Baseball Star Research Articles

Spirits in the Grass (review)

Reviewed by: Spirits in the Grass Scott D. Peterson Bill Meissner . Spirits in the Grass. South Bend, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2008. 288 pp. Cloth $25. A maxim of baseball fiction is that it has to be about something other than the game, and Meissner's novel fits this definition when it strives to portray smalltown life and address political issues surrounding the treatment of Native Americans. In spite of baseball's relative absence in the novel, the game makes up the center of Meissner's narrative: at age 37 Luke Tanner is looking to make a comeback for his town team of Clearwater, Wisconsin. Baseball thus serves as the motivation for his character as well as the source of conflict between him and his domestic partner, Louise Stiller. Despite the relative lack of game action, Spirits in the Grass echoes earlier baseball novels. Meissner invokes the fiction of W. P. Kinsella when he has Luke working on the baseball field as a spiritual connection to his late father, who was a local baseball star in his own right. Louise, however, is no Annie to Luke's Ray, since she wants Luke to get on with his life and take her away from their small-town midwestern existence. By giving Luke a delayed bildungsroman narrative, designing his character around transitional values, and seeking [End Page 160] to show how baseball can serve as the center of small-town culture, Meissner takes his book to deeper levels by plugging into the well-established baseball fiction formula first used by Noah Brooks almost 125 years earlier in Our Base Ball Club and How It Won the Championship. Although Luke's job at the local sod business does not offer him the opportunity to advance in the usual Horatio Alger mode, Luke looks to prove his ultimate maturity by demonstrating he can compete with the twenty year olds who are also trying out for the town team. To further demonstrate Luke's path toward maturity, Meissner has him ask Louise to marry him, but she wants him to be more in touch with his inner spirituality, which is very much in keeping with contemporary definitions of masculinity. Meissner's book further echoes Our Base Ball Club when he shows how baseball is central to the culture of Clearwater. After Luke discovers Native American artifacts at the ball diamond and the chance to play the season is threatened, the town is more concerned about baseball than repatriating the bones. Much of this discussion of the game's importance takes place at the diner, which serves as the stage for Meissner to introduce several types of small-town local color (the know-it-all, the bigot, the "lawyer," the maternal waitress, etc.), and the conversation there brings out the conflicts between whites and the Native Americans who are operating a casino in the county The "Water-in Hole," a bar, and Jimbo's, a local eatery where one orders by phone even though Jimbo might be standing at the counter, both illustrate the kind of eccentric places one might find in the Midwest. Two more small-town local color types, Mayor Butch Sobieski and Sheriff Rollis, are developed in great detail by Meissner, and they both play a large role in the political drama that builds around the bone Luke found while working on the ballfield. Butch, who was a ballplayer before he was the mayor of "one of the best small towns in America," and Rollis, the lonely law enforcement officer with an inferiority complex, become embroiled in the cover-up of the bones and local land rights. Except for Ring Lardner—who did not consider himself a serious writer until Jack Keefe had been relegated to the comic pages in the early 1920s—it has been difficult for novelists to write a pure baseball book. Bernard Malamud suffuses The Natural with mythical and historical levels so that writing professors would take him seriously. Coover, Kinsella, Brock, and Bishop all blend baseball with fantasy and fantastic elements, thus combining genres instead of telling a pure baseball story. Meissner borrows some of the supernatural from Kinsella and combines it with the political issues of...

Iron Man McGinnity: A Baseball Biography (review)

Reviewed by: Iron Man McGinnity: A Baseball Biography David Shiner Don Doxsie . Iron Man McGinnity: A Baseball Biography. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2009. 214 pp. Paper, $29.95. Back in the 1960s, a major-league star at the peak of his career would normally have been the subject of a book-length biography. For better or worse, that era is long gone. Contemporary baseball biographies often feature stars of much earlier vintage. This transformation reflects a number of movements in publishing, including the decline of hero journalism and the rise in academic standards in all areas of nonfiction literature, baseball included. Unlike many recent authors of baseball biographies, Don Doxsie is a journalist rather than a professional academician. As might be expected, his biography of New York Giants pitcher Joe McGinnity, the "Iron Man," is rendered in a clean and economical style. And, given how many early twentieth-century stars have been profiled in book-length biographies in recent years, it's not surprising that McGinnity's time has come. Joe McGinnity was a midwestern coal miner whose native talent for baseball made him a likely candidate to escape the mines and whose initiative and hard work led him to succeed. He boasted two full minor-league careers, one as a young man and the other after he left the majors in his late thirties. The first of those careers was singularly unimpressive given his subsequent major-league achievements. Doxsie plausibly credits McGinnity's eventual success as a pitcher to his lack of early triumphs. As a sub-.500 hurler with Kansas City in the Western Association in his midtwenties, McGinnity studied the unique underhand motion of Billy Rhines, a pitcher who had enjoyed major-league success in the 1890s. McGinnity essentially copied Rhine's unorthodox motion, which allowed him to throw a variety of curves with less wear and tear on his right arm than is the lot of most breaking-ball pitchers. As a result, he became much more effective on the hill and proved able to pitch professionally into his midfifties. The picture Doxsie paints of McGinnity is that of a rough-hewn and industrious blue-collar type who represented midwestern America as it existed a century ago. He was a gentleman off the field but a no-holds-barred competitor on it. His success as a pitcher was notable, but he was less accomplished as a manager after his major-league days came to an end following the 1908 season. He was reasonably adept at spotting talent, but too inflexible as a skipper to sustain the respect of his charges and too stubborn to adapt to changing circumstances. But he was a lifetime baseball man, and he never left the game for long. McGinnity's biographer is a diligent researcher and writer, but at times his [End Page 141] writing reveals some ignorance of the conditions of baseball during the deadball period. Doxsie writes, "McGinnity [was] destined to bat a solid (for a pitcher) .194 in his major league career" (46). In fact, although .194 is a decent batting average for a hurler today, McGinnity was a subpar hitter for a pitcher of his era. Of McGinnity's 1902 campaign, which was split between Baltimore in the American League and New York in the National, Doxsie claims that "McGinnity was a different pitcher in New York than he had been in . . . Baltimore" because his ERA dropped from 3.44 with the Orioles to 2.06 with the Giants (68). The author fails to note that most of that drop was due to the difference between the two leagues, which amounted to almost a run per game over the course of the season primarily because of different rules concerning foul strikes. While Doxsie's extensive research generally accords with today's standards, his use of secondary sources occasionally leads him to make suspect claims, as when he states that the manager who preceded John McGraw in New York "had used the former Bucknell College football and baseball star [Christy Mathewson] in the outfield in a few games" (65). One searches the baseball encyclopedias in vain for verification of that claim, which Doxsie credits to Joe Durso in a...

