Bits and pieces, February 27, 2024

Well, spring training is well underway. And this year, pretty much like every year, I promise myself I will keep up with every team, not just the Mets.I finally shelled out for a subscription to Baseball Prospectus, even though I consider it a bit too analytics-driven for a numbskull like me who has no interest in fantasy baseball.

I used to relay on the annual baseball magazines, but they seem to have gone the way of the dodo. I can’t seem to find any at my local CVS. As much as I want them, I’ll be damned if I’ll spend $20 to order online (although, to be fair, I did order directly from Lindy’s for $10.95 plus $4 shipping). Athlon seems to be out of the physical-print realm. There’s no more Sporting News and it’s a toss-up whether the formerly weekly, formerly monthly Sports Illustrated will produce anything. Smith and Street — my old favorite — was absorbed  by some company I don’t remember but that’s not available either.

And don’t get me started with long-gone magazines like Sports World, Sport Magazine, Sports Quarterly’s Baseball, and many others that are growing increasingly yellow and crumbly in my attic.

And now, on with the show.

♦  I’ve become almost obsessed with learning foreign languages. It started with a German colleague at work. I started Duolingo with the absurd notion that I would be able to have real conversations with him. Then that extended to other languages but especially Spanish. Unlike most of my classmates throughout my my lower-education days, I chose French, mostly because my mother came from Montreal. But there are a lot more people in my circle now who speak Spanish than French so I wanted to dive into that. One thing led to another and I go back and forth between those and several other tongues, including Japanese, Russian, Yiddish, Latin, and, of course, German.

I recently received a fascinating book, The Spanish Lexicon of Baseball: Semantics, Style, and Terminology, by John M. Chaston and Robert N. Smead, which I supplemented with Daring’s English-Spanish Baseball Dictionary, a slim paperback. I’m also slowly trying to get through BP’s regular articles en Espanol. (Just FYI, I also have a copy of Glossary of Baseball Terms: English-French, French-English, a 1984 publication by Pierre Dalliere. Looking for similar books for other languages so fill me in if you know of any.)

I’m old enough to remember when managers like Al Dark showed their craven side by complaining that the Latin players on their teams were a disruption because they continued to talk among each other in Spaniosh. I’m working on a piece about the subhead/first line in ballplayers’ obituaries. The one for Dark, who passed away in 2014, read: “Alvin Dark, who was the All-Star shortstop and captain of the New York Giants’ pennant-winning teams in the 1950s and went on to manage the team to a pennant in San Francisco, but who was later shadowed by controversy over his attitude toward black and Latino players, died on Thursday at his home in Easley, S.C.” (emphasis mine).)

In recent years, teams are encouraging their foreign-born players to learn English. Just this week there was this about the Mets’ catcher Francisco Alvarez.

♦   Wish I’d known about this at the beginning of Black History Month, but I’m getting it in just under the wire. The Athletic posted a series of articles by Jason Joines about The Black Aces, “the 15 Black pitchers from either the United States or Canada to win 20 games in a Major League Baseball season.” The list includes Don Newcombe, Bob Gibson, Al Downing, Jim “Mudcat” Grant, Dwight Gooden, Sam “Toothpick” Jones, Fergie Jenkins, Earl Wilson, Mike Norris, J.R. Richard, Dave Stewart, Vida Blue, Dontrelle Willis, C.C. Sabathia, and David Price. For more, read The Black Aces: Baseball’s Only African-American Twenty-Game Winners, by Grant with Tom Sabellico and Pat O’Brien. Since it was published in 2007, it obviously does not include Sabathia, who accomplished the feat in 2010, and Price, who won 20 in 2012. Because The Athletic is a paywall thing, you might not be able to read these pieces; my apologies.

♦  I feel like I’m back in school since I’m reading several books at a time. One — also with a connection to Black History Month — is The Mountain Empire League: A Novel, by Marshall Adesman. The synopsis, as reported in the Citizen Tribune (Morristown, Tennessee), has this as “the fictional story of Appalachian-based minor league placed mostly in fictional cities. All of the main characters are fictional, but their stories are drawn from the experiences of people like Curt Flood, Bill White, Joe Morgan and others. It is based on stories Adesman learned during his career in professional baseball as well as the stories real life ballplayers shared in their memoirs.”

♦  Another book I’m reading now is Frank Chance’s Diamond: The Baseball Journalism of Ring Lardner by Ron Rapoport. They don’t make them like Ring any more. I will be having a “Bookshelf Conversation” with Rapoport soon and will ask him how the advent of broadcasting impacted newspapers. When radio came along, team owners were concerned that it would reduce attendance but they were wrong. Same for TV. But we know what print journalism is like today: they’re failing left and right. New York Times sports department? Gone. Sports Illustrated? Gone. Pretty soon it will be like a scene out of The Time Machine.

By the way, it’s amazing the likeness between Lardner and John Sayles, who portrayed the sportswriter in his classic film, Eight Men Out.