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42

Posted in Current Events, Favorite Things, Influences, Neat Stuff, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on April 15, 2013| 3 Comments »

jackie-robinson-1956_April 15 means a couple of things to some people.  Of course, there is the unpleasant connotation of it as being Tax Day, the due date for income tax filing here in the USA.  But for the baseball fan, it is a date that marks the first day a black player took the field as a major leaguer, when a special player ran out to play first base for the Brooklyn Dodgers back in 1947.   This young black man was athletically gifted, smart and tough-minded.

That player was of course Jackie Robinson.

Major League Baseball now honors him on this day every year, Jackie Robinson Day, with every player on every team putting aside their own uniform numbers to wear his number 42, which is now retired throughout baseball. Currently, only Mariano Rivera wears the number 42 on his back  and after he retires at the end of this season, no player will ever wear the 42 on their back again outside of this day each year.

Retiring a number is a sacred thing in baseball.  A player’s number has an almost mystical connection with the fans.  Growing up, everyone knew that Babe Ruth was 3,  Lou Gehrig 4, Mickey Mantle 7, Willie Mays 24, Hank Aaron 44 and on an on.  Whenever I see the number 45 all I see is my hero Bob Gibson on the mound. And everyone , even Mariano Rivera fans like myself, knows that the 42 belongs to Jackie Robinson.

There is also a new movie out that bears that number and it tells the story of Robinson’s initial turbulent year with the Dodgers.  I haven’t seen it so I can’t really comment other than to say that it is a story that every child should know.  It is a remarkable story of self restraint and strength in the face of institutionalized hatred, one that made possible the  broader changes that took place in our country in the civil rights movement in the decades after Robinson’s first day on that field in 1947.

From what I have read, the biggest complaint is that the movie doesn’t really give a full accounting of Robinson’s life. Jackie was a legendary collegiate athlete at UCLA, lettering in four sports– football, basketball, track and baseball.  He was the NCAA champion in the Long Jump and could have easily played professional football.  Of course, that was impossible because  the NFL was segregated at that time as well.

Nor does it detail his military career which is of interest mainly for Robinson being court martialed for refusing to sit in the back of an Army bus at Ft. Hood, Texas.   He was eventually acquitted of all charges by an all-white panel of officers  but it was an incident that foretold of his strength and willingness to enter the fight in taking on the segregated major leagues.

Nor does it address the health problems that led to his early death.  He suffered from diabetes and was nearly blind when he had a heart attack that ended his life at the age of 53.  It was much too early for this remarkable man’s story to end.

As I said, it’s a story that every child should know and celebrate.

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Geometry of the Heart

Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things, Folk Art, Influences, tagged , , , , , , on April 4, 2013| 11 Comments »

GC Myers- Geometry of the HeartIt was Opening Day for Major League Baseball the other day, which is always  a red letter day for me.  It’s sort of like 2013 has officially began, that my day to day life now has something with which to synchronize, something to fall in rhythm with.  So, even though I have been feeling under the weather for several days,  I was able to complete a new piece, one that had been banging around in my head for a long time.  It incorporated the perfect geometry of the baseball diamond nestled among a tightly clustered neighborhood of Red Roofs.  It’s an odd piece, one that feels both typical and atypical at once.  That’s a quality that I like.

ralph_fasanella_sandlot_baseball_1373_356I have been wanting to incorporate the baseball diamond into one of my landscapes, perhaps influenced by some of the folk art paintings that did it so well.  I have featured some of these here, such as Malcah Zeldis’ Homage to Hank Greenberg, shown at the bottom of this page,  or Ralph Fasanella’s Sandlot Baseball,  shown here on the left.  These are paintings I like very much as much for the baseball aspect as for the wonderful folk art manner in which they are painted.  There is something in the sight of a diamond that has a hypnotic effect on me, something I hoped to capture in a painting.

I always remember the feeling when I was a kid and we went to Shea Stadium to see the Mets play, especially for night games.  You would head out from the dim light of the concourse and emerge into the brightness of the field lights.  The green of the field was so vibrant, the brownish red of the infield dirt so rich.  There was something perfect in looking down on that diamond, a design that made so much sense to a child’s mind.  A beautiful geometry, one that equalizes weaknesses and strengths.  The length of the basepaths, for example, are such that  on a hard hit  ball to the infield a fast runner can be easily thrown out at first but a slower runner can often beat out a soft groundball.

Here, a small man could easily conquer a much larger man from a distance of 60′ 6 “, the distance from homeplate to the pitching rubber.   Skill overcomes pure strength, size and athleticism.  If you ever saw Michael Jordan flailing helplessly at minor league curveballs, you’ll know what I mean.