Danny Almonte: Discursive Construction(s) of (Im)migrant Citizenship in Neoliberal America

In this project I will trace former Little League Baseball star, Danny Almonte’s, celebrity identity and flexible citizenship with particular regard to the way that he has been used as both an exemplary Dominican immigrant and later a cautionary tale. As such this critical biography of Almonte’s rise and fall in American popular culture—informed by Henry Giroux’s extensive theorizing on youth culture, Ong’s concept of flexible citizenship, and Steven Jackson’s understanding of “twisting”—will critically interrogate the mediated discourses used to describe, define, and make Almonte into a symbol of a (stereo)typical Dominican male. In accordance with contemporaneous hyper-conservative and neoliberal rhetoric pervasive throughout the United States, I posit the notion that Almonte’s contested celebrity was formulated within the popular media as the embodiment of the minority “assault” on white privilege.

Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star

Chief Bender’s Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star

Baseball on the Boards

Damn Yankees, the smash-hit 1955 musical, is easily is the best-known, most frequently revived baseball theater piece. Other high-profile plays include Elmer the Great (1928), a Ring Lardner comedy that was produced by George M. Cohan and featured Walter Huston as the title character, a comically thickheaded hurler; Bleacher Bums (1977), conceived by Joe Mantegna, which charts the frustrations of Chicago Cubs fans; Fences (1987), August Wilson's Pulitzer Prize-winner about a bitter ex-Negro Leaguer (a role created by James Earl Jones) and his relationship with his football-playing son; and Richard Greenberg's Take Me Out (2002), a drama about a gay ballplayer.Remarkably, no memorable baseball stage piece dates from the 19th or early 20th centuries. No major producer of the era-no David Belasco, Charles Dillingham, or Charles Frohman-saw fit to mount a baseball play. No Broadway headliner signed on to thrash the villain and smash home runs right before the final curtain.This is not to say that the theater and baseball were then the equivalent of water and oil. On the contrary. During this pre-radio, pre-television era, Americans regularly attended live stage performances. Minstrel shows and vaudeville thrived. Starting in the late 19th century, baseball stars began spending their offseasons appearing in theatrical presentations in which they recited monologues, acted in skits, or tapped their toes in musical numbers. For their efforts, they often earned more money in several weeks than they did for their season-long ballyard heroics. Most significantly, playwrights of all stripes were penning baseball-related dramas, comedies, musicals, skits, and operettas.A representative list of such titles is found in the Library of Congress Copyright Office's Dramatic Compositions Copyrighted in the United States, 1870 to 1916. It includes at least 36 indisputably baseball-themed titles (see the table at the end of the article), testament to baseball as a fertile ground for invention.Yet collectively, these titles have for decades been languishing in obscurity. One would have to pore through countless big-city and small-town newspapers to determine whether any of them were ever produced-anywhere. But they did exist, at least on paper, and their authors expectantly submitted them to the Library of Congress for copyright.Additional titles in Dramatic Compositions appear to be baseball-related, yet likely are not. Among the characters in The Bat and the Ball; or, Negative Evidence (1889), a farce by F.E. Chase, are a photographer, a photographer's assistant, and a journalist. None are ballplayers; the ball of the title is in fact a Policemen's Ball. The title character in Gabe's Home Run (1911) is no slugger. This comedy by William and Josephine Giles charts the antics of a harassed husband whose wife chides him for never coming home in time to complete his household chores.Some of the authors of bona fide baseball pieces were established theater professionals. Miron Leffingwell (A Home Run, 1909), for example, was an actor-playwright. Gustav Blum (A Double Play, 1912), was a producer-director-actor who was affiliated with 16 plays that came to Broadway between 1923 and 1946. Bolossy Kiralfy (The Sporting Ballet, or, Turf, Oarsmen, Base Ball, Hunters, etc., 1887), was a dancer-acrobat-pantomimist who staged musical spectacles and worked for the Barnum & Bailey circus. Frank Dumont (A Base Ball Crank, 1890), wrote and acted in scores of minstrel sketches and managed the Eleventh Street Opera House in Philadelphia, described in the New York Times as one of the most famous homes of minstrelsy in America. Richard Walton Tully (Base Ball Game, 1910), was a playwright-director-producer whose best-known stage works, including The Rose of the Rancho (1906) and The Flame (1916), were nonbaseball- related. All made it to Broadway. Base Ball Game did not.Others were thriving writers. Philip Verrill Mighels (On the Diamond, 1906), worked as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and published non-baseball-related novels, short stories, and poetry. …

The Sun Field: A Novel (review)

