on the way to Woodstock

I wasn’t alive in the spring of 1969 but if I was, I like to think I woulda been 17 and woulda had a big crush on a girl with olive-colored skin, black hair and dark eyes, so dark that I could see the world reflected in them except at night. Then it would be downright spooky and my crush on her would grow. She would lead me all over town in say Brooklyn. Yeh, I would be living in Brooklyn, not too far from the Greenwood cemetery. And I would know that Henry Chadwick was buried there and I would know that Chadwick created the first baseball box score and that he questioned the thinking that lots of errors equaled “bad fielder” because it might just be a case of a defender having greater range, getting to more balls = more chances = more errors. I wouldn’t be 100 percent sure of all this because I would have overheard it from a conversation a bunch of old men with hats would have been having at the local pharmacy.

I would follow my beady-eyed babe over the black wrought iron gates of Greenwood cemetery in the hopes of a kiss. It would be amazing to just clear the spiky tops of the fence, and I would make it and she would hold my hand and then let go and I would run after her and she would hold my hand again and then run away again. I would eventually get tired and pass out and when I woke up she would be gone. But I would have a brother and we would be really close, really different, but really close. He would be a weed smoker and the occasional dropper of LSD and he would go see bands and he would have a massive music collection and I would be a baseball card collector and I would like astronomy and baseball and that would be about it. I would have a lot of friends, but not many dreams other than liking it when winter was over and spring came and baseball would be starting again. I would go to a lot of Mets and Yankees games with my friends. I would like the Mets better, but I would also like to see American League teams and their players and anyway the subway and bus reached both Yankee Stadium and Shea Stadium so I would go to both. And I would like 1969 because there would be talk of men going to the moon and there would be four new teams in baseball and they would be all over North America – Montreal, Seattle, Kansas City, and San Diego. And at some point I would get wind that Jim Bouton would be pitching for the Pilots in Seattle and that he had been assigned a task – to chronicle his 1969 season and I would think that was really cool because his chronicle would be like a diary and that would be like gratitude for living, an appreciation of every day, good or bad, drunk or sober, proof of a life lived, a sort of a thank you note to God or whoever. I would want Bouton’s Pilot’s baseball card, but there would be a problem. Topps would issue its cards in spring, but they would be for the previous season so the 1969 set would be about the 1968 players. There would be no Jim Bouton Pilot’s card that year, but it was right about that time that my brother would invite me to some concert in upstate New York. He would say things like, “You gotta go and don’t worry, I know exactly how to prepare you for the event.”

He would sit me down and hand me a small piece of cardboard, much smaller than a baseball card, much much smaller, and he would tell me that it was LSD and that I should put it on my tongue. He promised that it would make me want to hear music, to go and see live music. I would be kind of innocent and gullible, but it would be my brother and I would trust him. Nothing would happen at first, but then I would start noticing things that were always there, but they would be different like the colored shapes of the floor tiles and the turquoise colored ceiling. There would be rainbow colors around the light and my brother would put on an album and it would be Canned Heat and he would tell me about the origins of the name canned heat and we would be like holy crap – “How could anyone drink that!” and I would get to thinking that maybe there was a little magic in all of this and that maybe I should go with my brother to this music concert he called Woodstock which would be the town where the concert would be and maybe it was the LSD talking, but I would wonder and then really believe that there would be a Topps baseball card maker at Woodstock and that he would be making cards from the back of his VW bus, that all the players who would be playing in that 1969 season would have cards including Jim Bouton on the Pilots!

