Ins and Outs
How Much Action
Wrong Glove
Some Mistakes Stand Forever
Bonehead Merkle
Decline Is a Moral One
Topic : Baseball
Joke
The devil challenged St. Peter to a baseball game.
“How can you win, Satan?” asked St. Peter. “All the famous ballplayers are up here.”
“How can I lose?” answered Satan. “All the umpires are down here.”
Ins and Outs
The baseball season is upon us and an office manager we know passes along this explanation of the game, given to her by her grandson:
You have two sides, one out in the field and one in. Each man that’s on the side that’s in goes out and when he’s out he comes in and the next man goes in until he’s out. When three men are out, the side that’s out come in and the side that’s been in goes out and tries to get those coming in out. When both sides have been in and out nine times, including the not outs, that’s the end of the game.
How Much Action
Dick Wade, a Kansas City sportswriter, once decided to find out exactly how much “action” occurred in a baseball game. So, on June 21, 1956, he took a stopwatch to a game between the Kansas City Athletics and Washington Senators and counted the time it took a ball to leave the pitcher’s hand until it arrived at home plate; then on all hit balls, he let the clock run until the batter was either out or safe. The total “action” during the two-hour, 28-minute game was 8. 5 minutes. Kansas City won, 15-6.
Wrong Glove
During the many months of modeling and molding it took to create her 9-foot, 800-pound Babe Ruth in bronze, the artist Susan Luery met countless experts and aficionados. Details were researched and debated. Did the Babe wear his belt buckle on the left or right? Was his hat cocked to the side or worn straight? No fact was too small to escape scrutiny. Except one. The bronze Babe, unveiled at the northern Eutaw Street entrance of Oriole Park, is leaning on a bat and clutching on his hip a right-handed fielder's glove. The real Babe was a lefty. Ms. Luery, who admits to "not being very astute in the fine points of sports,? said she worked with a vintage glove sent over by the Babe Ruth Museum. She says she believed the glove was Ruth's. Communication error? "Yes,? said Mike Gibbons, the museum director. Or, as Ms. Luery puts it: "It was the right glove on the wrong man or the wrong glove on the right man.?
Some Mistakes Stand Forever
1. The distance from the pitcher's mound to home plate in baseball?60 feet, 6 inches'stands today because someone back in 1893 misread an order for measuring 60?0? as 60?6?!
2. The "front? of the Capitol building in Washington, D.C., faces away from the main part of the city instead of toward it because architect Pierre L-Enfant mistakenly thought the city would develop eastward, not westward!
Bonehead Merkle
On September 23, 1908, at the Polo Grounds in New York City, there were two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. The New York Giants and the Chicago Cubs were battling for the National League pennant, with the score tied at 1-1. The Giants had two men on base: 19-year-old Fred Merkle on first and Moose McCormick on third. Al Bridwell slapped a single up the middle, scoring McCormick.
The game seemed to be over. But instead of tagging second base, Fred Merkle trotted off the field to the Giants? locker room. The Cubs threw the ball to second, forcing out Merkel. The run didn't count, the Giants lost the pennant, and Fred Merkle picked up the name, "Bonehead Merkle.'
But that's not the end of the story. Fred Merkle got another chance and went on to play for 14 more seasons, including five trips to the World Series.
Decline Is a Moral One
Today, the exalted status of economics in our public debate is being challenged in some rather intriguing places. For example, Wall Street Journal editor Robert Bartley recently observed, "If America is to decline, it will not be because of military overstretch. Nor the trade balance, Japanese management secrets or even the federal deficit. If a decline is underway, it's a moral one.'
Former Education Secretary William Bennett sees evidence of such decline in research identifying the most serious problems in public school classrooms. In 1940, running in the halls, chewing gum, and talking in class headed the list of teacher's disciplinary concerns; today, robbery, rape, alcohol, drugs, teen pregnancy, and suicide are most often mentioned. Bennett argues, "If we turn the economy around, have full employment, live in cities of alabaster and gold, and this is what our children are doing to each other, then we still will have failed them.'
Bennett believes one way to improve our national debate is to counterbalance, the Commerce Department's index of leading economic indicators with a collection of some 19 'leading cultural indicators? including the divorce rate, the illegitimacy rate, the violent crime rate, the teen suicide rate, and even hours devoted to television viewing. While these cultural variables are only crude indicators of our nation's social health, they do provide a more complete, and more accurate, empirical assessment of the condition of American society than is available from economic variables alone. Using economic variables-even under-utilized variables like business productivity and hourly compensation rates-it is difficult to explain public opinion polls showing that a majority of Americans believe the quality of life in America has declined over the last three decades. To understand such perceptions, one has to consider that since 1960, violent crime has risen 560 percent, illegitimate births have increased 400 percent, teen suicides have risen 200 percent, divorce rates have quadrupled, average SAT scores have dropped 80 points, and the proportion of children living in fatherless families has increased three-fold.
In essence, then, Bennett's leading cultural indicators are to our national debate what statistics like saves, fielding percentage, and earned run average are to baseball: reminders that economic production (or run production) isn't everything. Indeed, a society which manages to make great gains economically, but fails to progress in the cultural areas outlined by Bennett is likely to be no more successful in the long run than the 1931 New York Yankees. That ballclub, which featured sluggers like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, scored more runs (1,067) than any other team in major league history. But New York still finished 13 and one-half games behind the Philadelphia Athletics in the 1931 American League pennant race, in large part because the Yankees? lousy pitching more than offset run-scoring prowess.
