Political theory and practice – Thinking and doing

Play ball!

One Shot at Forever (2012) by Chris Ballard

Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages, rated 4.28 by 2,867 litizens.

Genre: Non-fiction; Species: Condescension.

DNA: [Jaded.]

Verdict: Clichéd.

Tagline: Meh.

A small rural high school baseball team in Illinois succeeded. This is so astonishing that Author investigates. In 1971 this was a team that could sometimes field only nine players, with a coach who knew nothing about coaching, from a school with an enrolment of 250, and yet it defeated teams with professional coaches from schools enrolling 9000. Out of 370 high school teams in the state this one emerged. What was the secret sauce to their success?

What follows is an account of two high school baseball seasons. It seemed to be written as an aspirant film script with villains, and climaxes. Even so the odour of disdain arises from page one, and lingers. The characters are too often painted as black or white to create tension. The descriptions of the games are perfunctory as though watching animals in a zoo across a moat, through a steel fence, or behind unbreakable glass.

Yes, it is true that I did not warm to the book. While the story is great, the telling does not match that.

In addition to the undertone of snobbery from the big city boy author about small town life, it ignores much of the full story. Most, if not all, of these boys played American Legion baseball in the summer after the high school season ended, where they had much more practice and coaching, and this is mentioned, well, I can only remember one time but let’s say twice. Would this experience have not affected their skills and attitudes? One way or another, the answer is yes.

While the context of the Vietnam War is underlined how it applied to these boys on graduation is omitted.

It is no surprise that it gets a higher Good Reads score than a far better book, i.e., Bottom of the 33rd. That fact simply confirms my prejudice about those who contribute to that source.

To judge from the blurb, the book had noble ambitions but… [See above.] These include the impact of high school sports on the players and on their families and communities. The roles of teachers as catalysts to stimulate the formative years. The glue of teamwork. That the purpose of the strong is not to bully the weak but to help them, making both of them stronger. It is a good list but it does not grow from the text.

‘I may never come back…’

Bottom of the 33rd (2011) by Dan Barry

Good Reads meta-data is 255 pages, rated 4.08 by 2,415 Scrooges.

Genre: Nonfiction; Species: ‘Informed Imagination.’

DNA: Horsehide, Grass, and Ash.

Verdict: Wonderful!

Tagline: Hope. Frustration. Redemption. Resignation. Life.

Things went wrong from the start. In the dilapidated stadium, the lights would not go on for the 7:30 pm start time. An ominous portent. When a technician summoned on that cold night of April 18, 1981, Saturday before Easter Sunday, found a way to turn them on, the payback was that they remained on … until 4 a.m the next day. The site of this marathon was McCoy Stadium of P’tucket in the Ocean State of Rhode Island.

Stop right there! Any 108-stitch baseball fan knows that date and place. If not, get thee to Cooperstown, right now!

In this early season AAA International League game the Pawtucket Red Sox hosting the Rochester Red Wings (Orioles) entered the Twilight Zone with no way out. Jean-Paul Sartre said, in Hui Clos, ‘Hell is other people’ (Amen!), in this case it was another inning. And another. Thirty-three times, while each team waited for Godot to deliver the game winning hit and to set them free.

‘Baseball is life and life is baseball’ sums up this story of the players, umpires, fans, families, passers-by, owners, managers caters, groundskeepers, who populated this bittersweet moment, ah, hours, and hours, as the temperature fell. If life has meaning, debatable I know, then so does baseball, and, perhaps, vice-versa, if baseball has meaning, then so does life.

What brought these people together in this performance of the theatre of the absurd? How did they react to this Sisyphean labour? Where did they go after this purgatory? Did those endless innings scar them for life? Some answers to these questions are gleaned in micro-biographies on more than a dozen of them.

Taking this extraordinary game, the longest ever played in ‘organised baseball’ (i.e., the North American Major Leagues and their minor league affiliates), as a case study, the author dissects the allure of the diamond for players (who hope to rise to the top in MLB, or reluctantly realise that they are sinking not rising), spectators, families, batboys, teenage girls in the concession stands, and lonely old men who prefer to sit apart in the stands.

The result is a tour de force.

In the course of the game, it is clear that some players are destined for the Elysian fields of the Bigs, while others need a day job – soon. The hopes of the latter have grown old and brittle in an Odyssean journey around the minor leagues; among them is an infielder for whom the Red Wings is the fourteenth team he has played for in just over a decade of wandering through the minor leagues, earning just enough…to need a working wife. At twenty-eight or even twenty-five, most of these men are baseball-old, in a game where youth is almost everything.

