I usually love to listen to baseball on the radio.
Tonight was not usual.
On the drive home from BWI Airport following a quick trip to Nashville, I tuned in to the 7th inning of the Washington Nationals vs. Atlanta Braves game. According to the announcers, the first six innings were well-played and scoreless.
The seventh was neither (well-played nor scoreless).
For all the T-ball aged readers of More to Come… here are things you’ll learn when you make it to Little League. (Apparently the Nats skipped that level of baseball development.)
First, when the #6 hitter has a lead-off double and you are the #7 hitter, you do not sacrifice bunt. By bunting you put all the pressure on the #8 hitter because the pitcher bats in the #9 hole. Of course, for the Nats tonight the #7 hitter bunts for a sacrifice in that situation, then the #8 hitter makes an out (a likely occurence for all #8 hitters – there’s a reason they are there) and all of a sudden the pitcher – who is throwing a shutout – is supposed to drive in the run. You know how often pitchers drive in runs with two outs.
Second, when you get a double play ball hit to you at shortstop, you turn the double play. Ian Desmond booted a tailor-made double play in the bottom of the 7th. Instead of two outs and one on at third, the bases are loaded with no outs.
Third, when you are a weak-armed center fielder and a sac fly is hit to you with the bases loaded, you throw the ball to second to keep the double play in order. You do not throw the ball to third, where you have no chance to get an out and you give up second base to the runner on first. Of course, Nyjer Morgan throws to third. Both runners score.
It is tough to be a fan of a team playing the worst baseball in the majors at the moment.
I picked up Top of the Order: 25 Writers Pick Their Favorite Baseball Player during the Politics & Prose sale a couple of weeks ago. Only a handful of the writers were familiar and the inclusion of Michael Jordan (yes, that MJ) and the fictional Crash Davis in the list of favorites indicated this anthology was going to take a different tack from the typical list of baseball’s greatest hits.
Top of the Order is, at best, uneven. I couldn’t wait to get through some of the self-indulgent essays (see Pat Jordan on Tom Seaver) which were more about the author than I cared to read. At their best, some of the essays captured the special nature of fandom (see the obsessive Darin Strauss on Mariano Rivera) where you didn’t mind the intrusion of the writer. Steve Almond leads off with a strong piece on Rickey Henderson that hooks the reader into this quirky collection. Neal Pollack writes a terrific essay on Greg Maddux that demonstrates how dominant Mad Dog was through so many years in the 1990s.
But then Sean Manning’s piece on Michael Jordan and John Albert’s essay on Jeff Kent’s mustache almost made me want to put the book down. So readers beware…you will probably find Top of the Order satisfying and frustrating at the same time.
One aspect of the book I found very appealing: more than a handful of the essays were written by women. And the best essay – not just by a woman but in the entire anthology – was by Carrie Rickey, film critic of the Philadelphia Inquirer, on Kevin Costner’s Crash Davis from the best baseball film ever – Bull Durham. First of all, she has the good sense to admit that she watches Bull Durham often. So do I. Rickey writes,
“Bull Durham” is one of the few (baseball films) to capture fully that catcher/pitcher conspiracy. “Bang the Drum Slowly” and “A League of Their Own”are others, but they’re not so much about what happens on the field as about what happens in the heart. “Bull Durham” is about what happens in both places – and why both places matter.
In just a few short pages, Rickey touches on many of the key scenes from the movie. She opens with her own take of Crash’s “I believe…” soliloquy (including a terrific “I believe that the dramas of Kevin Costner are self-indulgent dreck”), recounts the evergreen of Crash teaching rookie Nuke LaLoosh his baseball clichés (“they are your friends”), and notes that when we first meet Crash he shows the switch-hitter’s ability to digest, process, and adjust (going from denial, to anger, to acceptance in three sentences that end with “Who we play tomorrow?”)
Rickey’s essay reminds me that some of my favorite writing about baseball has been by women. In the 2008 anthology Anatomy of Baseball, Elizabeth Bobrick’s “Oriole Magic” is worth the price of the book. (Click on the link to read some excerpts.)