I could write a lot more here.  And I probably should.  But I simply want to show this new piece, a 20″ by 24″ that I’m calling Geometry of the Heart.  Here, the ball park, a Little League sort of field, represents the heart of the neighborhood, the openness of the field stands in direct contrast with the cramped houses.  This is a painting that I have really enjoyed painting, one that is probably more for myself than for anyone else but one that I needed to paint.

malcah-zeldis-homage-to-hank-greenberg

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Batter Up!

Posted in Favorite Things, tagged , , , , on February 17, 2012| 4 Comments »

Oh, it’s that time of the year once more.  Pitchers and catchers reporting to warm southern sites.  The first tentative soft toss of the ball and the swing of the bat.  Spring training is starting and for diehard baseball fans  it is the true beginning of the year, a time when the disappointments of last year are wiped from the slate and all that remains is the giddy hope that your team will experience that special year this year, topping it all off with a World Series crown.  It is, for me,  the best and most hopeful time of the year.

The photo I’m showing here may seem at first glance to have little to do with baseball but it is from a very important goodwill  tour of Japan that American players took in 1934.  Lasting a full month, it featured some of the best players of the day but by far, the biggest draw was the Sultan of Swat, Babe Ruth.  The crowds were massive wherever he appeared, with his every movement drawing oohs and aahs from the adoring Japanese fans.  This photo is from a parade from the Ginza in Tokyo which drew over 500,000 fans.  Most baseball historians mark this tour as the beginning of the baseball mania which still remains in Japan today.

I think it’s events like this that make me such a baseball junkie.  I mean, there’s  so much than just the game, which itself  has a Zen-like perfection in its geometry and a unique skillset  that allows players of any size to excell.  I mean, in what other sport can a 150 pound man utterly dominate a player that is a foot taller and  a hundred pounds heavier?  But it’s the  interweaving of the game with our history and our day-to-day lives through the past 150 years or so that also makes it different than other sports.  It has an ingrained tradition that  lives with us, existing in the same rhythm of our lives.  It is mythic with players like the Bambino who were larger than life and whose appeal made entire nations want to emulate him.  It inspires poetry and music.  It is, like those first days of spring training, all about hope and possibility.

It makes me want to smell the fresh cut grass of a ballpark.

Babe Ruth at the Meiji Shrine 1934

For more info on the 1934 tour of Japan, there is a book titled Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and Assassination during the 1934 Tour of Japan from author Robert K. Fitts.  It documents all the aspects of this famed tour including what might be the first mission in espionage from Moe Berg, the Princeton educaated Detroit Tiger catcher who was an OSS (forerunner of the CIA) operative during WW II.  See? History!  There are excerpts from this book here.

Batter up!

 

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Batter Up!

Posted in Favorite Things, Video, tagged , on April 2, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Groucho, Chico and Harpo with Lou Gehrig

Baseball season is finally here! 

I consider it one of the best times of the year, when my routine starts to include reading boxscores and checking the standings.  There is nothing like the rhythm of baseball for me and the way it weaves together with the daily lives of people who follow the game.
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One of the most vivid visual images of my youth are coming up the steps of Shea Stadium at night and suddenly having the bright green grass of  the diamond emerge before you.  Everything was rich and deeply colored.  The greens were dark, the dirt of the infield a warm clay red and the whites of the lines shining like lasers.  It felt like that moment in The Wizard of Oz where Dorothy opens the door and everything changes from a bland, colorless scene to one filled with powerful, vibrant colors.   I still get that same stir of  familiar excitement when I see scenes of a ballpark at night, ablaze in color.
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So my marathon season begins and, as a fan, I am filled with optimism because my team has won its first game.  Everything is rosy until that inevitable first loss which tastes bitter going down.  Losing and failure, a subject I’ve discussed this week, is all part of the game and it’s how a team or player responds to failure that determines the direction of a season.  That is where the drama lays in baseball.  Can’t wait for the game today!
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Here’s one of my favorite things, one that I showed here two years ago.  It’s Harpo Marx’s wonderful rendition,  from his appearance on I Love Lucy, of Take Me Out to the  Ballpark, one that strikes that ethereal chord I feel for the game.  Have a great Saturday!  Batter up!

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Play Ball

Posted in Early Paintings, Favorite Things, Video, tagged , on October 6, 2010| 7 Comments »

I woke up early this morning, even by my standards, and the first thing in my mind as I laid there in the dark was the thought that there was baseball today.  The first day of the baseball playoffs.  Baseball’s always been a link to childhood for me (and many, many others) but this morning there was the reawakened feelings of childish anticipation on Christmas morning at the prospect of watching baseball in the studio. 

My appreciation of baseball has regrown over the years back to the thrill it provided as a kid.  I had lost interest in it in the 1980’s as I was busy trying to make a living and find my own niche in the world.  But as I began to find who and what I was, I rediscovered the game.  Oh, there’s a lot to be cynical about in the game– ludicrous salaries that make greedy corporate types look like pikers, performance enhancing drugs and such.  Things that have driven away some longtime fans such as my father. 