Reviewed by: The Sun Field: A Novel David Thomas Holmberg Heywood Broun. The Sun Field: A Novel. 1923. Introduction by Darryl Brock. New York: Rvive Books, 2008. 142 pp. Paper, $14.00. In one of the most famous and defining remarks on modernity, French poet Charles Baudelaire wrote in 1863, “by ‘modernity’ I mean the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal and the immutable.” This duality of modernity, its being both “contingent” and “eternal,” resonates beyond just definitions of modernity, and indeed Baudelaire’s definition echoes throughout the multiple and varied modernisms that developed in the early decades of the twentieth century. These reverberations are felt in Heywood Broun’s 1923 novel, The Sun Field, when Judith Winthrop, the narrator George Wallace’s sometimes girlfriend, explains that she wept when New York Yankees slugger John “Tiny” Tyler made a game saving, one-handed catch because “I think the man who caught that ball created the most beautiful thing I ever saw in my life. No sculptor ever achieved anything like that arm and shoulder of his when he reached out for the ball. . . . It’s just that fugitive thing he created this afternoon.” Judith is in love with the brilliant but fleeting aesthetic beauty of a single moment, with the contingency that always accompanies sports. George, however, takes the realist view, arguing that “he isn’t a romantic symbol or anything like that. He’s a person. A ball player and a good one. Not quite as good as he was a few seasons ago but still hanging [End Page 164] on.” Judith wants the catch to mean something, even if that something is fugitive, but George believes only in the man himself; it is a debate between aestheticism and realism, with a bare-handed catch in left field, the “sun field,” as its subject. Judith and George’s argument over the modernist aesthetics of Tiny Tyler’s catch is at the center of Broun’s recently republished modernist novel; a fascinating, remarkably fresh, and funny story about a love triangle between a former baseball writer (George), his intellectual and strong-willed girlfriend (Judith), and a Babe Ruth-like slugger (Tiny Tyler), complete with nearly matching biography and statistics. The narrative action develops out of Judith’s aesthetic obsession with Tiny, which ultimately leads, among other things, to a marriage, some fights, and a World Series. And at times disorienting metafictionality seeps through the novel, as elements of the narrative unmistakably parallel Broun’s own life, even if Broun—writing as George—argues that The Sun Field “isn’t really an autobiographical novel.” Although Broun and George, his narrator-double, share much of their biographies (both were “born” in the late 1880s; and although Broun worked as a newspaper man and sports reporter for several different New York papers, beginning in the 1910s and continuing well into the late ’20s, George only briefly pursued this career), this is nowhere more evident than in their wives. The fictional Judith Winthrop is—like Broun’s wife, Ruth Hale—an ardent feminist and free-thinking wit, and shares with baseball the focus of the novel. Broun knew many of the baseball players of his day (in the introduction Darryl Brock tells of Broun playing bridge with Christy Mathewson), and a number of actual baseball stars from the era make appearances or at least get casual mention throughout the narrative, including Harry Heilmann, Ty Cobb, and Red Faber—both Tiny Tyler and his inspiration, Babe Ruth, hit walk-off home runs off of Faber. This conflation of reality and fiction lends a strange sense of transparency to the novel, a sense that one is not so much reading a modernist text as reading through a modernist text. The novel exists so entirely in its particular historical moment that it reads at times like a twenty-first-century parody of the Jazz Age; for example, Judith writes to George to tell him that the “Sherwood Anderson piece” is not finished but “I have an excellent article ready for him on ‘Tribal Rites in America’ which begins with ‘The Golden Bough’ and ends with a discussion of...

Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star (review)

Reviewed by: Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star Ron Briley Tom Swift. Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008. 339 pp. Cloth, $24.95. In Chief Bender's Burden, journalist Tom Swift provides an entertaining biography of Charles Albert Bender, who was elected to Baseball's Hall of Fame in 1953. Nevertheless, Swift often relies upon conjecture to discuss the response of Bender as a Native American to the racial stereotypes of baseball and American society during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Relying primarily upon newspaper and periodical accounts of Bender's life and baseball career, Swift paints a picture of an athlete who attempted to assimilate into the dominant white culture, but who finally succumbed to societal pressures and sought solace in alcohol. The major problem for Swift's study is that the taciturn pitcher rarely shared his innermost thoughts about topics such as race, so the author is often reduced to assuming how Bender must have felt when subjected to racial profiling and caricature. Swift frames his account of Bender's life around the pitcher's final disastrous appearance for the Philadelphia Athletics during the 1914 World Series against the Boston "Miracle" Braves. The flashbacks to episodes in Bender's [End Page 158] early life are developed in a somewhat cinematic fashion as the reader is returned at the end of each chapter to the struggling Bender on the mound attempting to retire the Boston lineup. The larger historical and cultural context in which Bender lived is best developed in the chapters on the young Native American before he entered professional baseball. Charles Albert Bender was born on 5 May 1884 in Minnesota. His father was of German-American descent, while his mother was a member of the Chippewa nation. The family lived in difficult economic circumstances on the White Earth Indian Reservation. Bender often quarreled with his father, and in 1896 he left his family for the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Rather than being forcibly separated from his family and culture through the Indian boarding school experience, Swift observes that Bender embraced the opportunity to leave his troubled family structure. At Carlisle, Bender was exposed to the assimilationist policies of school founder Richard Henry Pratt, who, along with legendary coach Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, believed that sport provided an opportunity to instill character in the school's Native population. Based upon examination of some compositions prepared by Bender during his Carlisle years, Swift concludes that the athlete internalized Pratt's philosophy or prudently pretended to have adopted his ideas. Swift writes, "Carlisle was a place where American Indians learned to self-censor and where incorrect behavior was sometimes met with a lashing. Besides, Charley [Bender] knew he wanted a place in the dominant culture, so he was willing to tell the dominant culture that he accepted, or at least conceded, its version of the narrative" (55). After graduation from Carlisle in 1902, Bender pitched for Dickinson College and the Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Athletic Club. Appearing with the Harrisburg club, Bender defeated the Chicago Cubs 3–1 and gained the attention of major league scouts. After signing with the Philadelphia Athletics and their manager/owner Connie Mack, the nineteen-year-old Bender won seventeen games as a rookie in 1903. Off the playing field, Bender established a reputation as the stoic Native American, unflappable and taciturn. Swift argues, Given that this sensitive unheralded rookie happened to be an American Indian trying to dispel a set of stereotypes that were so pervasive they might as well have been written on the outfield wall, it's not hard to understand why he chose his words carefully. He would have enough doubts without making more with loose lips. (97) Between 1903 and 1914, Bender won 193 games for the Athletics. He played an essential role in the 1905, 1910, 1911, 1913, and 1914 American League pennants garnered by the team, as well as the world championships of 1910, 1911, and 1913. Swift maintains that during Bender's heyday with the Athletics, [End Page 159] the athlete apparently embodied the assimilationist ideas of Carlisle Indian...

Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star

Chief Bender's Burden: The Silent Struggle of a Baseball Star

Hero Crafting in Sporting Life, an Early Baseball Journal

By the turn of the twentieth century, organized baseball had emerged as America's national pastime with larger-than-life heroes enshrined in mythic lore. Early sports writers engaged in a symbiotic relationship with professional baseball, promoting the sport, its leaders, and players, yet all the while profiting from the game's success. This article examines how Sporting Life, one of the earliest sports journals, played a role in manufacturing heroes out of early American baseball players. This study identifies mechanisms that Sporting Life used to craft heroes in the decade preceding the 1920s, which scholars have long identified as the Golden Age of sports writing. Many scholars have examined legendary Jazz-Age sports writers such as Grantland Rice and Paul Gallico, who mythologized sports stars in the 1920s, but this study reveals that only a decade prior to the Golden Age, Sporting Life writers were crafting heroes of the Dead Ball Era. One question served to guide the narrative: what techniques did Sporting Life writers employ to mythologize prominent professional baseball stars and leaders from 1912 to 1917? After a broad reading of Sporting Life issues throughout the 1910s, twenty-five issues were systematically selected and more than 205 articles were analyzed utilizing an in-depth textual analysis.

“Rebellion in the Kingdom of Swat”: Sportswriters, African American Athletes, and Coverage of Curt Flood's Lawsuit against Major League Baseball

In 1970, baseball star Curt Flood sued Major League Baseball in an effort to change the game's free agency rules. With few exceptions, those who have written about Flood's case agree that sports-writers of the era were overwhelmingly unsupportive of Flood because they believed that his lawsuit would destroy the national pastime. The author researched hundreds of newspapers and magazine articles, and has concluded that the belief that the majority of sports columnists considered Flood's lawsuit “a traitorous undertaking,” as one author put it, is false. In fact, a majority of sports scribes both criticized and praised Flood, as well as the baseball establishment. And while a number of sports columnists unambiguously castigated Flood and his actions, nearly as many enthusiastically backed his lawsuit and rhetoric. This article, then, argues that the sporting press of the early 1970s was more socially aware and sensitive to racial issues, and demonstrated more empathy for an outspoken black man like Flood, than is commonly believed. The author suggests that the opinions of the white sporting press on the divisive issues of the era were as varied and intricate as those of the wider American public.

Boy Toyby Barry Lyga; Boston, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007, 410 pages, $16.95

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessBoy ToyDavid S. Heath F.R.C.P.C.David S. Heath F.R.C.P.C.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:13 Jan 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2008.59.12.1480AboutSectionsView articlePDFView EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail View article Although this novel is about the sexual molestation of seventh-grade student Josh Mendel by his history teacher, Mrs. Sherman, it is not a serious, grim documentary type of work. There is no explicit recounting of the victim's experience. The author, Barry Lyga, has a light touch and Boy Toy is a treat to read. The main character, Josh, is the typical male adolescent protagonist, cast in the same mold as Holden Caulfield and Adrian Mole—highly intelligent and full of amusing wry insights into the sad state of the adult world. Gluing the novel together is baseball. Josh is a high-school baseball star, as are his best friend, Zik, and his girlfriend, Rachel. The book is replete with baseball statistics (Josh is also a math wizard), images, and metaphors. The plot is told in a very clever way. The reader and Josh are both in the dark as to what really happened that night of spin the bottle with Rachel—both age 12. Acting like a libertine twice his age, he rips off her clothes and starts to do things to her that have been taught to him by his seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Sherman. Together, the reader and Josh discover the truth—particularly the psychological truth—of how that pivotal event happened. Effortlessly, the novel flits back and forth between Josh as a 12-year-old and Josh as an 18-year-old about to graduate.All the subtitles and ambiguities of adult-child sexual relationships are explored in a tasteful understated fashion. There are ambiguities in Josh's feelings. At first he feels very special and grown up; he imagines that he is seducing his "hot" history teacher. Fascinated, the reader watches all this gradually unfold, like a slow-motion train wreck. The dialogue is particularly good: authentic, smart, funny, and convincing, especially the transcripts of his sessions with his psychiatrist. It is only by the last chapter, with the help of Rachel and his own brave confrontation with Mrs. Sherman after she is released from jail, that the damage done to Josh and to his ability to relate to his peer group—especially girls—becomes clear. The fiendish cleverness of the sexual predator is brilliantly portrayed without a sexual scene ever being described. It is all done by inference. Mrs. Sherman has turned him into a seasoned Lothario with a teenager's body and mind.Only after his own efforts and the tender mature support of Rachel—illustrated in some wonderfully touching love scenes—does Josh fully heal. The book ends on an upbeat note with Josh getting into an Ivy League school. This book, besides being a good read, provides great insight into sexual abuse of boys and would be of particular interest to those working in that field.Dr. Heath is a psychiatrist at Cambridge Memorial Hospital Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 59Issue 12 December, 2008Pages 1480-1480PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES December 2008 Volume 59 Number 12 Metrics PDF download History Published online 13 January 2015 Published in print 1 December 2008

