Lee Lowenfish

Dear readers:  I get high and get by with a lot of help from my friends is a running theme in my life story. One of my dear friends recently sent me a new book of baseball poems, "The Ball Dreams Of The Sky." It more than lives up to enthusiastic blurbs from such notable baseball writers as Ira Berkow, Tims Kurkjian and Wiles, John Thorn, former MLB outfielder Shawn Green, Bobby Murcer's widow Kay, and many others. 

"Ball Dreams" is the first collection by Henry Schipper, a veteran Hollywood writer and profilic producer of documentaries. Like all good poetry books, it will reward many re-readings. Schipper, raised in Holland, Michigan outside Detroit, is the son of Holocaust survivors and several of the poems deal poignantly with his family history.  He always comes back to his love of baseball as mystery and consolation. 

It is hard to select a particular favorite because they are all so thoughtful. I must say that his conversation poems, "Bat to Ball" and the bawdy "Bat and glove talking about a ball" are particularly memorable.  So is his meditation on baseball's inevitable downer, "Slump". Schipper tosses us a nice curve when the title of his collection is not the title of a poem, but the closing lines to "Body and Soul":  

"Both bat and glove dream of the ball;

the ball dreams of the sky."     

A simple love of baseball is also conveyed in "Eephus," a sleeper indie hit by first time director Carson Lund.  The setting is small town Douglas, Massachetts, south of Worcester and an hour west of Boston. The time is probably the early 1990s when the local Soldier's Field will be torn down after the season to be replaced by a school.

Anyone who has played softball with aging ardent players will relate to the competition.  The mastery of Lund's direction is that we don't take sides for either team - it is just the game we are following as the autumn leaves are falling and watchers - not really fans - come by to observe. Lund has chosen his actors well, no names recognizable except to cineastes.

Bill "Spaceman" Lee does pitch a late inning as the tied game heads towards a climax.  Lee is very good playing himself.  (I'd like to believe he apologized to his onetime Red Sox manager, baseball lifer the late Don Zimmer, who he lampooned and nicknamed the Gerbil - I don't think he did.)  A pleasant surprise is Joe Castiglione, recently inducted Hall of Fame Red Sox broadcaster, who does a convincing turn as a world-weary food cart driver.  My only criticism of the film is that it drags in the later stages. It is one thing to experience as a player oncoming darkness on a field with no lights. As a moviegoer, there is nothing dramatic about approaching darkness.

I predict that Schipper's poems and Lund's film will stand the test of time. As for predictions for the upcoming MLB season, I don't have many.  With so many injuries on so many teams, I remain an ardent Joaquin Andujarist.  The late MLB pitcher memorably said: "There is only one word to understand baseball - 'Youneverknow!'"        

I will say that I expect former Oriole outfielder Anthony Santander will hit well in his new uniform for the Blue Jays.  Toronto plays the Birds seven times in the first weeks of the season - including later today Th Mar 27. The revenge element can never be ignored as long as the player sticks to his mechanics and doesn't try to do too much.

As for surprise teams - there are always a couple because of the long long season - I think the Athletics - temporarily in Sacramento until their move to Las Vegas by the end of the decade - will be improved. They have spent some money on experienced players and their youngsters played well in the last half of 2024.  I do hope that when and if that new stadium in Las Vegas opens, they will have made room for a visiting team's bullpen - at last glance, such a "little thing" had not been included in the plans.

FINAL NOTES ON COLLEGE BASKETBALL: 

*NYU'S Division III women Violets repeated as National Champions and their winning streak is now 62.

*NYU men's team lost its final to Trinity CT by 4 points.

*Coiumbia's women's team beat U of Washington in the First Four of Division I March Madness and lost to West Virginia by 19 in the second round.

*Wisconsin men cagers lost 91-89 in the second round to Brigham Young as all-Big Ten forward John Tonge could not get off a full shot because of superior defense by

Mawot Mag, the Australian graduate transfer who previously played at Rutgers.

**Wisconsin athletic pride was restored when the #1 seeded UW women's hockey team rallied from a 3-1 late deficit to beat Ohio State in OT. 

Here are some closing TCM tips:

F Mar 28 12M (Sa Mar 29)  "The Asphalt Jungle" (1950) John Huston directs a classic noir with Jean Hagen/Sterling Hayden/Sam Jaffe.  Based on the W.R. Burnett novel. 

Su Mar 30 1215A, 10A  Noir Alley debuts "Count The Hours" (1953) Don Siegel directs Teresa Wright/MacDonald Carey - Talk about relevance:  "A lawyer defends a migrant work in a sensational murder trial"

Su Mar 30 10PM "The Lady In Question" (1940)  Charles Vidor directs Glenn Ford & Rita Hayworth six years before their memorable tussles in "Gilda" 

Always remember:  Take it easy but take it, and stay positive test negative (at least for as long as RFK Jr allows it)

Tip #1  Always keep the TV clicker nearby. If Orioles fall behind early - as too often they do with that woeful pitching staff - there are other games to watch. And movies on TCM and loads of good reading. 

