Robert E. Murphy2013-06-19T16:36:07-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=robert-e-murphyCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Robert E. MurphyGood old fashioned elbow grease.Questions for the Next Pope: Is Garry Wills a Catholic? Am I?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.27771432013-02-28T15:47:04-05:002013-04-30T05:12:01-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
Am I Catholic? Are you?
Is The New York Times anti-Catholic?
These questions come to me as, almost simultaneously, the pope resigns, America's leading newspaper reports day after day about continuing sexual abuse, homosexual culture and political intrigue in the Church, and Professor Wills, this country's most longstanding and prolific Catholic gadfly, publishes perhaps his most iconoclastic book yet about Christian faith.
Each question, I suspect, may have several answers: yes, no, maybe, sometimes.
Wills, a onetime Jesuit seminarian and a prickly and pugnacious scholar of history and literature, as well as Catholicism, once wrote a book about the papacy entitled "Papal Sin: Structures of Deceit," and last week told Charlie Rose that he didn't care who would succeed Benedict XVI. So if he is a Catholic (another of his 48 books is "Why I am a Catholic"), he is clearly not a papist. Now book No. 48 -- "Why Priests?" -- reaches even deeper into canonical Catholicism to poke at a far broader-based institution. He doesn't think this worldwide fraternity is essential, because there is no biblical basis for a sacerdotal class being extended from the Levites of the Hebrew Testament to the Christian community, nor is it proper that such a Christian class hold a monopoly on the dispensation of grace through the Catholic sacraments. The boldest opinion he expresses is that these men do not have the power to transubstantiate bread and wine into the actual body and blood of Jesus. That, it seems safe to say, is a Protestant view. So can one hold such a view and be a Catholic? Or, as I think Garry Wills would contend, is being a Catholic determined not by one's opinions about the Church, but by one's identification or profession of him- or herself as a Catholic (and, perhaps, by the sacrament of baptism)?
No. Yes. I don't know.
But I think I know this: A lot of people who attend Sunday mass, including me, have doubts about the "real presence" -- the divine content -- of the Catholic Eucharist, although we may not reject the doctrine outright. Many more have given up receiving the sacrament of Penance, involving the confession of sins to a priest. Perhaps most do not accept the Church's traditional teachings on eternal damnation. And it has been documented that the vast majority do not follow its directions on birth-control. And so on.
Certainly the long parade of revelations about sexual malfeasance among Catholic clergy and administrative irresponsibility among the hierarchy has made the question posed in Wills's latest title a timely and relevant one. Many quondam churchgoers now stay home because they have lost respect for and confidence in priests and their institutional church. Yes, the New York Times and other media voices are campaigning against the Church and to some extent might be considered anti-Catholic. The Times's executive editor until recently, Bill Keller, has put aside his boyhood Catholicism and has remained very interested in but no fan of the Church. A main purpose of newspapers, however, is to expose the sins and crimes and hypocrisies of institutions and individuals, and the Times's investigations of the Church have been above all a service to Catholics, if a hurtful one.
There was a time, half a century ago or less, when doubts and independent thoughts expressed by laypersons would have not only been vehemently condemned by the priests whom Wills deprecates, but also might have caused the excommunication of those who harbored them. And "time," I think, is a key word here. The Second Vatican Council of the 1960s, which, intentionally or not, increased freethinking among Catholics, was about "time," about the nature and function of an ancient-medieval-Renaissance Church in the modern world. It was a brave confrontation with the reality that time changes perception, understanding and, ultimately, truth, or at least some dimensions of truth. And it bravely opened the question of how much the Catholic Church change could, and still be Catholic? A tough question, and one that obviously hasn't been resolved, nor will it be during the imminent papal-election conclave, nor the one after that.
Apropos of birth-control and damnation, Wills makes a keen point about the difficult dilemma the Church faces in adjusting its teachings. He tells that during the post-Vatican papacy of Paul VI, theologians counseled him that contraception was not a violation of natural law, and therefore permissible. But a hierarchical advisor then pointed out to him that the Church had preached for generations that those who practiced birth-control were grave sinners who, if they died unrepentant, would be condemned to hell. If the pope changed the rule, he would not only be admitting that the Church had until that moment been wrong on a profoundly serious matter, but also would be facing the awkward prospect of retrieving all those transgressors from the eternal flames. Paul let the ruling stand, thereby opening the most visible modern rift between hierarchy and laity.
Still, has Garry Wills gone too far? Apparently, but how much does it matter, if his conscience and his extraordinary mind have led him to the place where his own undeniably Christian spirituality rests? And is it right for any of us claiming to be Catholic, whatever that may mean, to deny the validity of his faith, of Protestant faith or of many other religious experiences?
May God help us all.]]>Who's a Hooligan?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.16139332012-06-21T16:33:21-04:002012-08-21T05:12:05-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
I am inclined to disagree. Indeed, I am amazed that this ethnically loaded term has been accepted, as far as I can determine, without a whimper of objection from the forces of linguistic propriety, as suitable for describing thuggish or belligerent public behavior, particularly by football partisans around Europe and much of the world. And in recent weeks, as such fans have cavorted violently and abusively about the Polish and Ukrainian venues of Euro 2012, the word has been splashed around American newspapers day after day.
"Hooligan" (like other terms, such as "paddy wagon" and "shenanigans") is a word that was coined by English colonizers to demean the Irish immigrants among them, who had been driven reluctantly across the Irish Sea by brutal poverty and, in particular, the horrifying potato famine of the 1840s. It bears, therefore, a glaringly offensive historical coloring. But let us, as my native-Irish father used to say, "jump to the dictionary." In my Merriam-Webster Collegiate, ninth edition, I am amazed to find that the editors believe that it was derived from "Patrick Hooligan," an "Irish hoodlum in Southwark, London." It is not, of course. Hooligan is not an actual Irish name - there is not a single one listed, for example, in my Brooklyn phone-book. The term is factitious, a cross-formation of "Houlihan" and "Harrigan" or "Halligan," and therefore representative of all the Irish. Don't look for Seamus Shenanigan in your directory, either.
Several months ago, having noticed the word used at least twice in one week's editions in The New York Times, I communicated some of the above observations to the paper's public editor, Arthur S. Brisbane. I received a quick response from Mr. Brisbane's assistant, who informed me that, "The public editor wrote about this topic in February," and offered me a link to same. This directed me to a piece explaining that reporters and editors need to be careful about identifying people's ethnicities unless doing so is relevant to the story. "Are you kidding me?" I wrote back to this operative, "... or have you missed my point entirely?"
A month or so later, I mailed Brisbane a letter, repeating of the points that I have offered here. I did not receive a response.
It is remarkably ironic, moreover, that this old anti-Hibernian slur is applied primarily to soccer fans, for accounts that I have read describe the advocates of Ireland's team to be the most cordial and well-behaved in Europe. Here is what the English football-writer Rob Hughes commented about them in Monday's New York Times:
"Here in Poznan [Poland], as in other games, there have been no more committed supporters, no greater example of what true fans bring to a game, than the green-clad Irish. They occupied the stadium, vastly outnumbering the Italians [their rival fans]. They sang, they roared, they applauded good play."
This is reminiscent of reports in the same paper about Irish fans during a World Cup competition several years ago. In one piece, correspondent Michael Janofsky wrote:
The Irish supporters attending their team's victory over Romania last Monday in Genoa deserve a major salute... despite their obvious advantage in size, sound and fury, the Irish fans stood in stone silence during the playing of the Romanian anthem, in respect to the players and the Romanians among the crowd. Amid the rampant, often excessive nationalism and disrespect shown elsewhere, it was welcome and touching.
Perhaps these fans should be labeled "anti-hooligans."]]>The Brooklyn Nets -- How Sweet the Soundtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.9913232011-10-03T17:28:02-04:002011-12-03T05:12:02-05:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
The City of Brooklyn? Yes, and Brooklyn's history as a city is an important consideration in the argument that burned for years about whether or not there should be a major sports arena where there were primarily trainyards in a downtown area of this city that became a borough -- a city and borough that once hosted franchises in baseball's National League and Federal League, the National Football League and the All-America Football conference. That arena is now being built; a group of residents who vigorously opposed it in the streets and in the courts have lost. They had their rights and they had their reasons. No one wants to be forced to leave his or her home. And yes, there are legitimate questions about how great real-estate projects are arranged and financed. But their battle is done. We old Brooklynites wish them well, and indeed most of them are doing quite well, after leaving with wads of cash in their hands.
