"Let's go to the ball game"

A quaint article in which a venerable sports editor becomes the barker for the so called national pastime

PAUL GALLICO

■ With one exception, p.ractically every sport in America has at one time or another, or consistently, been blessed with the patronage of what is known as Society. Prize fighters are welcomed into the homes of the ne plus ultra. Park Avenue and Sutton Place are just awakening to the seduction in the moan of a tortured wrestler. The scions of some of our best families become publicly inebriated in trackside stalls at the bicycle races. Football, hockey, golf and tennis play to the snootier citizens, and running the ponies is their own private sport. The exception is strangely enough, the oldest and the most American sport—baseball.

If I were to try to sell you the game, I Avould lure you with a picture of soft summer afternoons spent sitting in the sun, neighborly, informal, your coat on or off as you desired, your eyes pleased by the movements of the white and gray clad figures against their background of green, the diverting patterns they made, the sudden, exciting bursts of motion, and the soothing and lovely arcs painted by the white, streaking ball on its periodic trips from the end of the batsman's bludgeon into the blue sky, where it hangs for a moment, a lazy balloon, and then descends gracefully into the black maw of the fielder's mitt.

Your ears now would be lulled with the distant rumble of the surrounding city, the passing subway and elevated trains, the subdued turmoil of the spectators, and the faroff, metallic voices of the players, the plunk of the ball into the hollow of the catcher's mitt. Your ears again would be pricked to attention and intrigued by electric cries that shoot out in long fingers of sound, streamers of lone voices from the hubbub—"0 you bum! Strike out and sit down! Three out!" "What are you looking at? Throw it!" "Bring him home, Johnny, bring him home!" "Wassamatter, 'fraid you'll get your pants dirty?" "Double him, double him!" Cabalistic cries, the meaning of which you need not understand to enjoy.

■ The sounds rattle about the stone and iron caverns of the stands, and sometimes the

peppery coaches are at your ear with their— "'right now, Joey, ol' boy, ol' boy, work on him boy, Joey boy, look 'em all over, Joey boy, he's all yours, boy, take your time, boy, all right, Joey boy, WHOA, a beauty, right down the alley, Joey boy, that's one for you ol' boy, he's all yours." And so on, ad infinitum, until the current of speech is broken by a new shock—the sharp, cracking sound of the hit ball and the accompanying cries of the spectators, cries that die away and melt indistinguishably into the rapid clatter of applause that terminates each. play. ...

Your gullet would be intrigued, astonished, excited and pleased by amazing viands and confections, al fresco tidbits that never manage to reach you elsewhere. The pangs. of appetite created by mid-afternoon in the outdoors are assailed by unforgettable whiffs of red, limber frankfurters, tumbling, bubbling, seething hysterically in huge white enamel cauldrons. What culinary genius ever decreed that their bed should be a soft, sweet roll, their finishing touch a dash of bitter mustard? If you have missed the ecstasy of that first bite, through roll, through mustard, through roll again, not to have tasted that amazing ineffable blending of flavors while far afield a running figure suddenly bursts into a puff of dust along the basepath, hooking the bag with an expert leg, then, my friends, you have not lived.

Where can you experience the soppy crispness, a paradox, but the truth, of an ice-cream cone delivered by a white coated servitor, as the teams between innings interchange positions and the stands are a-buzz during the lull in play? An ice-cream cone in July, to have, to play with, to hold, to lick, to nuzzle, to thrust the cold confection deep into the cone with the tongue, to bite with delicate teeth into the crisp side of the waffle, to nurse the last chilled morsel deep into the funnel, to eat it, to wipe one's fingers on one's kerchief and look anxiously around for another. Oh let's go to the ball game, the ball game, the ball game, tya-di-da-da-da-da-da!

■ Hot goobers in a bag with a red elephant drawn on it, crispy, salty potato chips in glazed paper—"Ginger ale, white rock, soda—lemon and lime! Ice cold soda here. Peanuts, popcorn, ice-cream cones. Red hot franks here, get 'em while they're hot. . .

