One Fan's Beef About Baseball

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
June 3, 1961


   I'VE ALWAYS thought well of Abner Doubleday for inventing baseball but confess that it doesn't fire me up as it once did.  It takes too long to play and it's become too refined.  Go to a night game that runs into extra innings and you get home about the time the milk man is making his rounds.
   Even allowing a fellow time to shave between innings, a regulation game should be wrapped up in a couple of hours.  It once was, but now such a game is an oddity.

   BASEBALL, paradoxically, has been hobbled by steps designed to give it more appeal.  The rules have been changed to insure more hitting and more runs.  Consequently more pitchers have to be used--and more time consumed.

Herb Score

   The spitter is long gone.  The emery ball was banned even earlier.  The pitcher now works with an unblemished ball.  If it's scuffed or roughed up it's tossed out.  It also is a far cry from the unlively sphere of old.  A well-hit ball comes off the bat like a bullet and pitchers work in an atmosphere of peril.
   Four years ago, Herb Score, one of the finest young lefties in the majors, was hit in the eye by a drive off the bat of Gil McDougald and never recovered his effectiveness.  The other day the White Sox sent him to San Diego.

   THE HOME RUN, once rare, dramatic and honest, has been made cheap and plethoric.  Half a dozen often are hit in one game, some by undersized runts who could barely have hit the dead ball Cobb and Wagner swung on into the outfield.

Cy Young

   With the fences in convenient range and windblown fly balls dropping out of sight, no pitcher can be sure of finishing what he starts.  Starting pitchers finished only 25 percent of last year's major league games.
   No pitcher has won 30 or more games since Lefty Grove did it 30 years ago.  Few pitchers can win 20, Warren Spahn and Early Wynn are the only hurlers currently operating who stand to win a total of 300 games, but in his 22-year span Cy Young won 511, an average of more than 23 per season.

   MAYBE the game would be less popular than it is if the dead ball were still used, if scores were low and close and the customers could get out of the park in time for dinner.  But a tight game always struck me as better than a loose one and baseball executives might be smart to revert to this view before they have to expand both leagues to 15 teams in order to beef up the gate.
   They might likewise take a leaf from baseball's bawdy past when players put winning ahead of fraternizing, and culture got lost in an occasional fight and the gendarmes had to be called out.
   It may be too bad, but the fact is that the roughneck player has more color than his gentlemanly teammate and is far better box office.  Ty Cobb was a rough one and so were John McGraw, Frank Chance and Johnny Evers.

Ty Cobb

Ty Cobb with spikes

 The best remembered St. Louis team was the Gashouse Gang, made up of such inelegant, unwashed

The Gashouse Gang

characters as Pepper Martin, Frank Frisch and Dizzy Dean.  They were not only fierce competitors but good showmen.  

TODAY, with umpires tossing players out for no more than a disdainful spit or a spot of cussing and arm waving, there isn't much color left.  There's just as much skill but many of today's stars are automatons, graceful and efficient mechanics doing an afternoon's work with little flair or enthusiasm.
   And if the baseball brass will hold still long enough for me to throw another one, I'd suggest that they keep the peanut and hot dog vendors out of sight save between innings so as not to obstruct the view.  At the last game I attended I saw more hucksters than hitters.  I'd rather watch the game than watch someone buy a beer.


Copyright 2013 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Spring's a Trial for the Weary

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune
May 6, 1961


   THE MELANCHOLY season is generally associated with fall, but for those of us who can take nature or leave it alone spring isn't so ducky, either.  The trouble is that if you leave spring alone you lose standing in the community.  The green-thumb brigade has taken over.
   We who prefer to live casually are trapped.  Anyone who hasn't a mound of black dirt in the yard waiting to be spread hither and yon is an indolent nobody.  To establish yourself as an upstanding citizen these days you have to push a weed, feed and seed cart around.

   I HAVE no black dirt on the place, don't intend to have any, and will get behind a pushcart with dedicated reluctance.  All I've done thus far is remove the winter cover from what I refer to loosely as the perennials.  The non-blooming climber has struggled through again, as I feared it would, but the expensive stuff, iris and roses of exquisite beauty, appear as dead as they'll ever be.
   We have three no-good peony plants that cling to life for no legitimate reason.  They've never produced more than three or four weary blooms, although stoked with black dirt and plant food since 1945.  I threaten each year to root them out but my wife, in whom hope springs eternal, won't have it.

