The crack of the bat, the roar of the group … the sport of baseball, lengthy a part of the American panorama and firmly positioned within the hearts of tens of millions, is again. Our new baseball season begins Thursday when the Cubs host the Milwaukee Brewers at Wrigley Field and the White Sox go to the Houston Astros.
Writers have at all times been drawn to the game, to its practitioners, its that means and its inherent poetry. Walt Whitman, referring to what was then a comparatively new addition to the nation’s sports activities scene, could have as soon as mentioned one thing alongside the traces of: “I see great things in baseball. It’s our game — the American game.”
I’m not the wildly passionate fan that I used to be when younger, however nonetheless, earlier than each season arrives, I reread what I contemplate one of the best novel written about baseball, Bernard Malamud’s “The Natural” (1952) — to not be confused with Robert Redford’s “The Natural” movie in 1984 — and John Updike’s “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” a exceptional story in The New Yorker about Ted Williams hitting a house run in his final at-bat in Boston’s Fenway Park in 1960.
There are all method of ideas, recollections and feelings that pepper the opening days of a brand new season, and listed below are some from author Ira Berkow, who informed me just a few days in the past, “I always look forward to opening day in major league baseball. The Ohtani-Trout matchup in the final game and final out of the recent World Baseball Classic gave us fans, and quasi-fans, a delicious taste of the intense pleasures that baseball can provide and are to come, from spring to summer to fall.”
I too was grabbed by that Shohei Ohtani-Mike Trout duel final week, two of baseball’s biggest gamers, teammates on the underachieving Los Angeles Angels, having at it dramatically within the ninth inning. There have been two outs and the rely was 3-2 as was the rating, Japan forward, when Trout struck out on an Ohtani slider, giving his staff the WBC victory over the USA.
Berkow has seen hundreds and hundreds of baseball video games and is the writer of the just lately printed “Baseball’s Best Ever: A Half Century of Covering Hall of Famers,” a group of his writing that comprises 150-some columns and have tales written between 1967 and 2022. In it, he writes that “Baseball retains its appeal because it is not frenetically and self-consciously modern … No other spectator sport in America has meant so much to so many for so long … the game is still timeless.”
Berkow has lengthy lived in New York, however he’s of Chicago, born and bred within the Lawndale neighborhood earlier than his household moved north. He attended and performed sports activities on the groups of Sullivan High School. After getting a level from Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and dealing for the Minneapolis Tribune and the Newspaper Enterprise Association, he went to The New York Times in 1981 and was there till 2007, sharing a Pulitzer Prize alongside the best way and freelancing to today.
He has written 20-some books. In 1974 he cowrote “Rockin’ Steady: A Guide to Basketball and Cool” with New York Knicks star and vogue plate Walt “Clyde” Frazier. It was a collaboration that prompted this evaluation from the good E.B. White: “(The book) has kept me steady for several days, and I have been enjoying it, particularly since I never heard of Clyde (I live a sheltered life).”
In 1977 he wrote top-of-the-line books ever written about Chicago, “Maxwell Street: Survival in a Bazaar.” In 2014 he wrote, with former Tribune reporter Josh Noel, “Wrigley Field: An Oral and Narrative History of the Home of the Chicago Cubs.”
Nearly 20 years in the past within the Tribune journal, I wrote a narrative in an try to reply a query posed within the headline: “Does Baseball Still Matter?” Berkow’s ebook “Baseball’s Best Ever” shouts, “Yes!” although most of its characters and heroes are lengthy gone. There are loads of them on this ebook’s almost 500 pages. Think of a former participant and you’ll doubtless discover him right here, with numerous Chicago of us.
Read the story about Ernie Banks, out of baseball and promoting life insurance coverage, as a result of “the most he ever earned in one season was $65,000. He was, though, able to save a substantial amount, but most of that is gone”; Nellie Fox’s widow awaiting a cellphone name telling her whether or not or not her late husband can be inducted into the Hall of Fame; Harry Caray, returning to the broadcasting sales space at Wrigley in 1987 after struggling a stroke, “being cheered like mad, and warbling as of old”; Berkow’s recollections of Bill Veeck; and his 1990 column about Chicago sports activities author Jerry Holtzman, then “64, stocky, with a shock of wavy gray hair, eyebrows furry as caterpillars, wearing suspenders and smoking a cigar not quite as long as his arm, has made his way, one of the brightest, most respected men in his profession.”
There is a lot to take pleasure in right here, to savor. You may giggle, certainly smile but additionally can be grabbed by unhappiness, no extra so than studying about Ferguson Jenkins, who, nonetheless dealing with the loss of life of his spouse, will get hit with the information of the deaths of his girlfriend and daughter … and the way it occurred.
I do not know what this new season holds for the White Sox or Cubs, what impact some new guidelines — bigger bases, a pitch clock, ban of defensive shifts — could have on the game. Berkow informed me, “The few new rules and various changes don’t bother me. It still can’t take away such artistry as a shortstop going deep into the hole to his right and throwing out a base runner by half a step.”
OK then. Play ball.
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Source: www.bostonherald.com