When Boston booed a 2-year old

I was at a Red Sox game once—this was when I lived in New England, better than 20 years ago, before the Red Sox became THE  Red Sox and you could still buy tickets at the box office on most game days—and it happened to be its annual family day for the season. Like most teams’ family days, the players bring their kids on the field before the game and they get to run the bases and have their names announced over the Fenway public address system and play a game, just like dad, if dad played with a wiffle ball. It was the 1989 season, the year Red Sox fans turned on Rich Gedman, the team’s long-time catcher who should have been remembered as a hero for his role in the Sox’ ninth inning comeback against the Angels in Game 5 of the 1986 ALCS (he had been hit by a pitch and scored on Dave Henderson’s subsequent go-ahead home run, and the Sox went on to win the epic series in seven games).

He was hardly a hero by 1989, though, when Gedman’s performance had dropped to the point where he was playing part-time and still hitting only .212, and the notorious Boston fans decided it was time to forget 1986 and ride him out of town. Earlier in this same season, he hit a home run and the boos cascaded down so loudly that he sprinted around the bases as fast as he could to get back in the dugout and shut the fans up. It must have been the only home run sprint in history.

So on family day 1989, the team’s kids line up on the field to get in their hacks with a wiffle bat and to make it even cuter, the public address announcer introduces each kid. Awwwww. And then up toddled little Mike Gedman, 2-year old son of Rich, and when his name was announced, thousands of fans did what had become instinct when they heard the word Gedman, and they launched into a round of lusty boos.

So if a city boos a 2-year old kid whose dad can’t hit anymore, it’s not likely they’re going to feel much pity for a Chechen immigrant with a weak personality and a bullying, alienated older brother. 

A review of "42"

Good, not great. Certainly entertaining, and a good introduction for a new generation to Robinson and what he had to endure. It wasn’t sublime, and I was hoping for sublime, but I’ll take pretty good. It’s a helluva lot better than the only other Robinson biography on film, “The Jackie Robinson Story,” the 1950 movie that starred Robinson himself and showed that he was as bad an actor as he was great as a ballplayer and human being.

Which might have been part of the problem with this movie, too. In life, Robinson was distant and quiet and kept his emotions out of public life, a habit learned no doubt during that 1947 season. That made it difficult to play even himself in his biopic, and Chadwick Boseman has his work cut out for him, too. Here, Robinson comes across as two dimensional and (no pun intended) colorless, no doubt because he was so distant and showed so little of himself. Credit to Boseman for giving it what he can, especially in the meltdown scene after the vicious taunting from Ben Chapman (more on that later), but bringing an inscrutable personality like Robinson to life is difficult.

The best work here is by Harrison Ford, who disappears into a role for the first time since……..um……..Well, yeah. Anyway, Ford takes the secondary role of Branch Rickey and gives him heart and humanity, showing us little glimpses of his motivations in breaking the color line. Yes, he wanted to sell tickets and make money and win the World Series for the Dodgers, but his Methodist motivations and Christian decency also drove him—he wanted to save baseball from itself—and Ford brings that out in nicely subtle touches.

The supporting roles are well acted, and the film doesn’t shy from the ugly moments as Robinson tried to drag baseball and the country forward. The scenes with the Phillies’ monstrously racist manager Chapman are especially uncomfortable, but they’re effective in accurately showing what African-Americans had to endure in the days before integration.

Also great is the CGI. I feel like I can now add Ebbets Field to the list of ballparks I’ve visited.

If I had one big beef about the movie, it’s the way it insists on beating the audience over the head by artificially heightening scenes that are already inherently dramatic (this was the birth of the modern civil rights movement, after all, what’s more dramatic than that?). The ridiculously swelling score, the corny lines (“maybe the kid really is superhuman after all”) only added a phony and unneeded gloss on what was dramatic to begin with.

