Good Enough to Dream by Roger Kahn

Author:Roger Kahn [Kahn, Roger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Essays & Writings, SPORTS & RECREATION/Baseball/Essays & Writings, Baseball, Sports & Recreation, History
ISBN: 9781938120503
Google: 4sae7HhyDtsC
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 1985-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Dog-Day Nights

No one can really explain what happened next, but, quite simply, fortune turned. We had been both good and lucky in playing .800 baseball and now the team lost some of its competitive edge and some of its good luck all at once.

In a style of writing that was popular fifty years ago, one blamed such change of circumstance on angered gods. The hyperbole proceeds tortuously from Homer. Old newspaper morgues are full of musings about an angry Zeus hurling stout thunderbolts at the heads of athletes who have lost his lordly favor. Although Utica, to be sure, existed in a prior incarnation, I have difficulty with the interplay of ancient gods and modern baseball, largely because of some good early training imposed on me at the New York Herald Tribune.

An enthusiastic sports editor once asked me if I wanted to cover college football. “You have a chance,” said Robert B. Cooke, who had learned his classics at Yale, “unless you call a football game a Battle of the Titans.”

“What I really want to write is baseball,” I said.

“You have to be careful there too,” Cooke said. “I sent one reporter up to the Polo Grounds and it rained. The first two words of his story were ‘Jupiter Pluvius.’ He actually wrote that Jupiter made it rain on the Giants. After that I limited him to other sports. For example, interscholastic soccer.”

Such instructive encounters linger with a man, like schoolboy baseball at Froebel Academy. Whatever the metaphysics of the Blue Sox situation, I can only report that a skilled and rugged Class A ball club, out front by seven games, subsequently proceeded to unravel.

Casey Stengel offered a characteristically cogent description of a slump. “It’s when the hitters ain’t hittin’,” he said, “and the pitchers ain’t pitchin’ and the fielders ain’t catchin’ the ball.” Always self-protective, Stengel did not add, “And when the manager ain’t managin’ great, neither.”

We did not collapse like a game animal felled by an elephant gun, but little things and then larger things began to go wrong. Larry Lee neglected to dive for a grounder back of second base. The ball carried through and cost us an important run. Gattis tried Moss at first base and Barry made two errors in one game. Moretti, racked between a troubled marriage and baseball, went home to British Columbia for a critical spell. Jimmy Tompkins temporarily lost mastery of his best pitch, the knuckle curve. The knuckle curve drops sharply and has to be thrown low. High, it becomes a long home run.

Our hitters cooled in clutch situations. The horrible hops of Murnane Field began to bounce against us. Frustration gripped Gattis and after a while frustration gave way to simmering anger. Each loss seemed to make his personality more contentious, and we would lose a lot of games.

One night, after a bad one, he actually suffered chest pains on the team bus. Our regular trainer, Dan Gazzilli, was spending that week away from the Blue Sox, picking up extra money by working in a basketball camp.

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