For those who have welcomed the coming of what will be known as the Barclays Center, and Brooklyn's first major sports franchise in 55 years, our excitement has been dimmed, however, by doubts about what the relocated National Basketball Association team would be called. Whether or not it would keep the name "Nets," which has served it for decades on Long Island and in New Jersey, or adopt a new label indigenous to Brooklyn, has always been less important than whether it would identify itself as a "Brooklyn" or as a "New York" franchise. I have long expected the latter, and so I was delighted the other day when one of its minor investors, the rap star Jay-Z, announced at the construction site that it will in fact be the home of the Brooklyn Nets.
Now for a bit of that history that I spoke of. Brooklyn was an incorporated city from 1834 to 1898, when it was consolidated into what was called Greater New York. That was the preferred term, because it was understood that the new entity was the union of two big cities, plus three largely suburban counties. From the 1850s to 1890, in fact, Brooklyn had been the third-largest city in America, behind New York and Philadelphia. In 1898 it had been overtaken by Chicago but had passed a million in population. By the 1920s it contained more people than Manhattan, the original City of New York, and it peaked at close to three million in 1950. Today its official population of 2.5 million is generally thought to be a significant undercount. It was not intended that becoming a borough of Greater New York would deprive Brooklyn of its status as an important American place in its own right. But some of its leading citizens had warned that that would happen, and to a large extent it did. It lost power and, enormously, lost prestige.
My best example of how Brooklyn was nearly effaced from the American map is a comment made to me some years a go by a fellow in Boston, who was, by the way, a college graduate: "Brooklyn? That's sort of like Brighton, isn't it?." Brighton is a Boston neighborhood that had a population then of, at most, 50,000. Now, if Brooklyn had remained a city, it would be unimaginable that any minimally informed American could be so ignorant of its identity. I dryly responded that there were at least as many people in Brooklyn as there were in Greater Boston.
The very name of Brooklyn became shameful. A couple of decades ago, St. Francis College, which has operated here since 1884, began to advertise itself as being located in "Brooklyn Heights, New York," which happened to be a still-prestigious enclave. (I wrote its president a note of concern that the school had left Brooklyn. He missed the sarcasm.) More recently, when Marriott built the first hotel to rise here in decades, they dared not christen it "The Brooklyn Marriott," but opted for "The Brooklyn Bridge Marriott" -- another reach for prestige. And so on. So you can understand my skepticism about an NBA team's choosing to print "Brooklyn" on its jerseys. I can hardly believe that it is happening.
But for a quarter-century or more Brooklyn has enjoyed a renaissance. Prices of brownstone homes in its more desirable neighborhoods begin at about a million dollars. In these areas there seem to be two restaurants and one café on every block, a clothing boutique on every corner, and next to that a wine shop or fancy-furniture outlet. There are so many young women pushing strollers in my neighborhood that the single set is objecting that they are taking up too much space on the sidewalks and in the bistros and cafés. But these complainants have the option of moving to Williamsburg in the north of the borough, which has become the first neighborhood ever outside of Manhattan to be the hottest location in the city for hip young folks to live and play in.
And so, 113 years after "The Great Mistake of '98," it has become possible to read such a quote as this, from Nets' chief executive Brett Yormark:
"Brooklyn was easy, because we think Brooklyn is the brand. Brooklyn is iconic. It transcends the marketplace. In many respects, it's a global name and reference."
Hallelujah. Now let's invite back, for the first Brooklyn Nets game, everyone who ever played or worked for the Brooklyn Dodgers, except Peter O'Malley.
]]>It's the Age of Metaphor -- Literallytag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8766702011-06-15T15:21:44-04:002011-08-15T05:12:01-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
When and where, for example, did schadenfreude emerge from academic shadows (pun intended) and begin to become almost commonplace in English writing and speech? It is actually a usage I don't much mind, because it economically expresses something that no English word or phrase can. You might catch me using it now and then, but I hope you won't hear me pronounce another annoyingly popular foreign word, faux. Any French-English dictionary will tell you that this is the equivalent of "false," so there is really no reason other than pretentiousness to be carrying on about "faux prophets" or a "faux British accent."
The trendy word that I've noticed most lately is "metaphor." This too used to be confined mainly to academia, but in the past few years it has broken out like a rash among the general population. For the most part, I say send it back to the literature classroom, for it is not only being used too often, but also too often incorrectly -- even by smart people and good writers.
A metaphor is a spoken or written statement of equation between one thing and another thing that are literally very different. It is a "figure of speech," which is not the same as a symbol or emblem or analogy. It is a relation that must be expressed or implied. One classic example is from the English ballad, "The Highwayman": "The moon was a ghostly galleon." Another, which I offered myself as an editor of The New York Times desk reference, is from Thomas Merton: "My eyes are flowers for your tomb." In each case the poet is stating that something is something else, transforming one thing into another through the power of his imagination. His observation is bolder than a comparison. (A college teacher of mine, a poet named John Fandel, one day seemed to have an epiphany in front of the class when he vocalized the thought that "in a sense, every metaphor is a moment of madness!")
But metaphors also occur far from poetry in everyday language. "He's a bull in a china-shop" is a metaphor. So is "She was floating in a revery." But the point is that these identities or relations are presented in words, which most of people who now bounce the word "metaphor" around do not realize. Moreover, unlike a symbol, a metaphor is not one thing that stands for another. It is improper to say that the moon or a rose is a metaphor. A metaphor, being a stated or implied relation between two things, has two parts, known to us snobs as "tenor" and vehicle."
A quick search of the Times of the past 30 days brings up eight uses of "metaphor" (including one wacky reference to "vegetable-metaphor terms") The first is from a letter-writer who states that the convicted Nazi guard John Demjanjuk is "a metaphor for evil and inhumanity." Well, no he isn't. He may be a symbol or representative or incarnation of evil, but he is not a metaphor or part of a metaphor unless some speaker or writer dares to equate him with something, such as evil or an evil country, as in a the phrase, "Germany became Demjanjuk, and Demjanjuk Germany." Likewise, when a normally articulate New York radio host stated recently that a certain song was a metaphor, he was lapsing. "Life is a song" is a metaphor, but not the song itself.
The next Times piece on the list, about a man known as "The Horse Whisperer," contains the statement, "establishing a connection with a horse can be extremely gratifying, and indeed, often become a metaphor for life." Wrong again, and in an article that goes on to quote an actual metaphor from this soft-voiced trainer: "Your horse is a mirror to your soul." I tell you, these misuses are legion, and certainly not restricted to the Times. I recently read a very thoughtful and deeply humane book by a Jesuit priest in which he seems to discover a metaphor on every other page, and seldom correctly. Mea maxima culpa.
The not unexpected corollary to this slovenliness is the constant misuse of "literally," which in about nine cases out of ten is applied to phrases that are in fact figurative -- or metaphorical. In almost all of the cases these gaffes occur when a speaker or writer chooses a figure of speech that has a close relation to what the figure is being compared to -- and then overstates the case, declaring to be literal what is not literal at all. Thus, back at the Times, the estimable Paul Krugman stated a few months back in a column about the federal-budget debate that a Republican proposal to cut nutritional aid to pregnant women and infants was "literally stealing food from the mouths of babes." Really? Are there any pictures of this? Sometimes such results can be quite amusing, like dangling participles. The program-notes for a concert I once attended, for example, informed the audience that Mozart's 38th symphony "set the city of Prague literally on its ear."
I'm reminded of a favorite New Yorker cartoon in which a fellow is sitting beside the hospital bed of another fellow who is trussed and bandaged around the middle of his body. The visitor is speaking: "Why, of course, I've heard the expression countless times. It's just that I've never actually seen it before." The poor bloke had literally broken his ass!
]]>Duke Snider -- Farewell, My Herotag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.8292282011-02-28T16:59:37-05:002011-05-25T18:35:25-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
This one hurts. For me and most of the kids of the 1950s, he was the one. Our hero. And therefore a hero for life.
It's corny, I know, but in Brooklyn the Dodgers were like family. My teenage sisters wished they could marry the handsomest ones, Duke or Gino or Don Drysdale, and I suppose I'd have liked them to teach me what my ailing father couldn't -- the way to play the game or how to swim. His decline and my adoption of the Duke exactly coincided. It was June 1956 -- I've looked it up -- and I was not quite seven. I lay on the red linoleum of our living-room floor watching a night game in St. Louis in which Duke hit two massive home-runs, one of which knocked out the electric lettering atop a clock on the right-field roof. It is my earliest memory of him. The game was still going when my father came home and asked what the score was. When I or someone else told him, he playfully followed up with a phrase -- he was an Irishman who liked the sound of words -- that I didn't understand: "In whose favor?"
He had been out that night to see a local doctor and would soon be conquered by a devastating paralysis.
