Baseball Spring Training

Every year I look forward to the return of baseball, the one spectator sport I care about, and every year I feel both positive anticipation and dread.  This year the dread is not that the Yankees have done too much to win and the Mets have done too little --that's common enough -- but the institution of replays to resolve disputes on safe and out calls.  From the little I watch baseball on TV these days (see my posts from last year on why that is) I know that, though announcers love to contradict umpires and say "he was clearly out (or safe)" the replays are seldom, if ever, clear enough to make the call better than the well-trained umpire who is on top of the play; to use replays is just adding more, not less, subjectivity.  Why don't we just eliminate umpires completely and have balls and strikes, as well as force-outs and tag-outs, totally determined by mechanical replays? I see the Staten Island Yankees and the Brooklyn Cyclones play more often than the Mets or the Yankees and I am always impressed by how effectively the two umpires cover the games.

I will miss Ralph Kiner, who always had a good story to tell.  One of my favorites involves Yogi Berra getting a single and then being given the sign from the first-base coach that the next pitch to the following batter will be a hit-and-run.  But Yogi doesn't run and fortunately the batter swings and misses.  So the coach gives him the same sign for the next pitch and gets the return sign from Yogi that he knows what to do.  On the next pitch Yogi again does not run and the batter hits into a double play.  The coach is furious and calls Yogi over:  "did you see me give you the hit-and-run sign on that pitch?"  "yeah," says Yogi.  "Did you see me give you the same sign on the previous pitch?"  "yeah," says Yogi.  "Then why in hell didn't you run?" says the coach and Yogi replies "because I forgot."
The problem I have telling this story is that most people, including ardent baseball fans, these days do not know what a hit-and-run play is (for those who don't: the runner on first runs on the pitch and the fielding team, thinking steal, moves to cover second and the batter hits it into the area vacated by the fielder moving to cover second base; at worst the double play is avoided).  I feel condescending but in order for people to understand this story I have to ask them first if they know what the hit-and-run play is.  The most common answer is "sure, you hit the ball and then you run."  I also like to quote Casey Stengel on Choo Choo Coleman: "the fastest catcher I ever saw going after passed balls", though fewer and fewer people seem to know what a passed ball is (as Casey often said, you can look it up). 

As sabermetrics (I term I don't care for) comes up with more and more obscure statistics (WHIP and WARP, for instance) I find that there are still many people who consider themselves fans who have no idea what slugging percentage or earned-run-average is (or even what the difference between an earned run and an unearned run is).  To some extent I blame the fans themselves -- if one does not understand the subtleties of the game one is more likely to just root for home runs, which everyone seems to understand -- but also the announcers, who seldom make any effort to explain earned runs or the infield fly rule, probably because they don't understand the rules themselves (I have heard more than one announcer call a run unearned long before the inning is over and the determination can be accurately made).  Things in baseball do change, though, which is one reason I continue to follow it.  When I was a kid they said Ty Cobb's stolen base records would never be broken and then along came Maury Wills, Lou Brock and Ricky Henderson.  Now Joe Morgan says base-stealing is again a lost art.

Phillip Lopate wrote an essay: Why I Remain a Baseball Fan (collected in Portrait Inside My Head, Free Press,2013) in which he wrote that he clings to baseball because of "its ability to generate narrative" and that "without knowing the individual players as a cast of characters, it is a pretty dull, abstract ballet."  That's a valid point of view and I looked at baseball that way once.  But now I find it a beautiful ballet, sometimes the most beautiful when nothing seems to be happening.  I had a friend from England who went to his first baseball game at Shea Stadium in the 80's and knew nothing about the game. He saw somebody walk up to the plate and then sit down and then two more people did the same thing quickly.  As far as he could tell nothing had happened but the crowd was going wild and he couldn't understand why.  "Are you crazy?," the friend who took him to the game said, "Dwight Gooden just struck out the side on nine pitches!"  Of course to appreciate the balletic beauty of the game one has to be there in person, to see everything from the coordinated movements of all the players to the gorgeous arc of the white ball against the blue sky.  Fortunately one can see that in Staten Island and Brooklyn, maybe even in better (and certainly cheaper) seats than in the Bronx or Queens.

















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The Great McGinty

The Great McGinty is a film written and directed by Preston Sturges in 1940 and, like most of Sturges's films, it is a struggle between cynicism and romanticism.  In Sturges's best films --The Lady Eve, Unfaithfully Yours -- this struggle comes close to being resolved, while in other films -- Christmas in July, The Great Moment --it is painfully unresolved.  I have often said that the best comedies are the most serious and The Great McGinty is serious indeed; it a film about a corrupt politician who ruins his career by allowing his wife to influence him to do good.  One sign of a good director is how vivid even the most minor supporting actors are and in The Great McGinty we see the beginning of Sturges's stock company, second only to John Ford's in powerful impression with little screen time:  William Demarest, Frank Moran, Jimmy Conlin, et al.  And, typically for Sturges, the best lines are tossed off so carelessly one is likely to miss them, with the visual and verbal combined ("I got a new suit" followed by "it looks more like the suit's got you.").  One of the reasons I think some are still so romantic about the Kennedy era is because the Presidents who followed him can only inspire cynicism --  Johnson, Reagan, Clinton, Bush -- and the one guy who was decent, the way McGinty tried to be, was Carter and he was chewed up and spat out.  Currently I am reading Richard Ben Cramer's What It Takes, about the 1988 Presidential campaign, and it is a fairly romantic book, about how anyone can become President if they are willing to pay the price. And I am also watching on Netflix Beau Willimon's House of Cards, which suggests that the price of success in politics is everything from dissembling to murder. 
The Great McGinty was Sturges's first film as director and he was able to do it, albeit on a small budget, because he sold the screenplay to Paramount for $10; he was tired of seeing his screenplays misunderstood by directors.  Sturges's success paved the way for other writers, particularly John Huston and Billy Wilder, to also become directors.