We would hitchhike, my brother and I from Brooklyn to Woodstock and along the way we would eat some more of these LSD cardboard tabs and I would start thinking about time being made up, about it being man made and that all that mattered was the sun and moon, night and day and I would feel even more excited about there being four more teams in baseball and when we would get to Woodstock, I would meet an old man with a radio, an AM transistor, and he would tell me that the Pilots were playing the Orioles in Seattle that weekend and I would know that and he would offer to drive us to Baltimore, that he had a Dodge Dart and we would listen to the game on the radio in Baltimore in his one bedroom apartment and it wouldn’t feel that weird or creepy because it would be Woodstock and I would trust everyone. And when I would say yes, he would say, “Maybe Bouton would pitch.” And it would feel so bizarre and magical that this old man would say such Bouton things, like how would he know that I had come to Woodstock to find some Bouton baseball card magic, but it would be really happening so I would tell my brother and thank him and he would understand because he would be a great brother and he would know things and we would get to Baltimore, me and this old man, on Saturday and the magic would just be starting because Bouton would pitch in Saturday’s, August 16th game and yeh, the Pilots would lose 16-3 and yeh, Bouton would give up three earned runs in two innings, but I would have heard Bouton’s name said over and over and I would imagine what he might do later that night and how he would paint the experience with words in his soon to be book and I would be excited about one day reading it. I would not remember how I got back home to Brooklyn, but when I would get there I would be more sure than ever that I would get that dark eyed girl to kiss me and I would still not know her name.

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towards sun-drenched lands

It had been there for years, stuck in the corner of Tucker Bandwith’s bedroom, leaning against the wall. Tucker never touched it, not out of respect, more disinterest than anything else. He never called it a bat. To him, it was a club because he was into ancient cultures, long time ago cultures, Neanderthal and caveman cultures when supposedly men carried around clubs that helped them ward off monsters, dinosaurs, and saber-toothed tigers.

It was an official bat. Some old ballplayer used it, a real MLB player or that’s what Tucker’s dad said, insisted, in a slur, a drunken slur. He had some connection to the player on the bat, but he never told him what it was. Dad gave it to him in the hope he’d catch the fever and he did, but a different fever – cowboys and punk rock music. Had an album collection that snaked around his room. He wore string ties with brooches and combat boots. He sprawled out on the black and copper- colored shag carpet in his bedroom, read the liner notes of albums and listened to music, the names of songs and albums, even the musicians didn’t matter, only the love he had for the lyrics. He dreamed of becoming a rancher and the dream made its way from his head to his heart to his hands. He rode horses, held reins at the local, indoor stable and on the rare day when it was warm outside and the livestock roamed or reclined, he studied the ways of cows sprawled out on the earthen floor, especially the way their tails waved in the wild, unpredictable breeze.

But then there came a foggy day, so foggy that you could only see the bottom half of downtown skyscrapers and in the suburb where Tucker lived, the water tower completely disappeared. Tucker had never been part of such a day. No one in Broomsville had, Broomsville, the coldest town in the nation, with 347.7 below freezing days per year, but never any fog and then so suddenly this fog, like a Woody Guthrie dust bowl blues rolling in thought Tucker. His caveman instincts kicked in; he picked up that bat, that club and prepared himself for whatever might suddenly come in from the fog, into his private 8×12 bubble. Minutes seemed like hours. He had his Star Wars watch to prove it. He rubbed the bat and it was smooth. He stopped for a second and for the first time, he read the name wood-burned into the barrel. There were actually two names – Louisville Slugger and Pepe Frías. He wasn’t sure which one was the actual name of the player, but it seemed strange to name a kid after a town – Louisville though he knew a girl named Georgia. Anyway, he chose “Pepe” as the name and began to make up a little jingle to soothe his fear of fog…

“born in a railroad track town
wearing an imaginary crown
Pepe Frías makes me clench my fists.”
about a land that no longer exists.”

And he took his song to heart or to his hands; he clenched them and then squeezed them around the bat handle and a creature suddenly appeared out of the fog, a dwarf of a creature with a computer screen for a head, a keyboard chest with all kinds of letters from all different kinds of alphabets – Cyrillic, Latin, and Chinese. There was a purplish brown liquid oozing out from where a human’s belly button would be. It mumbled in low baritone sounds not making any sense. Tucker grabbed the bat and started swinging. The computer screen head soon popped off and that purplish brown liquid started oozing from its arms which were mufflers and from the legs which were mini cement coal plant towers. He kept swinging that bat round and round and up and down and he made solid contact each and every time and he didn’t stop until the creature stopped speaking in that horrible low baritone. A strange silence, a loud silence began.

