Story Of Baseball Research Articles

Backyards to Ballparks: More Personal Baseball Stories from the Stand and Beyond by Eric C. Gray (review)

Backyards to Ballparks: More Personal Baseball Stories from the Stand and Beyond by Eric C. Gray (review)

Extra Innings: Fred Claire’s Journey to City of Hope and Finding a World Championship Team by Tim Madigan

Reviewed by: Extra Innings: Fred Claire’s Journey to City of Hope and Finding a World Championship Team by Tim Madigan Anna R. Newton Tim Madigan. Extra Innings: Fred Claire’s Journey to City of Hope and Finding a World Championship Team. Herndon, VA: Mascot Books, 2020. 202 pp. Cloth, $24.95. This book is a biography of Fred Claire and his career in baseball. In addition to well-written tales of his time with the Dodgers, it tells the story of his journey with cancer treatment at the City of Hope. As a book, it is anecdotal, rich with quotes and detailed accounts of his career with the Dodgers as the public relations director, executive vice president, and finally general manager (GM). Over the thirty years with the team, the final position was the most abrupt and challenging. In the wake of Al Campanis’s intemperate remarks on national television in 1987, Claire was asked to take and accepted the position of GM with the proviso that he have total and complete responsibility for baseball operations. He later said that he needed to accept responsibility and accountability and not blame others. The many baseball stories reveal the character of Mr. Claire and his approach to every situation: “He is so committed to doing the right thing every day” (32). [End Page 128] The author uses the format of alternating Dodger or baseball story chapters with City of Hope or cancer treatment chapters. The shift between the two major themes, City of Hope and baseball, is somewhat abrupt during the book’s first half. The introduction to the City of Hope story is, at first, a surprise for the reader. As Claire’s health issues continue and his care moves to the City of Hope, the background and the mission of the City of Hope are revealed. This approach elevates the book from a pleasant retelling of Dodger stories to showing the intersection between Claire’s baseball career and his personal journeys. Claire’s personality and character are consistent across both hugely demanding commitments. It becomes possible to understand that the adversities and the necessary perseverance are very similar between Claire’s journeys with the Dodgers and the City of Hope. Quotes from Claire demonstrate the synergy between the two endeavors. We all are tested, who we are is determined by how we handle the challenges. (191) What we can do together is profoundly more impactful than what we can do alone. (199) Cancer treatments are like the baseball season—you don’t win the pennant or lose it in a single day. You keep giving it your best every day, with focus and discipline. . . . It’s a matter of believing in the people around you who are doing their best to assist. (68) Today is all we really have. (10; this after his third relapse) The book’s last third covers Claire’s fundraising and community activities after he left the Dodgers and since his latest treatment to the present day. These activities are closely intertwined with his corporate and personal baseball relationships and his constant support for the City of Hope. Baseball is the setting, deep and wide enough to tell these stories. The writer does an excellent job of transitioning between settings and describing the challenges of a demanding career and health condition. It is thought provoking that one story reinforces the message of the other. Baseball operations at the top are very complex, often not in the control of the person in the top job. Cancer treatment is also not in the control of the patient. Madigan tells the story of both journeys remarkably well by using Claire’s character, values, and personal commitments, all of which contribute to telling this inspiring story. [End Page 129] Copyright © 2022 University of Nebraska Press

When Your Wife has Tommy John Surgery and other Baseball Stories by E. Ethelbert Miller

When Your Wife has Tommy John Surgery and other Baseball Stories by E. Ethelbert Miller

Cultural Truth and Ethnographic Consequences

Fieldwork in an increasingly literate world presents new dilemmas for anthropologists. The information recorded in ethnographies may have consequences in the cultures and for the people with whom the ethnographer has worked. The political system of the peoples′ nation may be able to use ethnographic information and the politics of the local community can be affected by the permanent record an ethnography creates. This paper uses an old baseball story as a metaphor for the decisive powers of the ethnographer, and illustrates the issues with four instances calling for decisions from fieldwork in southeastern Nigeria.

