Walking the Berkshires

Casey at the Bottle

My Great Uncle Dayt was legendary for his ability to recite "Casey at the Bat" in its entirety, frequently with a bottle of champagne as a prop as seen here at my Uncle Rob and Aunt Marla's wedding in 1977.  Once, at a Williams College reunion dinner, his classmates called for Casey and just at the climax, he lost his grip and launched a bottle of wine through a plate glass window.  But hearts were light and they dutifully passed the hat and carried on with their merrymaking.

The story goes that when Dayton graduated, his mother who was somewhat hard of hearing was astonished that her son was to receive an award for his "Latin Average", given that he had previously shown very little aptitude in the subject.  It turned out that the honor was for his "Batting Average" rather than his facility with ablative absolutes, but the thrill of the game and the love of language were one when he delivered Thayer's immortal verse. 

The last time I heard him recite Casey was in 1990 at my cousin Margaret's wedding.  He picked up the story a few stanzas on as the sturdy batsman approached the plate but otherwise never missed a beat.  At his memorial service late in 2005, I heard one of his great nephews take up the banner and deliver a grand rendition of Casey.

Tonight on the eve of the Fall classic, where anything is possible and there is always the possibility of seeing something that has never happened before, I can see Uncle Dayt standing there in the fields of Elysium, hands clenched and eyes alight, as all the heavenly host hangs on each inevitable word.  One of these eons, given the law of averages, Casey is going to knock it out of the park.

Casey at the Bat by Ernest Thayer

The Outlook wasn't brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.

A straggling few got up to go in deep despair. The rest
Clung to that hope which springs eternal in the human breast;
They thought, if only Casey could get but a whack at that -
We'd put up even money, now, with Casey at the bat.

But Flynn preceded Casey, as did also Jimmy Blake,
And the former was a lulu and the latter was a cake;
So upon that stricken multitude grim melancholy sat,
For there seemed but little chance of Casey's getting to the bat.

But Flynn let drive a single, to the wonderment of all,
And Blake, the much despis-ed, tore the cover off the ball;
And when the dust had lifted, and the men saw what had occurred,
There was Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a-hugging third.

Then from 5,000 throats and more there rose a lusty yell;
It rumbled through the valley, it rattled in the dell;
It knocked upon the mountain and recoiled upon the flat,
For Casey, mighty Casey, was advancing to the bat.

There was ease in Casey's manner as he stepped into his place;
There was pride in Casey's bearing and a smile on Casey's face.
And when, responding to the cheers, he lightly doffed his hat,
No stranger in the crowd could doubt 'twas Casey at the bat.

Ten thousand eyes were on him as he rubbed his hands with dirt;
Five thousand tongues applauded when he wiped them on his shirt.
Then while the writhing pitcher ground the ball into his hip,
Defiance gleamed in Casey's eye, a sneer curled Casey's lip.

And now the leather-covered sphere came hurtling through the air,
And Casey stood a-watching it in haughty grandeur there.
Close by the sturdy batsman the ball unheeded sped-
"That ain't my style," said Casey. "Strike one," the umpire said.

From the benches, black with people, there went up a muffled roar,
Like the beating of the storm-waves on a stern and distant shore.
"Kill him! Kill the umpire!" shouted someone on the stand;
And its likely they'd a-killed him had not Casey raised his hand.

With a smile of Christian charity great Casey's visage shone;
He stilled the rising tumult; he bade the game go on;
He signaled to the pitcher, and once more the spheroid flew;
But Casey still ignored it, and the umpire said, "Strike two."

"Fraud!" cried the maddened thousands, and echo answered fraud;
But one scornful look from Casey and the audience was awed.
They saw his face grow stern and cold, they saw his muscles strain,
And they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again.

The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go,
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But there is no joy in Mudville - mighty Casey has struck out.

Go Sox!

Why I Won't be Getting Much Sleep This Week, Either

Photo courtesy Reuters / Adam Hunger

Ouch! Once More Into the Breach...