 
Here's one book recommendation:  David Maraniss, A GOOD AMERICAN FAMILY: THE RED SCARE AND MY FATHER (Simon and Schuster, 2019)  Maraniss is the biographer of Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, and Vince Lombardi as well as the author of THEY MARCHED INTO SUNLIGHT, the story of one month, October 1967, in the war in Vietnam and the anti-war demonstrations in Madison, Wisconsin. 

His new book in understated effective prose tells the story of his father Elliott Maraniss's travails at the hands of the House UnAmerican Activities Commiteee (HUAC) after World War II.  Anyone who grew up in Brooklyn in the 1930s and is a University of Michigan Wolverine will want to read this book.

Maybe there is not enough about the happier, latter years of Elliott's career as an editor of Madison's insurgent newspaper the "Capital Times".  Or more detail on his love of sports, a man who ghost-wrote columns for Olympic sprinter Eddie Tolan (father of future major leaguer Bobby Tolan who incidentally almost tested the reserve clause before Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith did - see my book THE IMPERFECT DIAMOND). 

Or more on a baseball-loving father who took his young sons to the airport in Cleveland to welcome home the Indians after they won the 1954 American League pennant.  Yet I say that this recounting of how a "premature anti-fascist" and World War II army captain became victimized by Cold War hysteria offers absorbing and essential reading. 

 
Tip #2 - Take pleasure in little glimmers of hope your beleaguered team now and then provide.  Like the Saturday night August 17th debut of Hunter Harvey, a former Baltimore #1 draft pick who has been marred by injuries in the first years of his minor league career. 

Harvey threw a scoreless 8th inning with two strikeouts in a 4-0 loss to the Bosox.

 
Here's to a healthy and long career for the son of former Angels closer Bryan Harvey who drove through the night from North Carolina with Hunter's girl friend to be there for his son's MLB debut.

 
Tip #3: Enjoy the variety of stories that make every season interesting and different. 

For example, a long ESPN.com piece by Tim Kurkjian to commemorate the August 12, 1994 strike that led to cancellation of the World Series elicited some interesting comments from two first basemen who lived through it:   

 
Minnesota's Kent Hrbek was to retire at end of that season.  When the August 12 strike dragged on to the sad cancellation a month later by commissioner Bud Selig, Hrbek took the cup from his athletic supporter and nailed it to a wall in his house where it still stands.

(Speaking of Selig, his memoir FOR THE GOOD OF THE GAME is worth reading for the viewpoint of a small market owner who rose to be commissioner. More in the next blog.) 

Atlanta's Fred McGriff made this interesting observation to Kurkijian: the abuses of PEDs were caused by allowing players to bring their personal trainers into clubhouses.

 
For those of you who save your Sports Illustrateds, the double issue in late July/early August with Serena Williams on the cover contained some memorable baseball stories.  Emma Baccellieri's "Stuck in the Mud" about the Delaware River mud still used by umpires to rub the gloss off new baseballs is a keeper.

 
So is her piece "The Atlantic League" about the independent league that with the full backing of MLB is trying innovations to speed up the game and heighten offense. Last week I saw the Long Island Ducks rout the York Revolution at Bethpage Ballpark in Central Islip.

 
The cozy ballpark that seats over 7,000 does not show its nearly 18-year old age. (Although they need more screens to protect fans from foul balls.)  There were a few early glitches in the TrackMan electronic umpire giving info to the plate umpire.  (Don't dare call it a robot.)

 
My big problem with the technology is that there is no adjustment to the strike zone during an at-bat.  If you watch good hitters, they don't always take the same position at the plate even within an AB. 

 
Once again, common sense should dictate the encouragement of better umpiring not falling prey to blind belief in the Great God Technology.  If you see replays over and over again, I remain impressed at how good most of the umpires are at calling balls and strikes. Please let's remember the old age, "It's better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong."

 
Tom Verducci deserves a kudo for his story in the same SI double issue, "The Last of the .400 Hitters".  They were two minor leaguers, Aaron Pointer who did have a cup of coffee with the expansion Houston Colt 45's and is the brother of the famed rhythm and blues Pointer Sisters, and Darryl Brinkley who never was drafted or made The Show.

 
Yet New Yorker Darryl Brinkley who starred at Sacred Heart U. in Fairfield CT in the late 1980s persevered to become a productive minor leaguer and Caribbean League Hall of Famer.  Only the failure to obtain transportation in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 kept him from making the Orioles in Sept. 2011.

 
Let me close with some great words from coach Mike Roberts who earlier this month won the Cape Cod Baseball League championship for the third time in his storied career.   In the glow of the victory of his Cotuit Kettleers over the Wareham Gatemen, Roberts, the former North Carolina and South Carolina head coach and father of former Orioles All-Star second baseman Brian Roberts, told capecodbaseball.com: 

"You've got to love the backyard first and that's where it happens. . . . You can't the take the wiffle ball out of the game."   

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