A History of Contested Narratives: The National Film Board of Canada’s Evolving Cinematic Treatment (1945–2018) of the Internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two

The National Film Board of Canada (NFB) is world-renown for its documen- taries and animations. This article examines how the NFB dealt with one specific topic – the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two. By analyzing the films produced by the NFB between 1945 and 2018, this study seeks to understand how and why its narratives of the internment changed dramatically over three-quarters of a century. The study deals with six NFB films: Of Japanese Descent (1945), Enemy Alien (1975), Minoru: Memory of Exile (1992), Freedom Has a Price (1994), Sleeping Tigers: The Asahi Baseball Story (2003), and East of the Rockies (2018). Drawing on the postcolonial concepts of the colonizing gaze and hegemony, as well as poststructuralist concepts of the trace and discourses of power, it probes the evolution of the NFB’s cinematic culture and concludes that the NFB’s film legacy parallels a changing public discourse in Canada on this traumatic historical violation of human rights.

Diamonds at the margin of empires: ‘baseball complex’ in the Japanese American internment and colonized Taiwan

ABSTRACT This article studies baseball played at ‘the margin of empires.’ It attends to the manifestations of ‘baseball complex’ – the persistent sociopsychological affective force for baseball that derives from personal experiences/memories and political/historical institutions – in two geohistorical contexts: Japanese American internment in the US during World War II and Taiwan around the 1930s under Japanese rule. Besides historical references, newspaper reports and critical scholarship, two films are taken as core texts of analysis: Desmond Nakano’s American Pastime (2007), which enacts a story of baseball in the Topaz Relocation Center in Utah, USA during the second World War, and Umin Boya’s Kano (2014), which tells the story of Kano baseball team emerging from Taiwan under Japanese colonization. My reading draws attention to the stratified power structure that characterizes the margin of empires and suggests to move beyond the binary comprehension of baseball as either a tool of acculturation and colonization (for the imperial and dominant) or a medium of social ascendancy and cultural assimilation (for the colonized and minoritized). I argue that baseball not only could be utilized by those holding power or those obviously minoritized/colonized, but could be needed urgently by those caught in-between the powerful and the disempowered, such as the marginalized whites assigned to guard over Japanese Americans on sites of the internment or the Japanese relegated to Japan’s colony in Taiwan. Moreover, by foregrounding baseball’s trans-Pacific trajectory and exploring baseball’s entanglement with the triangulated power processes between the US, Japan, and Taiwan, I challenge the static meaning of baseball while testing out cinema’s value in simulating historical situations and changes.

Here’s the Pitch: The Amazing, True, New, and Improved Story of Baseball and Advertising

Here’s the Pitch: The Amazing, True, New, and Improved Story of Baseball and Advertising

Have to Write a Baseball Story Sometime: Hemingway, the Busher, and The Old Man and the Sea

