James M. Redwine

Oklahoma State University

Baseball vs. Football

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“If a woman’s just a woman but a good cigar’s a smoke” (Rudyard Kipling), football’s just a game but baseball’s who we are. Or, as my friend and favorite song writer, Randy Pease, sang about baseball (and life), “Maybe I should quit but that’s a hard thing to admit, God, I love this game.” Randy honed his musical skills when he took a break from his studies at Oklahoma State University where I also found pursuits other than the prescribed curricula. Another Cowboy that Randy occasionally played guitars and sang with in Stillwater, Oklahoma was a songwriter named Garth Brooks who also loved baseball. I wonder if he ever made the big leagues? For as Garth, Randy and the rest of us frustrated would-be major leaguers eventually accept and as the protagonist in Randy’s song knows, “our playing days are numbered and our fastball’s lost some speed” but we aren’t quite ready to “hang up the cleats and mitt.” On the other hand most of us, not Tom Brady of course, have no angst about leaving the sweaty football pads hanging in the dank locker room while we are still a ways from our porch swings.

Baseball is not just America’s Past Time it is America. It is a grimy catcher’s mask and miraculous or stumbling catches in left-center field. It is come from behind in the bottom of the ninth and lessons learned from games that should have been won. It is sweat and spit and grief and grit and all that makes us glad to endure heat and aches. Boys and girls and men and women of all ages can and do play baseball and softball; not so much football once high school fades.

Baseball affords fathers and mothers a parent’s greatest satisfaction, being asked by their adult children for advice. No kid over fourteen seeks football insights from their folks but even aging children who may question a parent’s sanity on matters of politics, music or religion still occasionally rely on mom and dad on how to hit a softball or play old folk’s league shortstop. As a parent slowly rocks and questions decisions she or he once made, when their grown offspring return to ask the best way to use a pinch hitter the cobwebs seem less opaque. On the other hand, no post-teenager cares what a parent thinks about a statue-of-liberty or a flea-flicker trick football play.

So, we can continue to pretend we understand football’s pass defense coverage two and can continue to yearn for our adult children to ask us to explain it and other football errata or we can thank baseball for keeping us in the real game. But I’ll let Randy finish the column because he is a fine writer of both prose and song lyrics:

“Although the song is on the surface about baseball, it’s really about life and how we should love our lives even when it beats the crap out of us nearly every day. In baseball, even the best hitters get on base only three times out of ten. Such is life. It’s full of disappointments and heartbreaks. But there’s always that hope the next at bat you’ll knock the ball out of the park. And baseball is a sign of spring – new grass, new life, renewal, redemption. It represents the hope that comes with a new season. And it poses a tough question: Can I still play or is it time to hang up the cleats and mitt?”

 

Lyrics to “I Love This Game”

♫ My name is Eddie Roberts, and I’m a starting pitcher

For the Winston-Salem Warthogs in the Carolina League.

I’m thirty-four years old.  My playing days are numbered.

I can’t control my curveball, and my fastball’s lost some speed.

 

I’ve been knockin’ ‘round the minors since I got out of high school,

signed my first pro contract on my seventeenth birthday.

From Burlington to Birmingham to Charlotte I have traveled,

But the White Sox never called, and I stalled in Triple-A.

 

Chorus

I love this game.  I love this game.

Maybe I should quit, but that’s a hard thing to admit.

God, I love this game.

 

I won fourteen games one year, led the league in shutouts.

Several of the pro scouts told me I was on my way.

But I hurt my arm in Lynchburg.  Doc said it was a pinched nerve.

And I swear that ever since, sir, it’s never been the same.

 

Chorus

 

I love this game, I love this game.

Maybe I should quit, but that’s a hard thing to admit.

God, I love this game

 

Coda

Maybe I should quit.  Hang up the cleats and mitt.

God I love this game.

 

My name is Eddie Roberts, and I’m a starting pitcher

For the Winston-Salem Warthogs in the Carolina League. ♫

 

© I Love This Game

Randy Pease Decaf Music 1998 (BMI)

Football vs. Politics

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Democracy is messy but usually bloodless. Football is sweaty and sometimes painful. Football teams choose representative colors such as black and orange or cream and crimson. American politics are red versus blue. Football teams are led by coaches and financed by taxpayers or fat cats. Political parties are led by politicians and financed by drips and drabs via the internet or fat cats. Football teams have a few stars supported by several Sherpas. I was happy to be one of the Sherpas on the Pawhuska, Oklahoma high school Huskies football team a while ago and enjoyed every minute of it, except for wind sprints of course. I am still enjoying supporting the Huskies team which is undefeated and on their way to what I hope will be Pawhuska’s first state championship in football.

Political parties have a few stars supported by, usually, faceless minions. Football teams have one mission, to win, whoever the opponent is. Political parties believe their mission is to provide better government than competing political parties would provide. I will leave it up to you, Gentle Reader, if you believe any political party manages to achieve this goal.

Both football teams and political parties are governed by rules of procedure and conduct. With football teams a conference sets the standards and with political parties governments from the local level on up to the top have a hand in determining policy and ultimate victory. Football games are controlled by officials on the field who can enforce the rules. Their rulings are immediate and not subject to appeal but some can be reviewed. Albeit the final ruling, in effect, is made by the same people who made the initial one. Political races are governed by laws and can be subject to recount, review, repeal and reversal. Football fans sometimes must just grimace and bear a referee’s egregious error, such as giving one team an extra down as in the 1990 Colorado v. Missouri game. Of course, the problem with any attempted remedy in football is it would be impossible to completely and fairly recreate the original game circumstance. On the other hand there is the benefit that, other than endless conversations over beer, the calls at football games are final. But political races such as Bush v. Gore in 2000 may end up in the U.S. Supreme Court and may never be universally accepted as final.