There were legions of Brooklynites who earnestly supported their team but would never follow baseball after they left. My older brother Johnny is my readiest example. Two weeks after that wondrous display in St. Louis, he took me to a Sunday doubleheader at Ebbets Field. It was the first of two times I was ever there. In the first inning of the first game, Gilliam and Reese got on base for the Dodgers, and Duke, who always batted third, drove one of his signature homers over the tall right-field scoreboard.
My hero for life.
Duke Snider -- christened "Edwin" -- would admit when his career was over that he had been a temperamental, even cynical, young man. Around the time of which I've been writing, he co-wrote a magazine piece with Roger Kahn that was headed, "I Play Baseball for Money -- Not Fun." And once, amid the swirling rumors that the vile Walter O'Malley would transplant the Dodgers to richer soil, he groused that Brooklyn fans, who had booed him, "didn't deserve a pennant." But he was a better man than that, and he grew old with graciousness, always speaking fondly of the borough where he had starred, offering bouquets such as, "I was born in California, but I was re-born in Brooklyn."
It was an awful irony that a few months after O'Malley did take the team away, the great Campanella was crippled in an auto accident, and he would never catch a pitch in Los Angeles. A less vicious irony was that Snider, the Los Angelan, would not excel in his native place as he had in Brooklyn. Yes, the grotesque conformation of Memorial Coliseum was inhospitable to his skills, but he was also hobbled by a balky knee and had become a part-time player at 31. In mid-century New York, he had been compared every day in discussions and arguments on stoops and subway platforms to the city's other great centerfielders, Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays. I have never heard a fan of Duke contend that he was the equal of either one, but he was good enough, easily, to belong in the conversation. And his lifetime numbers, which were fine enough, would have compared better to theirs if he'd had more years in full health.
I have a favorite Duke Snider story, which I heard him tell the unforgiving Brooklyn fan Howard Cosell one evening on New York television.
My other great baseball hero was the brilliant left-handed Dodger pitcher Sandy Koufax. (It is yet another irony that, while two of the best Brooklyn Dodgers of the '50s, Robinson and Snider, were Los Angelans, two of the best Los Angeles Dodgers of the '60s, Koufax and Tommy Davis, were Brooklynites.) Duke, a left-handed batter, remembered that he had, improbably, once faced the unmatchable Koufax. The old centerfielder was in his last year, offering what little service he could to the once-detested Giants, and he was idling on the bench one day when a teammate batting against Koufax fouled a ball off his foot and couldn't continue. On a 3-2 count.
The manager ordered Snider to grab a bat.
"What happened?" asked Cosell, fascinated, as I was.
"Fastball, way high and outside, ball four." He smiled.
He was looking back, as usual, with amusement and joy. I'll always remember him for that. But mostly I'll remember him for the sweet, powerful swing that exposed the number four on the broad back of my favorite Brooklyn Dodger. And right now I can only look back with sadness.]]>Student-Athletes and College Sports: Time to Do Somethingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.7967692010-12-15T13:22:55-05:002011-05-25T18:20:30-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
Why so interesting? Well, the two events have come to represent the opposite poles of what might still be called major intercollegiate football. Army versus Navy is one of the last examples of what this sport was meant to be -- a competition between true student-athletes. Indeed, it remains this in a pronounced way, for each young man on those two teams is fully involved in a rigorous academic and training program. In 2010, on the other hand, the Heisman trophy has come to represent the conflicted and disingenuous identity of the sport that college football has become -- a competition between residents of mostly large universities who are often students in name only and are either unpaid or illicitly paid quasi-professional athletes. Nearly every one who watches them talks about the hypocrisy of the situation, but no one does anything meaningful about it.
What would happen, by the way, if the trophy-winner were a player for one of the service academies? Would he be able to get to the award ceremony after playing in the biggest game of his year a few hours earlier? Obviously, the Heisman Trust, which presents the trophy, do not believe that a cadet or midshipman will win it again. Five have done so, but none since 1963, when it went to Navy's Roger Staubach.
The controversy around the Heisman this year involved the winner of 2005, the running-back Reggie Bush of the University of Southern California, and the favorite to win it in 2010, quarterback Cam Newton of Auburn, who indeed was awarded the trophy on Saturday night. The National Collegiate Athletic Association revealed that, during his last two college years, Bush and his family received hundreds of thousands of dollars from sports agents, and it nullified USC's 2004 national championship and imposed severe sanctions on its football program.
Newton's tale is more complicated. He began his NCAA career at the University of Florida, where, during the 2008 season, he was arrested for buying a stolen laptop computer, was suspended from the football team, and, after charges were dropped, left the school and played the next year at a junior college. The next act featured his father, Cecil, an ex-NFL-player, who had an apparently belated epiphany that his supremely talented son was worth money to him, and attempted to hold up Mississippi State University for something over $100,000 to enroll him there. The NCAA has confirmed that Cecil did ask for money, but has no proof that Cam knew about it. (Cecil's occupation? He's a Christian Pentecostal pastor and bishop.) When MSU didn't ante up, Cam suited up at Auburn University in Alabama, where he has fulfilled every promise and become the best amateur football-player in America. Presumably amateur, that is.
Now for a all I know Cecil Newton is a fine man who prayed over the issue and discerned that the struggling churches he oversees in Georgia are, in God's eyes, entitled to some of the money that a big university would make from his son's athletic skills. Or maybe he's one more corrupt churchman. His son may be a reprobate or a decent kid who made one mistake and got caught. The question I'm posing is whether or not he is a student-athlete, or is he a great, professional-quality athlete, with enormously lucrative potential, who, according to the American sporting system, is required to present himself as a candidate for higher education when he may not have either the aptitude or the inclination to be one. When observed from a distance, far from the enthusiasm in stadiums filled with 100,000 or more devoted fans, the latter situation and the system that it feeds are really ridiculous, and unfair to athletes who have no interest in being students.
I say, fill the stadiums; let the universities make money from their major-sports programs, but stop pretending that these are amateur exhibitions. Many commentators have called for openly paying football- and basketball-players in major programs. Fine. Pay at least some of them -- the most highly recruited -- and, to prevent bidding-wars, let the NCAA set guidelines. But, beyond that, end the pretense that all college athletes are also students. If the system demands that universities be feeding-grounds for professional sports leagues, let them continue to be, but end the silly requirement that athletes must earn college credits in order to become professional, as if they were preparing for law school or an engineering job. If they want to be students, and they qualify, enroll them. If neither, give them a room, their meals, a stipend, and maybe, to keep them occupied, a job around the campus. And let them represent the university on the gridiron or basketball court, not as students, but alongside players who are. The NCAA can then trim legions of investigators from its payroll.
And let the service academies, the Ivy League colleges and other, mostly smaller schools compete the old-fashioned way, entirely with student-athletes. In fact, set up a separate division for colleges whose leaders prefer to be rid of the compromising judgments involved in running competitive sports programs, and who feel that athletes should be subject to the same admission requirements as other students. They might well find that the games that their schools play are popular to the public and more satisfying to themselves.]]>Dreaming About, and Mourning for, the Dodgers' Billy Loestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.6643502010-07-30T10:54:17-04:002011-05-25T17:15:21-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
A year ago I published a book, After Many a Summer, which chronicled the long, sad sequence of maneuvers, deceptions, schemes and arguments that led to the departure of the Dodgers and Giants from New York after more than 70 years of spirited competition. If I was asked why I took this subject on, I would offer, among other reasons, that, when they left, I was an eight-year-old Brooklyn kid in love with the Dodgers, and that I'd felt the sting of betrayal and loss throughout my life. But I might have answered, "Well, I dream about Ebbets Field every few weeks or so, so I guess I was sort of compelled to write about this."
The dreams, at least in recent years, have had the same essential theme. The ballpark is still there, and recently has been sufficiently refurbished to allow baseball to be played in it once again, either by the Dodgers or some other team that has replaced them at last. (At least once, however, it was a hockey team!) The dreams usually involve feelings of surprise and excitement about going there, combined -- God knows why -- with a nagging awareness that I have delayed doing so and that I'd better hurry and get there before the park closes again.
But my last dream about Ebbets Field, just three nights ago, was different. I found myself zipping around the ballpark in a helicopter with a reporter named Bill Reel and a sexy woman who was a photographer for The New York Times and doubled as the pilot of the aircraft -- a function she was thoroughly ignoring while she sat talking to us guys and unfolding her legs to provide glimpses of her thighs. The real Bill Reel was a Brooklyn-based columnist for the New York Daily News, but not a sportswriter. He had entered my dream because I had been talking to a bartender about him on Saturday evening. The woman was another of those anonymous Ms. Rights that a fellow conjures up in the wee small hours. The purpose of their aerial mission was to determine whether it was possible for a man pitching in Ebbets Field to lose a ground-ball in the sun.
