I am Jack’s Tenuous Grasp on Reality

First off, thanks to Dan for sending me the link. This is completely amazing.

Jack Kerouac created a personal fantasy baseball league, using invented teams and made-up players, which he played (presumably by himself) and modified, from the years 1937 (when he was 13) until 1965 (when he was 42, eight years after the publication of On the Road). Detailed biographies were created for players and coaches, and were kept in spiral-bound notebooks. The article is vague about how games actually operated: “He created a set of cards that, in combination with the skill level of the batter and pitcher, controlled the progress of the game, possibly in conjunction with the use of dice,” which yields a picture of the legendary beatnick, sitting in a cold-water flat, with a jug of wine and a Camel hanging out of his mouth, playing Dungeons and Dragons by himself.

There is, I believe, a cautionary tale about technology here. Kerouac’s system, a fantasy baseball league with one participant, has to be one of the nerdiest things of all time. It might follow, since this thing seems to have taken up a lot of Kerouac’s time over a thirty year period, that Kerouac, in some essential way, was one of the nerdiest guys ever.

However, because the technologies needed to enable serious, hardcore nerdyness had not yet been invented, Kerouac went on to literally write the book on being cool. Coolness would seem to consist of drinking, smoking, sleeping with lots of girls and being an ass about it, doing recreational drugs, hanging out with non-white people, and listening to jazz music; Kerouac not only participated in all these behaviors, but he helped make them popular with America’s youth. (a last component of Coolness, New York Mets baseball, wasn’t invented until 1962)

The increased connectivity of the world has provided many more options for people who want to participate in things like imaginary baseball leagues, and since Kerouac’s death millions of people have spent thousands of hours on things like videogames, internet fantasy sports leagues, and Dungeons and Dragons, all of which seem to share a certain spiritual kinship with Kerouac’s baseball leagues. Did On the Road only get written because no one had invented Playstation in the 1950s? I guess we’ll never know.

Or maybe it’s a reason to be hopeful. The granddaddy of all hepcats seems to have been born to have a pocket protector and an opinion about StarTreck—under the pressure of circumstances he became Jack Kerouac. So throw your X-box out of a high window, tell you buddies on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan-fiction message-board that they can get started without you, buy a bottle of the cheapest wine at your local liquor store and head on down to the nearest highway and stick up a thumb… and you too might start a social revolution.

Kerouac seems to have named all of his teams after American car companies. That sort of makes the whole thing perfect.

The Commissioner is a Son of a Bitch

The first Commissioner of Baseball, or any other sport, was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. His name was the only good thing about him-- actually a possible second good thing about him was the fact that he eventually died, paving the way for the integration of baseball. As a federal judge, Landis jailed Wobblies, including Big Bill Haywood; he also managed to get Jack Johnson, an amazingly successful boxer and the first super-star black athlete, banned from boxing and sent to jail on a Man Act conviction for mailing his white girl-friend a railway ticket—these sterling credentials inspired the team owners of major league baseball to offer him a job cleaning up baseball in the wake of the Black Sox Scandal. Landis was only interested in accepting the gig if he was given sole authority over all aspects of organized baseball. The owners couldn’t see how they would make money selling tickets to games that were widely known to be fixed, so they agreed to Landis’ demands and the office of Commissioner of Baseball was formed.

Due to his racism, and the fact that anyone who jailed Big Bill Haywood is an official enemy of Sam’s Mets Blog, Landis goes down as a particularly offensive commissioner. However, the Commissioner is almost by necessity a son of a bitch. Chosen by the owners, they are charged with keeping the fans, players, owners, advertisers and broadcasters working together in something that does not deteriorate into chaos or harm the bottom line. The commissioner is a little man who sits behind a desk and pushes pencils; he is charged with making sure the athletes—the big, the strong, the fast, the wild and the stupid—follow the rules. It is our love of athletes that draws us to sport, and the little man behind the desk pushing them around becomes a son of a bitch by necessity.

Current baseball Bud Sielig actually did something that I approve of this week by deciding to follow Bonds until he hits his record breaking home run. I’m not that big of a Bonds fan, and am not untroubled by his legacy, but it’s the damn home run record and Seilig’s the damn commissioner, so the guy might as well be there. It took Sielig long enough to decide to go, that his uncertainty about it allowed him to accuse Bonds implicitly, without actually coming out and making an accusation: exactly the sort of miserable, gutless behavior that is pretty much required of any commissioner. I hope that Bonds goes into a vicious slump that coincides with a hellish heat waive and that Bonds and Seilig both spend all of August sweating in ballparks and accomplishing nothing.

Anyway, it’s Basketball Commissioner David Stern who is really pissing me off this week. Recently it was revealed that one of the officials, Tim Donaghy, was a compulsive gambler, with mob connections, who had been betting on games that he officiated and making calls to alter them. I spent most of the winter listening to NBA fans crying about how poorly officiated the games were and how disgustingly little the league was doing about it. I was never really sure if they had a point, but they did. As Basketbawful (a good read and an inspiration to start this blog) points out, this proves that the officiating in the league in general is so god damn bad that a cheating, gambling, psychopath can fit right in with all the other crummy officiating: the NBA never found out about the guy, until the FBI filled them in. What makes this completely frustrating is that the David Stern regime has routinely sided with officials against players. It is important to understand that in basketball this has an overtone that is not quite present in other sports: an integral part of the spectacle of the NBA game is watching the large black men at the mercy of the calls and whistles of the officials, who tend to be shorter and whiter than the players that they adjudicate.