Boy Toy

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Book ReviewFull AccessBoy ToyDavid S. Heath F.R.C.P.C.David S. Heath F.R.C.P.C.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:13 Jan 2015https://doi.org/10.1176/ps.2008.59.12.1480AboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail Although this novel is about the sexual molestation of seventh-grade student Josh Mendel by his history teacher, Mrs. Sherman, it is not a serious, grim documentary type of work. There is no explicit recounting of the victim's experience. The author, Barry Lyga, has a light touch and Boy Toy is a treat to read. The main character, Josh, is the typical male adolescent protagonist, cast in the same mold as Holden Caulfield and Adrian Mole—highly intelligent and full of amusing wry insights into the sad state of the adult world. Gluing the novel together is baseball. Josh is a high-school baseball star, as are his best friend, Zik, and his girlfriend, Rachel. The book is replete with baseball statistics (Josh is also a math wizard), images, and metaphors. The plot is told in a very clever way. The reader and Josh are both in the dark as to what really happened that night of spin the bottle with Rachel—both age 12. Acting like a libertine twice his age, he rips off her clothes and starts to do things to her that have been taught to him by his seventh-grade teacher, Mrs. Sherman. Together, the reader and Josh discover the truth—particularly the psychological truth—of how that pivotal event happened. Effortlessly, the novel flits back and forth between Josh as a 12-year-old and Josh as an 18-year-old about to graduate.All the subtitles and ambiguities of adult-child sexual relationships are explored in a tasteful understated fashion. There are ambiguities in Josh's feelings. At first he feels very special and grown up; he imagines that he is seducing his "hot" history teacher. Fascinated, the reader watches all this gradually unfold, like a slow-motion train wreck. The dialogue is particularly good: authentic, smart, funny, and convincing, especially the transcripts of his sessions with his psychiatrist. It is only by the last chapter, with the help of Rachel and his own brave confrontation with Mrs. Sherman after she is released from jail, that the damage done to Josh and to his ability to relate to his peer group—especially girls—becomes clear. The fiendish cleverness of the sexual predator is brilliantly portrayed without a sexual scene ever being described. It is all done by inference. Mrs. Sherman has turned him into a seasoned Lothario with a teenager's body and mind.Only after his own efforts and the tender mature support of Rachel—illustrated in some wonderfully touching love scenes—does Josh fully heal. The book ends on an upbeat note with Josh getting into an Ivy League school. This book, besides being a good read, provides great insight into sexual abuse of boys and would be of particular interest to those working in that field.Dr. Heath is a psychiatrist at Cambridge Memorial Hospital Cambridge, Ontario, Canada. FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited ByNone Volume 59Issue 12 December, 2008Pages 1480-1480PSYCHIATRIC SERVICES December 2008 Volume 59 Number 12 Metrics PDF download History Published online 13 January 2015 Published in print 1 December 2008

George Herman “Babe” Ruth Jr: Baseball Star and Early Participant in a Cancer Clinical Trial

George Herman Ruth Jr (1895-1948)—popularly known as “Babe,” “The Sultan of Swat,” or “The Bambino”—is considered by many baseball fans to have been the greatest player of all time. Ruth was born in Baltimore, MD, to German-American parents who worked long hours in saloons and had little time for their increasingly wild son. At the age of 7 years, Ruth was sent to St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, an orphanage and reformatory, where his custody was signed over to the Catholic missionaries who operated the institution. At St. Mary's, the boy was taught baseball by Brother Matthias, who also served as a stabilizing influence in young Ruth's chaotic life. In 1914, 19-year-old George Ruth was signed to a contract by the then-minor league Baltimore Orioles as the team owner's “newest ‘babe,’” a nickname that stuck with Ruth for the rest of his career. Later that same year, his contract was sold to the Boston Red Sox, for whom he proved to be an exceptional left-handed pitcher and played on 3 winning World Series teams. By 1918, Ruth's hitting skills had become too valuable to allow him to continue to be used solely as a pitcher, and he began to play outfield in most games. After the 1919 season, in a move bitterly regretted by Boston sports fans ever since, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee traded Ruth to the New York Yankees for $100,000, an enormous sum at the time. Ruth is best known today for his dominance of baseball during his years as a Yankee, as well as his flamboyant personality and reckless lifestyle. In Ruth's first season in New York (1920), he hit 54 home runs—more than any other entire team except the Philadelphia Phillies, who played in an exceptionally small ballpark—and batted .376 with a mammoth .847 slugging percentage. The latter set a record that stood for 81 years. His power hitting transformed the game, heralding the “live-ball era” in which the possibility of home runs and high scores drew large crowds. Increased gate receipts contributed to the 1923 debut of a new Yankee Stadium, nicknamed The House That Ruth Built. In 1927, Ruth was the first to hit 60 home runs in a single season, and he finished his career with 714 home runs—a record finally broken 47 years later by Henry Aaron—as well as 2217 runs batted in (2nd all-time to Aaron) and a lifetime batting average of .342 (currently 10th all time). Ruth's heavy drinking and smoking, public appearances with politicians and movie stars, series of mistresses (including one with whom he fathered a child), extensive charity work, and immense appetites fueled his legend and celebrity. Babe Ruth's contribution to cancer chemotherapy research is much less well recognized than his baseball accomplishments. In late 1946, Ruth developed hoarseness and persistent left retro-orbital pain, which was eventually diagnosed as a nasopharyngeal carcinoma with extensive regional lymph node metastases compressing the external carotid artery and causing Horner syndrome. Despite surgery and radiotherapy, the tumor persisted, and Ruth became cachectic as a result of dysphagia. In early 1947, Ruth participated in one of the very first clinical trials of an anticancer drug: Teropterin (pteroyltriglutamic acid), a folate analogue developed by Lederle Laboratories, which was a precursor of methotrexate, a drug still used in cancer chemotherapy. Ruth was treated daily for 6 weeks by Dr Richard Lewisohn (1875-1961) at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. He reportedly did not want to know which drug he was receiving or why (he was never told that he had cancer) and did not sign a consent form. Remarkably, Ruth had a dramatic clinical response with regression of adenopathy and symptomatic improvement, and his case was presented (anonymously) at a research conference in St Louis in September 1947. The Wall Street Journal and Time reported the following week that scientists were on the verge of a “cure for cancer,” but the drug was quickly discarded in favor of a more potent agent, aminopterin. Unfortunately, Ruth's cancer recurred, and despite additional radiotherapy, he died of pneumonia and metastatic cancer at Memorial Hospital in New York City in August 1948, at the age of 53 years. Babe Ruth has been honored philatelically dozens of times by many countries, including 3 times by the United States: in 1983 (Scott No. 2046), 1998 (Scott No. 3184a), and 2000 (Scott No. 3408h).

