever. Willie, Mickey and the Duke. 1,2,3.

* * *

Which brings me back to Michael and his dog pee. The most fascinating thing about his poll to me is that, of the 10 people who replied, four apparently said let your dog go wherever, whenever. I want their names, Michael. I don’t have a dog, but I have a friend who has three and they’re looking for new fields of dreams.

 bob@zestoforange.com