At times it is the team manager’s job to tell one of them that this is it. He will never ascend. Yes, he can hit. Yes, his glove is good. All true here in AAA. But the rosters are full of just such athletes, and he does not stand out among them. Enjoy the moment, because – look up – the curtin is falling ever faster with each birthday.

Pedant’s Corner. It seems the curfew rule was accidentally omitted from the AAA Umpire’s Handbook that year, and so the umpires had no express authority to end the game.

* * *

The author did impressive research with even more impressive empathy, developing biographies of dozens the participants it seemed, giving many of them their own voice from the inside out to reflect on baseball, that game, and their lives. It is touching, amusing, and poignant all at once.

Needless to say, but say it I will, the pygmies have reviewed it on Good Reads. (Apologies to pygmies for the comparison. If someone can suggest another metaphor for the small-minded gnomes who just have to criticise for its own sake to feel, briefly, smart, please let me know below.)

P.S. One golden summer while I was in college, I was the official scorer at Legion games for the local paper, and I read much of this story from the standpoint of that job. How in the world would a scorer fit at 33-inning game into a scorebook. The ones I used allowed 3 extra innings. Moreover, how would a publishing deadline be met. Ah, yes, the author not only explains how this scorer dealt with these problems but shows us the result. Ingenious, if nearly inscrutable.

Gunner Asch I

The Revolt of Gunner Asch (1954) by Hans Helmut Kirst

Good Reads meta-data is 240 pages, rated 3.90 by 330 litizens.

Genre: Fiction.

DNA: Deutsch; Species: Nazi.

Verdict: Meticulous and boring.

Tagline: One man’s war against the Wehrmacht from within.

In late 1938 or early 1939 in a small garrison town in northern Germany Herbert Asch is a reluctant draftee who observes the absurdity of military life. In the main the insanity is common to all armies. Any veteran will recognise the characters and situations, though in this case there is the added frisson that we know which way the wind of history is blowing, but Asch does not.

As is typical in all-male groups, efforts are made to identify and abuse the weakest link. For simplicity sake, Kirst limits this behaviour to the NCOs, and they focus on a harmless and hapless conscript who is a friend of Asch. Driven nearly to suicide by the relentless abuse, Asch saves this friend and declares his private and personal war on the Wehrmacht.

His heavy artillery are the many convoluted, contradictory, and obscure rules and regulations that govern army life. Think of Jim Kirk talking a computer to death and that is Asch’s approach. With a blizzard of references to regulations, sub-paragraphs, dictates, and more, he soon rattles the leader of the NCOs into a blunder.

For armour Asch uses the general indifference of officers to events in the barracks, as long as it does not blot their own personal careers. The best way to insure that does not happen is never to record irregular occurrences, like fights, like lost ammunition, AWOLs. If these things happen, and they do, and if they are recorded, then it means the relevant officers have failed! Although daily reports are written in indelible ink, where there is a will, there is a means… If they happen and are not recorded, well promotion remains within sight.

Asch’s infantry are the records he makes himself by observing the petty grifting, marital infidelity, and absences of the NCOs. This black book of data settles much hash.

The telling is precise, but, well, holds little interest to this reader. Asch’s campaign is the subject of at least three over novels by Kirst, but I am not at the moment motivated to continue. It bears a passing resemble to Catch-22 but it is neither as funny nor as poignant as that novel. Moreover, the shadow of hindsight darkens it.

The Incomparable Babe!

The Tomb that Ruth Built (2014) by Troy Soos

Good Reads meta-data is 238 pages, rated 4.26 by 127 litizens.

Genre: Fiction; Species; Krimi.

DNA: De Bronx.

Verdict: Safe!

Tagline: A drag bunt!

A year that has lived in infamy: 1920, when the Boston Red Sox committed original sin, selling George Herman Ruth’s baseball contract to the New York Yankees. Ruth’s sportsmanship and showmanship gave the Yanks three years of untold prosperity. Bankrolled by Ruth’s draw of fans to games and long desirous of their own turf the Yankees built Yankee Stadium in two years. (That is less time than it takes to get a pot hole filled in a local street in most places.)

At the dawn of 1923 the NYYs were bound for another pennant and now had THE stadium. It was not a ‘field’ (Ebbets), ‘grounds’ (Polo), ‘park’ (Shibe), ‘bowl’ (Baker), no it was a ‘stadium’ of Roman grandeur. (Though built to last its final at bat was in 2008.

Into this shiny new temple of baseball stepped a Yankee team based on THE BABE, who lives up to expectations on the field and down to them off the field. Somewhere along the dugout bench is Utility infielder whose curiosity is surpassed only by his carnal love for baseball. Well, he probably sleeps with his bat and glove ready to get in at midnight.