As for me, I am currently marveling how my alma mater, Indiana University, can be undefeated in football after many years of wandering in the football wilderness. This column was written before Michigan v. I.U. upcoming on November 7, 2020, so I am hopeful it remains valid when you read this. And I am chagrined that Oklahoma State University where I started college could have lost to Texas last Saturday. I want a recount! I know I personally saw several blown calls that might have changed the score of the Cowboy game.

Regardless, what I have decided after suffering through the entire 2020 political season and cheering (or moaning) my way along the football season is that the temporary pains that I experienced playing football pale in the excruciation caused by the clanging brass of competing political parties and noxious news anchors. I am thankful for football and am past caring about the motes in the eyes of those who do not see eye to eye with me on politics.

 

To Quit Smoking

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My grandfather smoked a pipe. Every Christmas his seven children and numerous grandchildren filled Grandpa’s stocking with tins of crimp-cut Granger tobacco. Grandpa smoked only Granger because he was a working man who also, along with Grandmother, eked out a living on a tiny hard scrabble farm. Grandpa did not drink, swear or hug his kids nor his grandkids nor did he talk, other than to nod at Grandma to get dinner on or to sternly tell a grandkid to not slide on the cellar door or to get out of the cherry tree. Pretty much what he did was work and smoke his pipe. He died of cancer.

Grandmother did not smoke herself but still died of cancer after living with Grandpa from the time she was sixteen through all those kids and grandkids, many of whom smoked. Grandpa, Grandma and my mother, who was the first-born child, travelled to Oklahoma by covered wagon in 1915. There was precious little relief to be had from the struggle to live and raise a family. Smoking was cheap and ubiquitous; until near the end of the 20th Century about the only warning about possible harm from tobacco was the folksy admonition to young people that it would “stunt your growth”. This was countered by the constant drum beat of the Marlboro Man and movie stars who hardly did a scene without a cigarette dangling from their lips. You may recall that 1978 hippie anthem by Little Feat about sharing a marijuana joint: “Don’t Bogart that joint my friend, Pass it over to me.” Humphrey Bogart, and almost every other hero of the silver screen, was famous for smoking. He died of cancer at age 57.

When I started college at Oklahoma State University in 1961 I did not smoke, but everybody who was cool did. In order to be a real college student I had to teach myself to smoke by practicing in front of a mirror in my dorm room. Yes, smoking was allowed almost everywhere, even in the classes at the option of the professor. One of my literature professors would get so involved in his lectures he would sometimes have three burning cigarettes lying in the chalk rail.

My parents both smoked and both died with cancer. Of the four children in my family, three smoked and one never did. The one who never smoked has never had cancer.

Now, Gentle Reader, what’s this column all about? Well, it is not an anti-smoking diatribe. If you or anyone else wishes to smoke, drink, whatever, I am not seeking the role of hall monitor. This is America. Do what you choose as long as you do not harm others. No, what this column is about is the smoker who was so addicted to tobacco he left his baby in a basket on a train as he stepped out to have a smoke.

This happened in Cleveland, Ohio on January 12, 2019 on the Regional Transit Authority train. When the father left his baby and stepped off the train the doors closed and the train took off for the next station. You can imagine the father’s panic.

It turned out okay as the engineer was informed and then returned the train to where the father was. The baby was fine. My guess is that when the baby’s mother heard about the event, she engaged in an intensive stop smoking intervention with the father. Maybe he won’t follow in Bogart’s footsteps.

Cosmogonism

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My great friend from our days at Indiana University, Dr. Walter Jordan, has an eclectic bent and a background in science. Over the years he has patiently striven to exposit for me numerous scientific phenomena. Occasionally I get it. However, even though I began college with the goal of defeating the Soviet Union in the space race, reality sat in during my freshman physics class.

It was not my fault that physics and I fell out of love when I was an eighteen-year-old freshman at Oklahoma State University. It was O.S.U.’s fault for seating the students alphabetically which resulted in my sitting right next to Dana Darlene Reno who was not only a fellow student but also Miss Oklahoma 1961. Somehow my mind never quite focused on the exciting mysteries of space and time. As for Miss Reno, I am fairly certain her ability to concentrate was not similarly impacted.

Regardless, it turned out that the formulation of sentences suited my abilities better than the formation of formulas. English and psychology were substantially less confounding to me than cascading atoms. However, my friend Walt has never given up hope that the light of scientific discovery might seep through my dark layers of linguistics. In fact, his most recent effort to lift the veil from my frontal lobe involved human speech and evolution. For Christmas Dr. Jordan sent me a copy of Tom Wolfe’s new book, The Kingdom of Speech, which points out that Charles Darwin’s claim that Natural Selection is the cosmogonism for the human race is disputable.

Darwin dearly wanted his theory to be the “Theory of Everything” (that’s the definition of cosmogonism) when it came to Homo sapiens. However, according to Tom Wolfe’s book, not only does Natural Selection not explain everything in Man’s development, Darwin was not even the first to have the idea. Wolfe posits that Darwin usurped the theory of Evolution from Alfred Russell Wallace and then spent the rest of his life, Darwin’s, trying to justify his chicanery.

The real problem for Darwin and numerous others such as the contemporary guru Noam Chomsby, was and is language. If Natural Selection is the total answer to Man’s rise from amoeba to atomic power, there should be gradations of speech such as from apes to humans; there are not says Wolfe.

Well, Gentle Reader, I know you might prefer, as did I, to daydream about things other than the lack of evidence for the progression of speech from specie to specie to us. If so, blame Walt. He is the one who sent me the book. I only read it because Peg threatened to have me clean the attic if she caught me with any idle time.