So on this Father’s Day, when so many baseball fans wax eloquently about how their fathers introduced them to the game, remember that a great many women (including my late mom) understand the game at a level many men miss. As Rickey writes about Annie Savoy in Bull Durham,
Here is a woman who knows as much about the game as Crash. Here is a woman for whom baseball is a religion, who sees the ballplayer who loves the game more than it does in return, and who loves him in a way that finally puts Crash’s life into balance. And he’s evolved enough not to be intimidated by her.
Catch a game of baseball this week…and perhaps if you’re a guy, take a woman with you to help explain what’s going on with the action on the field.
The full article is worth reading, but the ending is simply sublime:
We live in a time, Card said, in which people want instant replays, “do-agains,” the quick fix. But baseball has never lent itself to painless answers. “You’ve got to step back,” Card said, “and appreciate the larger sense of what this was.”
It was an act of human failing followed by colossal grace, which Card sees as proof enough of a perfect game.
My last post said More to Come… was going on sabbatical, but in cleaning up the nightstand today I realized I’d been holding four recent books that I planned to review on the blog. These represent my eclectic interests (which is what More to Come… is all about) as well as priorities in my life at the moment. So in the hope that I can now hold to my promise to take the blog on sabbatical, I’ll pass along thumbnail reviews of the four and put them in my mental “checked off” category.
The first is Michael Lewis’ terrific (as in well-written) and sobering (as in scary) The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. This is, by far, the best known of the four and much has been written about the story of three small hedge fund managers and a bond salesman who knew what was coming before the economic meltdown of 2008.
I don’t need to elaborate because Steven Pearlstein said it all in a Washington Post review I highly recommend. As Pearlstein writes, “If you read only one book about the causes of the recent financial crisis, let it be Michael Lewis’s ‘The Big Short.'” Agreed.
Lewis also has an opinion piece in today’s New York Times. I hope that means he does not intend to stop writing about the causes and outcomes of the financial crisis anytime soon.
The second recommendation is the new book by brothers Chip and Dan Heath entitled Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard. I am a big fan of their first book, Made to Stickwhich focused on communicating ideas that stick. We even exchanged some correspondence to discuss a few real-life examples. Switch is another winning book in the Heath brothers tradition. It goes beyond the intended “business book” audience to speak to anyone trying to move individuals, families, offices, or organizations to change.
You’ll find this to be a valuable read if you’ve ever thought that “your brain isn’t of one mind.” But change can come during times of transition, especially when you believe – as the Heath brothers do – that change isn’t an event but a process.
Now for something completely different: Still Inside – The Tony Rice Story. Rice is – in my humble opinion – the best acoustic guitarist on the planet, and this work covers his entire life’s story and musical development. Much of it is written in Tony’s own words or comes from remembrances from fellow musicians and friends. The section on the development of David Grisman’s Dawg music, when Rice left his bluegrass roots and joined the seminal David Grisman Quintet in 1975, is worth the price of the book. As Tony says, there are now at least 10 guitarists who can play circles around him while playing Rice’s own music, but none have the tone and touch…and none came up with the beautiful combination of roots, bluegrass, jazz, and even classical influences that makes the best of Dawg music still fresh some 30+ years later. After reading the book, I recalled all those great Rice albums that I had listened to on vinyl and immediately went online and downloaded several CDs worth of music from Tony’s four decades of music. Backwaters is Tony’s favorite, and with fresh listening I can see why.
The best part of Still Inside? My copy of the book is inscribed “To my old pickin’ pal, David – Tony Rice.” Now, there’s not a shred of truth in that, but my grandchildren (should I ever have any) will never know! Thanks to my friend Leti, who stood in line at Merlefest when I couldn’t go this year and snared the best inscription ever for a guitar lover. There are so many different phases to Tony’s music which would show his prodigious talent, but I’ve chosen his solo guitar version of Norman Blake’s Church Street Blues in the video below. Enjoy.