Have to Write a Baseball Story SometimeHemingway, the Busher, and The Old Man and the Sea Scott D. Peterson (bio) Don't you know there aren't any fathers on a ball field? —Gregory "Gigi" Hemingway to his father, Dear Papa, Dear Hotch: The Correspondence of Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner, 36 This resonating, Busher-like retort comes from one of Hemingway's letters to his friend A. E. Hotchner in 1949 during a prolonged exchange in which baseball was discussed in each letter between them. Hemingway lauds Gigi's control to the point of comparing him to Grover Cleveland Alexander (whom Hemingway met as a cub reporter for the Kansas City Star in 1918), and he seems to be proud that his youngest boy is tough enough to "try and knock everybody's cap off on the first pitch."1 Gigi's retort comes after he dusts his Papa, prompting Hemingway to ask, "Don't you know any better than to throw at your own father?"2 The irony here is that Hemingway threw at his own literary "fathers," starting with Sherwood Anderson, the target of The Torrents of Spring's satire. Another mentor, Ring Lardner, comes under fire in The Old Man and the Sea, when the protagonist, Santiago, leaves his fishing village and undertakes a Busher's journey to fulfill Hemingway's promise to "write a baseball story sometime."3 The latter brushback is especially fitting when we factor in the possibility that Santiago's overblown reverence for the "Gran Ligas" and the "great DiMaggio" are being played for laughs at a besotted Busher in the same vein as Lardner's narratives.4 Hemingway thus extended Lardner's vernacular modernist experiment to the middle of the twentieth century through his letters, short fiction, and The Old Man and the Sea as his use of the Busher figure transitioned from the objectification of a cultural other to identification with someone we can root for as "one of us."5 Vernacular modernism has been used as a critical approach in architectural [End Page 89] and film studies, but the theory is just beginning to be used by literary critics, according to Brooks E. Hefner, who uses the concept as a "model for rethinking modernist boundaries … by fully considering the modernist project of experimentation with language across race, class, and ethnicity in American popular writing of the 1910s and 1920s."6 As Hefner notes, Ring Lardner fits the definition as an early twentieth century writer without strong transnational ties and who used American vernacular to write for working class and middlebrow audiences.7 Although Ernest Hemingway has been linked with high American modernists for some time, his letters, short fiction, and novels also serve as examples of Hefner's vernacular modernism, beginning with Hemingway's apprenticeship in the 1910s and extending to the publication of The Old Man and the Sea at midcentury.8 Further, as journalists turned fiction writers, Hemingway and Lardner encouraged identification between their characters and their readers through the use of actual details, humanizing elements, and vernacular dialect.9 Vernacular dialect as employed by Lardner and Hemingway can be characterized by Michael Denning's concepts of ventriloquism—"throwing one's voice into the form of another" with Horatio Alger being a prime example—and impersonation, which involves the writer "assuming the voice of another in one's own form" to "represent, speak for, their audiences."10 Like his mentor Lardner, Hemingway laughed at the Busher through humorous use of ventriloquism while also encouraging identification with the figure by employing impersonation to speak in meaningful ways for the recurring character in baseball fiction of a brash, over-confident young player who leaves his rural background to "make good" in the major leagues. The long journey to The Old Man and the Sea started with Hemingway's apprenticeship steeped in elements of baseball and vernacular modernism through ventriloquism as he threw his voice into Ring Lardner's Busher figure.11 Hemingway's experience with Bushers began early: out of the ten baseball players named in requests for "action pictures" from the Sporting News and "art photos" from Baseball Magazine at ages twelve and sixteen, six of...

Introducing Michael Hopkins

Introducing Michael Hopkins Abby Frucht (bio) Not long ago I had the privilege of serving as judge for a local fiction contest. Michael Hopkins’ story, Static, rose to the top of a pool of accomplished, eye-catching finalists because its delicacy—its way of never saying outright the thing most needing to be understood, its insistence on understatement not for the sake of style but because in life, for everything that needs to be spoken aloud there’s something else for which words are worse than inadequate—appealed to me. The subject of Static is….except I shouldn’t explain, since to explain would subtract from Static rather than add to it. Suffice it to say that nothing about Static tipped me off on Michael’s new story, Full Count, which has to do with a Korean Phillies pitcher, Hyeon-Jeong, aka Rick, who upends the world of baseball and wears out his welcome by throwing countless unhittable knuckleballs. You might be thinking, like I did, that the world is over crowded with baseball stories, and you might be asking why, when I stayed mum about Static, I’m revealing, already, so much about Full Count. Well but that’s only the bare bones beginning. I don’t love baseball stories, generally. They remind me of those sports-based word problems in seventh grade math, of which I flunked every quiz since, playing no sports, I had no clue what they wanted me to think or do. To tell the truth it’s only because I liked Static so much I kept reading Full Count. I’m so grateful I did. Hopkins’ skill for keeping quiet is at first glance absent here, camouflaged by the noise of a baseball diamond. But those noises give way at just the right moments and in just the right measure to Rick’s private and defiant resolution of his problem. The very opposite of Static, in whose small domestic setting big things happen, the heart of Full Count beats more privately than it appears, yet this brilliant fiction spins us—like that of Pulitzer Prize winner Viet Thanh Nguyen, which I first read in my service as Pen Faulkner judge—into the charged territory of political identity, loss, and assimilation. We come away smart and smarting, moved and enlightened or rather lit up, in motion, like the ball game itself. Michael Hopkins lives one town away from me here in Wisconsin. We’ve never met. It’s possible we’ve crossed paths, and it’s possible too we’ll have coffee one day, talk writing, politics, dogs, whatever. Maybe we’ll be friends, but for now it’s a thrill to have learned Michael’s out there, just down the road. Why a thrill, you ask? Aren’t all writers just down some road from each other? Isn’t every new story by anyone anywhere every reader’s discovery? Yes….but no. I thank The Mill, Pleiades, Pen Faulkner, and other venues for allowing me this privilege of getting closer than usual, of reaching into, and out to, the next world over. [End Page 149] Abby Frucht Abby Frucht’s most recent book is Licorice (Grove Press, 1994), winner of a New Voices Award from Quality Paperback Bookclub. Copyright © 2018 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