In an insultingly irrelevant press conference, Stern, however, admits no responsibility for any of this, and acknowledges no larger crisis in the league’s officiating. Instead, he wastes everyone’s time by describing the (obviously completely worthless) methods that they had in place to ensure that the thing that had already happened wouldn’t happen.

COMMISSIONISTIC FOOTNOTE: For the first years of his job, Sielig was the acting Commissioner and not the official one, which meant that the position was technically vacant. The owner of the Texas Rangers, a one George W. Bush, spent a fair amount of time angling for the job. The corollary to this little factoid seems to be the old ‘what if Hitler had been a successful painter? Would he have just done that with his life, and never been a dictator?’ question, which was the very debate that inspired a high school history teacher of mine to curtly tell the class that hypothetical history was a waste of everyone’s time. But would a country that at least felt like a democracy and wasn’t involved in pointless, murderous wars be worth living in if baseball had been reduced to a miserable, totalitarian travesty? Would I be willing to make that trade-off? Yes, yes I would.

Annals of Baseball Weirdness

Perhaps the most unusual player in the history of the game, James Barron Grierson played his entire career in the minor leagues for the Yoknapatawpha County Furies, with the exception of a small handful of games during a brief call up to the Cardinals in the late fifties. As a result of a childhood trauma, Grierson suffered from multiple personality disorder, however, he was unusual even among people afflicted with that rare ailment, in that both of his personalities were baseball players. Jimmy was a left-handed batting outfielder, and J. Barron was a sinker-ball throwing right-handed relief pitcher. Although the managerial complexities that Greirson’s condition caused were numerous, the Furies were perpetually short staffed, and Greirson’s versatility was extremely useful and led them to accommodate him. And, while bringing a player on in a double switch for himself is not technically allowed by the rule book, the league in which the Furies played was a small one and not known for exacting standards in regards to regulations.

It was the short-stafedness of the Yoknapatawpha County Furies that led them to experiment with signing the Griersons, but the initial expectation was that he would be physically unable to perform at both positions, at least not on a regular basis. However, as his career progressed teammates, managers and fans were truly shocked at how completely unrelated the performance of the “two” players was. In fact, Grierson initially attracted the attention of the Cardinals when Jimmy went on a twenty-game hitting streak, while J. Barron was on the DL with a bad elbow. The Cardinal scouts were put-off when J. Barron returned and they began to grasp the complexities of the player, but, having a need in the outfield that they thought he could fill, they got Jimmy to agree to a short-term deal, and bribed the management of the Furies to fire J. Barron.

It was only in St Louis that the dual nature of Grierson’s life took a toll on his game: unemployed, J. Barron fell into a depressive alcoholic cycle, and this meant that Jimmy frequently ended up playing drunk, or extremely hung over. The final straw came after a series of opposing managers complained about the Cardinal outfielder who would approach them smelling of whisky and very earnestly ask if they had any openings in their bullpen. After a few weeks, in which he hit just over .200, Grieirson was released and returned to Yoknapatawpha County.

After some initial wrangling and hurt feelings, the Furies signed both Griersons a second time, and the two of them recorded several more decent years playing in Yoknapatawpha County, where his uniqueness had lead him to be beloved by the fans. Perhaps the high point of his career came during a game in 1961 in which Jimmy went three for four with a home run, and J. Barron pitched a scoreless eighth inning with two strike outs.

Grierson retired in 1964 and became the radio voice of the Furies for many years; J. Barron did the play-by-play and Jimmy provided the color.

Ty Cobb Should be on the $20

I’m deviating from my Mets theme because this is something that I feel very strongly about. The most logical objection to this, that Ty Cobb was a terrible racist as well as an all around son of a bitch, is actually half the reason to go through with it: he would be replacing Andrew Jackson. In addition to killing people in duels, Jackson oversaw the Trail of Tears, one of the absolute low point of the White Man’s treatment of the American Indian- I am kind of surprised that Native American groups have never tried to get him replaced. If my plan were to succeed, there would only be two prominent slave owners honored on US banknotes.

The records that Cobb set, his determination, the grittiness of his play are all a powerful testament to man’s will to achieve and the individual’s capacity for greatness- and the capacity of this greatness to eclipse the fact that he was a man who could almost be accurately described as “evil.” He was completely relentless in his desire for excellence: he would play mind games with his friends over the batting title and he sharpened his spikes and always slid feet first. Looking at Cobb’s career statistics produces a sort of awe that there is no logical reason to feel for a long dead athlete who played before my grandparents were born.

In addition to holding the all-time record for career batting average, Cobb once led the league in homers without ever hitting a ball out of the park. Only people like Charlie Parker could claim to be that good at what they do.

Cobb excelled equally at another American national pastime- making money. He started a proud tradition and was the first athlete to endorse the Coca-Cola Company.

One thing, however, stands out above all else about Ty Cobb and makes him more worthy than any other American to be honored on our currency. When he checked into the hospital for the last time, Ty Cobb brought with him a million dollars in bonds and a Luger. As much as any other incident, this seems to illustrate perfectly the impotence and folly of the values of American capitalism when taken to their extreme in the face of eternity.

We should probably think about that every time that we buy something