The fog lifted and Broomsville returned to cold and dark and all was well and right and fine except for the animal rights activists who insisted Tucker had killed an animal for no reason at all. Tucker pleaded with them, insisted that it wasn’t an animal, that he didn’t know what it was, but it made a scary sound and seemed ready to attack, that it was an act of self-defense.

The activists didn’t believe Tucker. They chased after him and they had gas station nozzles that shot gas and large softballs which were actually hard and they reared back and flung them at Tucker who ducked down alleys, kept a decent distance, avoided his attackers, but they grew in number when word sprang up about Tucker “the animal killer.”

Tucker knew every Clyde needs a Bonnie so he ran to his high school and waited behind the old elm tree; he waited for the wonderfully blue-haired, skinny, daughter of a construction worker – Ms. Penelope Dagger. Nothing needed to be said. They held hands and raced toward the Ludding Sea. Tucker positioned the bat under his armpit. Penelope scooped up a decent sized branch and together they sprinted across back yards and over fences and along railroad tracks. They knew all the shortcuts and soon the water appeared. You couldn’t see the other side. It felt like forever, They waded out into the water and drifted, staying afloat thanks to the bat and the branch.

The sun crawled slowly across the sky. Tucker and Penelope tried to bury their fears and enjoy the salty smell and cold, but refreshing water; they tried to feel gratitude towards the wood that kept them afloat, but they couldn’t help looking all around, for the boat that would inevitably appear, an Animal Rights Activist boat that would kill them. Instead, a few minutes later, a canoe appeared and two paddlers asked about the bat and they knew Pepe Frías, knew he was from San Pedro de Macorís and knew his 1976 Topps baseball card, him smiling in a Montreal Expos uniform.

“Any friend of Frías is a friend of mine.” said one of the men. He smiled. “Give me that bat and we’ll give you a ride.”

Tucker handed over the bat, climbed aboard, and with the barter complete, he sang his song,

born in a railroad track town
wearing an imaginary crown
Pepe Frías makes me clench my fists.”
about a land that no longer exists.

No need to clench your fists,” encouraged the paddler. “You’re heading to a land that still exists. You’re already there. It’s the nowhere land.”

“The now here land,” added the other paddler.

Now here thought Tucker. He looked at Penelope. They enjoyed the cold breeze and the seagull soars up above and the purplish clouds on the horizon. It wasn’t long before a fishing boot appeared. The canoe paddlers said a few words and the fishermen extended their hands and Tucker and Penelope stepped on board and then a few miles up ahead a larger cruise ship came into view. Tucker and Penelope slipped onto the back deck and no one noticed. They eventually joined the shuffleboard crowd and made small talk with an old couple from Dusseldorf. The ship was headed south, to the Caribbean.

They watched the waves bubble up behind them as the ship raced on…

Davillo removes the curse

there was mold on the bathroom wall. the kitchen clock was broken. severe weather sirens echoed at noon every day. Cliff Longhouse called it “the great decline,” said it started when his mom and dad drove him home from the “miracle” maternity ward and continued through the years, but it was something other than tombstones he thought about as a teenager that had him putting a book down before finishing a page.

light poured in through his bedroom blinds….shadows too and together, side by side, light and dark, they reminded Cliff of prison bars. He could have moved out, found an apartment on one of the other sides of town, joined a church choir, clipped coupons and flirted with a dreamy looking cashier at the local grocery store, but he couldn’t and he knew why. it was because of the curse a middle-aged Danish lady once put on him. She didn’t wave a wand, but she promised that he would grow old and lonely and scatter brained, be unable to focus on anything, not even during Do Something Different Day, the most cherished day in Hankerville.