Traditional baseball statistics still dominate news stories

This study investigates whether journalists have adopted sabermetrics, the use of advanced baseball statistics for making player projections and objectively measuring player performance, in their reporting of Major League Baseball stories since the print and theatrical release of Moneyball. Findings suggest that traditional baseball statistics still dominate baseball news reporting but the use of sabermetrics has significantly increased after Moneyball was published.

Here's the Pitch: The Amazing, True, New, and Improved Story of Baseball and Advertising by Roberta J. Newman

Here's the Pitch: The Amazing, True, New, and Improved Story of Baseball and Advertising by Roberta J. Newman

Archival Sovereignty in LeAnne Howe's <em>Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story</em>

Archival Sovereignty in LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings:An Indian Baseball Story Emily Lederman (bio) Ezol smoothes the hem of her dress. "Documents lie," she says casually. —Miko Kings 28 Contemporary American Indian texts engage with the materials of colonial US archives to highlight their complicity in the genocide and oppression of Indigenous peoples. Archival practices of documentation, including missionary records, the mapping of land, and the collecting or theft of artifacts and stories, are revealed as tools of settler colonialism mobilized to justify genocidal state practices. Yet these colonial archival materials may also serve as entry points to tribally specific histories. Since American Indians are both silenced and hypervisible within the colonial archive, working with the colonial archive's misrepresentations is an important part of destabilizing that archive. Well-read authors of the Native American Literary Renaissance, including N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna Pueblo), and Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), confront the limitations of the colonial archive and emphasize Indigenous modes of accessing, organizing, and preserving histories in their fictional texts. Contemporary American Indian novels continue to chart the violences of US colonial archives and offer a way out of a narrow historical lens. These novels open up historical possibilities and deepen historical understanding in part by repurposing colonial archival documents within Indigenous narratives and epistemologies. I focus on LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007) in this article because the text explicitly theorizes and models the construction of a decolonial archive using real and fictionalized documents. [End Page 64] Placing work of the interdisciplinary "archival turn" in conversation with the tribally specific, I call collections of document, story, object, and ephemera "archives" throughout this article in order to legitimize them as sources of historical knowledge and sites of knowledge production. Such collections are uniquely powerful because they occur outside of institutions; as feminist and queer archivists have demonstrated, calling personal collections and ephemera "archives" "remains a powerful authorizing act" (Eichhorn 15). Decolonial archives are mediums for preserving and accessing history that privilege Indigenous epistemologies and deauthorize the written document as the definitive record of what has past. The devaluation of American Indian forms of archiving was integral to the colonial project; as Diana Taylor has explained, "[P]art of the colonizing project throughout the Americas consisted in discrediting autochthonous ways of preserving and communicating historical understanding" (34). Therefore, to decolonize the archive requires both revealing the destructive nature of the colonial archive that continues to be employed to justify state violence (such as land and resource acquisition and a militarized US-Mexico border) and privileging Indigenous modes of preserving and accessing historical knowledge. Decolonial archives both enact Indigenous epistemologies and dismantle a narrow colonial historical lens characterized by Manifest Destiny and the erasure of Indigenous cultures and political systems. Formed outside of institutions, they redefine archival possibilities. The intentional inclusion of Indigenous narratives and epistemologies within institutions can also produce decolonial archives.1 My focus here is how literature creates decolonial archives by positioning the US colonial record within an Indigenous frame. Revealing the constructed nature of colonial historical narratives, American Indian contemporary texts tell tribally specific histories with the help of materials from the colonial archive. Both decentering and repurposing the materials of the colonial archive is a decolonizing archival practice, an act of what I call "archival sovereignty." Archival sovereignty is achieved in literature that takes control of both Indigenous histories and the colonial historical record. In addition to providing an alternative Indigenous archive, these texts decolonize the archive by intimately engaging with the colonial record. I choose the term "sovereignty" because of the work it does in marking the complex politics [End Page 65] of tribal struggles for self-determination within the context of US colonialism. Sovereignty points both to a history of tribal autonomy longer than the colonial gaze and to the necessity of working across borders, including with European American structures of power.2 I follow Jace Weaver's (Cherokee) formulation of sovereignty as both useful within colonial power structures and independent of their powers of bestowal. The archives I describe in this article are at once autonomous and in negotiation with the colonial archive. My use...

