Where the News Ends
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Take Me Out To the Ballgame From that enchanted afternoon in April when blue-suited umpires in eight major and countless minor league parks call...
...When he slid into a base in a cloud of dust, it was just too bad if the infielder did not keep out of the way of his gleaming spikes...
...A good symbol of the enterprising spirit of America was the fiery Georgian, Cobb, dashing for third base (when most players would have stopped at second) and quite possibly drawing a wild throw and coming in to score...
...Before long we recognized each other as holders of adjoining subscription seats for the concerts of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and mingled comments on the strong and weak spots of the Boston Red Sox with what we liked and disliked in music...
...But of all the immortals in baseball's Pantheon, the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York, Cobb, by general agreement, is the greatest and likely to remain on this pedestal forever...
...Intensely dynamic, fast in execution, heavily charged with excitement, suspense and uncertainty, baseball is America—the American character in action...
...Sinclair Lewis's George F. Babbitt boasted that he knew three languages, American, baseball and poker...
...Women may be just as ardent fans as men...
...Once, the face of an elderly gentleman in the next seat looked familiar...
...Or your neighbor may be a dyed-in-the-wool veteran fan, who has been watching games since the First World War or earlier and who will snap out a precise figure, such as "18," if you remark that Ted Williams or Mickey Mantle has been hitting a good many home runs...
...You may find yourself seated next to a 10-year-old boy, excited by his first big-league game, perhaps a shortstop on his Little League team...
...As Matthew Arnold said of Shakespeare: "Others abide our question...
...Then, from 1922 until 1940, when I was living in the Soviet Union, Germany, Japan and France, I wouldn't have known who won the World Series...
...Big-league baseball was long a monopoly of the states east of the Mississippi, with St...
...A British cricket match, with its leisurely "tea breaks," may go on as long as three days...
...Louis its westernmost outpost...
...As a boy, I kept up with the batting and pitching averages of almost every player in the two big leagues...
...Although team play is essential, it is also a game of individual heroes, of whom the supreme immortal is the fabulous Ty Cobb, of the old Detroit Tigers...
...And not the least of its merits is that there is nothing like a closely contested ball-game to take the spectator's mind off worries, troubles and tensions...
...WHERE the NEWS ENDS By William Henry Chamberlin Take Me Out To the Ballgame From that enchanted afternoon in April when blue-suited umpires in eight major and countless minor league parks call "Play Ball" until that crisp October day when some umpire signals the last out in the World's Series, baseball dominates the American sports scene, and for good reason...
...The worst team in the league may rise up and beat the best one...
...A baseball game lasts between two and three hours, with no breaks until the third man is out in the last inning...
...I know from personal experience that baseball addiction is as hard to outlive as alcoholism...
...But this year we have the San Francisco Giants and the Los Angeles Dodgers...
...He could hit and field and run surpassingly, and no one has matched or is likely to match his lifetime batting and base-running records...
...There have been more affable and likable figures in the game than Cobb, who never gave or expected quarter...
...Now, perhaps in my second childhood, I go out to Fenway Park two, three or four times a week when the Red Sox are at home, not only watching games but meticulously recording every play, down to balls and strikes, in a well-filled scorebook...
...The former Boston Braves won the world's championship in Milwaukee uniforms, while Kansas City houses the former Philadelphia Athletics...
...Nothing in baseball can ever be taken for granted...
...A game that starts out lopsided and dull may turn into a spine-tingling thriller as the team that is behind rallies in the late innings...
...The typical crowd at a baseball game is an excellent cross-section of America, male and female, old and young, people of quite varied tastes and backgrounds, but united in close attention to the unfolding contest...
...Calvin Coolidge who won a nationwide baseball quiz contest by spotting the name .and occasion when a player in the World Series (Bill Wambsganss of Cleveland, 1920) made an unassisted triple play—something about as rare as a royal flush, in poker...
...Thou art free...
...And it was the late Mrs...
...The contrast with the British national sport, cricket, is the contrast between the American politician "running" for Congress and the Briton "standing" for Parliament...
...Cobb could do everything in the game except pitch...
...Cobb played the game with a fierce passionate energy, a single-minded concentration that had to be seen to be believed...
...Baseball is one of the best conversational ice breakers among Americans of all groups and interests, from college professors to taxi drivers...
...I know of one elderly bedridden lady whose life is much enriched by the possibility of hearing baseball games over the radio...
Vol. 41 • May 1958 • No. 19
