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Leading Off With TCM Tips + Baseball News & Musings On Cusp of the Summer Solstice

Time for a bit of a curveball to open this blog. It's short notice I know, but must tell you about TCM (Turner Classic Movies cable channel) hosting a day of baseball films on Thursday June 13.  So instead of putting the list at end of blog,here is the lineup with an * for something esp. worthy of watching, not necessarily for excellence but for its contribution to the era in which it was made. 

 

6A "The Great American Pastime" (1956)  David Wayne leaves his job to take over a Little League team to come closer to his son (he hopes).

 

730A "Ladies' Day" (1943)  The marriage of Eddie Albert will supposedly help his team win.  With Lupe Velez and Ann Miller.

 

*845A "Death on the Diamond" (1934)  I don't recall TCM ever airing this one. Robert Young plays a handsome young St. Louis Cardinals pitcher with the hots for team secretary Madge Evans. But there is a killer on the loose.  Who can it be? With fine character actors Nat Pendleton and Ted Healy (of producing "Three Stooges" fame).  Uncredited Gashouse Gang outfielder Ernie Orsatti has a cameo role getting killed between third and home.  I'm not saying it is a great film, but it is different and this was the era when many Americans were fascinated by gangsters.

 

*1000A "Fireman Save My Child" (1932)  The first of Joe E Brown's baseball trilogy.  Brown's character is more interested in selling his fire-preventing invention than playing but you get a good sample of both. Brown was a great athlete, a circus acrobat at an early age and almost a major league quality second baseman but he chose the right profession. 

 

*1130A  "Alibi Ike" (1935)  The third of Brown's baseball trilogy (the second and his personal favorite "Elmer The Great" - 1933 - is somehow not included today.)  Based loosely on Ring Lardner's story written before WW I, Brown's manager is William Frawley in his pre-Fred Mertz stage. (Both Brown and Frawley had clauses written into their Hollywood contracts that forbade them from working on movies during the World Series which they usually attended. So did George Raft.)  Brown's love interest is Olivia DeHavilland in her debut film.  Actually she completed "A Midsummer Night's Dream" also with Brown earlier in 1935 but this film was released first. 

 

*1P "Speedy" (1928) A Harold Lloyd classic with a memorable scene of awed taxi driver Harold driving Babe Ruth to a game at Yankee Stadium. Lou Gehrig can be briefly spotted as they scoot up Amsterdam Ave.

 

*230P "The Babe Ruth Story" (1948).  Hastily finished so Babe could see it before he passed away in August 1948.  William Bendix isn't very good as Babe - Jack Carson would have been better but was unavailable.  Claire Trevor could have played Claire Ruth as a noir character but she doesn't.  Charles Bickford doesn't age one bit as Brother Matthias at the beginning of film and near the end, but what I would give to have a voice and presence like Bickford whose Hollywood career started in the silent movies in 1924.  His fate has been to be forgotten like Vern Bickford who was a competent third banana to Spahn and Sain on Boston Braves.  If you want to see newscaster H. V. Kaltenborn playing himself, this is for you.  And as a document looking backward during increasingly nervous Cold War times, I think you should see it.  I plan to see it again because I have a weakness for corn about baseball. 

 

*430P "The Jackie Robinson Story" (1950) with JR playing himself, Ruby Dee as Rachel Robinson, and competent character actor Minor Watson as Branch Rickey.  Minor may not have been a major actor but he isn't bad though Harrison Ford in 2013's "42" was better.

 

*6p "The Stratton Story" (1949) the film that cemented Jimmy Stewart's ascent to stardom.  June Allyson plays the loving wife who encourages husband Monty Stratton back to the minor league game after a hunting accident ends his major league career.  Jimmie Dykes plays himself and in what I believe is his last role Frank Morgan, the Wizard in "The Wizard of Oz,"  plays the scout the originally signs him.  Screenplay by Guy Trosper who was nominated for an Oscar.  Trosper later wrote such notable films as "The Birdman of Alcatraz" and adapted "The Spy Who Came In From The Cold".

 

 

One more TCM sports note - 

Sa Jun 15 345P "The Winning Team" (1952) Ronald Reagan portrays Grover Cleveland Alexander with Doris Day as his wife. "The Stratton Story" serves as the template for this film - the loving helpmate-wife who helps a baseball-playing husband through his crises.  I've only seen this film once and want to look at it again. 

