Читать книгу Poetry Night at the Ballpark and Other Scenes from an Alternative America - Bill Kauffman - Страница 9

First Principles, 2008

“April hath come on,” as Nathaniel P. Willis began his best poem. ’Tis the month of violets and baseball, and so I must tell you about last summer’s Baseball Poetry Night, or what I like to call Shoving Culture Down Fans’ Throats Night, at Batavia’s venerable Dwyer Stadium. Team President Brian Paris, a veritable one-man Chautauqua of self-improvement, and I misconceived the idea; with the declamatory assistance of my daughter Gretel and Holland Land Office director Pat Weissend, Brian and I filled the between-innings air of the August 17 game between the Class A Batavia Muckdogs and the Auburn Doubledays with recitations of odes to the American Game by Charles Bukowski, Grantland Rice, the Beat poet Tom Clark, and other bards of the ballfield. It went over as disastrously as you’d expect. My Batavia, God bless her, is poetical enough in my imagination, but as for poetry appreciation . . . well, let’s just say that when Brian asked the fans, “Do you want another poem or a song?” the shouts of “Song!” rivaled the New Testament crowd’s cry of “Free Barabbas!”

The Muckdogs lost the game, of course, but the muse couldn’t be blamed—not when your team average is a healthy man’s weight and you were recently victim of the first nine-inning perfect game in the NYP since 1956.

The low minors are the heart and soul of professional baseball. Batavia is a charter member of the New York Penn League (nee PONY League), which was drawn up in 1939 over libations at Batavia’s long-ago-razed Hotel Richmond, named for the railroad baron and George McClellan-backing Democratic Party boss Dean Richmond, from whom the thieving Vanderbilts stole the New York Central.

No one has stolen our team yet, though as one of the smallest cities (population 16,000) in pro ball we are not unacquainted with the abyss. The ostensible function of a minor-league team is to develop players for the majors, but the real purpose of Dwyer Stadium is to provide a gathering place for friends and neighbors across the generations to enjoy fellowship, conversation, and baseball.

I haven’t followed the majors since the 1981 strike. I can reel off the starting lineup of the 1975 Kansas City Royals but I can’t name a single Royal today. Besides, we in western New York have no “local” team in the bigs, the closest major league franchise being the Toronto Blue Jays, never an appealing squad, and about as Canadian as the music of Ontario’s own Shania Twain.

(Is there a more pallidly cosmopolitan North American city than Toronto? If Atlanta is the city too busy to hate, as the disturbingly cold-blooded Chamber of Commerce slogan used to go, then Toronto is the city too easy for other Canadians to hate. How, I wonder, did Jane Jacobs stand it? The Canadian team I root for is the sadsack Hamilton Tiger-Cats of the Canadian Football League. Three downs are inferior to four—Canadian football could make Bill Walsh renounce the short pass—and the three-minute warning and fifty-two-yard-line are just strange, but God bless the CFL and its idiosyncrasies.)

Batavia has been pelted with epithets over the years, but pallid is not one of them. The Muckdogs are one of those rooted and character-packed institutions that keep the blood pumping, and we are lucky to have a superb example of what every baseball city has to have: a baseball historian.

Bill Dougherty’s father founded the heating company that has borne the family surname for three generations. Bill is retired, which means he still spends five days a week running for parts and answering phones and pitching in, but when he’s not hanging around the office (or even when he is) Bill is researching and writing articles on our county’s early-twentieth-century town teams and ethnic nines and even traveling women’s baseball teams. Just now he’s in the early stages of planning a girls’ baseball tournament, apt since the Burned-Over District is the cradle of the nineteenth-century movement for woman suffrage and legal equality. (Susan B. Anthony I’ll keep on the bench to nag the ump, but Elizabeth Cady Stanton can bat cleanup for me anytime.)

History: “it’s not made by great men!” as the best Marxist postpunk band yelped. It is, rather, an accumulation of small stories that achieve, in their interconnectedness, a solidity, a resonance. I guess we’d have to call Bill an activist historian, since his labors of love have retrieved forgotten games and people and even rewritten the major-league record book.

