It ain't over

Masters of malaprop and malfeasance: From left, former Mariners' manager and Yankees®™
star Lou Piniella, former Dodgers©® manager Tommy Lasorda, Hall of Famer Yogi Berra,
Reds superstar and Hall of Fame®™ reject Pete Rose, and Yankees®™ and Mets manager Casey Stengel.
Cover for a book collection of baseball quotes and stories.

My wife says I should write about Yogi Berra, and so I shall, late as usual to the eulogy.

The Associated Press' initial story of Berra's death last week referred to the Hall of Fame®™ Yankees©™catcher as "Yogi Bear."

The error makes perfect sense to me; I will not pass judgment. Having lugged around a Yogi Bear doll through toddlerhood, I was shocked in childhood to discover an actual human named Yogi Berra.

The human had to have been named after the cartoon bear, I reasoned, because cartoons were more real to me at that stage in my life.

In reality, Berra's representatives sued animators Hanna-Barbera unsuccessfully to stop its use of "Yogi Bear" for the porkpie wearing, pick-a-nick-basket-stealing cartoon denizen of Jellystone National Park.

Sued for what, defamation?

Yogi Berra died a cartoon, for all the good and awful that word implies.

For people my age who remember Berra, he was the old baseball manager known mostly for mangling English. He's one of those public figures who became magnets for unfortunate but funny twists of phrases, including those they didn't actually say.

What Berra did actually say:

• "You can observe a lot by watching."
• "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
• "I can't think and hit at the same time."
• "I want to thank everybody for making this day necessary."

What Berra might have said, though probably not as we know it:

• "Ninety percent of the game is half mental." (or "Baseball is 90 percent mental. The other half is physical.")
• "It ain't over 'til it's over." (About his 1974 New York Mets rallying from fifth place to win the division). He might have said instead, "You're not out until you're out." 

What Berra probably didn't say, but seems so darn likely that it's tattooed into his mythos:

• “It’s déjà vu all over again!” 
• "Nobody goes there anymore (to a restaurant). It's too crowded."
• "It ain't over 'til the fat lady sings."

Berra appeared to have embraced this malapropping persona, which I and everyone else expected of this grandfatherly little guy with the big black beetly eyebrows behind giant glasses and a bulbous nose above a rubbery grin. He even authored a book subtitled, "I Really Didn't Say Everything I Said!"

Even the source of his nickname — Lawrence Peter Berra is his real name — is fuzzy, maybe or maybe not applied by a baseball teammate for the way he sat, like a yogi, waiting for his turn at bat.

But the gentle buffoonery masked the mastery of his baseball career. Wherever Berra was, championships were sure to follow. The New York Times reports he appeared in 21 World Series from 1946 to 1985 as a Yankees player and a Yankees and Mets coach and manager. Nobody has played in more World Series games, gotten more Series hits or whacked more Series doubles.

Newsreel footage made me think he was an unlikely baseball superstar, and his peers apparently thought likewise. His Yankees manager, Casey Stengel — master of accidental witticisms himself — said, “Mr. Berra is a very strange fellow of very remarkable abilities.”

He looks so tiny in the newsreels, so much smaller than the catchers I grew up watching, and still see today. His bat looked too big for him, but obviously appearances deceive: Berra hit .285 over 19 seasons, with 358 home runs, and was a 15-time All Star®™.

My image of him as a baseball player comes in black and white and gray, when he actually leaps like a little kid into the arms of pitcher Don Larsen after Larsen pitches a perfect Game 5 in the 1956 World Series.

God bless Yogi Berra. He's why I love baseball: Funny names, rich lore, humans playing a game.

I don't do numbers. Though I can tell by a batting average where a hitter stands in the pantheon of the day or of history, I still couldn't tell you with confidence what an earned run is. I am vaguely aware that  a low earned-run average tends to portend a good pitcher. All these other new stats? OPS? WHIP? I'm lost.

