Nineteenth Conference on

Baseball in Literature and

Culture

April 4, 2014

On the campus of Middle Tennessee

State University, Murfreesboro,

Tennessee

"Coming Home: reflections on time, memory, and baseball's eternal return (prompted by the revival of Nashville's Sulphur Dell)"

Last game

9.8.63

timeline

May 9, 1867 At a called meeting of the Nashville Baseball Club, a resolution of tribute is passed to James Maguire, a worthy and esteemed member of the club who had just died suddenly. Members voted to wear the usual badge of mourning at all matches in which their club is a party to during the current season. The resolution is signed by James Boner, chairman, William Moore and James Doherty, committeemen, and M. J. McKee, secretary

September 24, 1867 The Phoenix nine is victorious over the Nashville base ball club 25-20 at the Phoenix team's home grounds in Edgefield

February 12, 1897 Representatives from Nashville, Terre Haute, Washington, Evansville, Paducah, and Cairo meet in Evansville to finalize plans for the Central League. W. L. Work is the Nashville representative. Uniforms are selected as follows: Evansville, cadet blue, white trimmings; Terre Haute, gray and blue; Paducah, old gold and maroon; Washington, brown and red; Cairo, gray and black; and Nashville, blue and maroon. Nashville will host Evansville on opening day April 28th to open the season

July 19, 1904 Dan Lowney, Nashville shortstop, is arrested and fined for throwing a bat at spectators in the grandstand in Memphis

April 12, 1919 The Tennessee Supreme Court today renders a decision which permits Sunday baseball in the state. The Court holds that the blue laws of 1893 do not apply to baseball, as the game was not then being played

April 7, 1927 The 65th General Assembly of Tennessee adjourns early to see Babe Ruth and the NY Yankees at Sulphur Dell. A resolution had been adopted to invite Ruth to address the Senate, but he sent word that it would be impossible for him to appear because of a lack of time

1.27.14

“Present time lost is all time lost.”

“Lost time is never found.”

“Time flies but leaves its shadow.”

“Time wasted is existence, time used is life”

A.C. Grayling, The Good Book: A Humanist Bible

“Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.”

There is a moment in Proust when Marcel stumbles on the uneven stones in the Guermantes’ courtyard, and memory opens itself up. Wood, LRB

Brit Peter Taylor loves the symbolism of baseball’s journey home.

John Feinstein's Where Nobody Knows Your Name quotes an old pitcher who staged an improbable comeback: "sometimes going full circle in life isn't a good thing”... But baseball almost always supports rounding the bases & touching ‘em all.

LONDON — In a fascinating recent essay in The London Review of Books, called “On Not Going Home,” James Wood relates how he “asked Christopher Hitchens, long before he was terminally ill, where he would go if he had only a few weeks to live. Would he stay in America? ‘No, I’d go to Dartmoor, without a doubt,’ he told me. It was the landscape of his childhood.”

It was the landscape, in other words, of unfiltered experience, of things felt rather than thought through, of the world in its beauty absorbed before it is understood, of patterns and sounds that lodge themselves in some indelible place in the psyche and call out across the years.

...this process of retrospective comprehension in fact constitutes a life – is indeed how life is lived. Freud has a wonderful word, ‘afterwardness’, which I need to borrow, even at the cost of kidnapping it from its very different context. To think about home and the departure from home, about not going home and no longer feeling able to go home, is to be filled with a remarkable sense of ‘afterwardness’: it is too late to do anything about it now, and too late to know what should have been done. And that may be all right.

LRB

On Not

Going

HomeJames Wood

Most of us have to leave home, at least once; there is the need to leave, the difficulty of returning, and then, in later life as one’s parents begin to falter, the need to return again. Secular homelessness, not the singular extremity of the exile or the chosenness of biblical diaspora, might be the inevitable ordinary state. Secular homelessness is not just what will always occur in Eden, but what should occur, again and again.

When a philosopher references “eternal return” (or recurrence), you might expect a subtle discourse on Nietzsche...

or Murray.

Or maybe...

I bet you’ll not object if I duck Existential metaphysics, Buddhism, and theology, and just stick to the “pattern of the seasons for primitive peoples... “

Hope springs eternal

A scientist discovers a formula that makes a baseball which is repelled by wood. He promptly sets out to exploit his discovery. imdb

It’s the perennial sense of “eternal” we’re celebrating here, the feeling of renewed energy and optimism for another shot that indeed comes every spring, even for my daughter’s team. (This slide’s for you, Katie.)

Of course we all know the feeling of tedium and repetitive overfamiliarity that can overtake us at some ballgames.

