Adapted from the Twitter feed, Saturday, June 6, 2020. Originally posted Tuesday, June 16, 2020. Replayed Friday night, March 19, 2021.
New York Yankees great Yogi Berra at bat in a spring training game in Florida sometime in the 1950s. Berra is most famous as one of the best major league catchers of all-time. But he was a terrific hitter too, with a lifetime batting average of .285, 358 home runs, 2150 hits, and 1430 runs batted in. He was a pretty solid outfielder as well, when his knees needed a rest. And he was underappreciated as a manager. In 1964 he guided the Yankees to the World Series. He led the Mets to the Series in ‘73. You could look it up. Undated and uncredited photo via the Yogi Berra Museum.
Today’s Philip Roth’s birthday. I’ve been working all day on a post commemorating it. I know, I'm always working on a post. But this one's almost done. Just needs a few more graphs. It's about what I have in common with Roth. Spoiler: it's not writing. It's health. Mine's a bit better, being as I'm not dead yet. I hope to post it tomorrow. Meanwhile, there’s this from last summer. Coincidentally, no player was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame this year. You could look it up.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
From the Department of In Search of Lost Time. Saturday, June 6, 2020:
How did I not know---or how did I forget---that the baseball writers elected nobody into the Hall of Fame in 1971?
Yogi Berra was on the ballot, fer cryin' out loud!
I just found this out from Philip Roth's "The Great American Novel" which I started reading this afternoon.
Berra fell one vote short. Inexcusable. Inexplicable. But as Casey said, you could look it up. Which I did.
They didn't elect Luke Gofannon of the Ruppert Mundys of the Patriot League either. Lifetime batting average of .372, 3180 hits, 490 home runs. Sixty-three of those HRs in 1928. You can't look that up because Major League Baseball erased all the records and with them the existence of the Patriot League. You can search through the archives all day, dig your way down to the first line-up card of the original 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings deposited in the Hall of the Fame, and not find a trace of a clue that the Patriot League ever existed.
Hall of Fame? Hall of Shame, Smitty calls it. Smitty’s the less than reliable narrator of "The Great American Novel," a once-upon-a-time player for the Mundys, so he says, who suffered through their last, disaster-filled season, went on to be a sportswriter of national repute and a friend of Ernest Hemingway, and now, in his eighties, is determined to set the record straight and restore the memory and the glory of their times of the Patriot League, its great teams, and heroic players and legendary characters like Gofannon, Frenchy Astarte, Nickname Damur, Big John Baal, who killed a pelican roosting in the outfield of their Florida spring training ballpark with a line drive to right, along with their wily manager Gil Gamesh, in a prose style he swears he didn’t steal from Hemingway although Hemingway was convinced he did and vowed to kill him for the theft…
Every once in a while I would get a Christmas card from Hem, sometimes from Africa, sometimes from Switzerland or Idaho, written in his cups obviously, saying more or less the same thing each time: use my style one more time, Frederico, and I'll kill you. But of course in the end the guy Hem killed for using his style was himself.
Here's another conundrum: how come I didn't read "The Great American Novel" when it came out in 1973? That was the year I was discovering Roth.
I read "Our Gang", "My Life as a Man", "Goodbye, Columbus", and---don't tell Mom Mannion---"Portnoy's Complaint", practically one after the other, but not "The Great American Novel". I don't know why.Something else I can't look up. I hadn't begun keeping a journal yet…
My explanation for not having read it until now is that life and a whole lot of other books got in the way.
I think I half-forgot it even existed. But I'm glad. It makes reading it now all the more fun. It's fast making a play to be my favorite baseball novel of all time.
That’s not a long list. “Bang the Drum Slowly” and “The Brothers K”, and that’s about it. I’m very particular about baseball novels.
I have strongly mixed feelings about “The Natural”.
For the record, Yogi was elected to the Hall the next year, 1972, along with Early Wynn, who was also snubbed inexplicably in ‘71, and Sandy Koufax. Koufax was the youngest player ever inducted---he was only 36---and went in in his first year of eligibility.
You don't like "Shoeless Joe" or "The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop."?
Posted by: Mike Schilling | Saturday, March 20, 2021 at 11:49 AM