Chief Bender's burden: the silent struggle of a baseball star

The greatest American Indian baseball player of all time, Charles Albert Bender, was, according to a contemporary, 'the coolest pitcher in the game'. Using a trademark delivery, an impressive assortment of pitches that may have included the game's first slider, and an apparently unflappable demeanor, he earned a reputation as baseball's great clutch pitcher during tight Deadball Era pennant races and in front of boisterous World Series crowds. More remarkably yet, 'Chief' Bender's Hall of Fame career unfolded in the face of immeasurable prejudice. This skillfully told and complete account of Bender's life is also a portrait of greatness of character maintained despite incredible pressure - of how a celebrated man thrived while carrying an untold weight on his shoulders. With a journalist's eye for detail and a novelist's feel for storytelling, Tom Swift takes readers on Bender's improbable journey - from his early years on the White Earth Reservation, to his development at the Carlisle Indian School, to his big break and eventual rise to the pinnacle of baseball. The story of a paradoxical American sports hero, one who achieved a once-unfathomable celebrity while suffering the harsh injustices of a racially intolerant world, Chief Bender's Burden is an eye-opening and inspiring narrative of a unique American life.

From Art of War to Attila the Hun: A Critical Survey of Recent Works on Philosophy/Spirituality and Business Leadership

From Art of War to Attila the Hun:A Critical Survey of Recent Works on Philosophy/Spirituality and Business Leadership Steven Heine Introduction What is the key to decision-making and interpersonal skills that are effective and productive in this global era of cross-cultural business communications and negotiations? Is there something distinctive about the social values or worldview of East Asia that has led to the post-World War II economic miracle and prompted the West to study the Eastern style of conducting business? These are the main issues addressed in the recent boom in books on business strategies as well as on professional leadership and motivational techniques, which have proved to be a rich area of interest for comparative philosophy. Many different spiritual traditions have been mined for inspiration and guidance in the planning of strategic maneuvers for the purpose of prevailing in a competitive marketplace and in developing human and material resources in a stressful world characterized by continual contest and conflict. It is not surprising to find religious figures from Jesus (Jones 1996) to the Buddha (Metcalf and Hateley 2001) cited as sources. But it is perhaps more unusual to find that inspiration has been gleaned from figures as diverse as the biblical heroine Queen Esther and the baseball star Yogi Berra (Berra 2003), known as the "Zennest master of all" for his confounding, kōan-like utterances such as "When you come to a fork in the road, take it!" Like another Silk Road conqueror, Genghis Khan (Weatherford 2005), Attila the Hun has been recast in recent revisionist studies and reflections from a barbaric annihilator of civilization to a strategist/administrator extraordinaire whose deliberate methods of conquest and diplomacy presaged contemporary advances in organizational theory. Other sources range from classical philosophers and modern folklorists in the West to Eastern hermits and poets, along with warriors and generals, whose approaches can be adapted to professional leadership. Although there are ample representatives of both Eastern and Western thought, perhaps the single main source of practical advice has been the "Art of War" thought of Sun Tzu and extensions of this in various approaches ranging from the "Thirty-six Stratagems" to sword-fighting. It has been said that The Book of Five Rings (Miyamoto 1993), which, like Sun Tzu's text (Ames 1993), appears in translated renditions and commentaries too numerous to count, has for several decades been required reading at business schools as well as military academies. The Art of War is especially useful in prescribing strategic methods of deception and indirection to achieve victory on the battlefield, and this material is frequently consulted [End Page 126] for ways of gaining advantage in competitions with corporate rivals (McNeilly 1996; Krause 2005). Other Asian traditions—some very much influenced by and yet distinct from the rhetoric of the Art of War—have contributed to the discourse on the significance of Asian business. Confucian values of social cohesion based on patriarchal authority are seen to have played a crucial role in the postwar economic miracle. Zen Buddhism and the Samurai code of honor are important for interpreting leadership and management skills to maintain stability and equilibrium amid the vicissitudes of a topsy-turvy contemporary professional world. There are also many examples of the influence of philosophy/spirituality on business stemming from Western traditions of thought that encompass religious, folklore, and literary texts. These range from ancient wisdom in the Bible and in the classics, such as Heraclitus and Aristotle, to the nursery tales of Hans Christian Andersen and contemporary Christian evangelism. In addition to finding inspiration in these traditional sources, new research borrowing from cross-cultural mysticism, psychology, and alternative forms of spirituality has led to the emergence of an approach that I refer to, for want of a better term, as "Neo-philosophy," which emphasizes the role of self-discovery and self-control in the formation of decision-making and leadership skills. Neo-philosophy seems to point to an intriguing convergence of Eastern and Western outlooks in highlighting the fact that a productive professional life is based on choices made through the power of intuition and implemented by means of a pragmatic approach to resolving conflicts in a...

Reconnecting the Baseball Star

Reconnecting the Baseball Star Irving Rein and Ben Shields If Babe Ruth were a sports star in the digital age, how would the media handle him? Consider the event enshrined as the "bellyache heard round the world," Ruth's physical setback before the 1925 season. The crisis begins at spring training, where he started to feel ill but remained with the team and kept playing. On April 7 his condition worsened to the point where he collapsed while in Asheville, North Carolina, and was sent home to New York the next night for treatment. After arriving in New York, Ruth's personal physician, Dr. Edward King, ultimately diagnosed him with an intestinal abscess, which he said was caused by Ruth's diet. In the media, sportswriter W. O. McGeehan recast the doctor's conclusion, claiming that Ruth's collapse was the result of a hot dog overdose, a story that led to the event's now famous bellyache label.1 Despite this seemingly convincing story, lurking questions about what caused Ruth's illness have always underlain the bellyache episode. Was it merely overindulgence in brats and Coca Colas that caused the intestinal abscess? Or was it the result of the hard drinking, womanizing, and gluttonous lifestyle that Ruth had been leading? Some sportswriters even privately speculated that Ruth suffered from gonorrhea, a condition contracted from his notorious late-night partying.2 While these theories questioned Ruth's lifestyle and his penchant for alcohol and women, sportswriters at the time never printed a word of speculation, and Ruth survived not only a medical problem but a surefire communications nightmare. This situation would have been drastically different if today's all-pervasive, technology-driven media covered Ruth's illness. A cable television sports network would be following the Yankees in spring training, covering the team in advance of the season with a behind-the-scenes look at the players. At the first suggestion that Ruth was suffering from stomach cramps and a fever, news would be flashed on sports Web sites and text messaged to cell phone users—"Ruth Has Bellyache, 102.3 Fever. Listed as Day-to-Day"—and the television [End Page 62] anchors and newspaper reporters would file instant reports on his condition, often belligerently debating its causes and solutions as if they all went to medical school. And the crawler on the cable stations all morning, afternoon, and night would read: "BREAKING NEWS: Ruth in serious but stable condition," followed by: "Sources close to the team hint at lifestyle causes." Adding to the media barrage would be the key opinion-leading bloggers and podcasters, who would join the media blitz by writing or recording their own thoughts and interpretations of the illness, with the traditional media using this information in their own reports. Fans themselves would also travel to the training facility with their video recorders and digital cameras, hoping to capture a video to upload on YouTube and take a picture to post on their MySpace page. All of this is just day one of the Ruth bellyache. As new information about his condition is released, the sports world would expect updates in all channels until his illness was resolved and recovery time completed. During his era Ruth was glorified for not only his home runs but also his outsized persona, receiving a pass in the prime of his career for behavior that today's baseball stars could never attempt without significant consequences. In today's media environment, it is unlikely that stories of Ruth's excessive lifestyle would go unnoticed, and his image would almost certainly be tarnished. In light of this comparison, would Babe Ruth still be considered as not only the greatest baseball star of all time but also the gold standard of the golden age if he played under such media scrutiny? Although it is impossible to compare players across historical generations in sports, it is certainly less likely. Placing a Babe Ruth crisis in a modern-baseball context demonstrates how the contemporary communications environment in the sports industry has evolved over the course of baseball history. Ruth played in an era in which, despite his wildly careening off-the-field decisions, his...

