This Great Game

...This is very annoying to us baseball fans, who think baseball is esthetically superior and better for the soul...

...He insists that "baseball is just a game of common sense" which is no doubt true, just as it is true that, as his record shows, not all common sense is equally cornm o i l . Roger Angell's "Baseball in the Mind" is a light masterpiece, a love song to baseball sung by a fan with perfect pitch (no pun intended...

...Here are his main points: Throughout recorded history, in all Civilizations, successful agriculture has not been essentially based on large farms...

...Plunge off tackle, gaining not quite two yards...

...Jacques Barzen, who prefers baseball, describes football as "violence watched from a distance...

...We all know that the system of production without private property they have established in Marx's name has failed to eliminate the root condition about which Marx complained...

...Out comes the chain crew for a measurement...

...again the batter considers his even more difficult position, which is to reverse this imminent white speck, to redirect its energy not in a soft parabola or a series of diminishing squiggles but into a beautiful and dangerous new force, a force of perfect straightness and immense distance...

...But if constant action were the standard of sports excellence, the roller derby would he the most excellent sport...

...Together with the essays by eight sportswriters, two novelists, an umpire and a manager, they tell baseball's story, which is that baseball is uniquely pleasing to the eye and mind...

...Huddle...

...In an unending stream they came, thick, colorful volumes on the quarterback, the running backs, this league and that league, the Super Bowl and the good old days...

...Now baseball has struck back with an adornment for the thinking man's coffee table...

...His essay (and it is his...

...It is neat, it is pretty, it is satisfying...

...the ball, a line again, is redrawn to the pitcher, in the center of this square, the diamond...

...True, baseball is not a game of constant action...

...The photographs -- hundreds of them _9 -- capture the special action, violence, grace and danger of baseball...

...What is less known, however, is that the Comnmnists have on their part instituted a new alienation in a branch of production where it did not exist in Marx's time and does not exist in the non-Communist world: the alienation of the peasant, through a system that interl~oses politico-bureaucratic organization between the tiller and his land...

...The illustrations in This Great Game show baseball action at its graceful best...

...Kenner argues that such interpretations are based on the Genetic Fallacy that supposes the meaning of the poem is found in the poet's experiences, the books he reads, the women he frequents, and so forth...

...Consider the action in this familiar football sequence...

...The kick is a 16 The Alternative May 1972 virtually automatic suacess at twenty yards...

...The industrial worker, Marx's well-nigh exclusive concern, has come no closer to his own labor process and its product in Soviet Russia than in other industrialized countries...

...A fine, precise writer, Angell possesses the subtlety which we baseball fans fervently believe derives from extensive scrutiny of baseball...

...In a decade dominated by various forms of mayhem, including the "television war," football gained in popularity and pretensions to the point that its fans began to advertise it as the "real" national pastime, a "now" substitute for the distinctly non-now grace and stateliness of baseball...

...Well, the thesis was wrong...

...Now, with abrupt gestures, he gives it enormous speed and direction, converting it suddenly into a line, a moving line...

...Sencourt, continues Kenner, was a loquacious bore...

...In Eliot's later years, Kenner observes that Eliot had instructed his secretaries not to admit Sencourt...

...2.868 inches in diameter) that is moving over 100 m.p.h, and is rising or dropping, or curving while rising or dropping...

...While no political resistance should be expected from the embittered peasantry of Russia and China, their enduring passive resistance has thrown agriculture into a state of permanent crisis that is the Achilles heel of Communist management...

...If you make solid contact, and the struck ball eludes nine agile men, you get to first base...

...In time, these and other lines are drawn, there are on the field...

...Readers of Weaver's essay may decide that the talent looks so good because it is so well managed...

...Such action involves a remarkable lot of thinking, and that is where Earl Weaver, manager of the Baltimore Orioles, takes charge...

...Those who cherish memories of the Polo Grounds will especially be interested in the scenes beneath Coogan's Bluff half a century ago...

...7 George F. WiU Planting People Agrarian Policies and Problems in Communist and Non-Communist Countries edited by W.A...

...The Sporting Life This Great Game by Jacques Barzen Prentice-Hall, $14.95 I T IS FREQUENTLY said that football has become the "national pastime...

...Because of its pace, and thus the perfectly observed balance, both physical and psychological, between opposing forces, its clean lines can be restored in retrospect...