 

 AND NOW SOME NOTES ON BASEBALL ON MANY LEVELS AS THE SUMMER SOLSTICE LOOMS:

Congrats to the three winners of the NYC PSAL high school championships.

At the Triple A level, Grand Street Campus beat John Jay, 2-0, at Yankee Stadium on Monday afternoon June 10.  The two Brooklyn schools put on a memorable pitcher's battle. 

 

The prior weekend, the Double A title went to East Side Com. over Lafayette, 6-5.

The Single A title went to Brandeis over top-seeded American Studies, 15-0.  (The designations refer to the enrollment of the schools.)

 

Matchups for the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, are set. They will consist of 4 ACC teams and 4 SEC teams. With one exception, all games will be on the main ESPN channel. 

On Fri June 14 North Carolina meets Virginia at 2P

Top-seeded Tennessee meets Florida State, trying for first CWS title after many tries, at 7P 

 

On Sat June 15 second-seeded Kentucky, first time ever reaching this level, vs. NC State at 2P

Texas A & M vs. Florida, perennial contender but finished regular season only 1 game over .500, at 7P

 

The finals will be a best of three:

Sat June 22 730P

Sun June 23 2P - the one game on ABC

Mon June 24 7P (if necessary). 

  

As for MLB with under 100 games to play, the disparity between good teams and bad teams seems to be growing.  2022 was the

first season in MLB history when 4 teams won more than an hundred games and 4 teams lost more than a hundred.  It looks like we are headed that way in 2024 again. 

 

Too many ownerships don't really care about winning for a variety of reasons.  Among them are revenue-sharing that losing teams get anyway and also, probably the most important reason in my opinion, building a winning culture is very hard.  

 

As an Oriole fan that lived through a lot of dark years, I am enjoying this season and the last two actually as they emerged from darkness into contention.  How long they can stay up there with pitchers seemingly being injured every day is a concern.  But there is no doubt

that they have built a team of good players who really want to win and are increasingly showing that they know how to do it. 

 

There is one telltale sign that remains true - watch the teams that respond quickly to opponents scoring runs by putting up their own

runs on the scoreboard and you'll find strong evidence of that elusive winning culture.  The Yankees have that feeling this year too and the three game series in NYC June 18-19-20 will  be a good test for both teams.

 

That's all for this time.  Next time more details on the 35th Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture that I attended last month.  I was glad to give a case that player-manager-scout Birdie Tebbetts needs to be remembered as Baseball's Last Idealist.

 

In my next blogs, I will also look forward to my class in mid-July at the blessed Chautauqua Institution in southwest NY State near

Jamestown and the home of the National Comedy Center.  My theme this year is Fandom in American Culture: From Early 20th Century Kranks to Modern BIRGers and CORFers (BIRG means Basking In Reflected Glory; CORF means Cancelling Over Repeated Failure.)

 

Always remember - take it easy but take it, and Stay Positive, Test Negative!   

 

 

 

 

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Talking Baseball At Chautauqua and Other Opinions on Today's Baseball

During the first week of July I taught another class in the Special Studies program at the Chautauqua Institution. This year I called it: "Can Baseball Survive The 21st Century?"

 

I had a very receptive class of attentive adult listeners who asked good questions. I was glad that there was rewarding interest in my first book THE IMPERFECT DIAMOND: A History of Baseball's Labor Wars.

 

The topic of the endless player-owner conflicts in baseball seems especially relevant these days because the sport has always has been peopled by nay-sayers who think the game was always better in the past. 

 

As early as 1912, sportswriters were complaining that the games were too long!  Around the same time, John Montgomery Ward, the polymathic leader of the 1890 Players League which actually outdrew the established National League in its one season, gave up his brief job as president of the Boston Braves because he felt the players of HIS day were more serious about the game than contemporaries. 

 

I'm not a cockeyed optimist about the future of the sport in an expanding spectator sport market, but here is what I see as some positive signs: 

 

**The games in 2023 are shorter by a half-hour on average from last year's unacceptable average of over three hours a game. 

 

**The All-Star Game was more exciting than usual even if Felix "The Mountain" Bautista, closer for my Orioles, served up the game-winning 8th inning HR to Rockies catcher Elias Diaz. (Happily, Bautista suffered no hangover from his defeat because he successfully closed the Birds' first two post-ASG wins.) 

 

Diaz, a 32-year-old journeyman, is probably having a career year for one of the few teams that has no prayer of making the playoffs. The most obscure of the All-Stars, Diaz's heroics proved yet again that baseball remains the most delightfully unpredictable of all our sports.

