LOQUACIOUS LADY

The title today is a pun on an old movie title “Vivacious Lady.” I assume it’s not necessary to name the person to whom I’m referring. Having her there, by the way, had a good effect on her opponent. He became a gentleman for once. He didn’t do his usual cuss-you-out-then-grin act and he didn’t use the word “malarkey” once. There is new hope for his redemption.

There was one statement of his, twice repeated, that made me ponder. That was the one about all our spending in Afghanistan amounting to only three weeks expenditure in Iraq. It’s unbelievable on the face of it, no matter how much faith he has in it. And also, how are people figuring out what we’re really spending in either of those places? I believe they’re counting in the normal cost of maintaining an army, period, without regard to where it’s stationed or what it’s doing. In other words the army is going to cost us money whether it’s over here in Fort Dix or overseas in Fallujah or some such place. That has to be considered a fixed cost and shouldn’t be charged to the war. Are the war opponents resorting to Enron accounting?

So much for politics. Now, about baseball. The candidates weren’t the only ones debating the other night. The Phillies and the Brewers were doing it too. I never thought of baseball as comedy before this, but it was this time. The Phils had two men on base and two out when their pitcher, Myers, came up to hit against the best pitcher in the game, Sabathia, who, to be fair, was pitching on only three days rest for the second time. Nevertheless it seemed like he could be still resting and not have any trouble disposing of a hitless wonder who had come up to bat 58 times in the regular season and got only four hits. This gave him an average of .068.

He started off by whiffing a couple of times preparatory to striking out and ending the inning. But it didn’t end. Sabathia missed the strike zone once or twice and Myers did the rest by hitting foul balls out of play. The fans saw what was going on. They started to cheer and wave their rally towels, but above all they started to laugh. And so did I. We were watching David and Goliath at it again. I kept thinking of Myers’ 4-for-58 and shaking my head like I was looking at a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Sabathia seemed to react the same way. This couldn’t be happening to him. But it was. He had to throw nine pitches, thereby straining his arm just the way the fans wanted, and finally succeeding only in walking Myers. The cheering was ear-shattering.

The walk loaded the bases. The next batter, Victorino, then hit a home run, a grand slam in newspaper language, which scored everybody and put the game out of reach for the Brewers. Delirium swept the stadium. There was every reason for it. There had been a baseball moment which might never come again. I put it right up there with Babe Ruth’s called home run.



Philadelphia hasn’t had too many moments like this. In my young days Philly was completely off the radar screen. They had last won a pennant in 1915. They played in a place called Shibe Park. The only way we even knew anything about them was because they had two players called Morrie Arnovich and Sam Nahem, an outfielder and a pitcher. They got in the New York papers because Nahem came from Brooklyn and both were Jewish when Jews drew a lot of attention due to their persecution by Hitler and also for being in professional baseball, where Jews were scarce and two on one team was exceptional. Neither of them was a threat to Hank Greenberg as a folk hero, but they did make people somewhat conscious of the Phillies’ existence.

The Phils were soon forgotten, though, and didn’t surface again until 1950 when they astonished the world by winning the National League pennant with players like Del Ennis and Richie Ashburn, along with a pitcher named Robin Roberts. After that they subsided to their natural level and it took another thirty years for them to come back to life again in 1980. This time their stars were Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton and they actually won the World Series. Not only that, but they drew two million fans to their games.

Since then the Phillies have been players, as the saying is, and people don’t faint with astonishment anymore when told they are a threat to win a pennant. If ever there was a lesson about rising to higher things from our dead selves, etc., they have given it to us. Also we’ve learned a lesson in patience from their fans. Thirty-five years between their first two pennants and then another thirty years until the next one. A man could live on promises in a town like that, the people are so forbearing. Come to think of it, that’s what their teams did, isn’t it? It wouldn’t do for New York. We even go sour on the Yanks if they don’t win every year. “What have you done for me lately?” is our motto.

I’ll close this with some lines from a poem which appears to have been written by a Yankee fan:

The snow listens so hard it vanishes
The pastures clear themselves of everything but wind
The ponds collapse
The ground moves

The Yankees are heading north.

Robert Lord Keyes
(Real name, I think. Not to be confused
with Alfred, Lord Tennyson. He was not a
Yankee fan. He was born too soon or he would have been.)