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Chautauqua A Wonderful Way of Dealing With The Dog Days

A little googling has turned up the origin of the phrase “dog days”. It comes from the ancient Greeks who coined the term for the period from early July to mid-August when Sirius, the so-called dog star, rose just before the sun.

Dog days in baseball are obvious because players are dragging from the effects of the long long season. My Orioles are a vivid example. They are stumbling along looking like no more than a .500 team. Now they will have to do without key reliever Darren O'Day for the rest of the month, his second trip to the DL this year, this time with an ominous shoulder issue.

Yet except for probably the Cubs there are no super-teams out there so the last weeks of the season should be "fun" to watch, if one calls it fun to agonize with every pitch and possible pitfall.

Hall of Fame first baseman Jim Bottomley, the first great product of Branch Rickey's St. Louis Cardinals farm system, once offered this sage advice on how to deal with baseball’s inevitable ups-and-downs: "Win three, lose one, win three, lose one," etc etc. That way, he argued, there is no pressure from streaks, losing or winning." Of course, that is too rational a view. Fans live by passion and hopefully they are rewarded now and then.

My solution to the dog days this year was taking my first journey to the Chautauqua Institution in far western New York State 70 miles from Buffalo and just 15 miles from Erie, Pennsylvania. I co-taught Baseball and American Culture with veteran American Studies/Amer. Literature professor Mark Altschuler during the first week of August to an impressive group of 20 adult students.

They came from as far away as Mississippi and northern California, Ohio and Texas, Maryland and Kentucky. They learned a lot about Branch Rickey's long career from me and something about the importance of comedian Joe E. Brown's remarkable baseball passion.

Mark Altschuler had the brilliant idea of discussing the great interview with Wahoo Sam Crawford in Larry Ritter's classic oral history "The Glory of Their Times." He also led an exciting class on Jim Shepard's 1996 short story, "Batting Against Castro," set in pre-revolutionary Cuba (before Castro formed his guerrilla band in the mountains.)

Never missing a chance to see a minor league baseball game, my adventure actually started the previous Saturday night at Coca-Cola Field, home to the Buffalo Bisons, the Blue Jays’ Triple A affiliate in the International League. The Syracuse Chiefs, the Washington Nats’ top farm club, provided the opposition.

As always in minor league games, there was an interesting mixture of old and new, vets trying to hang on and prospects looking to make or return to The Show, the vivid term players use to describe the Majors.

Rehabbing infielder Ryan Goins showed some flash for Buffalo and soon he was back in Toronto--though he clearly is a sub now as talented Devon Travis has cemented his hold on the second base job.

Chiefs outfielder Brian Goodwin showed off the speedy tools that has left him for years on the cusp of a callup. And sure enough the Nats brought him up just last week for the first time.

There is always a poignant moment or two at a minor league game, a flash of yesteryear that comes along when you least expect it. Tonight it was seeing a Bisons pitching coach trudging off to the bullpen before the game. He had a little paunch and a fringe of longish gray hair framing the bottom of a largely bald head.

It was Bob Stanley, the longtime Red Sox reliever, who threw the pitch in Game 6 of the 1986 World Series that catcher Rich Gedman couldn’t handle before the infamous Mookie Wilson-Bill Buckner ground ball. Gedman’s passed ball tied the game but people only remember Buckner’s error that won it for the Mets who won the Series in Game 7.

I also saw stretching on the field before the game Chris Colabello, the disgraced ped user who was suspended for 80 games earlier this season. The first baseman-outfielder had been a feel-good story for last year's Blue Jays - rising from the independent leagues to become a productive major leaguer. But his success was tainted by the drug disclosure.
Toronto evidently has no plans to call him back to the majors.

On the Sunday before my classes began at Chautauqua, I paid a visit to the impressive Robert H. Jackson Center in nearby Jamestown, NY (home town of Lucille Ball where a Lucy and Desi museum stands - didn't have time to see it).

The Jackson Center is devoted to the life and work of the Supreme Court Justice appointed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt who served as chief prosecutor at the post-World War II Nuremberg Trials of Nazi war criminals. Center director Greg Peterson was gracious enough to tape an interview with me about my love of baseball and my work on Branch Rickey. It can be accessed at YouTube.