What? Well, there was a famously heartbreaking moment in the seventh inning of the sixth game of the 1952 World Series when, with the score tied 1-to-1 and the Dodgers leading the Series 3-to-2, the young Dodger pitcher Billy Loes failed to stop a comeback grounder, which glanced off his leg and scooted into right field for run-scoring single. The Yankees won the game, 3-to-2, and afterward, Loes, who was prone to making goofy statements -- he had predicted, for example, that the Yankees would win the Series -- explained that he had lost the ball in the sun.
For the fourth time in 11 years, the New Yorkers took the Series from the Brooks the next afternoon.
In the dream, Reel and Ms. Earhart were trying, not very efficiently, to focus on the area behind and to the left of home-plate to see how the sun might break through the girders there, while I, seeming to represent wide-awake reason, protested that they were going about this all wrong. Why make the investigation from the air? They could better determine the matter if they went down on the field and stood on or beside the pitcher's mound.
I was thinking about this dream again yesterday morning when, turning to the sports pages of the Times, I spotted a brief notice directing me to the obituary page: Billy Loes, 80, had died in a hospice in Tucson, Arizona. And I admit that I thought, for just a second, that what was believed in ancient cultures -- that dreams predict events -- may be true, after all.
Nah, it was just a wonderful coincidence. I have found that, almost without fail, if I think long enough about why a person has showed up in a dream, I will find the spark in an appearance, however fleeting, of that person or some other person or thing associated with him or her in my thoughts over the previous day or two. Why Billy Loes? Sitting in a restaurant early Sunday evening I became aware of a luscious flood of light bathing the room. Then, realizing that the windows faced east, I saw that the illumination was actually a reflection of the western sun coming off a store sign across the street, and at the same time I noticed a young woman -- Ms. Right? -- squinting into the sun as she prepared to cross the street from that direction. No, I didn't think of Loes. The amazing unconscious mind made the connection.
Nor, in fact, do I remember Loes pitching for the Dodgers. But I treasure him as a great Brooklyn baseball character who was, not incidentally, a marvelously effective pitcher for those great early-fifties teams. Once a schoolboy phenom just across the Brooklyn border in Long Island City, he pitched four full seasons for Dem Bums from 1952 through 1955, when he was 22 to 25 years old, and put up a sparkling record of 50 wins and 25 losses. Then he hurt his shoulder, was sold to the Baltimore Orioles for $25,000, and had only one more good year in a career that lumbered on until 1961. He never won more than 14 games in a season, but that was OK. As Richard Goldstein pointed out in his delightful obit, Billy figured that if he ever won 20 games, his bosses would burden him with the expectation of doing that every year.
His insistence that he had lost that ball in the sun was an instance of the boy crying "Wolf!" It was scoffed at because of his pattern of peculiar pronouncements. But as his pitching teammate Carl Erskine, quoted by Goldstein, indicated, the slant of the sun through the walls of Ebbets Field at a certain time on an October day made that excuse absolutely feasible.
So here's wishing time off in purgatory for Billy Loes for having told the truth in his lifetime. And happy dreams forever after.
]]>Unlike Steroids, HGH Can Harm Without Helpingtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.5329582010-04-10T18:10:04-04:002011-05-25T16:05:22-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
As a New York Met fan forlornly watching their 2010 baseball season begin with the all-stars Carlos Beltran and Jose Reyes still missing from their lineup, I have been thinking again about filthy deception in baseball. But not so much about steroids as about that other illicit supplement favored by athletes, human growth hormone, or HGH. Both Beltran and Reyes, like another accomplished sportsman named Tiger Woods, have been associated with the Canadian physician Anthony Galea, who is a known proponent of HGH and other suspect substances and treatments for athletes. Downhearted but curious, I've begun to make inquiries about this hormone that has lately been so much in the news. And one of the things I've found out is that its popularity boomed about 20 years ago when the belief began to spread that this was the one elixir in all the world that could reverse the inconvenient process of aging -- that humankind need look no further for the fountain of youth.
I wondered, since steroids and HGH are so often mentioned in the same sentences, what their similarities and differences are? I've learned that while steroids do indeed enormously enhance athletic performance, HGH does not have nearly the same effect.
Unlike steroids, HGH duplicates a hormone that exists naturally in the human metabolism. It is a synthetic form of growth hormone, a substance produced by the pituitary gland and that, according to my medical dictionary, "regulates somatic [bodily] and skeletal growth." It is, therefore, most active in childhood and adolescence, but it continues to sustain adult tissues and organs. Its production, however, slows down in middle age. So to the Ponce de Leons of the our generations, it has followed logically that replacing the growth hormone that older adults no longer produce would restore their declining physical virtues. The next step was to assume that even younger adults would be strengthened and otherwise athletically enhanced by supplements of HGH.
The start of this thought process may have been a 1990 University of Wisconsin study in which a group of 60-year-old men were injected with HGH for six months. The general results were denser bones, larger muscles and less fat. A report on the study in the New England Journal of Medicine concluded that these outcomes set the subjects' body-clocks back 10-to-20 years. The magical words had been spoken.
Whatever improvements were achieved, however, appear to have been cosmetic. Although HGH may cause muscles to grow, it does not strengthen them. This was the conclusion of a later study (2003) discussed in the same New England Journal. The article also pointed to a different study that showed that exercise was far more effective than HGH for strengthening the muscles of older people. Then a 2008 Stanford University study reported in the Annals of Internal Medicine found that in athletes, too, growth-hormone injections increased muscle bulk but not strength, and in fact might be a cause of muscle fatigue and joint-pain. The Mayo Clinic website seems to incorporate such studies where it states that "increase in muscle" caused by HGH "doesn't translate into increased strength."
This information, none of which is new, is a great surprise to me and seems to be under-reported. It suggests that many athletes are so determined to treat their bodies with substances or practices that promise them competitive advantage that they are easily duped by empty nostrums and medical charlatans who offer them not only useless hormone supplements but also such dubious techniques as "blood-spinning."
The connection between steroid-use and bodily harm has been well-observed. The performance-boost that many athletes have achieved with their help has been followed by various injuries and sometimes career-ending physical breakdowns. (Can anyone tell me where Carlos Delgado has gone since he almost single-handedly thrust the Mets into the 2008 National League East pennant race?) And now it appears that HGH can also cause harm without ever having offered the same benefit as steroids. The possible side-effects mentioned by the Mayo Clinic are not only joint and muscle pain but also swelling of the limbs, male breast-enlargement and possible contributions to diabetes and heart disease.
The reason that Delgado's teammate, Jose Reyes, was not in the Mets' opening-day lineup after missing most of last season with a damaged hamstring is that tests revealed he had an overactive thyroid, which required recuperative rest. Among the several possible causes of hyperthyroidism are a high consumption of seafood and increased human growth hormone. I don't know what sidelined this enormously talented shortstop, but I'm guessing it wasn't fish.
]]>Language Problems at the New York Timestag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.4784662010-02-26T15:35:15-05:002011-05-25T15:40:24-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/The New York Times Magazine, no one whom I know of has taken on the mantle of America's leading linguistic watchdog. I am not at this time a candidate for that post, but to partially restore the loss, I am today beginning what I expect to be a series of occasional blogs commenting on the use of the English language -- mainly the written language, and mainly as it is being put down at present in these United States. I am qualified to do this because some decades ago I was designated the "Official Class Grammarian" by my ninth-grade English teacher.
It was ironic to me that Safire issued his observations, inquiries and admonitions from a seat at the Times because the Times itself, though generally very well written, is a rather carelessly edited newspaper that regularly allows some of the most common faults in contemporary usage to appear in its pages. In recent months I have jotted down a few of these, and I want to point them out as illustrations of the slippage in grammar and usage that I suspect is more symptomatic of our time than of any other period in memory.
I think that these days the most widely ignored principals of proper English are the rules of agreement. Thus:
"a spouse's finding out about a cheating partner by reading their personal text
messages would have a profound effect on how such cases are played out..."
(December 9th, page-three continuation of a page-one article)
Got it? This sample violates one of two fundamental agreement requirements: namely, the requirement that pronouns must agree in number with their antecedents. If, that is, a pronoun relates or refers back to a noun preceding it in a sentence, the pronoun must be singular if the noun is singular, or be plural if the noun is plural. (Such a pronoun is called a "relative" pronoun.) In this case, the noun "partner" is singular, but the pronoun that relates to it, "their," is plural. This is what the Times would call a "disconnect" -- about which, more later -- and, I tell you, it can not be accepted!
