These Are Emotional Times for Baseball-Crazy Fellows

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

September 28, 1954

   THERE'S a tense week ahead for the baseball fan, starting tomorrow with the World Series.  I don"t mean the lucky cuss who can watch a game with the cold, analytical eye of a loan shark, alert for fine strategy and play.  I mean the bleeder, the wretch who follows one particular club and who is lifted to ecstasy or booted into despond by that club's varying fortunes.

   These are the boys who will suffer--the ones who love the Cleveland Indians or the New York Giants. They will hover around the radio or TV sets like June bugs around an arc light, gnaw their fingernails up to the elbow, chain smoke, go into apoplexy with every opposition rally and wish that the torment would end so they could relax and get some sleep.

   THIS ADDICTION to baseball in general and one club in particular makes no sense whatever.  Life goes on regardless of how one game or one series comes out.  Your baseball bug tells himself that every time his team loses --and he keeps right on bleeding.  The disease is incurable.

   It has its roots back in childhood, I think.  Nobody who fails to develop an interest in the game when he is a kid can acquire the suicidal devotion to it in later life that the baseball nut has.  The genuine addict probably played some as a boy and had visions of one day being a big leaguer.  Or he developed a fancy for one player and took that player's club to his bosom, there to hold it unto death.

   I caught the disease from a book, written long ago by Christy Mathewson, immortal New York pitcher.  It was called "Pitching in a Pinch" and it laid hold of me good.  I since have known few care-free summers.  My heart has belonged to the New York Giants.  If I am the soul of amicability of an evening it's because the Giants have won.  If I beat the kids and drive my wife to tears with snide remarks about the stew it's because they've lost.

   MAYBE you think I'm riding high now, since the Giants have won the pennant.  I am, but it's an uneasy ride.  I'm afraid of that low-down Cleveland club, which never has lost a World Series.  If they win this one I shall survive, I suppose.  The Giants have failed me before, and often, and I have muddled through.  But each tragedy has left its scar.

   When the Giants took on Leo Durocher  as manager I felt that I was cured.  He had been manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers and I hated both him and the Bums exceedingly.  But it made no difference.  Even though my estimate of Durocher is little changed, the Giants are still my boys.  I would string along with them if Georgi Malenkov were manager.

   Nice guys, somehow don't manage the Giants.  They've had but one who could qualify as such.  He was Mel Ott, a great player but no barn burner as a pilot.  The others, John McGraw, Bill Terry and Durocher, hardly could qualify as charmers.

   Just as managers make no difference in my allegiance, neither does team personnel.  If my current raves, Willie Mays and Johnny Antonelli, were traded to the Pirates my affections would not shift to Pittsburgh.  Willie and Johnny would become enemies.  If the Giants and Cardinals swapped complete teams, Stan Musial would become my ideal.

   I HOPE this week to shift some of the work to a couple of associates who are not baseball crazy.  Then I can watch the games.  In doing so, though, I shall be playing into Cleveland's hands.  Seldom do I see or hear a game that the Giants win.  I jinx them.

   It wasn't Bobby Thomson's homer that decided that playoff game between Brooklyn and New York back in '51.  I was the unsung hero.  I watched this one until the Giants went into the last half of the ninth, trailing by three runs.  By then my suffering had been too much.  I walked away, to mourn alone. A few minutes later the fellows were yelling that New York had won.  I raced back to the television set just in time to catch the final commercial.  But had I remained, Thompson would have been just another out.

   I'm going to watch this series, though.  I have laid up a store of cigarettes and aspirin and my fingernails are a nice length for gnawing.  And I've done what I could to counteract the jinx.  I have a dollar down on Cleveland--and I seldom win bets.  I hope I lose this one.  But if I don't there will be a slight monetary solace for an aching heart.

Addendum--   The Giants swept the Series in four games to win their first championship since 1933, defeating the heavily favored Indians.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express consent of the StarTribune.

