Off The Diamond
As the month of May draws to a close I am once again reminded that baseball's first full month should be nearing its end as well, the Cardinals should be in first place and until those things are true nothing will seem normal. I suppose it's technically true that St. Louis is currently tied for first in their division but I mean they should be perched in that position alone, which won't happen until the games begin.
Every once in a awhile a cardinal or two will give itself a rest on the phone line outside the window where I've been working. They really are beautiful creatures, though I should note that the ball team is not named after the bird but the color of their socks (many of the teams that date back more than 100 years get their names from their socks). My friend Deron Nardo, who continues to read this newsletter despite their increasingly yawning lengths, would like me to mention that the Phillies, from his beloved Philadelphia, were originally called the Quakers when they were established in 1883. They have an actual bird connection, having been briefly rebranded as the Blue Jays in the 1940s when their owner held a naming contest. I wonder what results a Philly-wide contest would produce now. Deron may well end up rooting for the Middle Fingers or the Battery Throwers or the Philadelphia Phuck Yous.
While I occasionally see cardinals from my window, I get nearly daily visits from hummingbirds, who come by to enliven my morning with their remarkable hovering and flapping. Hummingbirds have 2,000 meals a day, which makes me fairly envious. I read somewhere that Tour de France riders must eat the equivalent of 27 cheeseburgers a day, which tempts me to tell people who judge my gluttony that I am simply in training for a hilly bicycle race.
The Tour de France, of course, has been postponed as well by coronavirus, which is ironic considering it was a global crisis that led to the invention of the bicycle in the first place, when a German civil servant went looking for alternatives to horses after a volcanic eruption and its aftermath killed many of the area's equine residents. That was in 1818, around 20 years before baseball people will tell you that their game was invented, in 1839 by future Union General Abner Doubleday in Cooperstown, New York, which is why the Hall of Fame is in that city. I've visited Cooperstown to take in the Hall of Fame with my mother and brother years ago, it was a lovely trip and an essential pilgrimage for anyone who cares about baseball. Plus, if you go, you'll have one over on ol' Abner Doubleday, who never visited Cooperstown and didn't invent baseball because it had existed for nearly 75 years before he was born.
Baseball was invented in England and was first written about in 1744 in a popular pocket book. The game is often described as the child of cricket and rounders, a similar English bat-and-ball game, but baseball predates rounders by several decades. Americans were so upset that our national pasttime had an English origin that we simply made up the myth about Abner Doubleday in 1907, 14 years after Doubleday, who by all accounts never mentioned baseball in any of his writings, had died.
So it goes, we must have our national myths. Baseball is not unique in being an American institution that is not really American. The Bank of America was originally called the Bank of Italy. We think of "soccer" as an Americanized form of what Brits call football but it isn't, it's an English-first shortening of "Association Football" most popularized by Charles Wreford-Brown, a 19th century captain of the English national team.
Basketball, which should be heading towards its Finals these days with the Clippers on an unstoppable path towards the title, is a wholly American invention—sort of. It was invented by a Canadian, James Naismith, in Springfield, Massachusetts in 1891 at roughly the same time the English were inventing ping-pong (why are the English so good at coming up with sports?). Naismith, a P.E. teacher at the Y.M.C.A. training school, was tasked with coming up with a game that could be played indoors with little equipment (I'm referring to the number of equipment required, not its size). The legend is that he came up with the concept after throwing the crumpled remains of rejected game ideas into a wastepaper basket though that seems to be too good to be true, especially the detail of him yelling out "Kobe!" as he did so. Just the same, he came up with a game where players dribbled soccer balls up and down the floor and earned points by getting the ball into a peach basket. That was in 1891. It wasn't until 1912 that anyone thought of removing the bottom of the peach basket. Up until then, someone had to get a ladder after every basket and remove the ball which, uh, restricted the speed of play. Naismith went on to be the first basketball coach at the University of kansas at Lawrence, where his initial written rules are still housed. Jayhawks get all misty about owning these rules because they are pathetic, stuck in the past and not one of Naismith's original 13 rules mentions anything about recruiting violations so they can actually follow them all.
Boy, it feels good to smack talk, doesn't it? During this time of quarantine, forced togetherness and civic unity, we need a reminder that while we may flatten the curve with them, our friends and neighbors are still assholes for rooting for teams that we don't like. If the coronavirus has robbed us of anything, it's the sight of seeing the Houston Astros getting hit in the ribs with bean balls two or three times a game. We need that in our lives. Deprived of healthy sport-related tribalism, too many of us rely on the real thing. I blame the Chicago Cubs, whose World Series win in 2016 came just days before the election of Donald Trump and therefore cannot be totally absolved of all that's come afterwards. Go Redbirds.