This particular misusage has become epidemic. I really believe that in American written language, including language scripted for radio and television, such errors are now more common than examples of accurate agreement. A main reason for this is feminism, which has been a very positive development in many ways, but not necessarily in its effect on language. Granted, one of the flaws of English as it has evolved is its lack of a gender-neutral personal pronoun -- that is, a pronoun referring to person rather than to a thing. And it has never been a satisfactory solution to authorize the masculine form to relate to an antecedent that is neither masculine or feminine: "One must know his own mind." But the problem can't be solved by violating the rule of number agreement, especially when accurate alternatives are available. Thus, the sample above can easily be rectified by making the antecedent plural: "spouses finding out about cheating partners by reading their personal text messages." A less satisfying but nonetheless acceptable solution would be to retain the singular antecedent and replace "their" with "his or her." Any editor who does not catch and repair such an error is sleeping at the switch.
I don't seem to have recorded a violation of the second principal rule of agreement, requiring verbs to agree in number with their subjects. But this too is more frequently abused now than ever before. This error most commonly occurs when the subject is a "collective" noun - a singular noun that represents more than one person or thing, such as "group." Although every group contains more than one member, it is nonetheless a singular noun. It is one thing; it is not "groups." So it is mated with a singular verb (generally in our perverse language identified by the appearance of "s" at its end, the opposite of the convention for nouns). So: "The group is (not are) considered left-leaning."
I don't find such violations to be as grating as the previous example, and there are, and long have been, exceptions to this rule. For example: "The troupe were tired out by such a demanding play." The plural verb would be acceptable here because it conveys the sense that each member of the cast was fatigued - or, at least, that several members were fatigued -- and indeed it might be said that that tiredness can only be felt by individuals. Yet a singular verb in that sentence would not be incorrect.
The following, however, from page one of the Times of last October 24th, is incorrect:
"several visitors strolling by, each of whom wore face masks and vests..."
This is a different sort of agreement problem. Strictly speaking, this sample is not ungrammatical, because it is theoretically possible for each of several persons to wear more than one mask and more than one vest. But as a practical matter it is nonsense to indicate that. The writer obviously means that the each of the visitors wore a face mask and a vest.
I, by the way, would hyphenate the term "face mask," or, better still, would abridge it to "mask," since it is extremely unlikely that such an article would be worn anywhere but on the face. As Professor Strunk exclaims in the "little book" on grammar and usage that E.B. White reshaped into the indispensable Elements of Style, "Omit needless words!"
Well, look at this! My time is up, and I haven't got past the Times's agreement problems to those "disconnects" and other matters. Soon. Meanwhile, I hope I haven't committed any errors here.]]>Christmas Closes Another Dark Year for the Catholic Churchtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.4005642009-12-22T16:13:52-05:002011-05-25T15:00:22-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/The New York Times leads its metropolitan section with another piece about sexual abuse by Roman Catholic priests. Being Catholic educated through college in church-sponsored schools, I can't complain, nor can I resist the morbid appeal of such articles.
Having, as I do, a lingering religious sensibility and an attachment to Mother Church, is a complicated and confusing experience. One can be saddened and angered by repeated revelations of predatory behavior, mostly homosexual, mostly against children and adolescents, by priests and other church operatives, yet somehow be satisfied to read about moral failings a class of men who have too often distorted the call to serve the God of Love into an urge for power and cruelty.
It has been a particularly tough year for the church in Ireland, which has been over many generations the primary root of the church in America. In May, a government-sponsored commission delivered a report on church-run institutional schools that unflinchingly piled up details with a force that seemed to echo the violence of the incidents it described:
Punching, flogging, assault and bodily attacks, hitting with the hand, kicking, ear pulling, hair pulling, head shaving, beating on the soles of the feet, burning, scalding, stabbing, severe beatings with or without clothes, being made to kneel and stand in fixed positions for lengthy periods...
And on it went.
These evils were visited upon young people not only or even primarily by priests, but also by brothers and nuns belonging to monastic communities. Indeed, one of the reasons that this subject has been nagging me lately is my recent viewing of The Magdalene Sisters, a searingly well-made Irish film set in one of the nun-managed homes where, until the 1990s, women who had borne children out of wedlock or otherwise violated sexual taboos had been consigned and forced to labor in laundries. To serve its own purpose, the movie is selective and unrealistically portrays all nuns as relentlessly vicious, but the report quoted above demonstrates that such a strong and disturbing film is a valuable illumination of conditions in the not very distant past.
Nor have Irish priests in particular escaped the harsh light of state investigation. Last month a second scorching report reviewed 320 children's complaints of violation by priests in the Dublin Archdiocese, and concluded that, over three decades, through 2004, the administrations of four successive archbishops had been less concerned about helping victims than "the maintenance of secrecy, the avoidance of scandal, the protection of the reputation of the church, and the preservation of its assets."
These motives sometimes seem to me most culpable of all. Many of the abusers are mentally unhealthy persons who are in some sense stalked by their own unnatural sexual desires, but men in power who have belittled the offenses of these persons, and re-assigned them to places here they could offend again, were free to act righteously and did not. And despite the many necessary adjustments that hierarchies have made to handling cases of abuse more responsibly, there remains in the church a smugness about its own wisdom and virtue, a resistance to observation from the outside, and a pretense that nothing very significant or potentially transformative has been revealed.
I am thinking of men close to home, such as Cardinal Edward Egan, recently retired archbishop of New York and previously bishop of Bridgeport, Connecticut, who in depositions revealed by the Times early this month, retreated behind his legalistic training to challenge the gravity of sexual malfeasance under that earlier watch. The claims of abuse expressed by 19 persons in that diocese, he argued, were not "a significant segment or factor" in a population of 360,000 Catholics. And I think of the bishop of my own diocese of Brooklyn, Nicholas DiMarzio, who taped supportive phone messages for a local state-legislator who has helped to save a statute of limitations on lawsuits charging clerical abuse. DiMarzio, by the way, succeeded a man who had been waist deep in the Boston cover-up scandal that undid Cardinal Bernard Law.
I realize that such suits have devastated the finances of many dioceses, but DiMarzio's crossing the line of separation between church and state suggests that he worries more about his budget than the horrific activities that have imperiled it.
Yet neither Egan nor Law nor DiMarzio stands for the Catholic Church that I or most Catholics I know adhere to. We are drawn to the church that is truthful, compassionate, generous, charitable, mysterious and holy, and we go to the many places where it is found. We are strengthened by the honesty and fortitude of men such as Father Aidan Troy, formerly of Belfast, until he was run out of Ireland and sent (hardly the worst of fates) to Paris. Troy charged the Irish church with "a wholly inadequate response to the horrendous abuse that has been uncovered" in the report of last May and called for "radical action" that involved a moratorium on recruitment of candidates for the priesthood and the end to the "old failed ways" of a "broken, wounded church." He did not call for the end of Catholicism, or of his own ministry.
The great 20th-century Protestant theologian Paul Tillich spoke of "the sin of religion." It is not hard to find, for there is much more false than true religion in the world. Why, even a great majority of Christians believe that Jesus Christ was born on the 25th of December, unaware that the feast of his birth is actually an adaptation of winter-solstice celebrations. But that does not mean that the Christ who was born on some other day in some other place than Bethlehem did not bring light into the world.
]]>At Season's End, Withering Thoughts on November Baseball, Interleague Play and the Designated Hittertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.3478402009-11-05T20:10:24-05:002011-05-25T14:35:20-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
I am looking forward to this crucial game between two excellent ballclubs, the Yankees and the Philadelphia Phillies, whose well-contested series has, in New York, followed a dramatic playoff between the Yanks and an also distinguished squad of Los Angeles Angels. Baseball is still a great game despite what the men who manage and play it have done over the past few decades to diminish it.
I have written here about the corrupting effects of steroid-use and exorbitant salaries and ticket-prices on the elegant sport that is our national game -- and the spectacle of frigid, and possibly damp, November action, following intraleague series that were stretched out to comply with TV scheduling, can be added to the ways that filthy lucre compromises baseball. In my last blog I saluted the old Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek, who walked away from a broadcasting career when he could no longer tolerate the way that money was dominating the sport. Today I raise my glass to Angel Manager Mike Scioscia, who, without fear of whom he might be disturbing, described a scheduled three-day break between the first and second round of league playoffs as "ridiculous."
"Can I say it any clearer than that?", he asked with admirable frankness. "We should have never had a day off last Wednesday. We should never have three days off after the season. You shouldn't even have two days off after the season. It just takes an advantage away for a deep team, which everybody feels very strongly is an asset. It takes that advantage away and I think that's something that Major League Baseball hopefully will consider looking at."