Give me a good story, any time. Give me Willie Mays turning a double into a single so the pitcher would be forced to give a good pitch or two to Willie McCovey, hitting next in the batting order. Give me Roberto Clemente, tortured soul on the field, gigantic bleeding heart and soul off it. Give me Coco Crisp, Rusty Staub, "Three Fingers" Brown, Shooty Babitt, Preacher Roe, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, Joe Garagiola and Buster Posey, just because.

The San Francisco Giants this week are trying hard not to break my heart. Barring a miracle, they will. They're five games out of first with five games left in the regular season, fielding a starting lineup half of whom were in the minor leagues a month ago. The Giants have to win all five, and the first-place Dodgers, whom the Giants are playing right now, have to lose all five for the Giants to get a chance at winning the division.

It would make quite a story, the Giants flopping into the playoffs on kids and fumes. The odds are not in their favor. It ain't over, though.

Win or lose, the Giants always manage to make new rich memories of the people who played the game, not their statistics.

As Yogi said — or didn't — "The future ain't what it used to be."

Same as it ever was

A moment inspired by an early moment in
Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan.

I don't read much. Which may be plain to you.

It's quite possible I type more than I read, which is a bad recipe for good typing. Or writing.

Reading has always been … such … a … chore. As a kid, I couldn't overmatch the notion there was always something else I could be doing. As an adult, I'm sure there's always something else I should be doing.

Yes, yes, reading transports and enriches and transforms and immerses. I understand that. I have even felt these a few times. But reading always feels to me like extravagance, excess, impediment, like purposeful time wastage — and I waste too much time already.

What's more, when I do read, it's usually before bed, so to read at any other time induces a Pavlovian reaction to sleep. I'm done after five minutes.

What's even more, the ocean of books I am supposed to read as a useful citizen of the world is whipped to killer waves, a ceaseless storm swallowing up the shore all around, and I am small and hopeless in my inner tube.

Behold, then, the miracle that is me, reading two books at once! A little bit of each in sequence, not simultaneously, of course.

Not only that, get a load of me already drawing parallels between these two disparate works — and with the way I think at this point in my life.

It's very early yet and I could be wrong as wrong can be about these comparisons. At worst, I'll get another post out of this, a mea culpa.

One book is A People's History of the United States, by Howard Zinn.

The other is The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut.

Should I finish them, they will be major conquests in my barely perceptible onslaught against the family library, or what I call, "What are all these books and where did they come from?"

I picked up Vonnegut because, beaten about the corners already, it could take the abuse a recent family camping trip might render. Zinn's History is fat and hardbound and pristine and unwieldy, and wouldn't fit in the car.

I'm trying very hard not to read anything about Zinn's History, even though I'm suspicious. I pried it off the shelf because I had missed a lot of U.S. history in school (long story) and thought I could get it all back in one fell tome.

It reads like a well supported opinion piece, and I'm afraid by the time I flop exhausted onto the last page (688, before the bibliography!) I'll end up with many more thorny questions than answers.

Zinn's point so far, which I gather stitches his book together — the Constitution is set and the country is just now trying to figure out how to behave when I left off — is essentially: Them that has, gets.

Columbus showed up and began the brutal decimation of native cultures through might and greed. White Europe found nothing wrong and everything right with similarly decimating Africa and turning its people into chattel for its own gain, with ready new markets in the New World. Colonists wanted the western lands, and too bad for the Indians who lived there. The insular rich colonists were only too happy to let their lesser displaced citizens and white former servants fight the Indians because, you know, less muss and fuss.

So were the Colonial people in power too ready to rally their lessers to fight their battles against the British, with just enough romance in the Declaration of Independence to delude the lessers into some unrealizable idea of the American Dream — without disrupting the power base and their holdings.

Land barons got to keep their ill-gotten land under new rule. Slaves would still be slaves, Indians would be driven into the ground, women had no say, no rights.