The final book is another roots music work, chronicling one of the most influential musicians of the twentieth century. Meeting Jimmie Rodgers is an extensively researched work about the influences of Rodgers on a wide variety of pop and roots music of the 20th century. There are few individuals who know more about this field than Bill Malone, so his blurb carries a great deal of weight:
“Until I read this book, I had assumed that the last word had been written on Jimmie Rodgers, the great country blues musician. But, buoyed by Barry Mazor’s keen insights, innovative research, and felicitous writing style, I have become aware of new dimensions of the Singing Brakeman’s influence on American popular music. While Rodgers drew upon a wide array of styles and genres to build his own career, it has been his legacy to shape the sounds and styles of generations of musicians, both in and outside of country music, right on up to our own time.“
My father heard Barry Mazor speak and quickly knew I’d enjoy this work. So I jumped in when my father’s gift arrived, and haven’t been disappointed.
A best seller on the economic meltdown and four people who knew about it beforehand, a thoughtful work on transitions, and two new works on roots music pioneers. Take your choice, and enjoy.
The pace has picked up with my day job, so More to Come…the DJB Blog will go on sabbatical while I focus on other priorities. But before that happens, I want to share with you the work of Chris Steiner, an engineer-turned-journalist who has been writing about society’s relationship to energy.
This 2009 work takes the “inevitable rise” in oil prices over time and imagines how each $2 increase in the price of a gallon of gasoline will change our lives. Perhaps counter-intuitively, he sees the change as largely positive. The rise is inevitable because oil is a finite resource and demand worldwide is escalating at an unsustainable pace. For instance if China – which now has 4 cars for every 1,000 people – rises to only half the ownership rate of the US (750 cars/1000 people), it means an additional 400 million cars – or the equivalent of two United States’ worth of cars – on the road. That fits my definition of unsustainable.
Some of Steiner’s predictions fit our current way of thinking. For instance, when gasoline reaches $6 per gallon, the SUV as we know it is history. We’re seeing that now. Other conclusions were more of a surprise. I simply hadn’t focused on how much oil it takes to run the airline industry, but Steiner has. Just a little more than double the current price of gas will bring an emptying of the skies. When jet fuel reaches $4 per gallon, fuel costs will account for 40% of the cost of doing business for those airlines which remain. Steiner predicts the cost of a ticket will rise to the point where the flight across country, or up and down the eastern seaboard, will become much more prohibitive.
At $12, the suburbs begin decaying as people move to urban centers where density permits the use of mass transportation and car ownership is not required. This is good news for preservationists.
And Steiner predicts our behaviors and priorities will change further at $18 per gallon:
The state and federal government have plans to make the fifty miles of two-lane Route 20 between Freeport, IL, a town of 25,000 and Galena, a town of 3,500 four lanes all the way. The cost: almost $1 billion. That’s $18 million a mile to widen an existing highway between two rather small towns. The same billion could build a high-speed train corridor from Chicago to Milwaukee or from San Diego to Los Angeles….Instead, the momentum of our government’s road building machine may build a road that few people will know about, care about, or use.
Not all changes will be positive and many will require deep sacrifice and strong collective action. But the bottom line for Steiner is that we’ll have to live in a much more sustainable basis…as our grandparents did…or give up our economic security.
$20 Per Gallon is sobering, positive…and a good read.
One of my father’s favorite singers, Lena Horne, passed away yesterday at age 92. My father can’t carry a tune in a bucket and he can play only two songs on the piano – St. Louis Blues and Teddy Wilson’s Body and Soul – but my father had a great collection of 78s from the pre-war era and he knows his jazz singers. TB was so right about Lena Horne.
Lena Horne was a popular and influential jazz vocalist and actress who broke many color barriers over a career that spanned nearly seven decades, and her 1943 recording of “Stormy Weather” is arguably the most recognized song of its era. Horne was not only a multi-Grammy award-winning singer, she was also an award-winning star of stage, screen and television.