Good luck on that, Mike, for fairness is no longer an abiding principle in baseball. If the game were fair, smaller-market teams from Seattle to Pittsburgh would not be, in effect, serving as feeder squads for the rich organizations. The initial starting pitchers in this year's World Series, Cliff Lee and C.C. Sabathia, would still be toiling for the Cleveland Indians, as they were just over a year ago. And the Pirates of Pittsburgh, a storied franchise in one of this country's most attractive cities, would not just have set a professional-sports record by toting up their 17th consecutive losing season. Moreover, if the people who run the game were sincerely concerned about insuring pennant-races that were fairly contested in each division, they would not have opted for the cheap thrill of interleague play that requires those teams to play uneven schedules, matching them during parts of a season against teams of differing quality in the other league. So the LA Dodgers, for example, might face three games against a tough Angel outfit while the San Francisco Giants take on a weak group of Oakland A's.
This is a particularly sore point for fans of the New York Mets, of which I'm one, because the glossy media and financial attraction of intracity play in baseball-mad New York dictates that they must play six games each year against the Yankees, who are always very good and sometimes great. Meanwhile the Mets' division rivals, such as the Phillies, might have three games scheduled against the Kansas City Royals and three against the Indians. Insignificant? Please note that in both 2007 and 2008 the Mets lost the division championship to Philadelphia on the last day of the season. (Yes, in 2009, it was insignificant.) And it is very likely that interleague-scheduling inequities have influenced the out come of other pennant-races.
One more thing about interleague play: I concede the appeal of games between two teams in the same city and (sometimes) in the same state. But where is the added value of the Florida Marlins playing the Minnesota Twins, or the Arizona Diamondbacks versus the Toronto Blue Jays? In my view, the inclusion of such games on a team's schedule is more likely to have the negative effect of eroding rivalries within a league, as well as fans' familiarity with the players in that league. Again I speak from my own rooting-perch. The arrival of the Dodgers and Giants in New York to engage the Mets has always, because of the New York history of those teams, been a significant event. The fans also look forward to seeing the Chicago Cubs. But each of those teams now plays three games a year here, and in the last two seasons the Cubbies made their only visit in late September. I don't think I'm the only Met fan who admits that he is not nearly as well-acquainted as he once was with the rosters of these teams.
Baseball's original surrender to the lure of the cheap thrill was the American League's adoption the designated-hitter rule in the 1970s. I happened to be living in Boston when the designated hitter arrived in that traditional baseball city, and I remember a Globe columnist - I believe Ray Fitzgerald -- gloomily remarking that the change had rendered the arriving baseball season as the least welcome of his life. I have since prayed, and have been almost astonished to have my prayers answered, that the National League has never fallen to the same temptation. And I say so even though it is now the day after Yankee DH Hideki Matsui has brought the national championship back to New York by driving in six runs against the Phillies. Bully for him; he seems an admirable fellow. Yet, though I understand quite well the claims in favor of the designated-hitter rule, they do not balance its violation of the organic unity that is essential to genuine baseball. The most interesting late innings of any post-season game that I saw this year occurred in Game 3 of the Yankees-Angels series, when New York Manager Joe Girardi gambled to bring in his nonpareil relief-pitcher Mariano Rivera in an uncustomary non-closing situation, then switched his DH, Jerry Hairston, Jr., to left field to replace Johnny Damon. This meant that Girardi had forfeited his designated hitter option, and that Rivera took a place in the batting order - forcing Girardi decide, as all National League managers must, whether to let Rivera bat for himself in order to stay in the game. He put up a pinch-hitter, and the Yanks lost. But the fans of both teams were treated to a rare glimpse of traditional strategic baseball.
I applauded not only the development of a pitcher's coming to bat, but also the manager's willingness to employ that pitcher in a way not dictated by current managerial policy. The general rigidity and predictability of that policy is another dimension of the modern game to which I object. But I see that once again I have not left room enough to work through my full list of complaints. Once again, then - to be continued.
]]>What's Wrong With Baseball? Money, to Start Withtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.3185002009-10-14T14:53:10-04:002011-05-25T14:20:22-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
"I don 't know if the game has changed," Bob Gibson, now 74, told George Vecsey of The New York Times, "but the people have changed."
Actually the game changed radically in the decade after Gibson retired, which was the latter half of Reggie Jackson's career. They are being presented now as virtual contemporaries, but in fact Gibson played in one era, while Jackson, now 63, played in two. A quick glance at their year-by-year records reveals this immediately. Gibson pitched his entire career, from 1959 to 1975, for one team, the St. Louis Cardinals. Jackson batted from 1967 to 1987 for four teams. When Gibson retired, the designated hitter had just begun to transform the American League and divide the game, and free-agency, an even more transforming force, was just a-borning. It was the cause of Jackson's being traded that off-season by his original franchise, the Oakland A's, and the following year he signed one of the earliest mammoth free-agent contracts, for five years and $3 million, with the New York Yankees. Reggie Jackson was the face of a brand new ballgame.
As the 2009 playoffs proceed and the game of baseball continues to enthrall us with matches like the Minnesota-Detroit one-game decider last Tuesday, I've been thinking, with a nudge from Messrs. Gibson and Jackson, about the ways that the game has changed in the years that I've been watching it, which stretch back to about the time that young Bob Gibson began firing fastballs and darting sliders in the old Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.
No surprise: I think that it has changed mainly for the worse.
Having been badly burnt as a boy by a team president named Walter O'Malley, I have little retrospective admiration for old-time baseball owners. Their generally tight-fisted management, enabled by the unjust reserve clause that restricted players' freedom and income, almost necessarily spawned a severe reaction from the players and their union. But that reaction has, over the past three decades and more, opened a floodgate of money that has distorted and corrupted the game.
Major league baseball players simply make far, far too much money for the good of the game and its fans. Money is too important to be rendered meaningless, which is what happens when anyone receives extravagantly more than he needs for acquiring every conceivable material comfort and satisfaction. Many, perhaps most, players earn dollars that are simply symbolic -- that is, having no value except self-congratulation. A player earning $12 million a year who leaves his team and city to make $13 million elsewhere does not, if he is changing places for the money only, improve his life in any way, and each one who does so further erodes the bond between fan and team that is -- or used to be -- one of sports' greatest values.
An outstanding example of such a player is Johnny Damon, who starred for the Boston Red Sox earlier in this decade and was a key figure in the glorious 2004 World Series triumph that was their first in 86 seasons -- eight-and-a-half decades during which that city' earnest fans writhed in humiliation while, just down the coast, the New York Yankees piled up dozens of national championships. But then, in 2005, when Damon's contract ended, there were those contemptible Yankees trying to woo him away from the city and the fans who loved long-haired, bearded Johnny, and whom he appeared to love back.
Here's what he was reported to have said at the time:
"There's no way I can go play for the Yankees, but I know that they're going to come after me hard. It's definitely not the most important thing to go out there for the top dollar, which the Yankees are going to offer me. It's not what I need."
What the Yankees actually offered the 32-year-old Damon was an extra year. Quite reasonably, for a player passing his prime, the Sox limited their proposal to three seasons. When the Yankees went for four, Johnny Damon headed south. He also assented to a Yankee policy that deprived him of his signature locks and whiskers, features that, aside from being an essential part of his identity, he had turned into fast cash via television commercials.
Now I know full well that at this point many readers are shaking their heads in my direction and asking, "Hey Murphy, would you turn down $13 million?" (That's the per annum in Damon's Yankee contract.) Well, yes, I would if I were already getting $39 million from the team that I was emotionally and historically bonded to. To use Damon's own words, it would not be what I needed. Besides, after three years, he could still earn more money, maybe not $13 million, but certainly more than he'd need, and closer to what he would actually deserve
And here's the rest of the story: While Johnny Damon and hundreds of other players are making far more money than they need -- and many of them pumping poisonous steroids into their bodies to extend their earning-power -- the rank and file of baseball fans are being required to spend more money than they can afford to watch a ballgame. The better seats in the two new ballparks that opened in New York this season cost in the hundreds of dollars, with premium behind-the-plate tickets at Yankee Stadium topping out at $2500 before management noticed that, in a deep recession, the center-field camera revealed them to be glaringly empty, and mercifully slashed the price by half. Even the lower number is difficult to conceive. Anyone who is willing to pay a four-figure price for a single seat to a regular-season baseball game has too much money in his pocket, just as do many of the men on the field.
It may be that Bob Gibson was underpaid for much of his great career, or that his wearing the same uniform for nearly two decades was due in part to an onerous reserve clause, but the changes that were needed to make the game fairer to players have yielded to greed and disloyalty that have alienated those players from the fans and communities that they used to represent and be identified with. Some players from past decades are envious of today's multimillionaires, but at least one, a contemporary of Gibson, has vividly expressed, without any trace of that emotion, his own alienation from the modern game
Tony Kubek, Yankee shortstop at the end of their four-decade run of glory from the '20s to the '60s, then longtime broadcaster for the Yankees and NBC, decided after 20 years of free-agency that he no longer cared about major league baseball. During the players' strike of 1994, he sued for what he calls a "divorce." And he has never gone back -- not, he insists, to watch a single game.