The Baseball Film to 1920

Every motion picture is a time capsule, a moment in the life of a culture. But unless it is two minutes or ten hours long and non-narrative-in other words, decidedly non-commercial-a film is usually produced for one purpose: to make money. In this regard, a motion picture is no different from an automobile, a roll of bathroom tissue, or a can of beer. This profit motive also explains why, in the parlance of the business, individual films are referred to as product.Motion pictures that feature baseball-related settings have been produced since the late 1890s and early 1900s, when moviegoing was as novel as watching television was in 1950 or renting movies on videotape was in 1985. From the very beginning, baseball was depicted in motion pictures primarily because of the burgeoning popularity of the sport. It made sense to filmmakers that fans of the game would fork over their hard-earned nickels to gaze at comedies or dramas depicting speedballing hurlers, ninth-inning heroics, and likable underdogs triumphing against the odds. In particular, in this era before the advent of radio and television, motion pictures allowed moviegoers-especially those who lived outside the major league cities-to see and admire the baseball stars they only could read about in newspapers or hear about while chatting with their cronies at the corner barbershop. Such films generally were newsreels spotlighting major leaguers, or one- and two-reelers featuring ballplayers in what were little more than cameo appearances, or highly fictionalized biographical features in which scenarists transformed ballplayers into fairy-tale heroes. Whether in a story that was fact or fiction, however, seeing Ty Cobb or Babe Ruth up-close on a movie screen in 1917 or 1920 must have been a transcendent experience for the average baseball fan.Despite their growing popularity, motion pictures still were dwarfed by as the most popular form of mass entertainment. On November 8, 1908, the Washington Post described a polite vaudeville program, to be presented at Chase's theater. The bill included Lasky's Viennese production, Love Waltz,' with Alfred Kappeler and Audrey Maple ... Laddie Cliff, the English boy comedian ... Will H. Fox, fresh from London triumphs, in his new single piano act; the Young American Five; the Five Jordans, and so on. The final entertainment cited was a film: 'The Baseball Fan' by the American vitagraph.Yet the storylines found in the earliest baseball films, and the manner in which they portray ballplayers and fans, serve to mirror the now long-extinct American culture before 1920: a time of innocence, a pre-Jazz Age America that was a nation of small towns and small-town types. The prevailing view was that the simplicity of rural life was preferable to the corrupting ways of the metropolis. It was an era when filmmakers could celebrate a pastoral America whose foundation was Victorian morality, while emphasizing the notion that leaving the farm for the city meant going off in search of sin.Whether on purpose or by accident, baseball-playing characters were depicted in such milieus-and their on-field exploits were blended into standard plotlines featuring plainspoken Good Guys who win their true love while fending off one-dimensionally evil villains. If baseball truly was America's national pastime, such baseball players were ideal all-American heroes. Their honesty and good intentions aside, however, it was their onfield exploits that made them lastingly heroic. Before a new reality set in, that of flaming youth and bathtub gin, the Black Sox Scandal and the Roaring Twenties, baseball movies could lovingly-and believably-chart the comic antics of fans attempting to enjoy ballgames despite their bullying bosses or unsympathetic wives, or weave the stories of rural whammers or flamethrowers who overcome obstacles, perform storybook heroics, and win the love of the demure, true-blue heroine while spurning the entreaties of villains to cheat on the field. …

"Let's Just Say It Works for Me": Rafael Palmeiro, Major League Baseball, and the Marketing of Viagra