It is remarkable that Rickey, one of the leading Methodist lay preachers, never spoke at Chautauqua, an institution founded by Methodists after the Civil War as a retreat for Sunday school teachers. It quickly evolved into a center for all kinds of inquiry into culture and the arts.

"Cultivate Curiosity and Wonder" reads the sign on the wall of the giant Amphitheater that can seat 5000 people (though you must walk carefully going down the ramps to your seat.)
How true that statement is! I got to hear David Simon, creator of the classic HBO series "The Wire," talk about the futile war on drugs in his home town of Baltimore.

Most of all, I got to sense the special feeling of community that Chautauqua engenders. Once you get your gate pass that allows you in and out of the little town, you feel like you are in Brigadoon, the fantastic creation of the 1940s Broadway musical. I compare it to Cooperstown and Key West with water nearby and quaint houses everywhere and flowers and flowers galore.

Just two example of Chautauquan community - I told some ardent softball players who are intense fans of the Pittsburgh Pirates that I was an Oriole fan. The next day one of them gifted me with two 1965 Topps cards, one of Brooks Robinson and one of "Boog Powell outfielder"!

Second item - after indulging my metrosexual tastes with a massage and pedi-manicure,
the owners of the St. Elmo's Spa gave me some cherry tomatoes and organic corn on the cob from their garden. How tasty they were after my return to NYC.

For information of the nine weeks of Chautauqua in 2017, check out www.ciweb.org
Am making plans that some form of "Baseball and American Culture" returns.

That's all for now - always remember: Take it easy but take it!
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The Return of Kerrane's "Dollar Sign on the Muscle"

Lovers of baseball and a good read will be thrilled to learn that after a quarter-century a new expanded edition of Kevin Kerrane’s classic "Dollar Sign on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting" has been released. The title comes from the ever-quotable Branch Rickey who coined that phrase to describe the key moment when a talent evaluator and his superiors must decide how much a baseball prospect is worth.

That the book has been re-issued by Baseball Prospectus in its first foray into book publishing is more good news because BP has built its reputation concentrating too often for my taste on nearly incomprehensible “advanced metrics.” It is nice to see that they are also appreciating the importance of traditional scouting. In fact, its editor Ben Lindbergh recently attended and graduated from MLB's Scout School in Arizona and wrote excellent pieces on the experience for grantland.com

Originally published in 1984, Kerrane brought to the table a splendid mix of skills as a University of Delaware literature professor (he still teaches at the Newark campus) and as a onetime amateur baseball player. For "Dollar Sign" Kerrane enjoyed unprecedented access to baseball scouts during what turned out to be the first major in-season baseball strike in 1981. Kerrane was even able to sit in on some of the Philadelphia Phillies’ pre-draft discussions.

A widely published author of several literary anthologies, Kerrane has a great ear for the vivid language of scouts. “He runs like he’s waitin’ for his blockers,” snorts one after observing an athlete who had more success as a football player than a baseball player. “Looks like Tarzan. Runs like Jane,” pipes up another. Another scout declares definitively, “87 per cent of baseball is played beneath the waist.”

A fascinating ongoing discussion in the book concerns the importance or irrelevance of “the good face,” an old scouting term about an athlete who exudes aggressiveness and confidence. The book also features a searching examination of the methods by which Branch Rickey built his great farm system.

The handsome new edition comes with a color cover photo of Tim Collins, the Kansas City Royals’ diminutive flame-throwing reliever that KC scout Mike Toomey helped pluck out of a minor league organization. Kerrane has also added two new chapters based on his recent scouting expeditions and conversations with football as well as baseball scouts.

My only criticism is that some of the minor historical errors in the original edition were not corrected. Branch Rickey did not leave the Dodgers in 1949 but after the 1950 season. It was catcher Mickey Owen, not Owens, and brilliant scouting analyst Jim McLaughlin was bounced out of the Orioles organization before the 1961 season not 1962.

Nothing should stop you, though, from getting this new edition of the best book to date on scouting and one of the very best on baseball in general. It combines insight with passion and as winter continues its inexorable path early in 2014 it will warm your baseball-loving hot stove league fires.

As colorful scout Leon Hamilton told Kerrane, “I love baseball. I hope to die, when my time comes, in a ballpark. And I just hope that I don’t fall on the guy next to me when the tyin’ and winnin’ run is on base and keep him from seein’ in.“

That’s all for now. Just remember always: Take it easy but take it!
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