The famous 33-inning game between the Rochester Red Wings and Pawtucket Red Sox in 1981 started on April 18, was suspended in the 32nd inning at 4:09 a.m. on April 19 and was finally resumed (and completed) two months later on June 23.

Waiting for a scoreless pitchers’ duel to end can feel like an eternity. But anticipating the final out of a no-hitter is something else again.

Life’s like that. There’s no denying the repetitiveness of existence. Often enough, though, something great and surprising happens just when you least expect it. That’s what fuels the “wait ‘til next year” optimism for even the most cynical Cubs’ fan. (Him again.)

The season-opening thrill of another blank slate and fresh start is the gift we open year after year. I write this on Opening Night (not counting that exhibition in Sydney, of course).My team plays tomorrow in Cincy. [Update: 1-0 Cards!] Life resumes, as it has for generations. Cue Terence Mann.

The game also gives those of us marginalized or alienated by the cultures of business and popular entertainment (Kardashians et al) a feeling of being at home here. In a way, and to an extent, it reconciles us to our country. It’s been the glue for generations of immigrants, as Ken Burns and Terence Mann document so well.

When I was 6 & still without siblings, the new (fundamentalist) neighbors made me feel at home with our shared passion for baseball. To this day, I’m confident, that would still bridge enough of our differences to make a reunion not just tolerable, but delightful.

Pity those who’ve never found their pastime, “lost in the cosmos,” permanently not at home in the universe.

So many of us academics who continue to feel hero-worship for the old athletes of our childhoods admire and envy how at home they seem in their own skins. They don’t think too much. (That’s a compliment!)

When we achieve excellence at work-when we articulate a perfect explication of eternal recurrence, say- the world littles notes nor cares.

We have no Hall of Fame.

That’s a home.

...all to no end save beauty

the eternal—

(WmCWms, “

The crowd at the ballgame

”)

I need to think something lasts forever, and it might as well be that state of being that is a game; it might as well be that, in a green field, in the sun.

“Green Fields of the Mind”

The Nashville Sounds' recent announcement that they're coming home next season to their storied ancestral digs near the state capitol at Sulphur Dell (as renamed in 1908 by legendary sportswriter and Murfreesboro native Grantland Rice, from the less fetching "Sulphur Springs Bottom") invites reflection, with just a bit of sentimental self-indulgence, on baseball's perennial theme: completing the circuit and heading for home.

For when the One Great Scorer comesTo mark against your name,He writes - not that you won or lost -But HOW you played the Game.

Gene Autry: "Well, Grantland Rice can go to hell as far as I'm concerned."

GAME CALLED

Game Called by darkness — let the curtain fall.No more remembered thunder sweeps the field.No more the ancient echoes hear the callTo one who wore so well both sword and shield:The Big Guy’s left us with the night to faceAnd there is no one who can take his place.Game Called — and silence settles on the plain.Where is the crash of ash against the sphere?Where is the mighty music, the refrainThat once brought joy to every waiting ear?The Big Guy’s left us lonely in the darkForever waiting for the flaming spark.Game Called — what more is there for us to say?How dull and drab the field looks to the eyeFor one who ruled it in a golden dayHas waved his cap to bid us all good-bye.The Big Guy’s gone — by land or sea or foamMay the Great Umpire call him “safe at home.”

The original version of this poem was published in 1910 by The Tennessean Company. In 1948 Rice changed it into a eulogy for Babe Ruth.

April 7, 1927: Babe & the Yankees visit Sulphur Dell. [timeline]

The old Nashville Vols were the Dell's last occupants, closing it down 50 years ago, before the quirky park (with its uniquely short-and-sloping right field) was finally demolished later in the '60s. It was at that time the oldest park in the land, having hosted professional play (including Negro League teams) since 1870.

My first game in Nashville was at Greer, seated behind a rope in the outfield in the summer of 1980. The place has become kind of a dump, frankly, and it's past time for it to be left behind; but that won't hold back the flood of memories sure to come when we attend our last game there, this summer.

I taught our older daughter to “touch ‘em all”-

so she made sure to go back and tag 2d, one night at Greer. It didn’t end well.

There was a surprisingly stable group of core players that were with the expansion team all four years in Municipal...

In the ‘85 series, game 5, he led the Royals to a 6-1 win in St. Louis. My only series game. The 1st base ump gave them the series next game. But I’m not bitter.

We like the new place..

When I arrived in town the Sounds were entering their 3d season, and their first as a Yankees affiliate. It was the Don Mattingly/Willie McGee era.

I recall an exhibition at the end of Spring Training some time in the early ‘80s when the big club came to town. I found myself unexpectedly seated just behind The Boss, George Steinbrenner.

