Baseball Diary Vol II, #1

Los Angeles
March 30, 1983

(cover by Michael Kellner with an assist from Jagne Parkes)

"Our heroes, as a condition of a well-paid immortality, now stand in more or less permanent display, exhibits in garish buck-a-pull museums, illuminated by the coarse light of casinos instead of the gentle glow of nostalgia...Who thought...it would end like this, with one of the greatest players of our time serving out his days in an alley of slot machines." Richard Hoffer on Mickey Mantle's first day of work at the Claridge Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City

"Everything dies baby that's a fact But maybe everything that dies someday comes back Put your makeup on fix your hair up pretty And meet me tonight in Atlantic City"
Bruce Springsteen

"But on these evenings I...had to snatch [my mama's kiss] without even having the time or being properly free to apply to what I was doing the punctiliousness which madmen use who compel themselves to exclude all other thoughts from their minds while they are shutting a door, so that when the sickness of uncertainty sweeps over them again they can triumphantly face and overcome it with the recollection of the precise moment in which the door was shut."
Marcel Proust

"Old lady stand on the corner With a purse in her hand She does not know but in a minute of so She will be robbed by a naked man Beware, beware, beware of the naked man."
Randy Newman


Report from the Editor
Last night I was eating a delicious Eggs Moppioli I had prepared (recipe available on request) when a knock came at the door.

I screamed, "Come in!"

A naked woman came into my apartment. She asked me if I would enter the chili cook-off at the Treehouse Fun Ranch. I hesitated before replying. I have only cooked chili once in my life, from a recipe given to me by a computer programmer in Silicon Valley. I took a long sip from my vermouth and tonic water (with a generous dash of lemon).

"Sure," I said. "But what's in it for me?"

"$500 if you win", she replied.

I smiled.

"Can you write a song for your chili?"

I didn't bat an eye. "Consider it done."

"Good," she said. "We've got about eight topless cheerleaders that want to do a routine."

"I'll be ready," I told her.

She left shortly thereafter. I dove into my green beans topped with cornbeef and chicken sauce (a holdover from St Patrick's Day). Another knock at the door.

"COME IN!"

A naked man came into my apartment.

"Are we running in the Jimmy Stewart National Relay Marathon?"

I told him to sit down, but he was dripping wet and declined, not wanting to ruin the only piece of furniture in the place, an antique rocking chair. I had to explain to him that we were not entering the race this year due to dropouts on our team, Legs Amok. He was disappointed, but took it okay. Then he told me about his partner's mugging in broad daylight at a local Lucky's grocery store. I couldn't finish my meal. We chatted awhile. He said she was okay. And he left.

One other naked person came over that night and brought the typewriter I'm currently working on. Thanks, Greg.


Report from Oakland
by The Fearless Forecaster

HEY KIDS! What time is it? Yup, baseball's back! It's time to break out those sweat stained blue hats with the white interlocking el-ay and the crumpled visors, time to put four new double-A Eveready Energizers int he transistor, time to buy the 1983 edition of Street and Smith's, time to get one of those little cardboard season schedules that folds up and fist neatly in your pocket for instant reference, and time to start WORRYING. To hell with high unemployment, those dirty Russkies in Afghanistan, the rapists running the EPA, even herpes: I'm worried about the catching situation. Why DID Sundberg turn down that trade? What about Brock? Marshall? How's Burt Hooten's knee? Has Steve Sax heard about the dreaded Sophomore Jinx and what it does to rookie phenoms? Will Pedro Guerrero have to change his name to Gu-error-5 down there at third? Is Landreaux over his "chemical dependency"? What about Bill Russell? Is there life at shortstop after 34? Will we miss Forster? Ron Cey? And what's-his-name, um, Gravey? Good God! Do I need this? I've got bills, my love life is in shambles, my car needs a brake job, yes, yes, yes, it's BASEBALL!

Actually, the Dodgers are the team to beat in the NL West in 1983. They have, as the cliche goes, the right mixture of youth and experience, some hitting, some speed, some pitching, and a manager who's friends with Don Rickles. What more do you need? The rest of the division? Heck, you Dodger nuts down there don't really care, do you? I mean, everybody knows the Braves will fall apart by mid-season, that Captain America won't turn the Padres around, that the Gi, er, well, we'll SKIP OVER this particular team and that horrible city of San Fran, er, that city across the Bay from where I live, and that the Astros and Reds are doomed because God hates them. My forecast? The Dodgers first and everybody else tied for last.

