• Tim Wakefield took a no-hitter into the 8th inning tonight.  This wouldn’t matter much to me — I tend to think no-hitters, while cool, are pretty flukey — but Wakes is 42 years old.  Think about that for a second.  I did, and it put me in mind of one of my favorite books from last year, The Brothers K, by David James Duncan.  The Brothers K is about the Chance family, and its patriarch, who makes a dramatic baseball comeback late in life.  I know, I know, it sounds like a cornball book, but it’s so good, even if you’re not a baseball fan.

• The tenor saxophone on The Stooges’ “Fun House.”  I’d embed the song here, but it isn’t available on Lala yet.  Just go buy the CD and listen to it.  It’s, dare I say, raunchy.

• My friend Kiki Petrosino’s post at The Millions.  I can’t do it justice, so, here:  Sometimes, when I am writing poetry, I find myself wishing for the fluorescent orange belt I once possessed in my youth, when I was a “safety” at the crosswalk, ushering the smallest kids past the hot front grills of cars and school buses. I want other people to notice me and know that I’m a poet. Frank O’Hara says: “if/I ever get to be a construction worker/I’d like to have a silver hat please.” Totally!” Kiki has written a book of poems about Robert Redford called Fort Red Border.  She’s brilliant and so is this post.  Go read it.

• The weather today.  “Clear, cool and windy” is an underrated type of weather.

• The first 120 pages of Cryptonomicon, by Neal Stephenson.  I’m a tenth of the way through this book (it’s a bahoemith) but I’m already at that point where I can’t wait to find time to read it.  How can you not love paragraphs like this:  Like every other creature on the face of the earth, Godfrey was, by birthright, a stepndous badass, albeit in the somewhat narrow technical sense that he could trace his ancestry back up a long line of slightly less highly evolved stupendous badasses to that first self-replicating gizmo–which, given the number and variety of its descendants, might justifiably be described as the most stupendous badass of all time.  Everyone and everything that wasn’t a stupendous badass was dead.

Photo Courtesy of Library of Congress Flickr Stream

Is it a book of statistical analysis?  No, I would argue it isn’t.  There are arguments that involve statistics in it, but the book is so much more than this.  Take, for example, this essay about Ty Cobb, baseball’s original unredeemed hero.  It is about a photograph taken of Cobb and Christy Mathewson:

In photographs [make it a point to notice] Ty Cobb is often shown hiding one hand or both, twisting an arm behind his back or burying it in an article of excess clothing.  One photograph of him with which I am particularly taken shows him posing with Christy Mathewson in the dugout before the third game of the 1911 World Series.  Mathewson, as always, looks poised and confident, staring out toward right field.  Cobb is peeking out the corner of his eye at some unseen distraction — another photographer, probably — but what makes the photograph remarkable is that, to begin with, Cobb is wearing a suit that doesn’t look as if it could possibly have fit any of his relatives.  Cobb was a big man (he is usually listed at 6’2,” 180) yet his suit has got to be four sizes too large for him — it is hard to believe that a reputable haberdasher would have let him leave the store with it.  He is holding what looks like an expensive overcoat, and he appears to be dragging it on the ground.  His hat is jaunty and his smile is decidedly nervous.  He looks frankly a little bit crazy.

There was such a contradiction in that dugout.  Cobb was then a five-time American League batting champion, with more or less seven seasons under his belt–and yet he was also a twenty-four-year-old hick from Nowhere, Georgia, a little in awe of Matty, of the photographers, of the crowd.  He had no weapons, at that moment, to defend himself against his inadequacies–no spikes, no bat, no glove.  He was so crude that he must have felt that whenever they took those things from him, his shortcomings glowed like hot iron.  And whenever he saw them glowing, he got angry.  You can see it in his face, I think, that if he could just put on a uniform and go out on the field it would be such a relief to him, out where manners and taste and style were all defined by bases gained and bases lost.  And everyone else, for a change, would have to apologize to him.

This is, I think, one of the great snippets of prose ever written about the game.  James is one of baseball’s fairest writers, acknowledging Cobb’s racism, but also noting  that “Ty Cobb didn’t invent racism, someone taught it to him.”  When he analyzes the game, he tries to do so without prejudice.  You could do a lot worse today than to sit down with some of his writing and listen to a ballgame on the radio or watch it on TV or, like me, follow along on the internet.

Happy spring, everyone.  Play ball.