My neighborhood bar used to be a safe place to be a Red Sox fan, but tonight I was on my own.  I guess after 2004 the other members of Red Sox nation in my town had collected on their bets with shellshocked Yankee fans and bought themselves HD TVs, but there wasn't another B in the bar aside from the one on my cap tonight.  It didn't matter when the bartender closed up early because she is on call with the local EMTs, for after the bottom of the 5th it became clear that the accident was in Cleveland and the Sox were on life support.  It got tedious being the only one swearing at the TV so now I'm at home and thinking about Thursday, and the odds of the 2nd greatest comeback of all time happening within three years of the greatest. 

Ah, but now it's the bottom of the 6th and the Sox are on the board with 3 and are 4 runs back.  3 solo shots by Youkilis, Big Papi and Manny in the 6th!  I'll be following this down to the end on-line, after all, since we unplugged the TV many years ago.  Here we go again...

My President

We're fairly multilateral here at Walking the Berkshires - my Rightie cousin Tigerhawk regularly sends boatloads of readers my way with endorsements like : "If you are interested in the intersection of history and the environment from a (fairly) non-partisan perspective, make GreenmanTim's blog a regular stop."  And if, as J. L. Bell of Boston 1775 deftly puts it, this blog is "occasionally nettlesome" along with being sharp and quirky, none of that is motivated by a desire to get embroiled in divisive politics.  It is not that I am apolitical, but I'm after something else with this blog and am usually content to keep politics (and religion) a personal matter.

Except when it comes to my citizenship in Red Sox Nation and residency on its disputed frontier.  We know who the enemy is around here, and it wears pinstripes.

The Presidential election that truly matters to my tribe just closed and they are counting the ballots even as I write.  At stake is nothing less than the Presidency of Red Sox Nation, marking the most extraordinary transition to free and fair elections for a formerly ungoverned state since Vermont declared itself an Independent Republic in 1777.  RedSoxnation.com held a contest to identify candidates, and what's more made blogging a requirement for them to make their platforms known and present their case to the people.  Platform planks of greatest import and/or amusement included the following:

Petter Gammons (Hall of Famer and Journalist) - "That every Opening Day, every school in New England will play Ken Coleman's call of Carl Yastrzemski's catch off Tom Tresh preserving Bill Rohr's no-hitter against the Yankees in 1967."

"Regular Rob" Crawford (Regular Guy who as recorded and performed 2 Red Sox Songs) - "my first act would be to solicit applications for, then appoint, 10 "Red Sox angels" in New England, each of whom would be given a block of 4 season tickets to give away, game by game, to people whose lives - for whatever reason - would be deeply touched by a trip to Fenway for a Red Sox home game (that's 40 tickets per game)."

Rich "El Guapo" Garces (Legendary Fenway Reliever) : "As one of the most popular relief pitchers in Red Sox History, my first act as President would be to give each member of Red Sox Nation an El Guapo "Bobble belly" (like bobble head, instead belly shakes). Each member will then have my finely-tuned physique sculpture shaking in constant sight where Red Sox Nation will know and feel proud of me as its leader."

Jerry Remy ( Former Sox 2nd Baseman, Announcer and self-declared "Acting, Interim President of Red Sox Nation) - "I will accept none of the perks being offered to the president. Frankly, because of my situation, I don't need them. I will randomly pass them on whenever appropriate to Nation members and I will make such things public knowledge via The Remy Report."

Big Pupi (4 year old Cocker Spaniel) - " has marked his entire neighborhood and a seven mile stretch of the Colorado River for Red Sox Nation."

At a candidates' debate hosted by Tim Russert of NBC's Meet the Press, Pulitzer Prize Winner Doris Kearns Goodwin withdrew from the race and instructed her "delegates" to cast their votes for "Regular Rob."  My father has urged me to do the same.  Now with the Sox having won the Division and on the eve of the playoffs, the Nation awaits the election returns.  Who's my pick?  Tsk, tsk.  I don't respond to exit pollsters (though I did vote all ten times I was allowed). It wasn't the dog, though.  Stay tuned!