Nothing to do, no place to go, warm, comfortable, satisfied, and at one's feet the play unrolls, an unwritten and unrehearsed drama of athletic conflict—your side the hero, their side the villain. Attack, defense, guile, deceit, strength and speed, excitement and thrill, triumph and the happy ending, defeat and departure with the melancholy speculations similarly aroused by Turgeniev and Gogol. Wrong winning over right. Life is sometimes like that. . . .

Life very often presents you with the same ludicrous, shabby treatment that falls to the lot of the batsman who marches to the plate, his chest swelling with confidence, swinging three bludgeons, to make the one lighter upon discarding two. He wears his ego on his sleeve, he adjusts his cap, he bangs the rubber plate, he moistens his hands, he rubs them in the dirt, he draws a line in the dust with the handle of his weapon, he digs his spikes into the ground, he faces the pitcher. He then fans the air violently three times and sits down. Magnificent pretensions, heroic preparations, miserable failure. Public failure. Public shame. In the grandstand, safe, anonymous, hidden, an individual purses his lips, places his tongue between his teeth and violently emits his breath. The ensuing sound is characteristic of our public sport gatherings, vulgar, derisive, and deeply critical Indeed, it is criticism. The Spirit of Criticism. The deathless Bronx form of criticism. The Berry. We get it too. Our pretensions are as quickly evaporated in empty gestures at the air. The Berry is passed, politely, or kindly, or elaborately dressed up like a Ziegfeld girl representing the spirit of something or other; it is the Berry none the less. It does us good to see it publicly presented to a fellow unfortunate. For the admission fee of one dollar and ten cents it is value received.

■ Three strikes and you're out. Poor clowns waving their stuffed bladders at the whizzing ball. See how heroically the pitcher stands upon the mound. Everything is under control. The batsmen are his marionettes. They move and swing and jerk convulsively to his bidding. A noble figure. He rubs the ball into his glove. He hitches up his pants, he glances at first base. He glances at third base. He glances at the blonde in the upper stand who is sitting with her legs crossed. He looks at the catcher and deigns to receive his signal. No, not that one. No, not that one either. Ah yes, that one. He holds the game in the hollow of his hand. One hundred thousand eyes are upon him. How those batters have been churning the midsummer air. Another strike and the side is out. The side is as good as out. He winds. He winds again. Every move a picture. Now he is a tightly coiled spring. Now he releases himself. The ball flashes from his hand. CRACK! Oh! Oh!

Life is like that, too. Poor, cocky pitcher. He stands now disconsolately with his hands on his hips, suddenly a lonely and solitary figure. He follows the flight of the ball disconsolately. It is in the blue, rushing cometwise across the sky. Far afield legs are twinkling as a figure scampers to meet it. But something inside him tells him that the Worst Has Happened. The fielder presses his back up against the farthest fence and waves a futile leather flipper at the pellet as it sails gaily over his head and into the crowd. Now the batter is trotting triumphantly around the bases and in his ears, ears that two innings ago were reddened and made to feel strangely long and furry, rings wild acclaim. The lips that were pursed and tight for the awarding of the Berry are now parted wide—for the delivery of a resounding "Attaboy!" The draymer of life? My dears, you must come up to the ball game.

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You would have to go to the Ballet Russe to find anything as poetically graceful as the delivery of the lefthanded pitcher Herbert Pennock of the Yankees, or George Earnshaw of the Philadelphia Americans. And you must go into the realm of practical miracles to find any such performance as that of Babe Ruth catching a fly ball in right field on a dead run, and with a continuation of the same motion, throwing a runner out at home plate with such incredible accuracy that the catcher who takes up his position at the plate with his glove outstretched, never moves his feet out of his spike-holes, and has merely to pluck the ball out of his mitt and tag the on-going runner.