 

As always I offer a fervent wish that the analytic hordes swarming around every MLB franchise don't try to take that unpredictability away from us in the name of "the next big thing." 

 

In addition to the disproportionate rise of the analytic crowd, there remains the unwholesome marriage of television and MLB. I realize younger fans like all the new bells and whistles, but personally I can do without the in-game interviews.

 

It reached a new low in the ASG when pitchers Nathan Eovaldi and Josh Hader were interviewed as they were pitching. Thank God a line drive didn't rocket towards them at the mound while they were chatting with the prattling Fox Sports broadcasters Joe Davis and John Smoltz.  It also looked like Padres outfielder Juan Soto might have caught a foul ball in the right field corner if he hadn't been distracted by an interviewer.   

 

Since I prefer to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, let me add some more comments on my Chautauqua experience.  Located in southwestern New York State about 50 miles from Erie, Pennsylvania, the Institution was founded in 1874 as a retreat for Methodist Sunday school teachers.  (Somewhat remarkably, there is no evidence that [Wesley] Branch Rickey ever spoke there - I guess his baseball work in St. Louis, Brookly, and Pittsburgh and devotion to his southern Ohio roots kept him from coming.)   

 

There is important political as well as religious history at Chautauqua.  William Jennings Bryan gave his "Cross of Gold" speech there during the 1896 campaign against eventual winner William McKinley.  Franklin D. Roosevelt gave his "I Hate War" speech during the 1936 campaign.

 

Today's Chautauqua has become more secular and it brims and overflows with inspiring music, art, and dance as well as stimulating lectures every weekday morning at 1045.

 

On the Fourth of July I heard an especially memorable talk by Scott Simon, the longtime host of NPR's Saturday morning news and features show.  I knew he was a big Chicago Cubs fan but I didn't realize his father's best friend was Cubs broadcaster Jack Brickhouse and his aunt married Charley Grimm, legendary Cubs first baseman and manager.

 

An author and journalist who has traveled the world, Simon told a moving story of attending a soccer game in Kabul between the Afghani national team and a British team that took place during the brief interval when the Taliban had been routed by Allied forces. 

 

When the Afghanis scored the first goal of the match, a British woman paratrooper showed her support by

taking off her burqa letting her hair become visible.  It was the first time in six years that Afghanis could revel in the beauty of flowing female hair and the crowd went wild. Soon women all over the stadium took off their

burqas too. 

 

Simon could not hold back tears telling this story of a moment that did not, alas, lead to freedom and self-expression in a country now ruled again by the Taliban.  It did show the transcendant qualities of sport at its best. 

 

Chautauqua's summer programs last nine weeks through the end of August.  It is a gated community so everyone there must carry a gate pass although Sundays the grounds are open without charge to the larger community.  For information on programming this year and the themes for 2024, the sesquecentennial anniversary of Chautauqua, check out chq.org

 

As readers of this blog surely know, I had to see live baseball not just talk about it.  I attended the Fourth of July day game of the high-flying Jamestown Tarp Skunks against the Elmira Pioneers, two teams in the Perfect Game Wooden Bat Summer League. 

 

The Tarp Skunk nickname is a homage not only to the spunky animal in the area but also to Howard Ehmke, Connie Mack's surprise choice to start the 1929 World Series against the Cubs. Ehmke hailed from Chautauqua County and later became an inventor of a tarpulin used in many ballparks. 

 

In this age of inventive logos, there is now a skunk tail featured through the last number on the back of every Tarp Skunk uniform.  I'm not sure I like it, but it certainly is different.

 

There are only three regular season home games left for the Tarp Skunks, the last one on Fri July 28. They play at classic Diethrick Park built in 1939 and located 20 minutes from Chautauqua. Brief playoff series will follow.  For more info, check out tarpskunks.com

 

That's all for now - heading to Baltimore to talk about my new book on scouting BASEBALL'S ENDANGERED SPECIES at the Babe Ruth Museum Tues July 18 at 4p. Missed the Orioles split of the four game series at Yankee Stadium because I was at Chautauqua. 

 

Looking forward to seeing live the last two games of the Orioles' three-game series against the Dodgers. I'm not ready to call it a preview of a sequel to the 1966 World Series, but I can dream, can't I?  More on this

adventure in the next post.

 

In the meantime - Always remember:  Take it easy but take it, and stay positive test negative.  

 

 

 

 

 

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