Exercise is Something for an Oldster to Shun

By CHARLES M. GUTHRIE

of the Minneapolis Tribune editorial page staff

published by the StarTribune

May 29, 1954

   I WAS with some foolish fellows the other evening who were showing off by standing stiff-legged and bending over to touch their toes.  I don't know what they were trying to prove unless it was imbecility.  For me it would be.  I cannot bend over and even reach my kneecaps and have no desire to try.  It's tough enough lacing my shoes each morning.

   Anyhow I deem the whole business of exercise as silly for anyone past 30 and wish I could escape it entirely.  I wish I didn't have to push a lawnmower or work black dirt into the lawn, or clean up the winter's infestation of debris and junk, and wash windows and put up screens.  Anyone victimized by the spring cleanup who still has a taste for tennis or softball or push-ups is either young or crazy.

   IN A TIME of madness a couple of weeks ago I let myself in for some utterly fruitless exercise.  I purchased a portion of black dirt, a bag of fertilier and a sack of seed.  I resolved to convert my submarginal plot into a showplace--to make a dozen spears of grass flourish where one had languished before.

   The results have been about what I knew in my heart they would be--less than spectacular.  I have done everything but sit up nights with my lawn and can detect little reward for my husbandry.  I have, however, no word of reproach for the black dirt, fertilizer or grass seed, although the price of seed might convince the credulous that the stuff will grow on a tile floor.  The fault is entirely mine.   Grass may survive pestilence, blight or drought.  It cannot survive me.  All I get for such labor is exercise--and exercise I can do without.

   THEY SOUNDED me out the other day about a brand of exertion that is completely abhorrent.  They wanted me to play in a church baseball league.  The mere thought of it gave me a charley horse.

   The fact was brought home to me six years ago that nobody on the far side of 40 should have any truck with baseball besides consuming peanuts and hot dogs and hurling epithets at the umpire.

   At that time I got involved in a game and made a clean hit to centerfield.  I was thrown out trying to stretch it into a single and there has been a distinct tenderness around the right femur ever since.

   I HAD BEEN forewarned several years earlier, while living out west, that exercise was for the birds--but not for one gone flaccid from pecking a typewriter.  I joined the "Y", figuring that the body, once a thing of sinewy and rippling responsiveness needed firming up.

   I swam.  I galloped around the indoor track, hung over the parallel bars and shot baskets.  Then I somehow got entangled in a basketball game with a bunch of kids and aged five years in as many minutes. It was then that I knew the havoc time had wrought.

   When I afterward looked at myself in the locker room mirror I beheld a stranger.  The face was a crimson blob.  The jaw hung slack.  The eyes were those of a man wallowing in a hangover.

   There were no more trips to the muscle factory.  I realized that I was getting on.

   MY WIFE tells me I should take up golf.  But a man has his pride.  I took up golf once, 18 holes of it, and was so bad that even among a bunch of duffers I was a man apart.  If I ever golf again I'll have my wife pack a picnic lunch that I can eat under a tree, remote from the fairway, In the general locality of where I suspect my ball to be.

   If you don't spend 90 per cent of your time hunting the ball, you get in a lot of good walking playing golf, though.  And what is better than walking for the middle-aged?  What, in truth, is left but walking?

   If you take it slow and rest thoroughly afterward it is not overtaxing.  The wonders of nature are all about you--lilacs, pussy willows, lobelia, chicory, wild columbine
 and such.  There are beer cans to kick out of the path.  There is time to read any billboards within sight; time to sit under a tree and gain new strength from the good earth; time to think about those yesterdays when spring meant something.

   The next time my wife says we ought to take a walk around Lake Harriet I'm going to surprise her and go.  I want to see if I'm up to it.  We made the junket once--back in '47--and it was quite a pleasant hike, though a bit tiring.  This time I plan to take my cane.

Copyright 2014 StarTribune.  Republished here with the permission of the StarTribune.  No further republication or redistribution is permitted without the express approval of the StarTribune.