The day was announced on both AM and FM radio, spontaneously, sometimes three times in the same month and other times, only once per year. The rules were simple – do something different. walk to work up or down a never before street. Drive around in a rented hearse. Wear a red hat. Walk with a hippity-hop in your step. Sing out loud. something, anything different.

no one knew who or where the judges were, but they were there because friday night, at sun down, the winners were announced and rewarded with 10 tickets to Tubman’s Movie House. Most winners waited till the first of the month, when the new movie came out, to use their tickets. That gave them something to look forward to for 10 months. Cut the town’s suicide rate down by five percent.

there was one memorable Do Something Different Day that came when leaves had already turned yellow and red, broke free from branch home, and begun their wild see saw sway to the ground. And as they did their death ritual, a voice came, at first undecipherable, but once out on the street, all ears turned towards the place where no one had previously looked – megaphones sandwiched between tree branches and light poles… a voice with a southern drawl….

“Two boats been discovered at the bottom of lake makeawish.”

mothers and fathers made a bread line rush for the lake in search of something new – a Kansas City Athletics hat, a Montreal Expos t-shirt, a pliers, an anonymous family photo. kids left their bikes behind….everyone under a spell – the sudden need for something different, everyone ready to dive and discover.

And Cliff? he heard the words too, but they slipped in one ear and out the other, that damn scatter brain curse, his mind switching to thoughts of beer, to Hedwigs Pub and so that’s where he went. he sat in a booth beside Bobcat, Train Track Tom, Vandy the vampire and The poet, as always, lingered at the end of the rail, sipping from his customary pitcher of Blatz, no glass needed, reading from his latest poetry publication – “Hagar’s Kin.” he stopped in mid-poem and said – “Cliff, turn yourself into a pretzel, become solstitial,” the poet clearly under the effects of Do Something Different Day……the poet suddenly an alchemist.

Solstitial, thought Cliff, as in solstices, as in two polars, as in change, as in lack of focus, as in up and down, as in happy and sad, an all over the place way of being. Cliff laughed, an out of his mind laugh, so long and loud that he thought he had replaced his old mind with a new mind, a laughing mind, that maybe he’d been saved, but then he stopped laughing and thought about rivets and erector sets, his mind still operating like a baggage carrousel on the move.

“I’ll call my old friend Rilo Davillo,” said the poet. “He’ll be home and he never turns down a beer, not on Do Something Different Day day and don’t you worry Cliff, he’ll bring a bag of balls. And a bat? Look no further than our family doctor, the bartender, Hector. He always keeps one beside the grey goose vodka in case one of those punks high on energy drinks jumps the rail in search of a freebee.”

Rilo arrived in less than an hour and he was a beer drinker. it was in his DNA, stretched back to the beer baron ancestor days on his father’s side, but this was Do Something Different Day so he dangled a flask of Jamesons Whisky in front of Cliff and led him outside, up 4th avenue, to the Food Emporium parking lot where the lights stayed on all night.

“Take the bat and stand by the wall,” instructed Rilo.

“Give me that flask and I will.”

Rilo handed him the flask and counted off 60 feet six inches.

Cliff took a nice healthy swig, swiped his feet on the cement, spit on his hands and waved that bat like carney lansford and on the first pitch, he took a wild swing, low and outside, way out of the strike zone, and on the second pitch, he tried to check his swing, but couldn’t, inside, almost hit him. amazing that he was even able to swing, more than enough fodder to inspire Rilo, typically quiet and humble to offer advice.

“You got a lay off the useless, wild ones; they do you no good? Like those thoughts of yours, that distraction-itis. The poet told me all about it.

“I hate Do Something Different Day,” screamed Cliff, “Turns a poet and his friend into a buddhist Tony Robbins. I’m going back to the bar.”