All men are created equal. Except not you or you. Definitely not you, who don't fit the strict definition of "men."

Power and money rule, is Zinn's theme. Same as it ever was.

I slog ahead in glacial anticipation of how all of this turns out.

Vonnegut says the same thing, though he means: Same at it ever was, since the beginning of time until the unending end.

By not reading much, my literary DNA is gunked up with a lot of John Steinbeck and Vonnegut. Something about the way Vonnegut voices his ideas fits like snug proteins between the cadence of my thoughts.

Vonnegut writes a lot about humankind's inhumanity and cruelty and madness, its pointless quest for just about anything. Slaughterhouse-Five was about as reasonable a reaction as could be to witnessing the firebombing of Dresden during World War II, in which Vonnegut wrote of Tralfamadorians, alien people who exist throughout all time at once and see the great arc of absurdity and want us to chill out because it's always this way and always will be.

I understand I'll encounter the planet Tralfamadore soon enough in The Sirens of Titan.

Though one is science-y fiction and the other may end up being a weighty screed, the two books speak to the same thought: All this craziness and unfairness? All this injustice? It's been going on for a while. The pattern is quite predictable and traceable, actually.

Each book implies the unanswered question: What are you gonna do about it?

Oh, just remembered — I finished another book not long ago: Willie Mays: The Life, The Legend, by James S. Hirsch: It was our son's and came to our house some time ago to gather dust.

My favorite player whom I never saw play, Willie Mays troubled me as an adult because he came off in interviews as arrogant. For the longest time I stayed away from the book because of it, unwilling to mess up my romantic manufactured memories of Mays as player.

But Hirsch's book revealed Mays is just being frank. He is probably the best player ever, gifted and able and willing to play the game the way no one has before or since, so to him such brilliance is just a recitation of facts. In fact he is shy and suspicious of adults and more comfortable around children.

A deeply flawed and inconsistent person — and aren't we all, except spared the public stage? — Mays was sure and supreme on the field. The book describes the Giants' (New York and San Francisco) rocky and rollercoaster existence, punctuated a few years by triumph. Mostly though, heartbreak and disappointment, games so important at the time now just so many statistics trampled underfoot. Such is baseball.

Same as it ever was, as I listened to the Giants lose to the Arizona Diamondbacks last night, knowing the Los Angeles Dodgers had beaten the Colorado Rockies, dropping the Giants to four games out of first place in the National League West behind L.A. with only a week and a half more regular season baseball to play.

What are you gonna do about it?

To the wonderment of all

The great Willie Mays was already gone to the Mets
by the time I saw this illustration.

Behold, a serendipitous dip from my fountain of youth:

I give you — the works of Dave Beronio.

This is the stuff I promised to show way back when I wrote about my first baseball game 41 years ago.

The Giants split a doubleheader with the Cubs, and Dad, after a quiet sigh of "fer cryin' out loud," I bet, had split open his wallet for the dollar for the program.

Or yearbook, as the Giants were calling it. The Giants had won the National League West pennant the season before, and the yearbook basked in the glow, with a special logo befitting the design zeitgeist, and an out-of-focus photo of the great Willie Mays sliding into second base against what looks like the St. Louis Cardinals.

Half the fuzzy photo comprises the blue-green artificial turf that covered the field at Candlestick Park, and the year 1972 is printed in black over the green field.

The cover photo may have been prophetic, because Willie Mays was soon out of the picture, traded to the Mets in May, a month before my first ballgame. By June, the Giants had all but guaranteed they wouldn't defend their pennant.

Willie Mays was still the franchise at press time, though, and as I thumbed through the program, past the color photo essays and beer ads, I came upon Dave Beronio's drawing of Mays.

Candlestick Park and the rest of the world suddenly melted away. I sat bewitched. Somehow, with careful and yet carefree application of pencil — the same kind I pushed around a paper in maddening struggle — emerged Willie Mays, all life and light and likeness, exactly the man I had seen on TV and in photos.