...He knows exactly how everyone on his team bats against every pitcher in the league...

...Nothing to it...

...The pictures and essays will be useful in our crusade to keep football in perspective and in its place...

...No first down for team A, so out comes team A's field goal kicking team and team B's field goal blocking team...

...Batting...

...This Great Game is pretty and informative...

...Now we at least have a book that helps us explain our prejudices...

...Many critics, and wise ones I believe, have warned against this kind of analysis...

...In any case though, Sencourt will not be very helpful to those who engage in this sort of analysis...

...Matthiessen has written that to identify a poet's life with what he wrote is "misleading" and "disturbing...

...Weaver believes homework is important...

...This nmer game - - baseball in the mind - - has no season, hut it is best played in the winter, without the distraction of other baseball news...

...However, so long as interest-in Eliot endures, there will be many who feel that they must know more of Eliot., the man, in the belief that such knowledge provides a proper understanding of his poetry...

...This is the action sport...

...Con~idering the awful difficulties that critics have encountered when they try to assess Eliot's achievement, Kenner observed in 1959 that "opinion concerning the most influential man of letters of the twentieth century has not freed itself from a cloud of unknowing...

...Scientists speak of the profoundly moving esthetic beauty of mathematics, and perhaps the baseball field is one of the few places where the rest of us can glimpse this mystery...

...The most pithy and comprehensive statement of his ideas is contained in Agrarian P o l l , s and Problems in Communist and NonCommunist Countries...

...That description helps explain why the 1960s, which were unkind to many institutions and people, were so kind to football...

...Also, little is told to clarify the nature of his relationship with his parents...

...Then both speciality squads leave in a sea of substitutions...

...What the Communists have done to agriculture thus has "no parallel among the .major civilizations of history...

...Why did Eliot leave his native America to seldom return ever again ? Why did his parents object to him spending a year at the Sorbonne...

...But those who think there is no violence in .baseball should try to make the double play pivot at second base with Boog Powell rolling in with disruptive malice aforethought...

...And why did he choose to leave Vivienne, his new wife in England, while he visited his parents in America...

...Its hundreds of splendid photographs are shown through a dozen lively essays...

...Team A has the ball third-and-two on team B's twenty yard line...

...He is the Invisible Poet in an age o! systematized literary scrutiny, much of it directed at him...

...This book, like its subject, is neat, pretty, satisfying...

...Why did he abruptly give up an academic career after eight years' preparation...

...Eliot's desire for privacy was legendary and his poetry for all his defense of the objective correlative, classicism and tradition was highly personal and was sometimes "very near the limits of coherency...

...Now team A's kickoff specialists jog on to the field, as do team B's kickoff receiving specialists...

...Moreover, throughout a wide variety of social systems, farm operations "were not controlled by the state but by a variety of small and large private owners or possessors...

...This year four of his pitchers may win twenty or more games (only the 1920 White Sox had four such pitchers) and the Orioles may win one hundred or more games for the third season in a row (a feat matched only by the 1929-31 Athletics...

...And the better maulings can be re-savored on instant replay if one is watching football on a television screen, for which its compact action is well-suited...

...This book leaves too much of Eliot's life still shrouded in the mystery that originally brought many to it...

...He knows the sacrifice is overated because "statistics show that a man on first with nobody out has a better chance of scoring than a man or second does with one out...

...What have me Comnmnists done to agriculture...

...it is not "as told to" anybody) is a chewy, no-nonsense introduction to the thinking that has made him spectacularly successful...

...The gossipy anecdotes, which please him so, will keep the reader who enjoys that sort of thing from becoming bored...

...If one hundred m.p.h, pitches are action, and if huddles and measurements and jogging substitutes are not action, then baseball must have five times more action that football...

...Satisfactory answers to such questions, perhaps, will never be forthcoming, taving been interred seven years ago with the poet...

...If you fail to do this only seven out of ten times you are a star...

...From our perch we can sometimes see three or four or more such geometries appearing at the same instant on the green board below us and, mathematicians that we are, can sense their solutions even before they are fully drawn...

...The batter, wielding a plane, attempts to intercept the line and acutely alter it, but he fails...

...Baseball, Angell says, "is intensely remembered because only baseball' is so intensely watched...

...For a friendship that spanned some thirty-seven years, there is lacking the evidence that they maintained close regular contact during most of that time...

...And football, which consists of very short convulsions of action followed by much longer committee meetings, would rank somewhere below lawn bowling...

