Indeed, as Sherrod wrote in Scattershooting, a collection of his newspaper columns from the 1960s and 1970s, players play as much for themselves as for the teams that pay them. To paraphrase Ecclesiastes, there is nothing new under the baseball sun. (T)hey’ll start juicing (the baseball) like a tennis ball because Ruth has made the home run fashionable.”įashionable homers? Juiced balls? New Yankee Stadium? I saw him, and still see him, powerless against that strength. I imagined Cobb–in black-and-white, somehow–standing slack as he watched a great young phenom hack away at the game he’d loved and dominated. The old game was one of skill–skill and speed. I feel bad about about it for it isn’t the game I like to see or play. “I guess more people would rather see Babe hit one over the fence than see me steal second. “Babe Ruth has changed baseball,” he continued. Base running is about dead…(N)ow they wait for somebody to drive ’em home.”Ĭobb pointed to Ruth, who was being watched by the players from both clubs. In this game, power has replaced speed and skill. Well, the old game is gone,” (Cobb) said one day in 1924 as we watched Babe Ruth rocket batting-practice pitches into the new Yankee Stadium bleachers. Rice wrote of a time he shared with Ty Cobb. Example: As Rice articulated in his memoir, The Tumult and the Shouting, a book I discovered alongside Sherrod’s Scattershooting in that cardboard box, newcomers have always unseated the veterans, and the latest style has long supplanted “the way it’s done.” And the old-timers, may their memories be ever served, have always resented it. They have a way of reminding us they have been this way before, not least in the realm of major league baseball. Seasons change and names are replaced, but themes are ageless and stubborn. What I find here and now is what others have found in other places and times. The letters are out there, the old books told me…in not so many words. I discovered one book in an antiques store (don’t judge me) and the other two in an old cardboard box I had retrieved from storage and unpacked as if it were a Christmas stocking, and together, if just for a time, the books restored my standing as a writer by turning me into a reader again. Stranded without a topic, I stumbled across three old books whose content became a savior, rescuing me from that dreadful place of wordlessness and pushing me toward a better place where an idea can at last attach to letters. Blackie Sherrod, the Dallas wordsmith, reckoned sportswriters “got an early start by having their mamas drop them on their little heads as infants,” and that a career in sportswriting is “habit-forming, true, but cheaper than dope.” Grantland Rice, whose prose helped elevate sportswriters from the rank of ink-stained wretches to that of semi-respected craftsfolk, thought himself a member of “The Greatest Profession” and that “a little thing like money or the lack of it never gave us much concern.”Īs a writer in search of words to write, I recently read this stuff– learned this stuff–following a brief run of good old serendipity. Thus dishonored, the knights called themselves chipmunks, provided they were skilled in the ways of quip and keyboard. Ted Williams called them–called us, I suppose–the knights of the keyboard, with a derisive tone duly attached. Ty Cobb once sent a writer a telegram signing his own praises.
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