On October 28,2003, representatives of Pfizer pharmaceuticals gathered at corporate headquarters in New York City to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the launch of their wonder drug Viagra. The guest list for the big event, along with the requisite press, public relations executives, NASCAR luminaries, and satisfied customers, featured erstwhile Texas Rangers first baseman and designated hitter Rafael Palmeiro. (1) Not only has Palmeiro had a spectacular career, both at bat and in the field, but during the 2002 and 2003 seasons Palmeiro, currently of the Baltimore Orioles, also played the role of Viagra pitchman. The connection of Viagra--an official and, as its ads would have us know, proud sponsor of Major League Baseball since 2002--is not limited to Palmeiro's endorsement, nor did it end with his term as pitchman. Prominent outfield signage, a sweepstakes tied into the 2003 All-Star Game, and even an online fantasy baseball game entitled Clutch Performances[TM] reintroduced for the 2004 season, reinforce the connection between Major League Baseball and Pfizer's drug. What is it about baseball, as opposed to any other professional sport, that prompted Pfizer's marketing wizards to link it to their performance-enhancing drug? Why associate Viagra with professional sports in the first place? And what is it about Rafael Palmeiro, certainly a high-profile player but hardly Johnny Damon or Derek Jeter, that makes him the right spokesman for this particular product? After all, Palmeiro is not the first well-known celebrity to endorse Viagra. Who can forget the image of Bob Dole offering enthusiastic testimonials for Pfizer's little blue pill in those early ads, which became so familiar to American consumers that the former U.S. Senate majority leader went on to parody them in spots for Pepsi, along with Britney Spears? So why should consumers pay attention when Palmeiro steps forward with the bold statement, take Viagra. Let's just say it works for me? Looking at the way pharmaceutical companies brand and advertise prescription drugs, as well as the specific challenges presented by marketing this particular preparation, I will attempt to answer some of these questions. I will also consider recent attempts by Pfizer's competitors in the marketplace, perhaps inspired by Viagra's success, to market similar performance-enhancing preparations with their own sports tie-ins. NUXATED IRON At the outset the connection between baseball and pharmaceuticals seems tenuous at best. Yet Viagra is hardly the first drug to advertise using baseball imagery, and Palmeiro is hardly the first baseball star to endorse a pharmaceutical product. As far back as the nineteenth century advertisers sold American consumers patent medicines with the help of testimonials from a variety of celebrities, famous European physicians, and other quacks. Celebrity endorsers of patent elixirs were, for the most part, women. But baseball players such as Ty Cobb, chief promoter of Nuxated Iron, a performance-enhancing concoction of sorts, also played on this particular field. Still, athlete endorsers of such patent preparations were few and far between. With time, and with the eventual enactment and enforcement of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, patent medicines gave way to more efficacious remedies, ones with an official stamp of approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Still, the legitimate pharmaceutical industry did not really blossom as a commercial force until the years following World War II. Even when drug companies began to grow exponentially, and advertising for over-the-counter medications proliferated, ads for these products did not, for the most part, feature figures from the baseball world. There are undoubtedly scattered examples, but drug endorsements by baseball players were certainly not the norm. Recently, however, things have changed. Having retired after pitching for the New York Mets, California Angels, Houston Astros, and Texas Rangers, Nolan Ryan went on to pitch for Advil. …

History as Myth in Bernard Malamud's The Natural

Written between 1949 and 1950 and published in 1951, Bernard Malamud's The Natural garnered more critical attention than any other baseball novel. This attention is not surprising, for The Natural is the first novel of a writer who subsequently achieved canonical status, and, following Lardner's work, it is the first of many serious baseball novels in the latter half of the twentieth century. Critics are also attracted to The Natural because Malamud infuses his story of star-crossed phenom Roy Hobbs with allusions drawn from a variety of mythic sources--Arthurian legend, the Bible, Homer, fertility myth, the myth of the hero--as well as with central constructs from the work of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. At the same time, the novel draws on events from both documented and accepted baseball history, most notably from the Black Sox scandal but also from the careers of Babe Ruth, Eddie Waitkus, Wilbert Robinson, Bob Feller, Chuck Hostetler, and Pete Reiser. In several interviews Malamud admitted that he clearly intended to depict the twentieth-century baseball star as a mythic hero--in the case of Roy Hobbs, as one who fails in his quest, disappointing the hopes of his culture and community. In 1983 he told a USA Today interviewer, lived somewhere near Ebbetts Field. The old Brooklyn Dodgers were our heroes, our stars, like out of myth. (1) He also noted in another interview that his studies of myth in college had given him the background he felt he needed to treat baseball: transformed game into myth, via Jesse Weston's Percival legend with an assist from T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland plus the lives of several ballplayers I had read, in particular Babe Ruth's and Bobby Feller's. (2) This fusion of myth and baseball proven problematic for Malamud scholars over the years. First of all, the use of baseball itself as subject matter is an anomaly for a writer who subsequently wrote prolifically about the inner sufferings of Jewish grocers, salesmen, teachers, landlords, and tenants. Indeed, Malamud is most often seen as a Jewish novelist in the vein of Isaac Bashevis Singer. While some critics reconcile The Natural with Malamud's other work by comparing the suffering of Roy Hobbs with that of Malamud's numerous Jewish protagonists, many are troubled by his use of baseball as a vehicle to treat a twentieth-century man as a mythic hero. Reflecting the critical consensus, Edward Abramson questions whether baseball, despite its important position as an American ritual, can carry the weight of [mythical] allusion Malamud places on it. (3) Like Abramson many other critics devalue baseball, concluding that the game lacks the intellectual depth to support the layers of myth imposed on the story. Only Earl Wasserman strongly argues that the game proves appropriate subject matter, arguing that Malamud has rendered the lived events of the American game so as to compel it to reveal what it essentially is, the ritual whereby we express the psychological nature of American life and its moral predicament. (4) Unlike most critics, Wasserman demonstrates an extensive knowledge of baseball, cataloging at the start of his essay the various baseball events and circumstances Malamud draws upon. Wasserman, however, like other critics, is more interested in The Natural beyond baseball, following his brief review of baseball history in the text with a complex and detailed Jungian reading. My intention here is to treat the baseball history in the novel in terms of the ways it contributes to rather than detracts from the mythic treatment of the subject matter. As a boy and young man, Malamud saw ballplayers in mythic terms, and his appropriation and reworking of actual events serve not only to support the external mythic allusions but to illustrate how the real events of the game, both those recorded faithfully and those embellished by time and memory, ascend to the status of myth in the imagination of the fans. …

Reversing neglect to heal the poor: Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative

In 1938, Lou Gehrig, an American baseball star, discovered he had a rare neuromuscular disease that progressively made him weaker until he was completely paralysed. He died 3 years later. Lou Gehrig's disease, also known as amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) or motor neuron disease (MND) affects one in 50000 people. Stephen Hawking has it and David Niven died from it. The causes of this fatal disease are still unknown and no cure exists, just a few drugs to relieve symptoms; however, intensive research is being carried out to find a cure. In fact, more research has been performed on this rare disease in the past 5 years than has been carried out in the previous 150 years, and new potential treatments are being discovered regularly.