She was also an activist during the Civil Rights era, which is where I encountered her after the introduction by my father. The New York Times obituary recalled the difficulties she faced as a black actress during the era of segregation, often performing only musical pieces that could be cut from films for viewing in Southern theatres.
Stormy Weather is a great song, and Lena Horne made it her own. Here’s the full version from the 1943 film, remastered in 2002.
When in Oklahoma City last week, I made the time to visit the national memorial dedicated to the memory of those killed, wounded, or changed forever by the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995.
It was a powerful experience that would be moving at any time. In these days of bombing attempts in Times Square and daily cable television rants against government, the power of remembrance seemed all the more important. This place – forever altered in horrific ways 15 years ago by the act of an individual angry at the federal government’s actions at Waco and Ruby Ridge – is a somber counterpoint to the hysteria that counts as civic discourse in parts of America today.
One enters the outdoor symbolic memorial through a gate marked 9:01 – the minute before the bombing – to represent the innocence of the city. At the other end of a reflecting pool, the west gate is marked 9:03, after everything changed. The best known feature of the memorial is the field of empty chairs, 168 in all, each to symbolize a life lost. The smaller chairs especially tear at the heart, representing the 19 children or babies killed.
These are real people whose lives were cut short because of irrational hatred and violence. In today’s culture, we need this place to remember.
I posted a video earlier this morning of Muriel Anderson playing harp guitar. When the video ended, it did the normal YouTube thing and gave me an offering of related videos to view.
I clicked on Day Tripper — one of my favorite Beatles tune — and within about 20 seconds I was mesmerized.
Here’s Muriel Anderson, playing this wonderful and complex pop tune while explaining the thought process that went into the arrangement. She’s copying McCartney’s bass line (never an easy thing to do even when you aren’t talking) but then she has the melody going, and then she switches to play in B, and then…well, see for yourself.
After writing the post last evening on the harp guitar article in the Spring 2010 issue of The Fretboard Journal, I kept looking around on YouTube for other players mentioned in the article…and I came across this wonderful video of Muriel Anderson that I had to share.
Anderson’s harp guitar is a classical-style model which has a beautiful sound. I hope you’re able to listen to these videos on a computer that has a good bass speaker, because the sound of those ringing bass strings turns a beautiful tune into a magical tune.
(As an aside, check out all those beautiful harp guitars on the stage behind Muriel at the opening of the video. Guitar eye candy indeed!)
Several weeks ago the Spring 2010 issue of The Fretboard Journal showed up in my mailbox. I was traveling a great deal at the time, so I popped in it my briefcase and caught up on all the news from the world of beautiful instruments in airplanes and hotel rooms.
Ricky Skaggs, the young acoustic band Bearfoot (which I caught at last year’s Merlefest), and Bedford County, Virginia luthier James Jones are all featured in this issue. But my eye was immediately taken to an article on harp guitars.
I had never seen a harp guitar until I attended the Shenandoah Valley’s Oak Grove Music Festival one year and Stephen Bennett pulled out the strangest instrument imaginable. But then he began playing the most beautiful music, and I was transfixed. I’ve since met Stephen through my friends the Pearsons and Harringtons, and I’m always amazed at how someone can play such lovely music on such an awkward looking guitar.
Stephen Bennett and Gregg Miner (whose guitar photo from harpguitars.net leads off this post) are featured through the article.
Harp guitarists approach their instruments with what can only be characterized as religious zeal. Thus, it’s fitting that if you want to learn about the harp guitar, you’ve got to make a pilgrimage to see the “pope.” The pope is Gregg Miner, a musician and collector at the center of the harp-guitar universe.
Miner is a musician and incredible collector, and I encourage a visit to his harp guitars web site to learn about this mysterious world. However, I can talk all I want about harp guitars, but the best way to understand the allure of these instruments is to let you hear one. Fortunately, YouTube has several terrific videos of Stephen Bennett working his magic, and the Oregon clip below includes the bonus of a quick tuning lesson at the beginning.
Treat yourself. Give a listen to Bennett on YouTube and find out when he’s next playing at a venue near you.
I usually love to listen to baseball on the radio.