“42” didn’t live up to my expectations (it’s no “The Natural” or “Field of Dreams”), and there’s really nothing new here for anyone who’s already read a decent Robinson biography or baseball history. But it brings the familiar to life well, and is worth seeing.

Spinning Tales

(Note: This was originally published in the 2007 edition of The Wapsipinicon Almanac, a literary annual that’s published not far from here in Anamosa, and if you haven’t read it, you should. The publisher—Tim Fay—still sets the type by hand and uses only woodcut illustrations, so not only is it fun to read, it looks great, too. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

By the way, the tornado mentioned below hit Iowa City in 2006.)

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The radio announcer’s words were calm, reasoned, routine:  “The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch for coastal counties in southeastern New Hampshire and southern Maine.”

His tone, though, was anything but: “Ohmigod! Run! Everyone! Run for your lives! The National Weather Service has issued a tornado watch for coastal counties in southeastern New Hampshire and southern Maine! Do you know what that means? We’re gonna die! That’s what it means! We’re all gonna die!”

Within seconds the phone rang. It was the city editor in the main newsroom, breathlessly assigning me a story about the tornado for that afternoon’s editions.

“What tornado?” I asked.

“The tornado they just issued the watch for, find out where it is and if it’s caused any damage...”

As this was going on, the receptionist made plans to bolt for the basement the second she saw the tornado spinning down the street, and an advertising rep rescheduled a sales call because she didn’t want to be outside when the tornado hit. I could only scratch my head. Having grown up in the Midwest, the difference between a tornado watch and a tornado warning was bred into my bones. A watch meant merely that “conditions are favorable for the development of a tornado,” as the dry, scientific/bureaucratic language of the National Weather Service puts it. In other words, it’s merely a yellow light, the weatherman’s way of saying “oh, by the way, keep an eye out.” Besides, in the Midwest, we don’t need government agency telling us to watch out for tornadoes. All we need do is look out the window at those summer clouds juiced up by heat and humidity into soaring towers of gray-tinged muscle, stalking across the sky with bad-ass cockiness because they know they can’t be stopped. They’re menacing, ominous things that trigger our collective memories of muggy summer days and remind us any one of them might explode into a tornado at any time. Sometimes it seems like tornado watch announcements are on TV as often as re-runs of Friends, complete with color-coded maps and crawls listing all the affected counties. A tornado warning? Now that was something to worry about. But a watch? Please. Don’t bother me until I actually need to hide in the basement.

But in New England, where tornadoes appear about as often as the Red Sox win the World Series, that watch/warning distinction is lost. The clouds there are thin, wispy things that drift across the sky, as light as a....well, a cloud. They look like the fluffy, friendly clouds that kids draw in elementary school art classes, hovering over their houses with a happy-faced sun. So for a typical New Englander, tornadoes are completely off the radar, unless they’re spawned by a passing hurricane, in which case a tornado is just one more bad thing that can happen that day.

Despite a life lived largely in the Midwest, I’ve seen only one tornado up close. I was a college student in St. Paul at the time and I watched from my apartment as a thin, gray string hanging from a cloud a mile off shilly-shallied across a golf course, then lifted off the ground and snaked back and forth like an unmanned fire hose until breaking apart. As tornadoes go, it wasn’t very dramatic and a few downed tree limbs, chewed up fairways and missing pin flags were the extent of its damage. No green sky or freight train rumble, as so many witnesses describe a tornado’s presence. Meteorologically speaking, it probably wasn’t much more than a glorified dust devil and despite the screaming air raid siren and stern-voiced TV weatherman urging me to take cover, I never for a moment felt compelled to hide in the basement.

Such nonchalance wasn’t the case last April, though, when a tornado viciously tore apart parts of Iowa City, where I live now. The images of the rubble of St. Patrick’s Church and the walls-laid-bare sorority house have become iconic and will live forever in the town’s history. Fortunately, my neighborhood didn’t suffer any damage, but the steady, eery roar of the freight train sounded close enough that I took my kid and my cat and headed to the basement.

