Lee Lowenfish

One of the amazing aspects of a long baseball season is how the old cliche usually proves

correct:  The best teams almost always lose at least 60 and the worst teams somehow manage to win 60 (though not this year for Diamondbacks, Orioles, Pirates, and Rangers). 

 

Look at what happened to the Yankees after winning 13 in a row.  After a punchless shutout loss to the Blue Jays on Labor Day, they have lost seven out of nine. Gerrit Cole, the $341 million pitcher, will have to be the stopper and he probably can fill the role.  But the bullpen once the team strength looks shaky these days.

 

The soaring Tampa Bay Rays are not likely to be caught for the AL East crown but the Yanks still narrowly control the top wild card by two lost games over the Red Sox with the Jays only one lost game behind Boston.

 

The A's and Mariners still have a chance if they go on streaks.  They are playing each other six times so that might be difficult. 

 

In the NL, after winning 9 in a row, the Braves have lost 8 out of 12 and the Phillies are only 2 games behind them for the NL East lead.  The slumping Padres - who last month fired their accomplished pitching coach Larry Rothschild - I never like scapegoating any individual in a team sport - still have a two-game wild card lead over the Phillies and Reds with the Cards and Mets still having outside chances if they go on a winning streak.

 

I am enjoying these close end-of-year battles - even if the length of the games is getting ridiculous. Might as well savor the competition if the rumor is true that there will be even more teams eligible for playoffs in the future. lf the money from TV and "new media" is there, I fear it will happen because $$$$ makes the reigning commissioner and the owners (and most players) drool.     

 

Despite the nagging issues with MLB, nothing can kill my love of the game on the grass roots level.  So on the last Friday in August, with the Red Sox on the road, I made a trip to Fenway Park to see the Kelly Rodman Memorial Summer Rivalry Classic. 

 

Now in its 13th year, the event features high school and college players eligible for next summer's amateur draft in two seven-inning games. The idea has been the brainstorm of two experienced Northeast area scouts, the Red Sox' Ray Fagnant and the Yankees' Matt Hyde. 

 

They may work for fierce rival organizations, but they each share a genuine interest in helping future players learn correctly the basics of the game.  Over a few weekends earlier in the summer, the youngsters receive instruction and the chance to play games, culminating in the precious opportunity to compete on the hallowed diamond of Fenway.

 

A few Augusts ago I went to the Rivalry Classic the one time it was played at Yankee Stadium. I saw a rising high school senior from Arizona belt a homer in the lower right

field stands.  His name was Cody Bellinger soon a NL MVP for the Dodgers.  (Slow in his

recovery from two surgeries, he will have a chance to play in October and possibly turn his season around.)

 

I also saw in the stands a former Rivalry Classic participant following the action. His name was Mike Yastzemski, then an obscure unappreciated Orioles minor leaguer and by 2020 a contributor to the SF Giants' resurgence as they battle with the Dodgers this season to

escape the wild card sudden death game.

 

Since last year's game, the Classic has been dedicated to the memory of Kelly Rodman, a full-time Yankee area scout who died of cancer in March 2020 at the unconscionably young age of 44. No one who ever met Kelly will ever forget her. It was heartwarming if bittersweet to see her face regularly flashed on the Fenway videoboard.

 

I remember her participating one Sunday morning a few years ago as an instructor in a clinic sponsored in Newburgh, New York by The Baseball Miracles project founded by retired White Sox scout John Tumminia.  She was a bundle of energy and life-affirmation as she led

pre-teenagers through drills and sprints.

 

A star softball outfielder at Eastern Connecticut State University, the native of Wallingford, Connecticut went on to play baseball in many places around the world before she turned to baseball scouting. 

 

She coined the mantra, "Be Great, Today!" to inspire players in their daily effort to improve.  There is a T-shirt with that motto and other apparel available by contacting 

jen@thekellyrodmanmemorialfoundation.org

 

Last month at Fenway I saw some famous offspring competing.  For the Bosox squad there was Pedro Martinez, son of Hall of Famer Pedro who was there to give support along with the youngster's mother. Pedro told me that he is primarly an infielder, currently in college in Lynn, Massachusetts, though he played outfield in the second seven-inning game. 

 

For the Yankees, Carson Sabathia, a prep first baseman, looks like he is taking after his father in size and he displayed a quick power bat.  I'm kinda glad, though, that both youngsters are not trying to emulate their famous fathers on the mound.    