You can go first-nighting for a decade before you will approach anything as tense, as dramatic and as continued in suspense as a pitching and fielding battle, in which every attempt to hit safely or to reach a base is defeated, inning after inning, suspense that is further heightened by the inevitability of a sudden ending, a break, a home run, an error, the faltering of the pit'cher, the disorganization of the perfect machine. The players in the field arc mere servants to the rhythmic passage of the ball from corner to corner of the square, whipping it in straight lines or flat arcs from one to the other with perfect, easy motion, . interrupting its whistling flight from the end of the bat with amazing captures, taming and controlling it once more to their own desires. The eye never tires of the pleasing patterns they cut with it.

The greatest professional sport of all began strictly as an amateur pastime. One of the olio-chromatic reproductions of the celebrated Messrs. Currier and Ives represents the solemnization of such a championship by two well-whiskered teams in the happy land of Hoboken about the year 1846, and is accurate only in that it fails to show the kegs of Munchener, Pilsener and Kulmbacher which no doubt decorated the terrain beneath the shade of some leafy, cooling tree.

It is not quite as old as the family of John Jacob Astor, but the kids around New York were playing a game with a ball and a bat called "One Old Cat" about the time the first Cornelius Vanderbilt was collecting four bit pieces from customers for riding them on his steam ferry between New York and New Brunswick, and it is considerably older than the pretensions of most of the people now catalogued in the Social Register.

I do not know whether this antiquity entitled the game to any special consideration from the haut monde. As a matter of fact it might work just the opposite way, in the shape of an unpleasant reminder that about the time that the first informal umpire cried—"Heezaht," the founders of our greatest families of today were still peddling suspenders, selling bad food to the defenders of the nation, or otherwise busying themselves in humble and undistinguished ways.

Baseball, somehow, has always been more or less tied up with beer and pretzels, and later in fact, when brewmasters engaged some of their excess profits in the noble and philanthropic work of supporting ball teams. Even today, the most famous of all baseball nines, the New York Yankees, is owned by Colonel Jacob Ruppert, to whom it gives considerable joy and frequent high blood pressure. However, Society's apparent neglect of a virile, exciting and rowdy sport cannot be attributed to the fact that a few years ago it was played by vulgar and uneducated fellows who often

stimulated and overstimulated themselves with strong liquors, and were frequently seen to come flying out of bar rooms, corner saloons and public drinking chambers with no visible means of propulsion, for I note that some of the latter day bearers of fine old names consider it fashionable to be individual members of that degraded collection of mountebanks

known as prizefighters, and practically all of the holders of fiefs in Newport, Bar Harbor, Montauk Point and Syossett have built bar rooms in their own homes, in which the proudest features are the brass cuspidor, and chromos of Leda and the Swan, tacked upon the wall, relics of some corner swill parlor from the brighter age.

It is probably only a matter of time until the well bred patter of ultra blue-veined palms shall resound from the concrete caves of the Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds, and Navin Field and Sportsman's Park. The summers are not far off when such lyric heroes as the incomparable long distance sluggers Babe Ruth, HackWilson, Lou Gehrig, Lefty O'Doul, Babe Herman, Jimmy Foxx and Bill Terry will be the petted lions of Society, and the week-end guests of that charming Easthampton matron, Mrs. Applethwacker. The day is practically at hand when such epic characters as Uncle Wilbert Robinson, John J. McGraw and Cornelius McGillicuddy, managers respectively of the celebrated Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants and Philadelphia Athletics, and the greatest strategists in the game will be photographed walking on Park Avenue. I can almost visualize the item in the society columns that such sterling and sensational pitchers as Dazzy Vance, George Rommell, Freddy Fitzsimmons, Bob Grove, Herb Pennock, and Senor Adolfo Luque, are present at a morning musicale at the Plaza, and that such gallants of the infield as Travis Jackson, Sig. Antonio Lazzeri, Glenn Wright, Del Bissonette, Rogers Hornsby and Jim Bottomley have received bids to a debutante dance at the Ritz.

I feel that by now I have demonstrated that baseball is, as a matter of fact, much too good for the common people who have heretofore been permitted to enjoy all of its blessings exclusively. There is plenty of room in the ballyard for Vanity Fair and the intelligentsia. Come on up to the ball game and let your brains cool off, and nibble at a Wienerwurst en pain et avec moutarde.