Columns
Love is in bloom at the LA Books Festival
We keep hearing, in this age of microscopic attention spans and digital addiction, that the printed word is doomed. Someone forgot to tell the 130,000 people who thronged the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on the UCLA campus April 24-25.
What I saw at the festival was love in bloom. In Southern California weather — sunny, mid-70s, little humidity, a caressing breeze carrying the scent of blossoming flowers — beaming book lovers crowded around white caravan tents on the grounds. They listened to music, attended panel discussions and stood in line to meet their favorite authors and get their books autographed.
Publisher and writer Dave Eggers set the tone for the weekend’s happiness with a distinctly contrarian analysis of the future of the printed word. “It’s the best time in the history of the printed word to be a publisher or a writer,” he said. “People want to declare the death of the printed word. It’s always our tendency to assume something is dying. It’s a fun thing to do, but it doesn’t always make sense.”
That may be wishful thinking. But he may be right.
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In 1884, only real men dared play the game
In the archives of the Armed Forces Institutes of Pathology, in Washington, is a remarkable set of 1889 images labeled, “Hands of an ex-professional baseball player.” The photographs of this man’s broken, mangled, disjointed and deformed fingers are powerful testimony to the brutality of major-league baseball as it was once played: barehanded.
They are my favorite pictures in my new book, “Fifty-nine in ’84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had” (Smithsonian/HarperCollins), because they speak eloquently of a time and place, post-Civil War America, where winning was a serious matter, and people had to be tough and resourceful to survive. That included major-league ballplayers.
None was tougher than Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn, who in 1884 pitched for the Providence Grays of the National League, then baseball’s premier circuit.
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When R.I. was the epicenter of baseball
It’s around noon, on a gloriously warm, sunny, late-winter day that sings of the coming baseball season. I am standing on the quiet corner of Messer and Willow streets, in Providence’s West End, while filthy plastic bags and scraps of paper scurry across the intersection in a stiff March breeze.
The occasional customer strolls in and out of an orange-coated grocery on the first floor of a triple-decker, casting puzzled glances at the man biding his time in the black sunglasses and dark business suit. This neighborhood has its share of historic homes, aluminum siding and street gangs.
Wincing at the old ball game
YOU CAN READ all you want about major-league baseball in the early days. But you get more of a sense of it standing in the outfield at McCoy Stadium on a blistering hot Sunday morning listening to the zip and smack of a hard baseball slapping the bare hands of Gil Faria during his warm-up tosses.
“You get used to it,” he says with a smile.
Will we ever know who really invented baseball?
WHEN I WAS A KID, many Americans still thought Abner Doubleday had invented baseball on a meadow in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 1839. (That’s why the Baseball Hall of Fame is located there, alongside “Doubleday Field.”)
Doubleday was a Union general who fired the first shot in defense of Fort Sumter, which makes him something of an American hero. But the whole idea that he invented baseball is preposterous. His many letters make no reference to such a role. Nor does his obit in The New York Times. He was attending West Point at the time he was supposedly in Cooperstown, handing down the sacred rules.
The high privilege of knowing Fred
WHEN I WAS WRITING a book about Old Hoss Radbourn — the pitcher who won an astonishing 59 games in a single season, more than anyone in the history of major-league baseball — I knew there was one man I had to see.
Frederick Ivor-Campbell was probably the world’s foremost expert on Radbourn, who pitched for the Providence Grays of the National League in the 1880s. Mr. Ivor-Campbell, a leading figure in the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), had written about him (elegantly) for American Heritage magazine and other publications. And he lived in Bristol.
The beauty of the two-hour baseball game
THE OTHER NIGHT, the dazzling Jacoby Ellsbury made two astounding catches, and the Red Sox fought back a bid by the Tampa Bay Rays to steal away their victory in that lifeless dome in St. Petersburg, Fla.
But my favorite moment may have been when the home-plate umpire came out to scold reliever Jonathan Papelbon to hurry it up. Umpires are supposed to do that, but they rarely do.