 But, for me, I look past those  trappings and see only the game and its pace and geometry.  Nuance and history.  The way it raises emotion with a game both simple and complex.  A game where a player is not judged by sheer size or strength or pure physical ability but by skill level and intangibles such as grittiness, hustle and gamesmanship.  A game where losing and failing are built into the game and those who aren’t afraid to fail succeed.  A game that is celebrated with poetry and romance.

So, today is a day for baseball.  A day of childish wonder.  A day of joy here in Mudville.

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The image at the top is a little experiment from when I was first starting to paint.  I call it Casey at the Bat.  It’s hard to explain what I was going for and how close I came to reaching it with this little piece.  I know it doesn’t look like much but it is pretty much what I wanted from it.

In honor of the first day of the playoffs, here’s a 1908 Edison recording of Take Me Out to the Ballgame. 

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Spring Training!

Posted in Favorite Things, tagged on March 4, 2010| Leave a Comment »

As I worked in the studio yesterday, familiar sounds filled the space for the first time this year.

The slap of a ball on the leather of a glove.  The crack of the bat.  The muffled bellow of a called strike from the umpire.  The crowd roaring when a ball clears the outfield wall.  The familiar voices of the longtime announcers describing a pitch or giving a player’s stats as he strolls to the plate.

Baseball’s back.  Spring training is underway once more.

I feel as though my year is officially started and that I am once again engaged with the continuum of time.  Baseball is a symbol of the cyclical nature of time and the fallibility of man for me and feels almost ingrained.   The biggest stars, names that will resonate with fans for generations, fail on a regular basis, much more often than they succeed as their season goes on an almost daily basis through three seasons of the year.  The game is about patience and perseverance, continually slogging ahead day after day.  Putting aside setbacks and looking at each new day and the next game as a new start.  Grinding it out.

Doesn’t sound too appealing when put that way but the beauty comes from the moments of triumph that sprout during this long march through the year,  bursts of brilliance and sudden victory that overshadow the failures that came before.

Much like life. 

So again, pitchers throw, catchers catch and hitters swing .  Fielders kick the dirt of the infield and track flyballs across the lush green carpets of the outfield and once again, I feel as though I am back in the flow and rhythm of my year.  Play ball!

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Baseball and Humility

Posted in Current Events, Favorite Things, Influences, tagged , , , on October 18, 2009| 4 Comments »

Walk-Off WinI’m up surprisingly early this morning, after watching about a 5 1/2 hour Yankees/Angels playoff game last night, one that ended well after 1 AM.

It was a classic with everything that a fan could want.  Great performances.  Drama.  Heroics.  Sheer elation.

And humility.

Yeah, that’s right.  Humility.  I’m not talking about the “Aw, shucks, it weren’t nothing, Ma’am …”  kind of humility.  I’m talking about the built in humility of the game.  This a game where you will fail nearly every game in a game that is played nearly every day, often in crucial moments.  If you only fail as a hitter 70% of the time you could very well end up in Cooperstown, in the Hall of Fame.  As a fielder, there will inevitably be moments where, even if you are the best,  you will fail, making an error.  As a pitcher,  you are an ace if you only give up 3 or 4 runs a game.

Yet with all this failure, there is still the possibility of victory.  Take for instance, the night Derek Jeter had last night.  The Yankee captain started the scoring early with a home run.

Top of the world, ma, to quote Jimmy Cagney.

But as the game progressed he struck out a couple of times, hit into a costly double-play  and made an error in the field that could have been disastrous.  Yet, through all of this failure, his team emerged victorious.  That’s what I like about baseball.  It’s not about physical dominance but is most often about consistency and persistence, slogging forward despite the failures.  Shrugging them off and looking forward to the next at-bat, not as a chance to again fail, but as an opportunity to succeed.

There’s a life lesson for us all in there somewhere.  The most successful players in baseball have the ability to sweep away the memory of the last failure and move on to the next opportunity.  They try to learn from their failures.  Adjust.  And dare to fail again.  Something we should all remember.

That’s the humility in baseball.

Go, Yanks…

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The Golden Age

Posted in Biographical, Early Paintings, Favorite Things, Influences, Neat Stuff, tagged , , , , , , , on April 9, 2009| 2 Comments »

Babe RuthI recently picked up a book titled Baseball’s Golden Age: The Photographs of Charles Conlon.  It is, as it says, a book of photos of baseball players from the first part of the 20th century.  The photos are all black and white and give the players a grim, rough edge.  Not that they needed the help.