   I DON'T condemn the green-thumb boys out of hand.  Some of them are quite personable chaps and good to their wives and children.  But I'm sick of having them look down their noses at me and my kind simply because they enjoy landscaping and we don't, and are willing to spend hours currying their lawns while we aren't.  Our only sin is an inherent inability to respond to the season's promises, but they write us off as oafs.
   The fellow I pity is my next-door neighbor.  He has given gardening some of the best springs and summers of his life but his back yard resists every effort to produce grass and should be put in the soil bank.  The payoff came last summer when he worked himself to exhaustion sodding the place.  It made my back ache to watch him and I hoped fervently that success would crown his efforts.
   But this spring the area is again barren and he has given up.  "The damned ground won't even support crabgrass," he muttered.  "I'm gonna put the whole works into patio and to hell with nature."
   I've heard variants of this theme from other non-nature boys, but while such an escape has unquestioned merit I've never actually seen it done and was close to it only once myself.  This was after I'd converted my lawn into desert with crabgrass killer--which was all my fault, my wife said, because I ignored the directions.
   I now merely go through the motions of lawn care to maintain my reputation, knowing that failure is inevitable but knowing, too, that custom being what it is one can no longer loaf the weekends away and permit his mind to feast on the eternal values.

   THE TROUBLE with most fellows of my era is that we were not schooled in sophisticated landscaping as boys.  My father never pampered his lawn or fought weeds.  We considered dandelions manna from heaven.  We ate the greens.  Now I'm caught up in this complicated seed and fertilizer frenzy and can't adjust to it.
   When I explained all this to my wife the other day she brought up the name of a man a couple of houses south who could grow grass on a billiard table and whose lawn is an unblemished carpet.  "He's 20 years older than you are and seems to have made the adjustment."
   Any day now I'll be out with the pushcart.


Copyright 2013 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Tribute to a Patient Mother

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune

date unknown; probably 1962-1963

   SHE WASN'T expected to milk the cow, tend the chickens, mend fences or chop wood.  These were masculine chores and dad performed them with the help of his sons.
   But mother pumped and carried water, did the laundry via washboard and copper-bottomed boiler, churned the butter, strained the milk, baked bread, trimmed the lamp wicks, pushed wood into the kitchen range and considered an ice box the ultimate in refrigeration.
   The kids helped with the dishes, turned the crank on the ice cream freezer for the reward of licking the dasher, beat the rugs during spring housecleaning, kept the woodbox filled and carried out the ashes.

   WE WORKED more cheerfully for mother than for dad.  We were closer to her.  She was our confidante and companion.  Everyone was her friend and she upstaged nobody.  She was an earnest church worker but spoke no ill of the ladies of the night who were entrenched in considerable force at the east edge of town.
   She fed the drifters.  She invited the homeless in for dinner on special days.  Many kids were closer to her than they were to their own mothers.  She had a broad social awareness.
   Dad made no objection to her generosity but initiated little himself.  He was of different stripe, more or less a loner.  You couldn't be sure of him.  He could be kind or tyrannical, gracious or mean.  We were afraid of him.

   NOBODY feared mother.  Her discipline was gentle, her patience astounding.  Looking back now, I know she sought, perhaps unconsciously, to make home comfortable because of her man's inclination to make it otherwise.
   "She was the worst housekeeper and the best mother there ever was," brother Bud recalled recently.
   He spoke well.  She wasn't a good housekeeper.  Nobody who allows two sons and a couple of friends to play "basketball" in the dining room can be a good housekeeper.
   There was a hook above the archway between this room and the parlor.  A punching bag once hung from it.  We'd throw a bean bag at the hook and, if it stuck, It meant a basket.  The bean bag leaked chaff, chairs got banged around, dishes rattled and the dog ran for cover.  After the game mother would provide lemonade or cookies.