The NL East is of interest only because the Dodgers are required by law to play somebody from this division before they can go to the World Series. So how about the Cards again? Nah, it's too hard to win back-to-back titles as the Dodgers found out in 1982. I'm going with the Expos, who I also picked to win last year but didn't because they're stupid. If the Expos are stupid again this year, the Cards might repeat, but keep your eyes on the Pirates, especially if the Cobra comes back (that's Mr. Parker, in case you don't know). My advice to Dodger nuts is to pray for an outbreak of bubonic plague in this division that sends all the good teams to the hospital and lets the Mets finish on top.

Now for the American League. Say - uh - you all do remember the AL, don't you? It's kind of this other league, see, that plays a modified version of baseball that most purists consider an abomination along with plastic grass and big-mouthed owners who are always meddling with their teams and firing managers every other day and - Anyway, the AL West is very close. I'll say Chicago, but only because my favorite aunt lives there and I almost melted the last time I was in Kansas City. Besides, I hate George Brett and those ridiculous fountains in Royal's Stadium California has a lot of old guys and they lost Don Baylor, who led the league in game-winning hits in 1982. Oakland, the team that plays just down the freeway from me, has got more holes than a slab of Swiss cheese, and should save me lots of money this year, since I refuse to pay to see lousy teams play. I understand there are three more teams in this division, at least that's the rumor, and I'm doing research now to find out who they are.

OK, the AL East. I bet you're all thinking to yourselves: "Uh oh, here we go." Right? Am I right? Huh? I always save the AL East for last because I have a certain, shall we say, bias toward one of the teams in this division, and I like to end these worthless forecasts with a little screed on how this certain team will reduce the rest of the division to wimpering idiots, begging for the blow that ends the misery. Well, not this year, folks, uh uh. This year, I'm picking the Brew-sers. I know, I know - you're thinking: "Sure, Ef-Ef, the Brewers. You can't fool US. WE know who you REALLY THINK WILL WIN." Yeah, well, OK, maybe deep down inside me on those genes indelibly imprinted with the en-why, I do sort of, kind of, a teensy bit, think that there's about a million-to-one shot that the Yuckees can pull it off. Especially if some unnamed person whose initials are G.S. can keep his paws off the team for two seconds and start treating human beings with some respect and, and, and the Brewers really look strong, except maybe for some problems in the bullpen if Fingers can't come back, and a little age on some of their starting pitchers, and a rather thin bench, and, and, well, the rest of this division is filled with ugly teams from places I wouldn't ever live in even if you paid me. So I like the Brewers this year - really I do.

Last year I also forecast the MVP's and Cy Young winners from both leagues, which naturally is even dumber and a bigger waste of time than picking the pennant winners, but I'm going to do it again anyway. I'm going to look into my crystal baseball and say that Andre Dawson, the same guy I picked last year, will be NL MVP, and that Fernando Valenzuela, even though he isn't worth a million, will pitch like it anyway, and win the Cy Young.

Fearless Forecaster's Picks for 1983:

NL West
1. Los Angeles
2. A certain city in Northern California across the Bay from Oakland
3. Atlanta
4. San Diego
5. Houston
6. Cincinnati

NL East
1. Montreal
2. St Louis
3. Pittsburg
4. Philly
5. Chicago
6. New York

AL West
1. Chicago
2. Kansas City
3. California
4. Oakland
5. Texas
6. Seattle
7. Minnie Ha-Ha

AL East
1. Milwaukee
2. New York
3. Boston
4. Baltimore
5. Detroit
6. Cleveland
7. Toronto


Ken Koss Kwiz, Spring, 1983:
Off to a fast start:
1. What baseball player was nicknamed "Three Finger"?
2. What was the name of the short-lived baseball league formed in 1914?


Chavez Ravine: On the Outside Looking In
Photo essay by J. Hastings

On a Sunday in late March with two weeks still remaining before the start of regular season play, a Baseball Diary press pass and fifty cents will get you a short ride on the San Fernando Flyer but it won't get you into Dodger Stadium. So one who wishes to document the waiting emptiness, the expectant silence, of this vast "maison de sportif", must do so holographically. One must attempt to obtain a sense of the whole from patches of seemingly unrelated detail - seeing the rigid formality of this mock combat called baseball and the solidity of the tradition upon which it rests in the base of a massive light standard (fig. ii); seeing the insulation and near-mystical separation of the modern-day Odysseus from his teeming fans in a striped barrier and barbed wire gate (fig. i); seeing the complete tapestry of fifty thousand lives intertwined for a single ritual purpose in a single ritual place in the patterns of a deserted parking log (fig. iii).

Perhaps most important of all, one must invent a great deal of pseudo-intellectual swill to explain why one has a picture of a dumb lamp post, a dumb gate and a dumb parking lot instead of Dodger Stadium like one was supposed to have in the first place.