Baseball Musings from Paul Crume

[HowAboutThat]

Unless you are from Dallas and are older than about 50, you’ve never heard of Paul Crume. He was a daily rider for the Dallas morning news and he was brilliant, funny, poignant and very insightful.

He wrote this in the early 1960s, and it is such a good description of Baseball that I wanted to share.

Baseball and opera

 

Watching a met performance of La Traviata one night, I discovered what was wrong with baseball. 

They have taken the opera out of it. 

 

Like opera, baseball is a thing where the tightly knit dramatic passages come in short takes. There are frequent moments when all the players are just arranged around the stage. Nothing is happening.

These moments all but demand that a performer take the center of the stage for a short bravura passage or a solo performance of some kind. They are set up for a Casey Stengel to lift his hat to the crowd and release the sparrow beneath it. A good manager who will lie down on home plate in front of the empire and refuse to move, like Bobby Bragan , is invaluable.

These make the memorable moments in baseball. 

In the old days of Snipe Conley And his crowd, you got a lot of fine areas even in the Texas league, but baseball has fallen into the hands of the stuffed shirts. A baseball scout now doesn’t bother himself about whether a player can please a crowd. All he is interested in is whether the man can play baseball.

The result is what might be called the Mickey Mantle era. Mantle is a cooly efficient baseball perfectionist. His play is a joy for the aficionados to watch, but unfortunately they don’t fill the grandstands, much less the bleachers. If you have seen a dozen mantle games, you’ve seen them all. He will either hit or he won’t; He will make the catch or he won’t. The law of accidents says this style of play will produce it’s great moments, but what was left in between except the sight of old Casey straining toward the pitcher’s mound like Father Time with a bill he means to collect? And now he is gone.

The baseball fans consummate player was Babe Ruth. He could make striking out a thing that left people breathless for five minutes. First there was the fateful wait while the pitcher thought, or whatever they do out there. Then the nasty flicker of the bat over Ruth’s shoulder which signified that he was about to strike. After that the long wait while Ruth wound his arms and legs around and around and possibly toppled over. If Ruth hit one, it was a hit that had everybody on their feet. If he struck out, you had a weak feeling of disaster narrowly averted.

A few people like Ted Williams have tried to save the national game. Yet, every time Williams shoots off his mouth, he is lectured by sports writers, who never could play right field on a sandlot team, About being a good sport. Better 2000 people in the stands who hate Williams’ guts, than two who say, “good boy.”