From the time I was a kid I was always interested in baseball from the turn of the century.  I read all sorts of books on my heroes and we had an old souvenir-like program from the 40’s that had many of these same photos with short stories and stats of many of these players.  I spent hours and hours looking at these faces and names until they took on a talisman-like quality in my mind.  Guys like Nap LaJoie, Rabbit Maranville, Wee Willie  Keeler, Cy Young and on and on.  In reality, many of these guys probably wouldn’t shine in today’s game but in my mind they were magic.Ty Cobb

Of course, there was a hierarchy.  Shown above, the Bambino, Babe Ruth, was the king.  An actual Sultan of Swat accompanied by his prince, the steady Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig.  Then there was the nasty tempered Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach, shown here in one of the most famous of baseball photos of its time.  Renowned for sharpening his spikes and using them on waiting fielders as he stole numerous bases, Cobb was always bitter over Ruth’s dominance of the spotlight.

These players always really stuck out in my mind because of the images and stories I encountered as a kid.  They were brawny and raw looking.  They drank hard.  They fought.  They had a hardened mythic look in their gray wool uniforms.  They didn’t look like the players of my youth.  In the 70’s baseball started to be played in awful multi-purpose stadiums with hard artificial turf surfaces, vast cold edifices that sapped all of the organic quality from the game.  The uniforms were evolving as well.  The 70’s brought these stretchy polyester space suits that only added to the artificial feel of the stadiums.  I always think of Willie Stargell, a large first baseman for the Pirates with a big personality who would’ve fit in well with my old-timers) in this god-awful form-fitting spacesuit.  He looked ridiculous.

Walter Johnson The Big TrainIt was easy at that time to drift away from the game that had provided so much magic when I was young.  I stayed away for almost twenty years, barely checking the races or stats.  I have a huge hole in my knowledge of the game from the 80’s and early 90’s.  The return of smaller stadiums built to fit baseball saw a rebirth but it was the Yankees that brought me back.  I had grown up despising the Yanks ( the voice of their announcer Phil Rizzuto was like fingernails on a chalkboard to me) but this team in the 90’s was a throwback.  They had grit.  They fought. They made plays that became mythic.  They made me feel like I was 9 years old again, reading the wonderful hyperbole of the old sportswriters as they made mighty pronouncements about the exploits of the Bambino.  Baseball was magic again.

So leafing through this book rekindled many memories.  With that I leave you with a short piece of film that simply shows the great Big Train,  Walter Johnson, throwing. I saw a part of this on Ken Burns’ wonderful documentary series on the game and was mesmerized by his extraordinarily long arms and the whipping action his arms.  There is a kind of poetic beauty in the motion.

Maybe that’s the poetry of baseball that people talk of…

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Take Me Out to the Ballpark

Posted in Biographical, Favorite Things, Personal Mythology, tagged , , , on February 14, 2009| 4 Comments »

Bob GibsonIt’s that time of the year.

Catchers and pitchers are reporting to spring training.  Baseball is in the air.

Baseball has always held a special place for me.  Oh, I was no more than an average player– decent bat, lousy arm and a so-so glove– but there was pure magic in seeing the heroes of my youth and hearing the stories of the early legends of the game.

I remember my grandmother telling me of going to NY in 1921 on their honeymoon to see Babe Ruth play.  Ruth hit a double and a triple as she recalled.

I remember sitting with my grandfather, the mythological Shank ,who used to call me  “The Rat,” and watching the  World Series in the afternoons after I had my tonsils out in 1968.  The St. Louis Cardinals were playing the Detroit Tigers and I was introduced to one of the heroes of my youth, Bob Gibson.

Gibby was it for me.  The toughest guy out there, one whose competitive fire is still legendary.   So dominating as a pitcher that baseball changed the mound height because they felt the hitters needed help since he was practically unhittable.  I read his early autobiography, From Ghetto to Glory, numerous times and that made him an even bigger hero to me.  He was eloquent and college-educated, a rarity for ballplayers of that era, and his story was compelling.  He remains a hero.

Baseball was always played at our house.  My dad was a pretty fair pitcher.  He would play catch with me and my friends and would break out his knuckleball.  It was uncatchable, having a spectacular drop that would appear to be entering your glove only to end up hitting you in the stomach.  I was never able to master the pitch but still appreciate a well thrown knuckler.

Other times, I would pitch to him and he would hit flies to my brother in the outfield.  Periodically, he would hit hard liners back at me.  They would bang off me or make me dive out of the way and he would cackle.  I would then try to drill him with the next pitch, which would make him laugh even more because he had gotten my goat.  I would calm myself and wait until he would pitch to me, waiting for the perfect pitch when I could send one back at him, making him duck or dive.

Over the years baseball has become my calendar for the passing of the year and is a comforting friend on the days when the world seems ready to implode.  I am still captive to the numbers and legends of baseball, one of those romantics who see poetry in a game based in tradition.

To that end, here is a wonderful version of Take Me Out to the Ballpark from Harpo Marx, played on I Love Lucy. It is delicate and graceful.  It’s the essence of the memory of baseball for me…

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