The fun begins when workmen putting finishing touches on The House find a corpse stuck into the wall behind a concession stand on opening day. Mum’s the word! With President Harding in the stands no one wants to spoil the party with this sordid detail, moreover, the owner does not want the brand new stadium cursed with this cadaver, so he asks/directs Utility Man (whose few baseball duties give him plenty of time off) to find out what happened on the QT. Why him? Because the victim was a onetime teammate on his journey through the majors. This is New York City 1923 and the police couldn’t care less if there is no cut for them.

What follows is a lot of baseball, though none of it bears on the krimi plot, and some digging by Utility Man to backtrack the victim. In addition to the baseball asides, there is a diversion into the film world of D. W. Griffith that tails away into nothing. Likewise, the rookie Utility befriended in the early pages disappears. Despite assurances that he would be rewarded for his efforts, there is no justice and after Utility Man figures it all out, he is cut to make way for a strapping rookie name of Gehrig.

On the brighter side, the baseball is palpable, the characters are clearly distinguished, the human side of Circus Ruth is revealed, and the plot, albeit only a third of the book, makes sense. The mix and match of historical and fictional characters is seamless. It is the seventh in a series that has many more titles. I read one years ago set in Wrigleyville (figure it out or go home), and liked it. Still earlier I started one set in Green Monster Nation (ditto) but failed at a flood of clichés in chapter two. Still two for three is some average!

Ruth in the early stages of his celebrity is well done. He is already being eaten by expectations both on and off the diamond. He knows it but is powerless to resist the siren call.

Silence, please.

Le dernier combat (1983)

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h 29m, rated 6.7 by 6643 cinematizens.

Genre: Post apocalypse.

DNA: France.

Verdict: A quiet version of Mad Max.

Tagline: Sshh.

Man roams around a destroyed world of office buildings, defiled apartments, crashed American cars, pursued by four or five other men. Nary a word is spoken, nor is there a tendentious narration so de rigour in Hollywood to explain and blame the situation on the audience. It just is.

He flees on his Leonardo da Vinci homemade airplane to other, equally desolate parts.

Meanwhile we meet the Doctor hold up in his clinic fending off a lone Barbarian at the gate. Man and Doctor unite against Barbarian, but, well, he is a Barbarian and subdues them, but Man escapes.

Yes, in a bow to Hollywood conventions there is a woman to fight over, in fact, two of them, but they have but five minutes of plot time. Most of the time director Luc Besson, before he surrendered to Hollywood, shows that a little can be a lot. (A long way from Valerian where a lot is a little.)

It makes no sense but moves at brisk pace, and hangs together, almost. Only two words are spoken. Correction, only one word is spoken but it is spoken twice. ‘Bonjour.’

I watched this from my private collection via Plex in a hotel room in Canowindra (look it up).

Da Boird!

The Hapsburg Falcon (2013) by J Trtek

Good Reads meta-data is 182 pages, rated 3.73 by 15 litizens.

Genre: Krimi; Species: Sherlock.

DNA: Brit.

Verdict: Elementary.

Tagline: The stuff that nightmares are made of.

The Woman reappears, having twice outwitted the incomparable Sherlock Holmes, she turns to him for help in an hour of need: the one, the only Irene Adler.

It seems an overweight, gregarious, duplicitous, and garrulous Man thinks she has what is his – dat boird – only she doesn’t. It beggars belief but Irene is engaged to a young wastrel who schemed to get that bird, make a fortune, and whisk her away to parts known. But both wastrel and bird have taken flight.

Enter Holmes.

There is a coda that traces the characters in this tale, including Sam Spade, to 1940. That alone is worth the price of admission.

But it lacks that early line in The Maltese Falcon that said it all: ‘We didn’t believe you; we believed your $50.’

The one and only Veeck.

The End of Baseball (2008) by Peter Schilling, Jr.

Good Reads meta-data is 340 pages, rated 3.85 by 209 litizens.

Genre: Alt History.

DNA: Baseball.

Verdict: What a ride!

Tagline: If only.

In Hollywood where fiction is fact the publicity for this book would say ‘inspired by a true story,’ almost. Bill Veeck, baseball fans need no explanation, lived and breathed baseball, and kept himself alive through 36 operations after losing a leg on Guadalcanal (1942) in the USMC dreaming of hit-and-run, sacrifice bunts, faked cut-offs, catcher pick-offs, and line-drive doubles. An invalid, he returned to the States in 1944 to light up the world of baseball for the next forty years, wooden leg and all.