This story starts with Ty Cobb and the famous “suspension game.” Cobb had gone into the stands in New York on May 15, 1912, to thrash a heckler who was yelling “Your sister screws niggers” and “Your mother is a whore.” The heckler, Claude Lueker, had lost all but two fingers on his hands to an industrial accident, though when told he’d throttled a handless man, truculent Ty replied that he’d have beaten up Lueker even if he had been legless. Commissioner Ban Johnson suspended Cobb, his Tiger teammates struck in solidarity—even though most of them despised Cobb—and when Tiger owner Frank Navin realized that he’d be fined heavily if the Detroiters didn’t take the field against the Athletics in Philadelphia, Navin and Tiger manager Hughie Jennings cobbled together a team of Philadelphia-area amateurs, semipros, and sandlot sultans which Cobb biographer Al Stump called “the most farcical lineup the majors ever had known.”

As a player, Detroit manager Hughie Jennings was hit by a pitch 287 times, a major-league record that withstood the modern charge of Houston’s Craig Biggio. The affable Jennings “had two ambitions in life,” writes Bill James: “to become a lawyer, and to meet the pope.” He did both. Even better, he met a Batavian: twent-four-year-old Vince Maney, who was working in the Iroquois Iron Works in Philadelphia and playing semipro ball. Jennings signed Maney up as shortstop for a day.

The game of May 18, 1912, was a rout. Emergency Tigers pitcher Aloysius Travers, who later became a Jesuit priest, was touched for twenty-four runs on twenty-six hits in eight innings. Who needs a bullpen? Vince Maney described the game in a letter to his brother: “I played shortstop and had more fun than you can imagine. Of course it was a big defeat for us, but they paid us fifteen dollars for a couple of hours work and I was satisfied to be able to say that I had played against the world champions. I had three putouts, three assists, one error, and no hits.”

If only Bill James had been sabermetricking in 1912. For Vince also walked once and was hit by a pitch, giving him an on-base percentage of .500. Calling Billy Beane!

Maney played under an assumed name that day. He was a strikebreaker, after all—a scab of sorts, although Ty Cobb wasn’t exactly Samuel Gompers. For nigh unto one hundred years the baseball record books listed Maney as Pat Meaney, forty-one, of Philadelphia. The fictive Meaney’s made-up age gave him the specious distinction of being the oldest rookie ever to debut in the majors till forty-two-year-old Satchel Paige joined Cleveland in 1948.

Enter Bill Dougherty. Add countless hours at the Genesee County History Department and the Richmond Library, volumes of baseball histories, communications with the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, and a determination to do right by a fellow Batavia Irishman. Thanks to the indefatigable Dougherty, Vince Maney has gotten his due. Open the newest edition of any standard baseball reference book or website and you’ll find an entry for Vincent Maney, born and died in Batavia, NY, a Detroit Tiger of 1912.

So far as we can tell, Vince is the only Genesee County boy ever to play a game in major league baseball. A Moonlight Graham of our own. Given his due after all these years only because of the labor of another man, a Batavian who grew up enthralled with baseball and his hometown and never lost his love of either.

We are eleven weeks from the start of another season—this one a special blessing, as our good neighbors the Triple-A Rochester Red Wings rescued the Muckdogs from an off-season flirtation with extinction. Soon enough I will find myself on the Dwyer Stadium beer deck draining a beverage with historian Bill Dougherty and Steve Maxwell, whose insurance company was founded by none other than the homecoming Vince Maney many decades ago. There is a continuity still in the America that counts. Heck, the nuns at St. Joe’s used to make my dad run over to Vince Maney’s office for free inkblotters. We are bound, all of us, in this little place that in my imagination is bigger than the whole world.

Yeah, I know, it all leads back to a single game and an 0–2 line and an .833 fielding average, but Vince did get hit by a pitch, too, just as Batavia has been beaned as often as Hughie Jennings. There’s more than one way to make it to first base. And even for those of us who never cross the plate, never score a run, there are other ways of making it home.