UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title On the Poetry of Baseball Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/82m2z3s3 Author Rubman, Lewis Publication Date 2011-01-01 Peer reviewed Thesis/dissertation escholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California
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Headline in the October 22, 1941, issue of Diario de la Marina (Havana). The subtitle reads, This afternoon, beginning at exactly half past two, the two powerful teams will decide the fourth Amateur World Series of Baseball. Same paper, next day: Cuba lost yesterday s game.
6 González Echevarría does not change his version in the corrected and enlarged corregida y aumentada Spanish edition.
8 The seasons, however, were only six and nine games long, respectively. My source for information of Gálvez s tenure with the Almendares club is Figueredo 12-13, 15-16.
A couple of notes to this note are in order. Gould may have found Casey at the Bat abominable, but Martin Gardner points out that T.S. Eliot admired the ballad and even wrote a parody about a cat, Growltiger s Last Stand, in which many of Thayer s lines are echoed. (15) Robert Frost says that he had hoped to write some day an epic poem some day about a ball batted so hard by Babe Ruth that it never came back, but got to going round and round the world like a satellite. I got up the idea long before any artificial moon was thought of by the scientists. I meant to begin something like this:
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1 To be inserted in printed text as a nine page, 5-1/2 x8-1/2 pamphlet.
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220 expression to mean tonto, mentecato stupid, foolish (64). Venenzuela, whose name means Little Venice, has a significant population of Italian origin, and so, whether or not Juan Bimba has an Italian etymology, the resemblance it bears to the Italian word for child, bimbo, -a, is enough to give rise to negative associations when referring to an adult. Bimbo also is pejorative in the United States, referring to either a contemptible man or a promiscuous or unintelligent young woman. (Lighter) We feel-- influenced perhaps, by cross-linguistic contamination but also by the word s history in Venezuela--the subliminal undertone of festive derision, as we do when reading the earlier reference to baseball bats and rumbas, reminiscent of the bawdy comments frequently heard at wedding celebrations. Bimba has another connotation that the contemporary Spanishspeaker cannot shake, even though its origin is after Blanco s poem The Mexican bakery Bimbo, is a large international concern. (In Spain, sliced bread is known as pan bimbo ). The brand name may be innocent, but the company isn t above advertising at baseball games by hiring scantily attired busty models, the much admired Chicas Bimbo, to serve as human billboards. Photo: Gail Rubman Batting practice, when the players concentrate on hitting and the crowd pays only cursory attention, is the part of the game that most resembles what happens in the Goya cartoon I mentioned in my discussion of the royal badminton game Blanco uses in his welcoming speech. Janis A. Tomlinson s analysis of that cartoon helps us understand that the worlds of the Madrid fair and the Tropical Stadium are not very far apart. She observes that the
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238 By 1908, he was pitching in the major leagues with the Boston Red Sox. Early in the next season, he hurt his foot in a mock tussle with his best friend [and career-long roommate,] Tris Speaker, (Berg 17) causing the pitcher to miss at least a dozen starts. I use roommate in a loose way; the two men roomed together on the road and shared a house when the team was not at home. Photographs of the couple s domestic arrangements raise eyebrows today but might not have if they had been published when they were taken. Unfortunately, I have not seen any documentation to verify either conjecture. Both photos probably by Boston photographer Richard W. Sears.! holder unknown. In pointing out these details about Joe Wood and his friend, I am not engaging in the doubtful enterprise of posthumously outing the two men. Rather, I want to indicate the markers of a homoerotic relationship in their well-known friendship, markers that seem not to have caused much if any comment in their day. If there had been any, such comment would have been easy to dismiss by appealing to the camaraderie of the locker-room and ball park. Unlike Wood s closeness with Speaker, Minnie Miñoso s locker room behavior seems not to have become public knowledge until the appearance of Chico Carrasquel s memoirs. The implications of his
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2 The twentieth-century Mexican counterrevolutionary Victoriano Huerta was known as El general Rompope General Eggnog, because he was made of eggs and alcohol
4 Freud says that puns are generally counted as the lowest form of wit, perhaps because they are cheapest and can be formed with the least effort. They really make the least demands on the technique of expression just as the actual play on words makes the most. Whereas in the latter, both meanings find expression in the identical word, and hence in a word used only once, in the pun it is enough if two words for both meanings resemble each other through some slight similarity in structure, in rhythmic consonance,
in the community of several vowels, or in some similar manner. (655) It seems to me that the father of psychoanalysis, or his translation, has got it wrong; all puns are word play, not all word play is puns.
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311 reliving olden days as far as his aching joints would permit. I was delighted to learn that I actually had seen the star of the 1911 World Series in action, attenuated as it may have been. But then I looked at what accompanied the story. It was a photograph and caption that identified Home Run Baker the man to the right of Lefty Gómez, the first player clearly visible on the far left. And Home Run Baker was dressed in a business suit, standing up in the seats behind first base, separated from his fellow old-timers, all of them, with the exception of general manager Ed Barrow, leaning out of the Yankee dugout and wearing Yankee pinstripes.! Ernest Sisto/The New York Times/Redux My memory was more reliable than the journalist s observation! Unless, that is, the report was just ambiguous, poorly written rather than poorly observed. The writer says that Baker was at third base, reliving the past, not that he was playing third base. Although semantic ambiguity can be a poetic virtue, that ambiguity must enrich, or at least complicate, rather than merely muddle, the reader s perception. Something as nebulous as the brown fog of the unreal city in lines 60 and 61 of The Waste Land demands the precision that naming its color provides. Journalism has a different set of requirements. It