Once and Future Red Sox Fan

I first discovered I was a Red Sox fan in 1975.  That Fall I was a 2nd grader in Worcester, Massachusetts and the Sox were going to the World Series.  It was all any of my friends at Tatnuck Elementary School could talk about, and all we heard on the radio or TV was Yaz and "Pudge" Fisk and Luis Tiant and "The Spaceman" and the "Gold Dust Twins."  That golden October Fisk willed the ball fair in the immortal sixth game of the World Series against the Reds, and then the Big Red Machine broke the hearts of Red Sox nation in the seventh.  The next year, we moved to upstate New York and I lost my way.

My father was a dyed in the pinstripes Yankee fan.  Baseball was something of a religion in his family, and now that we were 85 miles as the proverbial crow flies from the House That Ruth Built, my sister and I strayed from the true faith and thought maybe we were Yankee fans too.  I started collecting baseball cards and only had eyes for the Bronx Bombers.  Dad started taking us to Yankee games where he had access to box seats off the first base line.  My sister had a crush on Bucky Dent, and how we cheered in 1978 when what looked to be a high fly ball sailed out of there to clinch that season ending tiebreaker: another notch on the broad Yankee belt and another open wound for the Fenway Faithful.

Our Yankee apostasy ended in 1980.  That summer we went to Fenway and for 8 bucks a ticket sat in the bleachers with the beach balls and the pot smoke watching Yaz and the Eck and Dewey and Rice and Lynn on that emerald grass. We brought along a sign that our father had suggested would attract the attention of the TV cameras: "Preserve our Pastime: Fire Kuhn!"  The Commissioner of Baseball was a surrogate target for the real enemy: the loathsome owner of the Yankee franchise, George Steinbrenner.  I can't remember whether it was the latest firing of Billy Martin or some other straw that finally laid that camel low.  Perhaps it was this commercial that did it for him.

Whatever the reason, there came a point in that season when my father announced that Steinbrenner had killed the game and he was renouncing baseball. 

He held out for about a year, then modified his exile to exclude only the Yankees and the Red Sox.  The Yankees, of course, had worshiped false gods and betrayed the faith, so Dad needed a new team.  It had to be the American League East, and it could not be the Red Sox.  Somethings are hardwired and nurture has nothing to do with it.   So Dad picked Detroit, guaranteeing that we would no longer be going to any home games and would have to find our own way out of the wilderness.  For a season I flirted with Milwaukee, but by 1984 I knew in my heart that I had always been a Red Sox fan, and so I embraced that identity, just in time for Detroit to go all the way under Sparky Anderson (making Dad's random pick seem pretty prescient, at least for a season).

In 1986 I was a freshman in College.  We had Roger then, and Wade, and poor, decent Bill Buckner.  We watched him make the one mistake that would overshadow his entire career, making him the goat of the World Series and bringing down on his head the approbation of Boston fans for all eternity. 

In the Fall of 2003 I was sitting in a high end restaurant in Hartford at a land negotiation that was going south.  A former Lt. Governor had asked me and two of my colleagues to meet with the owners of a property we had been working to conserve and see if there was yet a deal to salvage.  It was also the sixth game of the American League playoffs between the Red Sox and the Yankees, and as we sat around the table sizing each other up we could hear cheers and groans coming from the adjacent bar.  Hartford is disputed territory in Red Sox Nation, and the landowners were from the central Connecticut coast, but it turned out that all of us were Red Sox fans (or professed to be that night), and with that basis for agreement to get us started we managed to find our way to yes.