Only moreso, somehow.

How did Dave Beronio mold the face just so, the shade here and light there, to make it dazzle? It was the best kind of magic. In the moment, and ever since, I have desperately wanted to draw like this.

"Sudden" Sam McDowell

The yearbook showcased Beronio's treatment of the Giants stars, including the starter acquired from the Cleveland Indians the year before, "Sudden" Sam McDowell:

Beronio was wise not to compose the lefty in a Giants hat, but to let the rockabilly hair and sideburns unfurl.

Beronio used black pencil on coquille board, a heavy paper with a pebbled surface. The pencil catches on the pebble shapes and creates a kind of dot pattern that made print reproduction easier.

Coquille board is somewhat old-school, popular in the mid 20th century among editorial cartoonists and newspaper illustrators.

Old-school would describe Dave Beronio, coming out of that fine time, before my time, when illustration daily graced the sports pages.

A closeup of the coquille board texture.

Noting Beronio's 75th birthday in 1996 from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives, Rep. George Miller said the athletic reporter and editor would spar with the boxing greats of the time, interview them for stories — then have them sit for portraits.

As an editor for his hometown Vallejo Times Herald and the Vacaville Reporter, Beronio did so frequently, which is how the Giants called on him to draw for the 1972 program.

Beronio was a gunner on a B-17 Flying Fortress during World War II, flying 35 missions and earning the Distinguished Flying Cross.

He was distinguished for a special commemoration on the walls of Candlestick Park, the lone writer among pro athletes. And he introduced his friend Bob St. Clair when the San Francisco 49er was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1990.

Juan Marichal

And he drew me these wonderful pictures for me for a dollar.

Thumbing through the program again, I am still enthralled by Beronio's drawings. Occasionally I'll find gestural cross hatching, just a hint of looseness. For the most part Beronio showed great patience and economy of style.

He drew just enough, until the work was just right. His subjects shone as a result.

Should you stumble upon this blog and know about Dave Beronio and his work, I'd love to learn more, the man and his process. His body of work seems so far to have eluded the magnet of the Internet.

Until then, I'm grateful for the magic.

"Keystone Kids" Chris Speier at shorstop (my favorite) and Tito Fuentes at second base. Speier, in his
second season in the pros, was that day's Brandon Crawford. Speier's only sin is that he's now
the bench coach for the Cincinnati Reds.

My first ballgame

Technicolor could not even do justice to how green
Candlestick Park's carpet was that day. Willie McCovey
launched the world's highest popup that day.

By miracle of the Internets, I know nearly every detail of my first professional baseball game, 40 years ago this summer.

The only factors not recorded for posterity (at least not online) are how vividly green the grass glowed at first sight (I've heard this many times from others recalling their first Major League game, even when the grass is fake, as it was in 1972 at Candlestick Park); and how bored I was by the third inning of the doubleheader. That's the inalienable truth we ignore about baseball; it can drag on, until our own lives slow to its pace around adulthood, when we can finally withstand weaving it into our daily lives over the radio.

Without the computer as crutch, I can remember:

• I went with my dad (and we went with some other people, but I can't remember who; since my aunt was the only reason we'd visit the Bay Area, maybe it was some of my cousins and her second husband)

(We took our kids to their first game, also at Candlestick, a story that merits its own post; our son's birthday is today.)

• The San Francisco Giants hosted the Chicago Cubs for a doubleheader (which seemed like a good idea at the time; if one game is good, how much better should two games be? Ask any 10-year old.)

• Juan Marichal started for the Giants against Bill Hands in the first game. I had heard of Marichal before I got to the park, either because my dad told me or he was one of those players whose names transcended baseball, like Willie Mays.

• Game 2 was a blur of nothing.

• Ron Santo played third for the Cubs. I had his baseball card. I also had cards for Bobby Bonds, the Giants' rightfielder (and Barry Bonds' dad) and catcher Dave Rader.