Cliff drank beer all the way until 2 AM bar time, and that’s when he closed his eyes, took a deep breath and studied the room like a weather vane studies the wind, to know if there were an after hours party to attend. there wasn’t so he asked the bartender Hector for a bag of peanuts and Hector, on the Do Something Different Day frequency, handed Cliff a bag, no charge, and added two cans of miller beer. Cliff, already drunk, stumbled a while, but his GPS guided him up 5th avenue, then down 5th avenue, then across the Green tree bridge and sliding down the hillside.

He sat under that Green Tree Bridge, beside the water, and the sound of Lake Makeawish came to him. He forgot all about the peanuts and beer. Instead, he thought about the two boats at the bottom of the Lake and then his mind, his ears, turned towards that sound of water. he listened to it and for a change, he had no other thoughts except that sound.

How the Pilots first round pick paved the way…

The arrival of a new baseball team to a city, whether by relocation or expansion, I would imagine, is a permanent parade for kids, new friend to teenagers, companion for adults, medicine for an elder. I was born in July, 1970, a few months shy of witnessing the birth of the Milwaukee Brewers, not that I had any idea what a baseball was at birth. That took a few years, maybe five, when my dad came home with a pack of 1975 Topps and it was probably more the wild, psychedelic colors than anything about baseball that sucked me in, but I do remember one of the cards – Jim Brewer of the Dodgers which probably struck me as strange, a player named Brewer on the Dodgers?

Later in life, I learned the creation story of the Brewers, of them actually being born in Seattle, as the Pilots and that team going bankrupt after one season, yes, one and done. In that spring of 1970, the truck driver was instructed to head northeast, not northwest, to go to Milwaukee, not Seattle, to become the Brewers, not the Pilots. The Brewers retained the Pilot’s blue and yellow uniforms that continue to this very day, a somewhat superficial reminder, but there was more….there was the player the Pilots selected in the 1969 amateur draft. More on that famous pick a bit later.

Firstly, the Pilots added to their roster in the 1968 expansion first, winning the mini lottery, but choosing to pick second, rewarding them both the second and third picks. The Royals, the other American league expansion team that season (The Padres and Expos were the NL expansion teams) picked first, among the American League teams, selecting Roger Nelson from the Orioles. Nelson didn’t pitch too bad in 1969 for the Royals. He gave up 170 hits in 193.1 innings, but it kind of paled in comparison to the production the Pilots got from their first 2 picks….Don Mincher and Tommy Harper. They got Mincher from the Angles. I mean the Angels. I always screw up their name when typing. Anyway, Mincher hit 25 homers and drove in 78 runs and made the all-star team. However, I’m not sure if the rule back then was that at least one player from every team made the all-star game? The other player the Pilots got, in the expansion draft, 3rd over all, from the Indians, was Tommy Harper. He had a .349 OB% and led the league with 79 steals.

The following year came the amateur draft and for some reason that I don’t know, none of the new teams picked first. The Pilots had the 21st pick followed by the Expos, Royals, Padres. The Pilots picked shortstop/pitcher Gorman Thomas out of James Island, high school in Columbia, South Carolina and eventually turned him into an outfielder, a centerfielder. Like every other player back then, Thomas had to dig in and work hard (there was no pampering first round picks). Thomas was called up to the crew in 1973, and hit 2 homers in 155 at bats. Over the next four years he was up and down, AAA minors to majors. Limited playing time and get this, he hit a whopping 51 homers in 1974 as a member of the Sacramento Solons in the Pacific Coast League and yet, he didn’t even lead the team in homers! That honor went to Bill McNulty with 55. On that same team Sixto Lezcano hit 34 and Tommie Reynolds hit 32. As a team they hit a stunning 308 homers which begs the question what professional baseball team has the record for most homers in a single season? The Twins hit 307 in 2019.

In 1978, Thomas got 482 at bats and made the most of it, hitting 32 homers. He became a strikeout/home run machine, leading the league with 45 bombs in 1979 and 39 in 1982. He was also a damn good centerfielder, but more than anything else he became a symbol of hard working Milwaukee and all its breweries and manufacturing plants.