The next morning, when I boarded my bus for downtown, the driver suggested I bring my camera because we were heading into a “war zone.” I thought it was intentionally over-the-top rhetoric on his part to build dramatic effect until we arrived downtown and it did, indeed, look like a war zone. Construction scaffolding folded up and dropped in a pile. A convenience store canopy blown over. A pizza joint flattened. Brick facades hung perilously from the roofs of buildings. The streets littered with glass, limbs, whole trees, loose power lines and traffic lights. I was awe-struck. I knew it was bad, the pictures broadcast on the news the night before told us that, but no TV news pictures could convey the extent of it all. This was no fault of the photojournalists. Like real war, the damage simply overwhelmed the limited frame of a TV camera.

To show how capricious a tornado can be, when I arrived at my office I found my building was utterly undamaged. Not a scratch. Not a single broken window. Nothing. But right across the pedestrian mall, not 100 feet away, an entire block of buildings had their roofs torn off and their brick facades were scattered on the sidewalk. Months later, some of the businesses in those buildings still had not re-opened.

Later, I walked to the residential neighborhood east of downtown and saw the emotional damage that accompanied the physical. One homeowner stood in his second-floor bedroom, now fully exposed to the world, and shouted to no one in particular, “my house ain’t got no fuckin’ roof.” Over and over he shouted it, “my house ain’t got no fuckin’ roof,” as if it was only through repetition he could make himself understand that his house no longer had a fucking roof.

I also passed by a young woman sweeping broken glass off the sidewalk, her motions robotic, her face empty and expressionless. Behind her stood her house, now with no roof, no windows, and a pine tree lying horizontally across the demolished porch. Faced with the enormity of the re-building task that now faced her, she chose to sweep broken glass off the sidewalk. At least it was one thing she could scratch off her to-do list.

Fortunately, my own then-4-year old son seems to have escaped the evening without too much trauma, despite the fact we spent a good portion of it huddled in the basement bathroom with a terrified cat. He still gets a little skittish when lightning flashes, the wind picks up and brightly colored maps appear on TV, but after a few deep breaths, he goes on. When I was a child, I felt impervious to tornadoes, at least at home, because we lived just a few blocks from Lake Superior and my parents assured me that such close proximity to water protected us. Tornadoes, they said, don’t come near water. I wasn’t sure why tornadoes were afraid of water because it didn’t seem to make much sense, but it gave me one less bogey man to worry about so I happily believed. I know better now, but I’m still not sure where this myth comes from, and even more mystified by the fact it still hangs on. For instance, many of my Iowa City acquaintances were surprised that our tornado crossed the Iowa River last April, blowing apart the venerable Dairy Queen on the west side, then crossing the water and heading downtown on the east. Tornadoes, they had convinced themselves, don’t come near water.

I wonder sometimes if believing in this myth is a conscious choice because a tornado’s uncontrollable rage strikes a nerve in all of us—we usually can’t detect them until the last minute, we don’t know when they’re going to hit and we don’t know what direction they’ll move. In the end, if a tornado has us in its sights, we’re screwed. It’s that kind of fear that causes such an emotional reaction to Dorothy’s plight in “The Wizard of Oz,” as she scrambles around the farm desperately looking for safety as the badly animated tornado bears down and then carries her away from all that she loves. They remind us that in the eternal conflict of Man versus Nature, Man almost always gets pinned. We like to think we’ve got nature licked—that dams control floods, chemicals control bugs, medicines prevent disease. Modern technology gives us an edge against even hurricanes, because we can see them coming days in advance, plenty of time to batten down the hatches (though folks in New Orleans may question that one). But it’s hard to kid ourselves when it comes to a tornado because with tornadoes there are no such illusions of control. Our only real defense is to run like hell and hope you can find a place to hide. But we don’t like to run and hide, our nature is to stand and fight and it’s frustrating to know that if we try that with a tornado, we’ll get our butts kicked. So we believe in myths like the shield of water, convincing ourselves that there is a defense against tornadoes, and we all have one less bogey man to worry about.