And then 2004, the world changed for Red Sox Fans, and I spent the playoffs screaming and crying and clenching my teeth in a neighborhood bar as they clawed back from certain death to take it all from the Yankees after losing the first 3 of 7.  The World Series sweep was icing on the cake, but the AL championship series was more than any self respecting Red Sox fan - particularly one that had come back to the fold after going over to the dark side - had a right to pray for. 

The Yanks are at Fenway for a late season 3 game series this weekend.   Sox are up 5-1 in the bottom of the 5th in the first game.  My Dad is probably watching the game in Andover.  And he's rooting for the Sox! 

Team	W	L	PCT	GB
Boston	89	58	.605	-
NY Yankees	83	63	.568	5.5

Sox Appeal

In October 2004, I tried to explain baseball to my 4 year old daughter. 

"Emily,"  I said; "You know why Daddy's been so excited lately?  The Red Sox beat the Yankees!  They're going to the World Series!"

Emily didn't miss a beat.  "Poor Yankees!"

"No, not poor Yankees!" I spluttered; "Don't feel sorry for them.  They always win!"

My daughter didn't understand why anyone would not root for a team that always wins.  Winning sounded good to her, and I felt like I had dropped an easy pop fly and unwittingly made a Yankee fan out of my little girl at the very moment that Red Sox fans were living our impossible dream.

I shouldn't have worried.  Choosing sides is not decided by parents but by peers, and kindergarten in Northwest Connecticut is disputed territory on the tattered fringe of Red Sox Nation.  Watching them claw back to take the pennant from the Yankees was not a simple matter of walking into the neighboring bar and cheering at the big screen - you had to pick the right bar or there would be nothing but pinstripes on display and no one to buy you a celebratory round.  Emily figured out by 1st grade that if her father was a Red Sox fan, then so was she, though she had never had the opportunity even to watch a game on TV until this year, since we pulled the plug on our set years ago and all it shows are dvds.

We stayed in a hotel on the way to Monhegan a few weeks ago, and the game was on.  Emily and Elias suddenly saw the emerald grass under the lights, the red dirt on crisp white uniform shirts, and heard their avowedly anti-baseball mother shouting at the umpires.  I can only imagine what they will think when they get to see the big show at Fenway one of these days.  We will work our way up to it, taking in a Cape Cod League game of the Wareham Gatemen on Monday.

I asked Elias which player he liked and he smiled and replied; "Big Papi."  Good choice for a little boy . 

"I love Manny" said his sister, "He's so cute!"  Hoo, boy.  At least she didn't fall for Derek Jeeter.

"Hello Cleveland!": Baseball's 10 Cent Beer Riot

The early 1970s were the nadir of America's Rust Belt and of Baseball.  Axis of Evel Knieval shows us why in a chilling anniversary post on the game when an ill-conceived promotional "Ten-Cent Beer Night" went horribly awry:

"During the first few innings, tipsy fans tossed smoke bombs and firecrackers at each other. By the second inning, a topless woman had leaped onto the field and chased down one of the umpires for an unwanted kiss; another streaker joined the Rangers’ Tom Grieve as he circled the bases following his second home run of the night; a father and son team ran into the outfield and dropped their pants. Meantime, golf balls, rocks and batteries rained down on Texas’ players throughout the game. At one point, someone heaved an empty gallon of Thunderbird wine at Rangers’s first baseman Mike Hargove. As the game neared its conclusion, the evening descended into total chaos. During the ninth inning, the Indians managed to tie the score and placed the winning run on third base. At that point, a fan ran into the outfield to steal Jeff Burroughs’ glove. When Burroughs began chasing the fan, Rangers’ manager Billy Martin, along with several of Burroughs’ teammates, rushed to help out -- several of them, including Martin, carried bats."

Read the whole, sordid thing. 