The face of the franchise Gorman Thomas. Even to this day, mostly amongst the older crowd, Gorman remains that face, more than Yount, certainly more than the lier, I mean liar Braun and more than today’s struggling star Christian Yelich.

baseball cards i have to have part 16 – Grimsley

I often smuggle a book into work, stash it in my front pant pocket and during the day visit a good bathroom stall and read. It has to be a paper back and kind of small, to fit into my pants. One of these books is THE YEAR THE MONTREAL EXPOS ALMOST WON THE PENNANT by Brodie Snyder. It’s about the 1979 season. The Expos finished 95-65, two games behind the eventual World Series winners – the Pittsburgh Pirates.

I crease the pages of corners when I read books, to be revisited at dull moments in the future like page 43 in the Expos book. Ross Grimsley says,

“The Reds wanted to have full control over your lifestyle. They sent me to the barbershop three times in one day during spring training. If they said gargle with peanut butter and stand on your head, you did it. I had been reading about witchcraft and they jumped on me for that. They told me I was crazy. They also told me I didn’t run right, I wore my socks too high. And they didn’t care for the people I associated with. They continually degrade the individual and I guess I was a rebel. I told them to go stuff it a few times. I told them to leave me alone and I would pitch for them. That worked in Baltimore and it worked here. (in Montreal) They leave me alone and what I do off the field is my own business.”

Grimsley’s dad Ross ll played 16 seasons in the minor leagues and then appeared in seven games for the White Sox in 1951, his only seven appearances of his short big league career. 16 years in the minors! Sixteen !!!!! All at the same job!!!!! Pitching. Both he and his son were left-handed. I’d like to get this 1979 Kellog’s Grimsley, a 3-D reminder of what lefties bring to the democratic table…..pizzazz!!!

umpire constellation perfection

Some swear they’ve seen perfection in clouds along the sunset horizon slowly turning orange and purple. Others have heard it in Robert Plant screaming “I got a woman, stay drunk all the time.” I felt it many moons ago when Robin Yount flew across Memorial Stadium April 1987 air and snagged Eddie Murray’s fly ball, preserving the Juan Nieves no-hitter, only one in Milwaukee Brewer’s history, but it wasn’t perfect.

Perfect is both an adjective and a verb. In baseball, it describes a game, a perfect game, but to be perfect like Dennis Martinez you have to perfect what’s typically not perfect, a regular game, so it’s kind of an adjective and a verb. It inspires fans of both sides to surrender their allegiances.

A perfect game in baseball has been real 23 times, 24 if we include Harvey Haddix’s 12 perfect innings that ended in a base runner in the lucky 13th inning, 25 if we include Armando Galarraga’s perfecto that got flubbed by Jim Joyce on the 27th out. Joyce apologized after the game and Armando aptly said, “That’s ok, no one’s perfect.”

So umpire mess ups and tie scores aside, there’s only been 23 perfect games…..only 23, only 23 times have there been 27 consecutive outs made by a pitcher and his defense. The lights went out. The stadium emptied. People walked home or to bars and had perfection on their mind and breath. They stashed their stubs in a safe place.

Dallas Braden and Phil Humbert provoke a scratch of the head and so does Randy Johnson going perfect at 40 years old. Who even pitches at 40! The Tampa Bay Rays have been on the losing end of three of them. Two were in the pre-1900 years which interestingly happened within a week of each other, the first one on June 12, 1880 and the second one five days later. The timing is almost as wonderful as the name of the very first umpire who called it – Foghorn Bradley!

Speaking of umpires, there is only one umpire who has been a part of three perfect games and he was calling balls and strikes in two of them!

Ted Barrett.

Barrett called David Cone’s in June, 1999 and followed it up with Matt Cain’s in July, 2012.

I’ve never paid too much attention to umpires, however, I have heard horror stories about Angel Hernandez and I did read Ron Luciano’s Umpire Strikes Back and I know once upon a time National League and American League Umpires were separated, no inter-league action, wore different colored sport jackets too I think. But Barrett calling two perfect games has me googling.