Which is probably why my New England co-workers were so frantic about the thought of a tornado. Their only frame of reference is Dorothy helplessly spinning away from her Kansas farm, or TV news pictures of the flattened houses and demolished lives in the most recent tornado-squashed Midwest town. They think of that awesome power and wonder how their quintessential colonial New England coastal town can stand up, the whitewashed church steeple, the colonial inn where George Washington ate, the fleet of lobster boats docked in the harbor.

In the end, all of that was safe because, predictably, there was no tornado. Eventually I convinced our receptionist to stop looking out the door every few minutes, the ad rep there was no need to cancel her client meetings, and my editors they should stop planning the big package of tornado stories and not expect photos of flattened houses anytime soon. The watch was still the day’s lead story, though, probably the first time that “there was no tornado” made the front page.

--30--

Jackie Robinson: Civil rights icon, angry second baseman

Next weekend, Jackie Robinson's life gets the silver screen treatment when "42" is released,  and whenever I think of Jackie Robinson, this is the image that immediately comes to mind……..

There are no shortage of photos of Jackie Robinson. When you are a civil rights pioneer and one of the Most Important Americans Ever, there will be lots of photos. But with Jackie, so many of those photos lack a human element, something that shows Robinson as something other than the pedestal-dweller that we make of him today. Not that he doesn’t belong on a pedestal, but by nature people in a pedestal lose a part of their humanity, we don’t see them as one of us anymore, and that doesn’t do any good for us or the person on the pedestal.

So many of Robinson’s photos are stage managed by the Dodgers’ public relations machine, like so many player photos were back then, to the point where their humanity is scrubbed right out of them. The ridiculous posed shots of him pretending to field a ground ball……..

or “swinging” a bat with a motion that no major leaguer would ever use……

hanging out with Duke and Gil……

 

stealing home aginst Yogi in the World Series…….

  

 or speaking at the March on Washington…….

 

All these photos are great for establishing Robinson’s place in history, but they only contribute to turning him into an almost mythological figure, not a person, not a ballplayer. He has been given this heroic sheen that is only reinforced by time and that sets him apart from most anyone else.

That’s why I like this photo so much (a reminder of what it looks like)......

It’s taken at one of baseball's most famous moments, when Bobby Thomson's “shot heard ‘round the world” won the NL championship for the Giants in the 1951 playoff with the Dodgers (the “the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant, the Giants win the pennant….” game). For starters, the picture is just a great piece of journalism. You can tell what’s happening immediately, by the mob of Giants surrounding Thomson at home plate, and by poor Ralph Branca walking away from the mound, his shoulders slumped, already groaning under the weight of history. Giants win, Dodgers lose.

And then there’s Jackie Robinson, wearing a number you rarely see anymore (and won’t for much longer because Mariano Rivera can’t pitch forever) in a position we’ve rarely seen him—a human being, overshadowed by an historic moment, one in which he played no significant role.

He’s not the man who broke color line in this photo, not a civil rights icon, not one of the Greatest Americans Who Ever Lived. He’s off his pedestal here, the sheen is gone. He’s just a ballplayer who is confused, stunned, pissed off. He seems to be willfully ignoring Branca, angry with that son of a bitch who just gave up the winning home run. He is not thinking in this picture that he is the man who broke the color barrier, or that he is a civil rights pioneer, or that he carries the hopes and dreams of millions of African-Americans. What he’s thinking in this photo is that the Dodgers will not play in the World Series because they just lost the game, a game it should have won, and lost in the most painful way possible.

And that makes him immediately relatable, one of the few things that most of us will ever have in common with Jackie Robinson. We will never know what it’s like to be a myth or be placed on a pedestal or see our names on the list of Greatest Americans Ever. We will never know what it’s like to play major league baseball. But we all know what it’s like to stand there with our hands on our hips, wondering “how the hell did that just happen?”