   IN ALL BUT bitter weather Bud and I slept out back in a tent to be sure of adequate fresh air.  The tent had a wooden floor and two double beds.  Every boy in town, at one time or another, shared the accommodations with us.
   Mother would come out each morning, ostensibly to waken us, but actually to determine how many would be on hand for breakfast.
   It is a pleasure to hark back to those yesterdays and the mother who made them possible.  I salute her this Mother's day as a great and understanding woman, a woman of compassion, courage and humor.  Dead now for more than 25 years, I see her with the six children who died before her--helping, counseling and comforting--giving to them the abundance she gave to the three who survived.


Copyright 2013 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.

Moving's Both a Physical and an Emotional Strain

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE
of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff
published by the StarTribune

November 12, 1955


   SOME FOLKS down the block have sold their house and soon will move to another neighborhood.  They've bought a place more suitable to present need and in this I'm happy for them.
   But I'm saddened, too.  They're the kind you like to have around, the kind you can drop in on for chatting purposes or for borrowing a cup of sugar or a ladder.  And I'm prepared to shed a sympathetic tear when the moving ban backs up to the curb and transportation of their household wares begins.

   FOR MOVING is as maddening an experience as ever confronts the human animal.  Never, until you're involved in it, do you realize what a store of worldly goods you possess and how much of it, originally retained for sentimental reasons or against some time of need, has faded into the limbo of forgotten junk.
   My father, who could muster a fair temper even when not beset, became a fiend incarnate whenever the family moved, which happily was not often.  I would as soon have been set down beside a wounded grizzly and wondered what on earth possessed the man.  Twenty years and a couple of moves of my own later, I found out.
   The fellow who now lives next door moved in a couple of years ago and had I, personally, never been caught up in the toils of moving I'd have counted his coming a calamity.  He did much of the moving himself and, while straining under tables, chairs, sofas and such, showed all the amicability of a rattler, scaring not only his own kids but every juvenile in the area.  But I recognized his mood as a phase that would pass.

   ABOUT the only good thing to be said for moving is that during the forced inventory you turn up articles you thought had been carted away by mistake in that scrap-metal drive of World War II.  A five -year period of mourning I wasted on a departed ax was broken one moving day.  I found it resting across the garage rafters.  For years I blamed my son for loss of a pipe wrench.  One moving day I found it behind the furnace.  I'd deposited it there and forgotten it.
   You should take at least a month to move out of one place--and a year or two to move into another.  We've camped in the same abode for 10 years now and the attic still bears evidence of the hasty improvisation implicit in every transfer of duffle.

   AND THAT one month you ought to take in preparing to abandon a place does not insure full preparation. Invariably, after the movers arrive, you find candlesticks on the mantel and pictures on the wall that must be herded into cartons, along with cans of pickles, paint and sundry bric-a-brac.
   Then, after you've moved everything that can be lifted, you note the dirt.  You simply can't leave the place looking like a hog barn.  What would the people who moved in think?  So you borrow some cleaning tools--yours have departed with the van--and muck out.

   BUT THE physical torment of moving is less severe than the emotional.  You leave some of yourself behind when you leave a place you've lived in long.  All about are evidences of past days.  Here is where your children have grown up.  Those grooves in what once was the nursery floor were worn there by a baby bed, pushed back and forth during endless evenings of lullabies.  Those tiny holes on the inside of the front bedroom door were left by thumbtacks which supported pictures of daughter's high school friends.  The dent in the baseboard recalls that long ago Christmas when your son strapped on his new roller-skates and made an unwise and amateurish trip across the living room, tipping over a table lamp en route.
   The first floor lacks both bath and bedroom, though, and the place is drafty and hard to heat, difficult to clean and keep in repair.  Better get rid of it and move into something smaller now that the children are grown and gone.  It sure will be nice to live in a house that doesn't have a squeaky back door and doesn't creak as if bewitched whenever the wind blows.

   BUT YOU have to start out fresh, somehow, when you move, even though the shift be only to a different neighborhood.  It takes time to recapture the feeling of home.  The new place takes getting used to.  There's no peony bed or apple tree out back to shout the glory of every spring, no rosebushes to shelter against winter kill, no scuffs on the wallpaper to recall a rumpus between two sons, no pencil marks on the kitchen door to record their growth.
   All these the old place had.  They are the warp and woof of family living, the stuff of memory.  Pain and heartache, exasperation and disappointment, happiness and comfort are there enshrined.
   You can get away from an old home, but it can't get away from you.  That's the big reason why it's hard to move.


Copyright 2013 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.