And if that doesn't satisfy you, another another account reveals that Billy Martin's bat showed up later, broken.  Still another offers that "you could buy six cups of beer at a time, and that some 65,000 were consumed on this particular night."  Futility Infielder provides some of his favorite quotes from Mike Shropshire's Seasons in Hell which sends up the whole affair in Gonzo form:

"When the game reached the bottom of the ninth inning, the temperament of the crowd became strikingly like that of Billy Martin when he reached his hour of belligerence in the cocktail lounge.  What had been a largely congenial gathering turned combative.  Woodstock had become Kent State."

Lord have mercy.  Thank goodness I was in kindergarten then, and a Red Sox fan.  Of course, we had integration busing and Bill Lee, so no one gets a free pass in that era.  The "Spaceman", of course, is the one who was quoted in the Los Angeles Times three years after the beer riot as saying;

"I would change policy, bring back natural grass and nickel beer. Baseball is the belly-button of our society. Straighten out baseball, and you straighten out the rest of the world."

A Diamond Courtship: Love and Baseball in the 1890s

She was a schoolgirl at Vail-Deane in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  He was captain of the Elizabeth Athletic Club baseball team.  A high school crush on a red haired second baseman sparked the romance that brought my great grandparents together, and it is fair to say that their many descendants owe a great deal more to what my father calls "that epic poem, told over 162 days."

There were many amateur and semi-pro base ball teams in the late 1880s and early 1890s in New Jersey. These included The "Alerts" and The "Dauntless", the latter of which merged in 1890 with the Elizabeth Athletic Club or E.A.C.  This was a reasonable decision on the part of the dauntless, as 8 of its number also played for the E.A.C.   

Elizabeth base ball fans were extremely partisan, especially  Margaret "Madge" Olmsted and her sister Kate who were staunch supporters of the Dauntless and the E.A.C.  It is no coincidence that the red haired second baseman, Archibald Gracie Ogden, played for both clubs.  The Olmsted girls took great pleasure in extolling the virtues of their diamond heroes in verse, and deriding their adversaries in equally fervent lines.  One of Madge Olmsted's many scrapbooks contains the following item, clipped from the "Town Tattler" section of the local paper:

"The Alerts Base Ball Club requests that those unknown individuals responsible for removing the sign from in front of the Club kindly return and take the nails from which it used to hang as well.  A job worth doing is worth doing well."

No record exists in our family archive of the identity of the culprit or culprits, but both Madge and Kate Olmsted were capable young ladies and their brother Ned was a scamp of the first order.  My money would be on Madge, though.

This photograph of "The Dauntless "was taken on the 4th of July, 1887.  Archie "Mike" Ogden, so called for his red hair although he was not of Irish but of English and Scots descent, is seated 2nd from the right in the second row.  The Dauntless wore light blue uniforms, which coincidently is also the color of a modern-day vintage baseball team from their hometown, The Elizabeth Resolutes, that plays by 1870s rules. 

Here is Archie Ogden once again, this time with the Elizabeth Athletic Club in a photograph probably taken in 1891.  It was cut from a team photo, clearly the only person of interest to my great grandmother Madge Olmsted but as for the rest of the team something of a loss to posterity. He has cultivated the wispiest of mustaches, a facial feature that soon vanished never to grace his lips again.  Could that, too, have been the influence of Miss Olmsted?

Their courtship was long even by the standards of the day.  Briefly interrupted by the Spanish American War, the real reason for the delay in matrimony was that as a cashier at Brown Brothers Bank, Archibald Ogden felt he had not advanced sufficiently enough to provide for his two maiden, elder sisters and a wife and family as well.  This state of affairs stretched into the early 1900s, and yet their interest in each other endured, until quite unexpectedly a wealthy uncle left Archibald Ogden and his sisters a small fortune in his will of $50,000 each, worth over $1,100,000 at the time if one uses a calculation of relative value based on the consumer price index.  With this windfall, he proposed and they were speedily wed in 1904. 

The Depression swept most of these assets away, but the diamond on the grass, and not the green of money, bought and sealed their love, and still for us today, baseball remains a family passion.