W. Somerset Maughm's Up at the Villa

On that warm day of early June there was an animation in the air which put everyone in a good humour.  You had a sensation that no one there was affected by anxiety; everyone seemed to have plenty of money, everyone seemed ready to enjoy himself.  It was impossible to believe that anywhere in the world there could be people who hadn't enough to eat.  On such a day it was very good to be alive.
Up at the Villa (Doubleday, 1941)

Except that Karl Richter is no longer alive and Mary Panton has helped dispose of the body.  Up at the Villa is not Maughm's best book, not at the level of Cakes and Ale or Of Human Bondage, but it is a beautifully written novella about class and gender roles among English expatriates in late 30's Italy, where things are not always what they seem.  And it is also an effective evocation of how one can live a safe life and then throw it all away in an instant of impulsive passion.  It reminds me of Fritz Lang's films, especially The Woman in the Window (1945, based on J. H. Wallis's novel Once Off Guard, 1942), where something similar happens. I find Maughm a pleasure to read and re-read for his intelligence and style, especially in this day and age when editors and writers seem afraid to use words of more than two syllables and "prevaricate" is considered too difficult a vocabulary word to put on the SAT's.  In the same way that I appreciate a skilled film director such as Michael Curtiz more than I once did, in this age when it seems that D.W. Griffith never lived, I appreciate Maughm's complex psychology and erudition.

Benito Cereno

When to this is added the docility arising from the uninspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors, one readily perceives why those hypochondriacs Johnson and Byron -- it may be something like the hypochondriac Benito Cereno --took to their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their serving men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher.
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno, 1855.

If one finds Moby Dick intimidating I recommend Melville's shorter works (Great Short Works of Herman Melville, Harper and Row, 1969), full of insight into human experience and emotion and, in Benito Cereno, race.  Captain Amaso Delano finds a ship drifting off the coast of Chile, a slave ship that had been attacked by disease and weather, or so its captain claims, with more slaves than crew members surviving.  Delano finds appearances to be strange but takes everything at face value, providing food and water for the survivors.  But then when he takes leave of the ship Benito Cereno, its captain, jumps into Delano's boat and it is revealed that the slaves have, in fact, revolted against the crew and have been holding the remaining crew members captive, completely fooling Delano, whose own prejudices have prevented him from seeing the truth.  We see what we want to see, what we prefer to see, when it comes to race; this tends to be as true now as it was in Melville's day, as much as many things have changed.  In Stepin Fetchit's performances in John Ford's films, Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) and Judge Priest (1934), for example, some people see a shiftless African-American, while the character is really appearing to be shiftless in order to confirm prejudices that actually allow him a kind of freedom, a way of coping, just as the slaves on Benito Cerneno's ship are doing.

A Life of Barbara Stanwyck Steel-True 1907-1940 by Victoria Wilson

This book (Simon and Schuster, 2013) of over 1000 pages (including notes and index) only covers the first 33 years of Stanwyck's life.  Terry Teachout, in Commentary, said that no biography (with some exceptions) should be over 400 pages.  But this is not just a biography of Stanwyck, it's also a biography of Frank Fay and Robert Taylor, Stanwyck's two husbands, and a history of film and theatre in the early 20th Century.  And all of it is fascinatingly written and thoroughly researched,  Yes, Wilson does take too seriously much of what was written in fan magazines and I did get tired of the lists of who attended Thalberg's funeral, who was at what party and who was at the racetrack on Christmas day, etc;, but these are minor quibbles. Stanwyck made more than thirty films during this period, only a few of which have much artistic merit (The Miracle Woman, The Bitter Tea of General Yen, both directed by Frank Capra) but Stanwyck was learning her craft and fighting for good scripts, which is why her career flourished and Kay Francis's, for example, did not.  The book ends with one of her best films:  Remember the Night, written by Preston Sturges (who later directed her elegantly in the very funny The Lady Eve). and directed by Mitch Leisen.  It was only after 1940 that Stanwyck started to pay enough attention to the choice of director, as Bette Davis had already been doing for some time.  It was then that her career truly soared, as she worked with sympathetic directors Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Howard Hawks, Robert Siodmak, Anthony Mann, Fritz Lang, Allan Dwan, Gerd Oswald, and Samuel Fuller.

Michael Curtiz

I will have more to say about the TCM March schedule presently but at the moment I just wanted to recommend Michael Curtiz's The Breaking Point (1950), the best of the three film versions of Hemingway's To Have and Have Not  and one of the best films of Curtiz and John Garfield, who died two years after it was made, at the age of 39, after refusing to name names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.  Andrew Sarris cited Curtiz's Casablanca as an exception to the auteur theory but later changed his mind, though he never wrote about Curtiz again in detail.  There is little published about Curtiz in English, with the exception of Kingsley Canham's The Hollywood Professionals Volume 1: Michael Curtiz, Raoul Walsh, Henry Hathaway (The Tantivy Press, 1973), a book that does not even mention The Breaking Point, probably because the film was not available at that time.

The Breaking Point has much in common with Casablanca --they are both about struggle and loyalty --but it is also a pessimistic post-war film noir, about family and work and race, with a heart-breaking ending.  It can be seen in conjunction with the nine other Curtiz films on TCM in March:  Romance on the High Seas (1948), Four Wives (1939), The Sea Wolf (1941), The Sea Hawk (1940), Private Detective 62 (1933), The Key (1934), Kennel Murder Case (1933), Female (1933), Adventures of Robin Hood (1938).