 

I noticed scouts from the Brewers, Pirates, Twins, and Tigers in uniform helping out in pre-game drills and providing guidance in the dugouts. Another rewarding touch was to see coaching third base for Fagnant's Bosox squad Kayla Baptista, a softball player from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. 

 

During one half-inning break, the public address announcer asked Brad Dubrowski, a Monmouth University southpaw just back from a successful summer season for Harwich in the Cape Cod Baseball League, to take a bow.   

 

I am not sure where I first heard the phrase, "Competitors and Colleagues," to describe

scouting at its most generous.  But I certainly sensed that feeling the last Friday of August in Fenway. And no doubt every season in the future.  

 

Baseball remains the hardest game to master but there is joy in competition and solace in collegiality. So it was almost fitting that the games were split - the Yankees won the first game and the Red Sox the second.

 

TIME FOR TCM TIPS: There is not a heavy dose of sports-themed films in Sept. and they will be aired late in the month. 

 

Three roller derby films will be on back-to-back-to-back on Th Sep 23 starting with "Rollerball" at 8p and "Kansas City Bomber" at 1015p. 

 

On Su Sept 26, if you haven't seen it, make a point to see "Easy Living" at 1130a. Noir master Jacques Tourneur directs Victor Mature, a LA Ram football player who a cardiologist (Jim Backus) warns has a heart condition that could jeopardize his life.

Lisabeth Scott plays the scheming wife (what else is new?), Lloyd Nolan is the Ram owner,

Lucille Ball his secy. and get ready Jack Paar is the PR guy.  I kid you not.  And some of the Rams, including Kenny Washington, play themselves.

 

Coming up on Tu Sept 28 at 8a is Burt Lancaster in "Jim Thorpe All-American". Later that day at 630p, Harold Lloyd tries his hand as college football player in the silent movie "The Freshman". I'll note these films again later this month but mark your calendars now.  

 

Even though they have added a lot of bells and whistles to the website and taken away the original music for Eddie Muller's Noir Alley series, a full list of Noir Alleys through the week before Christmas is available on the TCM website.  

 

I highly recommend Fritz Lang's "Human Desire" on Sun Sep 19 at 10A esp. for the opening scene of Glenn Ford as a railroad engineer riding his first route since his return from

the Korean War.  The viewer actually feels he/she is in the driver's seat.  The triangle that develops among Ford, Gloria Grahame, and Broderick Crawford is pretty gruesome but after all it is Noir. 

 

That's all for now.  Always remember:  Take it easy but take it!  And especially in these

uncertain times, Stay Positive, Test Negative. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Major League Baseball has returned, narrowly beating out the NBA and the NHL in the race to grab the attention of scores-starved sports fans. After the first weekend of the season, every one of the 30 MLB teams can claim a victory. 

 
No team has started 3-0 for the first time since 1954.  And my supposedly doomed doormat Orioles took two out of three at Fenway against the admittedly weakened Bosox whose pitching looks as questionable as Baltimore's.

 
The Birds already have two feel-good stories. Starter Alex Cobb picked up his first victory since 2018, and reliever Cole Sulser earned his first MLB save, a two-inning job that brought back warm memories of the days of Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage, Sparky Lyle, and Bruce Sutter. 

 
'Twas quite a weekend for the Big Green of Hanover, NH. Sulser is a Dartmouth alum. So is Kyle Hendricks who pitched the Cubs' first complete game opening day shutout since 1974. With no walks, only three hits, and almost 10 K's, his Opening Day line was evidently the best since 1888.  

 

The glow from this good news faded when it was learned that over the weekend in Philadelphia, more than ten of the Miami Marlins had tested positive or shown symptoms of coronavirus.  

 
The first home games of the Marlins have now been postponed and so has at least the first game of the Yankees' visit to Philadelphia.  The clubhouse that the Marlins occupied all weekend has to be thoroughly disinfected. 

 
Who knows if this tenuous 60-game MLB season will be completed, let alone the expanded playoffs in which 16 of the 30 teams will qualify. 

 

The public health of the nation should override considerations of commercialized sports.  

 Sadly, I fear that decades ago we lost in this country any concept of what "public" and "health" really mean.

I just found a poem by Carl Sandburg written in 1918, around the time that World War One was ending and the flu epidemic was raging, that speaks so vitally to our current situation.  

 
It's called "I Am The People, the Mob" and one line goes: 

"Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. 

