Baseball works blue

Spring training is in full swing, and if anything can salve the pain of yesterday's bludgeoning at the hands of Minnesota, it's another season of Cubs baseball. The picture from above is outdated, since it has a clean-shaven Zambrano, instead of one sporting the sort of mustache that invites a rake to the chest.

Thankfully, Zambrano is in Mesa, Arizona instead of the fictional island
of Val Verde with the same dozen mustachioed stuntmen who get killed by
Schwarzenegger over and over again in some sort of brutal samsara of
poor aim and bad editing. Or impaled on a pipe.

The Trib offers a decent and growing selection of Spring Training photos, although none have surfaced to rival last years' crop, such as this offering of Ryan Dempster and the now-departed Matt Murton.


Kilroy was here

BASE BALL

Baseball has a lot going for it as a game testing skill, mental fortitude, and the ability of really fat guys to excel as athletes, which really irritates Europeans. In his 1867 Haney's Base Ball Book of Reference, baseball statistics pioneer Henry Chadwick (an Englishman who came up with such innovations as the box score, as well as inventing statistics such as batting average and ERA, which are still used today by stone-age luddites who only watch baseball highlights on newsreels where the action is comically sped-up) wrote about the virtues of the game:

But one of the strongest aids to the popularity of Base Ball, lays in the fact that it is a game-- and about the only one by-the-way-- which can be countenanced and patronized by the fairer sex. American ladies have heretofore been shut out of all the pleasures incident to games, in which contests are entered upon for the palm of superiority in courage, activity, nerve, and judgment and manly skill, by the low character of the surroundings of most of the sports and pastimes that men indulge in. In Base Ball, however, we have an exception in favor of the ladies, and one too, that they have not been slow to avail themselves of, as the presence of the fair sex by hundreds at the leading contests of the past five or six seasons fully testifies. If our National Pastime had no other recommendation than this alone would suffice to give it a popularity no other recreation could reach or compete with, in the estimation of Americans.

Of course, baseball's genteel image has reversed since then. A special instruction from 1897, for example, seeks to curb the problem of players cursing out spectators, especially in the presence of said ladies.


The 1897 instructions. Click to
read the full document.

The instructions contain examples of the "brutal language" heard on the fin-de-siècle diamond such as "you cock-sucking son of a bitch," you prick eating bastard,"I'll make you suck my ass," and the nearly unbeatable "I fucked your mother, your sister, your wife," which features the sort of serial commas found mainly in translation books for phrases such as "which way to the hotel, the museum, the jai-alai match" (unless I am the only person who owns translation books that inexplicably and continuously refer to semi-disreputable gambling venues).


I'm sure that jai-alai is just waiting for
a Black Sox -style match-fixing scandal,
which would destroy the sport for
hundreds of bestubbled undershirt
enthusiasts

BARNSTORMING FOR GOD

Of course, baseball could also be a holy pursuit. In 1903, Benjamin Purnell formed the House of David commune in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Purnell encouraged a lifestyle dedicated to vegetarianism, celibacy, and the type of unrestrained hair growth that consistently torments Duck Dodgers in the 24½th Century. More importantly, the House of David formed a barnstorming baseball team in the 1920s, taking on semi-professional and even Negro League teams and drawing a following of people who wanted to gape at their unorthodox grooming habits.

The House of David's style of long hair and bushy beards is all the
more astounding as it predates the invention of vans

The House of David Museum provides numerous fascinating photos of the team, as well as a video of their famous "pepper game" that involved throwing the ball around which is one step below Ricky Vaughn in defying the some fields' repressive "no pepper" policies. The commune also served as the site of an amusement park, featuring gardens, zoos, and a miniature train.

Everybody rides the trains: marketer's observation or
threat backed by the full-bearded vengeance of
bat-wielding cultists?

The Museum website, however, glosses over the 1926 arrest of Purnell on charges of fraud and indecency. Purnell demanded that members hand their possessions over to him, and he apparently had trouble following his own calls for celibacy, especially with the commune's younger members. As Philip Jenkins has written in Mystics and Messiahs: Cults and Religions in American Society (part of an astoundingly prolific catalogue), Purnell lived in "palatial splendor while his subjects starved." In 1927, the "lascivious prophet," as Jenkins calls him, faced charges of statutory rape involving perhaps twenty members of the commune in what was referred to at the time as the "trial of the century," which should be illegal to do in 1927 as all trials of the century should be labeled retroactively at midnight of the end of the century by a panel of third-rate comedians awkwardly reading stiff one-liners off of a teleprompter.

YOUNG PEOPLE...WITH FACES

The House of David is, of course, best memorialized by drummer Buddy Rich, whose legendary ravings towards his evidently subpar backing band have been immortalized on the internet. He invokes the House in a heated exchange with a bearded trombonist:

Two fuckin' weeks to make up your mind whether you want a beard or you want a job. I'll not have this trouble with this band. This is not the goddamn House of David fuckin' baseball team. This is the Buddy Rich Band; young people...with faces! No more fuckin' beards. That's out! If you decide to do it, you're through. Right now! This is the last time I make this announcement. No more fucking beards.

He continues:

You keep your fuckin' mouth shut, get the fuckin' beard off, or get off the band, right now. Now what do you think of that? Now that's a definite suggestion. When you go to work tonight, if I catch the fuckin' beard on you, i'll throw you off the fuckin' bandstand, O.K.?

I got nothin' for you. I got a right hand to your
fuckin' brain if you want it.

Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light,
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout;
But not at BYCTOM because this post was nothing but vulgar language
And statutory rape trials.

Get me Vaughn

The Jake Peavy trade has just fallen through for the Cubs after days of rampant speculation, which has shed a spotlight on the baseball winter meetings in Las Vegas. Unique to baseball, team executives gather around in order to provoke intrigue and double-dealing. The meetings are shrouded in secrecy as baseball writers leap to follow false trails, executives practice their dissumlation, and the players are moved around like risk armies as increasingly desperate GMs talk themselves into overpaying for journeyman middle relievers. The whole scene resembles the secret dealings of nineteenth century European diplomats, whose correspondence, betrayals, and secret alliances restitched the map of Europe, with less of an emphasis on epaulettes, points of honor, and occasional literal saber rattling as a senile aristocrat may unsheath his Mensurschläger and rattle it menacingly at a younger colleague whom he believed to be a conniving agent of the Pope.


Clemens von Metternich, left, whose machinations reset the balance of power in
Europe after the fall of Bonaparte. Brian Sabean, right, whose machinations may
well lead him to offer a $30 million contract to Ron Villone.

THE BASEBALL OFFSEASON: A TIME FOR BLOODSPORT

I recently came across this excellent treatment of cockfighting in a 1966 magazine devoted to the fine and gentlemanly sport. The magazine offers catalogs of fighting cocks delivered straight to your sweaty basement cockfighting den, reviews of cockfighting accessories, stories of cocks successfully fought, and editorials denouncing Lyndon Johnson. As the magazine puts it, "If you expect to fight coopwalked cocks against fresh farm walked cocks, you are kidding only one person - yourself."


A full catalog of fine fighting birds. You can
click on the picture for the full size for increased
legibility and so that anyone walking by who sees
the giant "POWER COCKS" in the picture can be
reassured that you are merely looking at
purchasing birds to tear each other asunder for
your own amusement while you shake money as
part of an incomprehensible betting system

The baseball link in all of this is, of course, Chicago Cub Aramis Ramirez who so enjoys a good cockfight that he found himself prominently featured in a Dominican cockfighting magazine. The issue came out during the fallout from the Vick trial, which drew a predictable pile of outrage. The New York Times found the idea appealing enough to send a reporter to the Dominican Republic to attend a cockfight who promptly began showing the restraint of a veteran J. Peterman writer:

At the Club Gallistico de San Martín, two armed policemen stand at the arena entrance and ask spectators to leave their guns in a locked chest. As the men file in to take their seats, the scene looks straight out of “Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome,” the 1980s dystopian classic.

Four rows of cascading seats surround the ring, which is bathed in flickering fluorescent light. Ceiling fans rattle. Those who could not afford the entry fee of 300 pesos, about $9, cling to metal bars that surround the arena. The fight starts when the birds arrive in plexiglass elevators that creak and lurch on a track above the crowd. Then they descend into the ring.

Two birds will enter, one bird will leave.

I'd like to think that immediately after writing that, the journalist quit his job, bought a shack by the ocean, a closet full of unbuttoned white shirts and linen pants , a panama hat, and a Dominican manservant while spending his days downing whiskey in the type of sweaty bar with a slowly rotating ceiling fan before becoming drawn into an anti-government intrigue by a beautiful woman and her mysterious connections to a leftist organization.


Aramis Ramirez direct from the pages
of a Dominican cockfight enthusiast
magazine preparing to enter his rooster
against the armored rooster denizens of
Bartertown

Personally, I find the sport of cockfighting a bit blasé and demand a return to the grand English tradition of bear baiting. As we all know, many of England's greatest theaters that served as the canvas for Shakespeare, Marlowe, and other Elizabethan luminaries to reshape the direction of modern drama also served as places to go to watch a bear reduce a pack of snarling dogs into a pulpy residue. In the seventeenth century, Bear Gardens became a popular, although controversial form of entertainment. An article from the PMLA journal from 1925 by J. Leslie Hotson contains a passage written in the 1630s by a man known only as "Honest William" describing the bear-baiting experience:



But, the bear-baiters had their critics as well, as D. Lupton from 1632 attests:


Perhaps D. Lupton would enjoy his bear-bait more if the Bears had a chance to take their righteous bear fury out on the humans who captured them and baited them for their own amusement. They could do so using Troy Hurtubise's anti-bear assault suit that he constructs in the film Project Grizzly. Project Grizzly is hands-down the greatest film ever made about a man who single-mindedly endeavors to build suit resistant to grizzly bear assault for some reason. The suit resists pummeling, mauling, biting, gashing, and all other manner of potential grizzly attacks including anti-flame insulation in case he runs into any firebreathing or torch-wielding bears. The movie itself is slow moving unless you're a fan of Canadians gathering in bleak poolhalls and shabby diners, and it never really answers the fundamental question of how Hurtubise intends to use the suit. In fact, the second half of the movie involves him stalking a grizzly for no apparent reason since his mobility in the suit makes a shambling Romero zombie look like an agile, mustachioed trapeze-man, and once he inevitably falls over he remains trapped on his back with no way out of the suit except with the potential assistance of the rampaging bear. There is, however, his dedication to buckskin, knives (used not for defense, but apparently to impress wayward mountain men that he may encounter) and comical methods of testing his suit. The following clip from the movie may be one of the most wonderful things ever put to film.


Note: The clip here has saberdance clumsily edited over it, but I'm pretty sure that the original movie featured the Robocop theme, which makes it infinitely more awesome.