The premise of this novel is that Veeck acted on his oft stated ambition to break the colour bar in Major League Baseball, hatching a complicated plan to do so in a coup de theatre that would surprise and defeat the many opponents of this change. The nub of the plan was that he, with his $500 payout from the Marines, would buy two baseball teams, one all-white and one all-black, and Hey Presto! Switch the one for the other on Opening Day! Genius! So he thought, but well, what did the elder von Moltke say, no plan survives first contact with reality, and neither did this one.

FYI the two teams were the catastrophically broke Philadelphia Athletics in the American League and the unloved Philadelphia Stars of the Negro League. This latter team was hardly better off financially than the A’s, but had many talented athletes. Veeck assembled investors who had profited from some of his legerdemain before the war to funds the deals without knowing his master plan, and off he goes in this roller coaster ride of one imaginary season.

The cast of characters ranges from Satchel Paige (whose autograph I once had), Buck Leonard, Roy Campanella, J Edgar Hoover, Eleanor Roosevelt, Judge Landis, and a great many more. What a kaleidoscope of the times and places of 1944.

Post Script. By the way Veeck did break the colour bar in the American League when he ran the Cleveland Indians by signing and playing Larry Dobey.

Precipice

Precipice (2024) by Robert Harris.

Good Reads meta-data is 464 pages rated 4.21 by 1107 litizens.

Genre: Historical fiction.

DNA: Edwardian England.

Verdict: Not for me.

Tagline: …. (Meh.)

The book is very well written, well researched in keeping with Harris’s other historical fictions, but…. Yes, there is a ‘but’ because, well, the story is depressing and boring. British Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith (1852-1928) went sleepwalking into the Great War, daydreaming about his mistress in cabinet meetings, only occasionally noticing what went on, and even more remarkable, throwing secret state papers into the street for the German sympathisers and agents who followed him around to collect, so preoccupied was he with his lady love; this sixty year old man in a teenage hormone haze barely knew what he was doing. When confronted with this fact of the state papers, first he denied it, then, then excused it, and then…continued it.

All in all, he must be a candidate for the Donald Trump Prize for the most vacuous head of government. Yet he was PM for nearly a decade and Liberal Party leader longer. Asquith’s entitlement mentality and monumental incompetence is so tedious that I started flicking pages, and pages.

The woman was far more responsible than he was on this telling. She secreted his nine letters a day, tried to stop his littering with state papers, and finally broke with him to go to France to drive an ambulance. His reaction to the latter was to feel sorry for himself rather than snap out of his stupor.

Bring on Lloyd George!

Grey (sometimes ‘Gray’ in the Kindle text), Kitchener, and Churchill were the only ones in these pages who realised from the off that there would be a long and terrible war. Grey tried to prevent it, while Churchill savoured the thought but was realistic about what had to be done, and Kitchener feared it. None of them got any help from Asquith who drifted.

By the way, Harris claims both in a forward and an afterward that all of this is true. I believe him.

Soup’s on!

Tampopo (1985)

IMDb meta-data is runtime of 1h and 54m, rated 7.9 by 23,001 cinematizens.

Genre: Parody.

DNA: Japan.

Verdict: More!

Tagline: A Noodle Eastern.

A square-jawed stranger rides into town and when he enters the saloon the crowd of idlers goes quiet. So opens the Spaghetti Western.

Well, sorta. The stranger is driving a tanker truck, and the saloon is a ramen bar on the outskirts of Tokyo. In what follows are fist fights, espionage, Rocky training, and more as the stranger searches for the perfect ramen through an encyclopaedia of oater movie tropes. A team is assembled and the quest proceeds.

***

The momentum is hampered by interludes about love and food, some of which are odd and others incomprehensible, including a very tedious start. None add to the main theme. Cutting them would reduce the film by 30+ minutes. But the red line (as they used to say in Moscow) is clear and it rattles along.

I saw this long ago at Sydney Film Festival on its first release.

Another poor little rich boy.

Blue Desert (2013) Deserto Azul

IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1h and 34m, rated 7.4 (!) by 52 cinematizens.

DNA: Brazil.

Genre: Boring.

Verdict: Nothing comes from nothing.

Tagline: Is this all there is?

A movie about the purpose of life and the meaning of human existence, modestly declaimed the writer and the director.

With that pretension stated, what follows is an indulgent account of the angst of an adolescent posturing this way and that. In case it was all too deep for the viewer some scenes are repeated two or three times, and there is a narrative to guide the dull wits like me.

He is a poor little rich boy who seems to have no responsibilities or ambitions. He meets or perhaps dreams of a man even more useless than he is, painting the Atacama Desert blue.

It takes place in the Jetsons’ Brasilia, and is gorgeously photographed, preferable to turn the sound down and the subtitles off and watch the moving pictures.