Then - I forget."    

 
I think the search for a time when sacrifice meant something attracts me to movies of the 1940s, several of which I've seen recently on TCM.  Until the virus hit, I was supposed to teach at Chautauqua next week a class on baseball and American culture in the 1940s.

Please allow me a little historical reflection.

 

The 1940s are such an important decade in our history because even the most liberal historians admit that FDR's New Deal didn't get us out of the Great Depression but arming for World War II was the main reason. 

 
During the war, sacrifice was understood by almost the entire country.   Future Hall of Famers Bob Feller and Ted Williams willingly gave us their baseball careers to serve their country in World War II. 

 
Just as importantly, tens of millions of ordinary citizens, white and Black, risked and lost their lives in combat. And those at home, men and women and boys and girls, planted victory gardens and donated basic supplies to the war effort. 

 
Though wartime MLB was a diluted product, love of baseball remained a national glue. The opening scene from the early noir classic, "Laura" (1944), has Dana Andrews toying with a hand-held ball-bearing game called "Baseball" as he begns to tackle a mysterious murder case. That gesture has always symbolized for me the spell of the game on this country when it truly was the only national sport of any significance. 

 
But once the war ended after the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the national mood changed.  The best movies really caught that change. 

 

In William Wyler's "Best Years of Their Lives" (1946), being a war hero means nothing to Lieutenant Dana Andrews when he returns looking for something better than a soda jerker's job in his Midwestern town. 

 
The subtleties abound in Robert E. Sherwood's script based on Mackinlay Kantor's novel.  Frederic March's sergeant - a lower rank in war than Andrews but a bank officer in civilian life - brings back a captured Japanese sword for his son who tells him his professor at school opposed the dropping of the A-bombs.

 
Two John Garfield films seen on TCM in past weeks have also really stayed with me.

"Pride of the Marines" (1945) was made when the war was not yet over. Salt-of-the-earth soldier Garfield can't come to grips with being blinded in battle, but nurse Rosemary DeCamp leads him towards acceptance.

(To modern ears, the use of the derogatory term "Jap" may jar in both movies, but given that the war was still going on, the language is understandable.) 

 
In Garfield's last Warner Brothers film, "The Breaking Point" (1950, directed by Michael Curtiz)), his character Harry Morgan has become a small boat captain because the post-war period hasn't been good to him.  "Every time since I took off my uniform, I'm not so great," he tells his wife (Phyllis Thaxter). He plunges almost inexorably into crime. 

Based on Hemingway's "To Have and Have Not," the film is more gritty and superior to the Howard Hawks' 1944 version with Bogart and 19-year-old Lauren Bacall.  "Breaking Point" was written by Ranald McDougall who got the main writing credit for "Mildred Pierce" (1945) and went on to create for Harry Belafonte that haunting vision of a post-nuclear war world, "The World, The Flesh, and The Devil" (1959). 

 
"The Breaking Point" was the last Eddie Muller Noir Alley TCM selection until after Labor Day and will give me plenty to think about over the summer. Writer McDougall created the memorable character of a son for Garfield's fellow sea worker Juano Hernan

dez, an excellent vastly underappreciated actor.  Patricia Neal as a femme fatale is rather unforgetable. too.

 

Two tips for TCM for end of July:  

Thurs July 30 11:15A - "Easy Living" (1949) directed by Jacques Tourneur based on a story by Irwin Shaw.  A football player with a bad heart (Victor Mature) is warned about his life-threatening illness by a cardiologist (Jim Backus in pre "Mr. Magoo" days.)

 

Victor's wife wants him to keep playing (Lisabeth Scott).  Owner of the team is played by Lloyn Nolan.  Sonny Tufts plays a teammate of Mature as does Kenny Washington who was the Jackie Robinson of the NFL in 1946 (and also played with JR at UCLA).  

 

Other Rams are in the film including Tom Fears, Fred Gehrke, and Elroy "Crazylegs" Hirsch..  Memorable touch guys Paul Stewart and Richard Erdman appear, Lucille Ball plays the team secretary and I kid you not - Jack Paar is the team PR man.

 

Then Fri July 31 at Noon -  a TV "Director's Cut" from 1955 - "Rookie of the Year". A sportswriter recognizes a baseball player as the son of a banned player from an earlier time.  

 

Well, that's all for now.  Be well and stay well and obey social distancing and mask wearing rules.  But still always remember:  Take it easy but take it!