Koufax, Stengel, and the power of delusion

Every day, I am greeted with requests to vote for such-and-such a site for a Koufax Award, so this is a reminder that--though I may like your site--I will not be voting in an election that, for me, makes Diebold look fair. Having been rudely trashed and eliminated from the competition for reasons that remain a mystery, I prefer to read The Heretik's permutations on baseball and blogging.

Which brings me to southpaw Casey Stengel, a witty, colorful man. Stengel said many memorable things, my favorite being "The key to being a good manager is keeping the people who hate me away from those who are still undecided."

Stengel also said "If you're so smart, let's see you get out of the Army." George W. Bush was 29 the year Stengel died, but his ability to get out of military service was a quiet, family affair, so Stengel never knew that getting out of the Army had nothing to do with being smart. Stengel also could not have foreseen that baseball, America's pastime, would later be synonymous with fueding, greed, and steroid use.

Sandy Koufax himself had to face anti-Semitism--the "subtle" kind that you are supposed to ignore because people "don't mean anything by it." As a culture, we focus on baseball's history of racial segregation, but players made remarks that must have hurt Koufax throughout much of his career. One player--I forget who--once said in an interview that the attitude of some players was that Koufax should not have been playing baseball, but should have been involved in intellectual pursuits or "whatever those people do."

Baseball is no longer America's pastime, but just one more thing that we have idealized beyond what it ever was. Consider, for example, Joe DiMaggio. When some very ugly truths about Joe DiMaggio's life finally came out, people refused to hear about them, and to this day, DiMaggio is considered an American "hero." I am not sure why he was a hero in the first place, but now we know that he was the opposite of one, yet that doesn't stop people from idolizing and idealizing him.

I grew up when baseball really was the national pastime. I watched it on TV with my father, and attended minor league games across town. When my mother learned that the local baseball Annie had befriended me, she forbade me to see her. Such was the unfairness of baseball, even for a young adolescent girl who just wanted to watch the local boys run the bases.