...The publishers commissioned Leroy Nieman to do some original action portraits of eight superstars, and the paintings explode with color and energy...

...As Angell says, "onl~/ baseball, with its statistics and isolated fragments of time, permits so precise a reconstruction from box score and memory...

...Elapsed time, five seconds...

...But "The Invisible Poet" is still with us...

...And he knows how much of baseball strategy revolves around base running and preventing base running...

...His style, throughout, is lucid and straightforward...

...If you fail only sixty per cent of the time, you are a superstar...

...The same questions seem to persist...

...Football, unlike baseball, is a game which can hold the attention of persons who do not know much about it...

...the batter and fielders are also transformed into fluidity, moving and converging, and we see now that all movement in baseball is a convergence toward fixed points - - the pitched ball toward the plate, the thrown ball toward the right angles of the bases, the batted ball toward the as yet undrawn but already visible point of congruence either with the ground or a glove...

...Twenty-two beefy men mauling one another is as entertaining as a horse opera or a situation comedy...

...Where man's labor is controlled by others through the power of employment which property confers, man finds himself estranged from his own productive activity, and his life subject to alien powers...

...Although Sencourt has not written a scholar's paradise of information, he has managed to pen a pleasingly written account of Eliot's life...

...The nation's publishers bought the subversive doctrine about football as "the new national pastime," and before long the fans were being supplied with pretty football picture books that weighed about as much as Bubba Smith, and caused coffee tables to groan like injured linemen...

...If'Kenner is correct in his estimate of Sencourt, then Sencourt might have been nothing more than an undesired hanger-on to Eliot...

...Those who think baseball is a game without manly danger should stand at the plate while Juan Marichal puts a 110 m.p.h, velocity on a very solid baseball that crosses the plate on a trajectory that seems to begin at third base and passes four inches from one's ribs...

...It captures the pace and balance of baseball and will be enjoyed by fans while they play their private winter baseball...

...If team A's kicker does his job well (and he should since it is all he is ever asked to do), he kicks the ball into the end zone where it is prudently downed by team B's specialists at downing balls in end zone...

...There are some marvelous old early parks, fans and heroes...

...You just make solid contact with a round bat (not to exceed 2.75 inches in diameter) on a round ball...

...Communist rule, far from bringing about the "'realm of freedom," has caused not only the appearance of new crimes but also a new mode of exploitation...

...was Marx's ultimate indictment of a social system that interposed private property and market requirements between the worker and his life activity...

...Too much of Sencourt's information is not taken from Eliot, but rather is gathered through hearsay or his deductions from incidents he heard about...

...This is the thesis developed in depth over a number of years by Karl A. Wittfogel who has thereby made a major contribution to the study of...

...Simultaneously, the fielders hasten toward that .r point of meeting with the ball, and noth the base runner and the ball, now redirected, race toward their encounter at the base...

...He gives an example of intense watching: "The pitcher, immobile on the mound, holds the inert white ball, his little lump of physics...

...Were there personal reasons, related to his homelife, which compelled Eliot to leave the country...

...As a picture book This Great Game is a striking success...

...To me, that is what makes this book such a great disappointment...

...Second, they have organized the tillers of land army-like into brigades, *'large production brigades," teams and squads, within The Alternative May 1972 17...

...Soncourt has not contributed to lifting that "cloud of unknowing" which has surrounded him...

...So runs the central justifying thesis of Socialist Revolution...

...what might be called the "'inner contradictions of Communist-run economies...

...As Hugh Kenner, a critic who has written much of Eliot, flatly states, Sencourt "wasn't privy to as much of the story as he and his posthumous sponsors let on...

...First, they have forced it into the mold of large, even gigantic units, bureaucratically controlled, in the hope of thereby parallelling the development of industry...

...Douglas Jackson University of Washington Press, $15.N M AN IS ALIENATED from himself if he is not the master of his own labor process and its fruits...

...Would such a man make a reliable witness to a'man's life...

...Again the pitcher studies his task - - the projection of his next line through the smallest possible segment of an invisible, seven-sided solid (the strike zone has depth, as well as height and width) sixty feet and six inches away...

...Football fans slouched in front of their television sets, watching flickering images of their well-padded heroes collide, like to say that baseball is not for he-men...

...There are those who believe that the Orioles' talent is such that they could win without a manager...