Team history

Skeeter Barnes, “not as easy as it looks”...

but a terrific memory!

...I had not quite disgraced the player whose glove

I borrowed for the contest: the one and only

"Skeeter" Barnes, a very good career minor

leaguer who had many cups of coffee in The

Show with Cincinnati, St. Louis, Montreal, and

Detroit. You could look it up.

But you'll have to take my word for what Skeeter

said to me as I returned his glove to him and

hustled back to my hiding place in the

grandstand. "It's not as easy as it looks, is it?"

No, sir. It's not.

Home may be sublime,

or...

“All countries are home to the wise.”

The Good Book

You can’t talk home and

ballparks without thinking of

Wrigley, as did

Luke Epplin in the Daily Beast

recently.

“I should disclose my considerable

bias. As a southern Illinois [in my

case “Greater St. Louis”] native, I

was raised a devoted St. Louis

Cardinals fan and an equally

passionate Cubs despiser. The two

sentiments usually come bundled

together, and cut both ways...

“In a column from 1990, George

Will wrote: ‘Cardinals fans

probably should be allowed to

vote, and perhaps even to enjoy

most other civil rights, but

Cardinals fans were (and

probably still are) insufferable.’

Fair enough, and guilty as

charged. (But, ‘insufferable’? Some of us don’t know the meaning of the word. Or the spelling. “GO USA”)

I have owned T-shirts

that reference 1908, and

take pride that baseball

is one of the few

activities that St. Louis

does better than

Chicago.

I would interpret a World Series

championship by the Cubs as a

sign that the end is near.

A Splendid homecoming

9.28.60

44 others

"I've found that you don't need to wear a necktie if you can hit."

John Updike, “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”

New Yorker, 10.22.60

“He knew how to do even that, the hardest thing - quit.”

Ted’s ultimate homecoming, as envisioned by his misguided son, is improbable.

Slideshare09; MoL12

“Bodies ascending” (Bodyworlds)

Completing the circuit and coming home to the museum - one way to do it.

We’ve heard of being undressed by a pitch, but this is extreme.

U@d 2.28.14.

by John Updike

It looks easy from a distance,

easy and lazy, even,

until you stand up to the plate

and see the fastball sailing inside,

an inch from your chin,

Baseball

or circle in the outfield

straining to get a bead

on a small black dot

a city block or more high,

a dark star that could fall

on your head like a leaden meteor...

Baseball was invented in America, where beneath the good cheer and sly jazz the chance of failure is everybody's right, beginning with baseball.

“Carl Sagan admired William James’s definition of religion as a “feeling of being at home in the universe”...” He thought “science opens the way to levels of consciousness that are otherwise inaccessible to us.”

Ann Druyan, ed., The Varieties of Scientific Experience

“....cherish the Pale Blue Dot...

the only home we’ve ever known”

In development:

How much greater weight our memories acquire when we attach to them the gravity of exclusivity, when we reject or repudiatie the thought that anything else than “the same dog barking” or the same game re-commencing might possibly be “forever”...

Of course we all know the feeling of tedium and repetitive overfamiliarity that can overtake us at some ballgames, before something happens. Like life. The repetitiveness of existence. Often enough, then, something great and surprising, fueling the “wait ‘til next year” mindset for even the biggest losers.

My every walk is a circuit, but I never risk being/feeling out at home.

Proust’s madeleine, and the ballpark’s dog-&-beer

the moment in Proust when Marcel stumbles on the uneven stones in the Guermantes’ courtyard, and memory opens itself up.

George Carlin on the significance of "home" in baseball - there's nothing like it in football.

Carl Sagan - "human beings born ultimately of the stars have begun their long voyage home"... “preserve & cherish the Pale Blue Dot, the only home we’ve ever known”

Jennifer Hecht on hanging signs on trees and considering the "forest" home...

T.S. Eliot on returning to the place whence we came and knowing it at last...

My parks: Sportsman’s, Busch 1 & 2, KC’s Municipal Stadium ‘69 & Kauffman ‘70(?), [Didn’t make it to Twins game in ‘69…], Wrigley & Comiskey ‘72, Anaheim (?), Atlanta Fulton County & Turner Field, Spring Training (Al Lang, Casey Stengel (?), Intrasquad with Joacquin Andujar and Andy Van Slyke, Jupiter- Ray Lankford, Mark McGwire, Vero Beach, Bradenton, Sarasota...

Emma running the bases at Greer… sitting on the outfield grass at first game, later behind George Steinbrenner… Mattingly, McGee et al… Skeeter Barnes (“not as easy as it looks”)...

Cooperstown, b’ball’s mythic home.

Happy Flight: coming home after a road sweep.