• Willie Mays was gone by 1972, traded to the New York Mets by Giants owner Horace Stoneham, who supposedly traded Mays for cash and then gave the money to Mays, because Stoneham couldn't afford to give the great Mays the money he deserved. I had come in hopes of seeing Mays, and didn't realize until that he reached the ballpark that he was no longer a Giant. Though I liked baseball, I wasn't paying careful attention.

• Willie McCovey, the first baseman and eventual Hall of Famer whom people called Stretch, hit a ball so high into the air, twice as high as the lip of the stadium, I felt the adrenaline rollercoaster ride of being one of the few fans who would see this man hit a ball clear out of vast Candlestick Park. The headlines the next day of this amazing feat: Imagine! It became a routine popup instead (to the shortstop in the bottom of the seventh in the first game, exacting detail courtesy of www.baseball-reference.com). Nothing new under the sun.

• Giants Manager Charlie Fox got mad at an umpire's call (not sure which call; the exhaustive statistics fail my curiosity here) and told the umpire so, body shaking, arms wheeling, prompting his rejection from the game. In revenge Fox took advantage of the artificial turf, smooth as a billiard table, and threw several buckets of baseballs onto the field, where they rolled wherever the field was green, and then a couple of armfuls of bats, which arced this way and that as if free of gravity. I cheered with the crowd: A grown man having a child's tantrum! Who'da thought?

• The $1 program held me transfixed, especially the pencil drawings of selected players. They helped inspire me to draw, in the same way that Bernie Fuchs and Leroy Neiman and Mort Drucker did. It kills me I can't find the program, which I know I kept. It's somewhere in my series of godawful messes or (better) I gave it to my son. I'll post some of the work if I find it soon.

• One of the drawings was of the Giants' young infielder, Chris Speier, a wiry spider of a player who with second baseman Tito Fuentes were known as the Keystone Kids, turning double plays. I became an instant fan of Speier.

Here's what the comprehensive stats tell me:

• It was Sunday, June 11, 1972 (I missed the 40th anniversary by almost a month); the first game started at 1 p.m. under sunny skies, 70 degrees at Candlestick Point. In addition to me, 21,728 other people also paid to sit in the stands. The summary doesn't indicate whether the stiff wind was blowing, but it probably was. Almost always did.

• A legend, Leo "The Lip" Durocher, was the Cubs' manager.

• The Giants were not good, not like the year before, when they had won the National League West division. Two months into the season and they were already 16 1/2 games behind first place, with 18 wins and 38 losses. They weren't contenders like today, when they're leading the division. They had lost seven straight and would lose that game too, getting shut out 4-0. They rallied to win the second game 3-1. I didn't really care about any of this.

• It was not the great Juan Marichal's day. The Hall of Famer would lose, and would also commit two throwing errors in the same inning trying to pick off runners at first.

• Catcher Fran Healy and a sometime shortstop named Damaso Blanco drove in the go-ahead runs for the Giants in the second game. Ron Bryant got the win for the Giants. Burt Hooton started for the Cubs; Hooton threw a no-hitter his first year in baseball, but was really more known later as a solid Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher.

Forty years later, Hooton is still in baseball, a pitching coach for the Houston Astros' Triple-A ballclub. Chris Speier is bench coach for the Cincinnati Reds; he and his team were just in San Francisco to split a four-game series with the Giants, and I got to hear a lengthy radio interview with him over the weekend. Tito Fuentes is a Spanish-language radio broadcaster for the Giants. Willie McCovey is an almost daily presence at AT&T Park, where he sponsors Junior Giants youth baseball. Willie Mays is also a constant, long since returned to baseball's good graces after he and Mickey Mantle were shunned for being greeters at Las Vegas casinos. Marichal is still revered in these parts.

And each and every day this time of year, kids' hearts thump extra hard when they first catch sight of the glowing green grass of a Major League ballpark.