According to a study conducted by Boston University, Barrett ranked at the bottom of umpire accuracy between the years 2008-2018. Here’s the link to that study – http://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/mlb-umpires-strike-zone-accuracy

I don’t know what it all means in terms of his calling perfection, especially because the study was completed after Cone’s perfecto. But if he did lack accuracy, maybe it spurred on the perfection? Maybe he got into the minds of hitters and had them swinging at bad pitches? Maybe I’ll watch the games in their entirety, thanks to you tube!

The only things I know for sure, for now, are that Barrett used to be a sparring partner for boxing legends George Foreman, Evander Holyfield and Mike Tyson. That’s what it says in a New York Times article I found thanks to a google search. And then there’s Wikipedia sharing that Barrett has a masters degree in Biblical Studies and that he wrote a thesis called “An Investigation of Faith as a Life Principle in the Lives of Major League Umpires.” And oh yeh, he is also an ordained minister.

Maybe him studying the bible, being a minister, and writing a thesis about faith and being an umpire; maybe him sparring with George Foreman, maybe none of this has to do with him calling two perfect games or maybe it does? This is the kind of question that results in heavy drinking or going to church. I can’t do either right now. I have dinner to make and it’s only sardines and pasta, but perfect enough for tonight.

post apocalyptic baseball starter kit

I had no idea what the rumors of Jose Abreu being traded to the Red Sox might do. I mentioned it Thursday morning as a work warm up and the lone Red Sox fan in our Montreal warehouse smiled a David Ortiz smile and then added,

“Wasn’t there another Abreu in baseball?”

“Yeh,” I said. “Bobby Abreu.”

“For the Cardinals?” he asked

“No, a couple of other teams, but mostly the Phillies,” I said.

“Oh yeh the Phillies,” he responded. “He was an Expos killer.”

I had no idea about Abreu being an Expo killer but I related to the horror because Reggie Jackson murdered the Brewers at County Stadium. I told my co-worker this. He paused and then said,

“We’re going to an Expos game one day.”

He might have been referring to the annual spring training games held at Olympic Stadium between the Blue Jays and some other team, but he said Expos. I could have asked him, could have made clarification my top priority, but I prefer riffing off someone any way I like, delusional as it may be.

So one day we were going to an Expos game. Hmmmm. Of course things would have to change. Typically baseball arouses ire rather than awe in Montrealers. They seem to use the sport as a springboard to deconstruct society and all its woes, maybe understandably so considering the Expos were stolen from Montreal and moved to Washington D.C.

Then there is a group that welcomes the idea of baseball back here, but only if there is a new stadium. They know exactly where to put one too, how much money it would generate, and so on. No one liked Olympic Stadium. No one does. This is nothing new. Even the Expos management didn’t like it back in 1975 when they promised major league baseball it was a temporary solution while a new stadium was built. We’re still waiting. But a new stadium wouldn’t solve Montreal’s problems. Sure, if you build one, people would come, but only for a year or two and then what? The newness of the fashion would fade.

I say forget the new stadium mentality. Start over. Take a new road. Mind you this is very much a work in progress. I’m no urban planner, but as a baseball fan in Montreal I can only tolerate so much Bobby Wine-ing. Here’s my nine cents…..

1) revive Montreal’s lost rivers from before the automobile highways aroused a strange desire in cement.
2) create blue prints to carve canoes from fallen trees, paddles too.
3) build real simple baseball diamonds all over the place, river to river.
4) organize teams according to old parish neighborhoods
5) open bars and diners near the diamonds.
6) organize baseball games.
7) don’t keep score.
8) stop the games at random moments and have players and fans breathe, feel the wind, make games longer.
9) make batting practice a city-wide every day holiday and let fans take batting practice after every game.