"I just got a different life," he said this summer, when he was inducted into the broadcasters' wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. "People have said, 'you must hate baseball,' but I never said that because I don't. I didn't like some of the things I saw. I'm not averse to either side making money, but money was becoming more important than the game itself."
See what money does? I've got so wrapped up in it that I've left no room to get to the designated hitter and other things that bug me about the modern game. Next time.
]]>Vin Scully's Last Inningstag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.2634442009-08-19T18:00:20-04:002011-05-25T13:50:23-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/
The news broke quietly last month in the place that he had identified, at the end of a famous broadcast, as "The City of the Angels." After six decades of expressing the piercing drama of the national game more eloquently and movingly than anyone else ever has, he scheduled his last innings with underspoken, indirect comments to a newspaper columnist. "God willing," he would broadcast Dodger baseball for one more season, after which it "makes sense" that he would retire.
That famous game was on September 9, 1965, Sandy Koufax pitching in another Dodger-Giant pennant-race. Ninth inning, one out: "I would think that the mound at Dodger Stadium right now is the loneliest place in the world." Then two out, two balls, two strikes on Harvey Kuenn: "Swung on and missed, a perfect game!"
We all heard Vin Scully's wonderful voice, undulating in pitch as it informed, entertained and excited, on national television and radio broadcasts during the last half of the 20th century. Like so many others in the '80s and '90s, I would douse the volume of World Series telecasts and turn to the sound of Scully on the radio, when he untypically worked with another commentator. It was not the format he preferred, yet he also did that better than anyone else. I remember his asking Bob Gibson if, great fastball pitcher though he was, he might be less inclined to throw that pitch to a man known to be a fastball hitter.
"I might like ice cream," Gibson responded, "but I can't eat a gallon of it."
And I waited for the stories.
"One of the scariest things I've ever seen was in the old Sportsman's Park in St. Louis, when the late Gil Hodges was settling under a pop foul beside first base, and a fan in the lower stands suddenly flung an empty bottle toward his head." It missed, and "the Quiet Man" of the Brooklyn Dodgers lived to play in their last games and to win an impossible national championship as the manager of the New York Mets.
More than anything else, I would wait for him to tell those stories about the Brooklyn Dodgers, whom he covered for eight years in his twenties, and whose last two splendid but twilit seasons will for me always be represented by his resonant and literate sentences.
Near the end of 1956 the Dodgers brought up promising, power-hitting outfielder with the evocative name of Don Demeter. He had only three at-bats for Brooklyn, but one of them I watched on an black-and-white Olympic-TV screen, and I can still see the ball flying toward the left-field wall of Ebbets Field, and hear the words in which Scully declared a historic moment:
"And the kid has hit one!"
Demeter was 21. Scully was 28. I was seven.
It shouldn't have surprised me, then, that when, during one of those CBS Word Series broadcasts Vin mentioned Ebbets Field, paused, and parenthetically inserted "dear old Ebbets Field," I nearly began to cry - the way that a college teacher of mine once told me he "wanted to weep" each time that Holden Caulfield mentioned "old Phoebe," his little sister,
I 've been told by people who've known him that Vin Scully is a very nice and even modest man, who, for all the years spent in the fishbowl of broadcasting, has tried to guard his privacy and remained reticent about the events of his life, including his spot in the middle of the most wrenching event in the history of American sports, the Dodgers' once unimaginable abandonment of Brooklyn. This spring Curt Smith, a onetime presidential speechwriter who has fashioned a second career writing about baseball and its broadcasters, published a biography of Scully in which its subject had no participation or interest. There are things in this book, aptly titled Pull Up a Chair for Scully's characteristic first-inning suggestion, that I have learned elsewhere and written about in my own recent book: that Vin came of age in Manhattan's Washington Heights, played centerfield at Fordham, was hired by the august Red Barber to air college football, then Brooklyn baseball in a ballpark that he had never seen. But, myself the son of Irish immigrants to New York, I did not know and was intrigued to find out that his mother and father had come together out of County Cavan, that Vincent, his father, had died when the boy was five, and that Bridget, his mother, had afterward sailed with her child back to the old country. And I was reminded, self-indulgent though it may seem, how thoroughly Irish a man is Vin Scully in every feature of his ruddy face, in every word on his descriptive tongue, in every narrative and witty turn of his discourse, in his fondness for poetry and, away from the ballpark, his constant readiness to sing a song. And of course, being Irish, he is reluctant to talk about his personal past, especially the chapters darkened by deep sadness, or, God help us, by any tint of shame.
Vin Scully, if he is as decent a man as I think he is, must know that the Dodgers' flight from Brooklyn for 300 acres of central Los Angeles was a shameful maneuver. He must know this although he has basked for half a century in the western sun, embraced and been embraced by the California Southland, become, in fact, one of the most popular personalities who ever lived there. Yet I don't believe that he has ever said a public word acknowledging that shame. This is not to say that it was his. He has always said that he was glad to keep his job, albeit a continent away from all, except for that stint in Cavan, that he had ever known. I do remember once, in a conversation with the New York radio host Jonathan Schwartz, his reference to the emotional difficulty of the move. I liked that fine, but waited in vain for him to offer some further, heartfelt commentary to his New York audience.
The shame was mainly Walter O'Malley's, probably the only owner in sports ambitious, duplicitous and greedy enough to uproot the most financially successful franchise in his game. It is not for any man to deny any other man his friends, and Walter O'Malley was more than a friend to Vin Scully. He was, like his actual stepfather, like Red Barber - Scully said so -- a surrogate father to him. Vin apparently loved him, and love has its own rules. And it is not Irish, except maybe for the Playboy of the Western World, to attack your own Da. O'Malley's own father was a ruthless crook, but the son remained close to him while he lived and afterward spoke of him with affection.
Walter, for all his well-rehearsed blather, was not a full-blooded Irishman, nor was he, as he liked to call himself, "a Brooklyn man." Scully is the first but not the latter. Both had grown up in other boroughs rooting for the Giants, and, as near as I can tell, Vin never lived in Brooklyn. (O'Malley did.). He had not even visited the borough before 1950, and, sincere and gracious as the memories he expresses may be, it would not surprise me to find that his not set a foot here since 1957. To him the Brooklyn Dodgers are a lovely toy to play with in his memory, an historical artifact owned and coddled by the Dodgers of Los Angeles, not a lost and irreplaceable experience, as they are to their old devotees who may live anywhere but are rooted in Brooklyn.
Lately, to my amazement, I have found Vin Scully's voice, lovely still but flatter, more perfunctory now, on the internet. I will keep on listening, and wish that once, before he calls his last pitch, he will hear the better angels of his Irish nature, and say to Brooklyn, "I know that what the Dodgers did to you was awful, and I'm sorry for your trouble."
]]>It's Time to Realize that Every Baseball Player is a Steroids Suspecttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.2487772009-07-31T17:15:47-04:002011-05-25T13:45:21-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/New York Times, names the very player who this season has illustrated the principal point that I made back then. And it reinforces my further point that steroid-use has become so widespread in the game, and dishonest denials by users so prevalent, that it is no longer possible to assume that any player is clean, or to believe anyone who states that he does not now take or never has taken anabolic steroids. Anyone.
The player of the day is David Ortiz, the gregarious, beloved "Big Papi," who in 2004 and '07 was a primary contributor, along with fellow-user Manny Ramirez, to the Boston Red Sox' first national championships in more than 80 years. I've been shaking my head all season about this guy Ortiz, convinced -- though of course without proof -- that his was one of the biggest names on the list of juiced players, because his performance this year and through his career illustrates what I have suggested is a clear and reliable guide to steroid use: "Look for the anomalies."
Anomalies such as night-and-day contrasts in performance within a single season. In my previous discussion, I pointed out the extraordinary disparity in New York Met first-baseman Carlos Delgado's production in the first two months and last four months of the 2008 season, and strongly implied that the improvement was the result of his falling off the drug-free wagon -- a suspicion reinforced by his being felled this season by a ravaged hip, the steroid-user's injury of choice. In May of this year, I watched the Delgado-less Mets take on Ortiz's Red Sox in an interleague series in Boston. Or so I thought I was doing, but in fact those Sox were Ortiz-less, although his full 240-or-more pounds appeared in each of the games. Seldom have I seen a more inept batter. He really did not seem capable of driving the ball out of the infield. Slugger of 54 home runs in 2006, he had, after six weeks of the 2009 season hit only one. Then in June and July, he smacked 13.