why i sort of hate history…

game five of the 1982 ALCS
county stadium
milwaukee
i was there
and yet,
I don’t remember a damn thing about the game
not the bark of the vendor, the smell of beer,
or fans running onto the field.
memory is so damn elusive.
nothing but flashes
a dizzy slide show.
only a familiar smell slows it all down,
turns it into an old film
but only for a few seconds.
maybe I don’t want to remember?
maybe I block it out because it’s gone and that makes me sad.
then joe charboneau pops into my head and
just like his name (charbon in french is coal)
there’s fuel.
suddenly, i’m grateful that my memory sucks.
i write this poem.
it forces me to focus on my life right now
that this is all i got.
just this….
the sound of a dumpster flap opening and closing in the breeze,
a walk to work,
some 8-4,
a homeless man begging for a change,
the smile of the post office cashier,
wordpress,
the seasonal discussion of baseball returning to montreal…..

a visionary dud or?

On a good day after work, I take deep breaths and walk home slowly. It’s paradise. I inhale bus fumes and see amputated trees. It’s been that way for 10 days now….tree stumps on apartment lawns. Makes me wonder if a man in a cape will swoop down at night and turn them into gnomes? Or maybe they’ll be picked up by a shredder truck and turned into pulp?

I hadn’t given these stumps too much thought until I sat down and started to write about them. Maybe the city cut the trees so the overhead electric wires will have more room, in anticipation of freezing rain this winter? Or maybe the trees have been diseased and had to be removed to not contaminate the other trees? Or maybe I’m the chosen one and it’s my duty to gather up all this wood and begin construction on a new baseball stadium? Of course, stadiums aren’t made of wood anymore, but I would be part of a new nation, a chosen nation, that comes together, a nation of warriors, wood gatherers, and millioners….together as one people to get people off their anti-baseball asses. There’s too much culture in Montreal anyway. They already took away our horse tracks.

We wouldn’t be the first to consider ourselves a chosen people. There were the Moonies starring Reverend Sun Myung Moon. He preached that Korea was chosen by god to perform a divine mission. There were also the Tarahumara people of northwest Mexico. You might recognize the name from one of the stories in Dreaming .400…..Running from the Shackles. In it, the main character – Tunis, the one who inspires the test tube baseball babies is part Tarahumara. The story is fictional, but the Tarahumara are real and they believe they are chosen people or “Pillars of the Sky.”

There are many examples of people who believe they are chosen. It probably does wonders for an individual’s self-esteem and potentially propels an entire race to great heights or causes a nosedive into confusion and paranoia. Either way, I like the extremes it begets. With that in mind, what would happen if I heard more voices,

“Collect 18 tree stumps and I will give you a dugout in which to dwell. Collect 7 more and there will be livestock for you everywhere, plenty of cows and pigs to provide an endless supply of hot dog-hamburger-bratwurst stadium concessions, wheat and barley for your beer too, and an endless supply of joy….no more misery, only dancing and joyful noise and screaming and laughing and fun fun fun!”

And then in flash, what if all of it was taken away. What if the 18 stump sacrifices and dugout promises didn’t exist? What if it was all fig newtons of our chosen people’s imagination? Then what? Well, we might look at each other anyway and realize that we had something going on, something good, a dance of sorts, a people, so we might decide under a still standing tree to carry on the tree stump search as a metaphor……..and from there, on that first day, we might find a stray stump and from it, carve out a baseball bat and it may not turn out so good. It may be a bit asymmetrical, but the historians among us might point out that old-time baseball players used bats a little less than perfect too.

 

the impossible possible anatomy of perfection

every once in a while Dennis Martinez’s perfect game pops up in conversation. Gets me wondering how many perfectos there have been. off the top of my head hmmmmm, I start with Len Barker in 1981 and then of course Don Larson in the World Series 1950 something, Sandy Koufax a few years later and Mike Witt on the last day of the 1984 season….Tom Browning, David Cone and David Wells. More recently, Matt Cain did it and so did Felix Hernandez and oh yeh, Dallas Braden and Philip Humber and i’m missing a bunch but the point is Braden and Humber everything suddenly seems possible.