But he was already a suspect in my mind. When Ortiz arrived in Boston from Minnesota in 2002, he had not hit more than 20 home runs, nor knocked in more than 75, nor batted .300 in any full or near-full season. The Twins didn't think enough of him to play him every day. Then in his first five years in Boston, his home runs ranged from 31 to 54, his rbi's from 101 to 148, his average from .287 to .332. Anomalies in performance between seasons or longer portions of a career are also indicators of drug-use.
Now I know that respondents to this blog will argue about other players before the "steroids era" who improved dramatically during their careers. To those readers I say, I am proving nothing. But this is the steroids era, and I am recording what I very strongly suspect. And what I already suspected about this player is now reinforced -- not proven -- by the test evidence just leaked to the press. I would add, as I also indicated in my previous piece, that I think that there have been steroids in baseball for far longer than the steroids era is usually considered to cover.
I have been saying for some time, to sometimes disbelieving companions, that if the full extent of steroid-use in baseball ever becomes known, I expect that the number of users will be legion. And maybe only then will fans fully realize how severely this plague has infected the integrity of the national game -- and yes, other sports, as well. I write this fully understanding that athletes who feel that they are at a competitive disadvantage to rivals using pharmaceutical enhancements will naturally be tempted to use them in turn. This still would not justify the intake of substances that are dangerous and illegal. But, beyond that, steroids are not an equalizer. They affect different athletes to different degrees, just as, for example, antidepressants have varied effectiveness for different psychiatric patients. The uneven effects of steroids also seems to depend on the regimens being applied and on whether or not accomplished practitioners are constructing those regimens. So one player may be minimally improved by steroids - might even be more harmed than helped by them -- while another -- first to mind is Barry Bonds - will achieve dramatic, exorbitant results. The consequence is that a modern fan can never trust that he or she is watching an honestly competitive game, nor that the statistical records that the baseball fan closely follows and compares to those of seasons past are even remotely legitimate.
Steroid-use thus makes fools of fans and of all non-participants who study or follow or report on the game. I am thinking particularly of broadcasters and sportswriters. I remember feeling embarrassed several years ago when one of the most articulate and intelligent play-by-play men in the game, Gary Cohen of the Mets, was expounding on the radio about how great and underappreciated Roger Clemens' pitching achievements were for a man his age. "Gary, Gary," I thought, "Stop it! Don't you realize that the man is saturated with steroids?" We have since learned, of course, that he almost certainly was. And just this week, a couple of days before the Ortiz-Ramirez revelation, a very good New York Times baseball-writer, Tyler Kepner, exposed his naiveté in a piece about the slugger Fred McGriff in which he compared McGriff's career numbers to other offensive stars of his time and seemed to accept on faith that his subject was the only man among them who had not been juiced. How exactly does Kepner know that, and is he as credulous today? I'm sure that if he ponders the subject a bit more, he will conclude that it is far from certain that any baseball-player of the past 20 years was entirely clean, and that not having been caught using drugs is no proof that he never did. Likewise Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated, who last February extolled Carlos Delgado as "the lost slugger of the Steroid Era." Journalists, I know, have to file pieces, but I'm sorry they have to file pieces like these.
I'm also sorry to state that I believe that every player is suspect to a lesser or greater degree. Except David Wright of my Mets. What? You want me to explain why he's hit just six home runs this year after knocking 33 last year and more than 25 in each of the past four. Simple. The new Mets ballpark. Huh? What about road games? Hey, what the hell are you insinuating!
]]>O'Malley vs. Moses, a Half-Century Latertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2009:/theblog//3.2195692009-06-24T13:10:52-04:002011-05-25T13:30:21-04:00Robert E. Murphyhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-e-murphy/New York Times bestseller list. And my agent sent me a note: let's think again about that idea of yours. So we did, and After Many a Summer was published last month.
The end of the Brooklyn Dodgers is a lasting, almost mythic story because it is unique: of all professional teams, the one most closely associated with the place it represented, the most financially successful baseball team, a perennial winner in its league, historic beyond sports and nationally followed because it was the game's first integrated team, was uprooted by its ambitious owner and replanted on the other side of the country. The words "Brooklyn" and "Dodgers" were so firmly bonded that their separation had not been imaginable, but in 1957 Walter O'Malley managed to separate them. "It took a certain type of individual to pull a stunt like that," the Brooklyn baseball historian Tom Knight once remarked, "and Walter was it."
And the story endures because O'Malley was, physically and otherwise, an oversize figure, a character so vivid, with his slicked-back hair, constant cigar and prepossessing paunch below his chin and at his waist -- ever blabbing, ever scheming, ever smiling, whatever his intent. His image doesn't fade, and so, half a century after he pulled that most memorable stunt, the long debate about his culpability is still going on. In fact, it is being renewed. The current debate faces him off against another enormous and indelible personage, the longtime New York parks commissioner and public-works czar Robert Moses, whom O'Malley had to involve in his cherished plan to erect the finest baseball stadium in the world at a choice location in Brooklyn.
A main reason for Robert Moses' enduring prominence is the Robert Caro massive biography of him, The Power Broker, published in 1974 and still in print. Deeply researched, compellingly written, it is the most influential book ever written about an American city. The man it depicts, across a very broad canvas, is a onetime reformer who was corrupted by power absolutely, an impossibly vane, imperious, intransigent autocrat. For all its length, however, it is oddly reticent about its subject's involvement with Walter O'Malley and the fate of the Brooklyn Dodgers, a gap that was filled in 1987 by the academic writer Neil Sullivan in his book The Dodgers Move West. Sullivan, a Los Angelan who had moved to New York, made a rather convincing case that Caro's Power Broker was the man principally responsible for the Dodgers' abandonment of Brooklyn.
Old Dodgers fans like me, who lost them at the age of eight and accepted as an article of faith that O'Malley was a grasping old sinner whose avarice had obliterated my team, now had a choice of villains. Or we could attach villainy to both men in the proportion that suited us. It was that way for more than a decade, until Michael Shapiro showed up with a book about the Brooklyn Dodgers in which, though he did not credit Sullivan, he came to the same conclusion, and stated it more definitely: "Walter O'Malley is not the villain of this story. . . . Robert Moses is the bad guy in this story." His book was nicely written in a popular narrative style, and it weighed the scale of opinion more heavily against Moses. That was in 2003. In the summer of 2007, Home Box Office aired a 50th-anniversary memoir of the Brooklyn Dodgers, and there beneath the lights was Shapiro, and -- what's this?-- Caro himself, with something to say about Moses and the Dodgers, after all. I had begun by then to write my own book, and from that point on, nearly everyone to whom I mentioned my project -- even in Brooklyn -- would remark, "It was all Robert Moses' fault, wasn't it?"
Well, no, it wasn't. Moses might have done more, but he was not about to do exactly what Walter O'Malley wanted so that O'Malley could become rich. The blame-Moses revisionists had claimed the historical high ground, but there was another book published in 2003, Taking on the Yankees, in which Henry D. Fetter, a Harvard-trained lawyer, raised an objection, stating, with felicitous precision: "If Moses can be held responsible for 'the fall of New York' [in Caro's subtitle], how much easier to pin the primary responsibility on him for the far simpler task of driving the Dodgers out of town." He had placed his finger exactly where I have found the problem with the blame-Moses thesis to be: it is simplistic. The story of the Dodgers (and Giants) leaving their native city is a complicated one, and many characters can be blamed, the chief of which will always be Walter O'Malley.
Henry Fetter has read my book and embraced me as an ally in the O'Malley-Moses debate. He is especially glad to find me, I think, in a year when there has also been published an official, family-approved biography of Walter O'Malley, in which Michael D'Antonio concludes, atop other absurdities, "Only the most hardheaded [Brooklynites] would refuse to forgive him for making the most out of the Dodgers." Mouthing such views, the pro-O'Malleyans move further ahead, for D'Antonio's book has an original printing five times greater than mine.
Fetter and I, however, are not alone; other writers are having no part of the Moses devil theory. New York Times columnist Dave Anderson, who covered the Dodgers for long-lost Brooklyn Eagle, has said as much. So has Joe Gergen of Newsday, Bob McGee, the author of a thoroughgoing history of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Ebbets Field, and Curt Smith, chronicler of baseball broadcasters, most recently in a biography of Vin Scully, voice of the Dodgers both east and west..
While writing this I've received an e-mail message from Henry Fetter. His article "Revising the Revisionists: Walter O'Malley, Robert Moses and the End of the Brooklyn Dodgers" has just been awarded the Kerr History Prize by the New York State Historical Association. Seems like we non-O'Malleyans are doing what the Dodgers never will. We're coming back.