From the Editors

From the Editors Michelle Raheja, June Scudeler, and Siobhan Senier With this issue of SAIL we humbly accept the mantle of editorship from Chadwick Allen. Chad stewarded this journal with great vision and leadership for six years, and we are ever grateful to him and his mentorship, to say nothing of his enviable efficiency and thoroughness. Thanks, too, to his fabulous editorial assistant, Lydia Heberling, who spent hours coaching us on the day-to-day management of incoming submissions, outgoing review requests, and final issue preparation. We wish both Chad and Lydia all the best as they move on to other things now! They're leaving us with very big shoes to fill. Special thanks go to our editorial board, particularly those long-serving members who have agreed to stay on through this transition, including Lisa Brooks, Jodi Byrd, Molly McGlennen, Kenneth Roemer, and Jace Weaver. This year several valued board members rotated out, including Robin Riley Fast, Susan Gardner, Patrice Hollrah, and Christopher Teuton. We thank them for their service. And we're very excited to welcome new board members who represent an array of new fields and expertise: Scott Andrews, Cari Carpenter, Stephanie Fitzgerald, Laura Furlan, and Sarah Henzi. Since its initial founding as the official newsletter of ASAIL in 1977 and its eventual incarnation as Studies in American Indian Literatures in 1980, this journal has been a gathering place for discussions of North American Indigenous fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, and film. The growth of the field and of the literature itself in those decades has been nothing short of awe-inspiring. Like other editors before us, we will always retain pride of place for cutting-edge work on the canonical Native authors who helped usher this field into being, as well as a commitment to the study and promotion of new, emergent, and lesser-studied writers and texts. At the moment, we are seeing some exciting new developments. These include a wealth of new work on First Nations / Indigenous Canadian literatures, as well as on Indigenous futures and speculative genres. We are also seeing dynamic scholarship at the intersections [End Page vii] of fields with which Native American and Indigenous studies is increasingly in dialogue, e.g., ecocriticism, disability studies, cinema and new media studies, and digital humanities. We welcome your good work in these fields, as well as proposals for special issues. The four articles in this issue represent SAIL's long-standing commitment to both historic and contemporary texts. The first two focus on Progressive Era writers and texts, and the second two read twenty-first-century novels. Christopher Pexa, who recently published an absorbing article entitled "Charles Alexander Eastman's Animal Peoples and Their Kinship Critiques of U.S. Empire" in PMLA, revisits Eastman here with a look at some of his writings about children's education, emanating from his work with the Boy Scouts. Provocatively, Pexa argues, Eastman produced an ambivalent citizenship discourse that simultaneously "invited white children to 'play Indian'" and "insist[ed] on the felt mediations of embodied Dakota archives and lands." Pexa's complex, nuanced reading helps us dismantle the old assimilation/resistance binary, revealing "an Indigenous politics of the land whose embodied and relational contexts push back against a national citizenship model based in racialized, settler colonial logics of assimilation and absorption." Jennifer Bess similarly complicates assimilation narratives with her analysis of commencement speeches from the Phoenix Indian School. Like other scholars before her who have exhorted us to read past the propaganda that hovers over publications like the Carlisle School newspapers, Bess finds the Phoenix Indian School students exercising subtle and not-so-subtle challenges to dominant narratives of assimilation. In particular, she finds that these students "maximized their use of the safety zone provided by Native American history, oral traditions, and local geography," ultimately "drawing on and advancing their intellectual traditions as mechanisms of self-preservation and self-advocacy." Emily Lederman brings this kind of archive-decolonizing consciousness to LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, a novel that, after all, contains a found archive: the mail pouch of Ezol Day, mail clerk, boarding-school survivor, and storyteller. Where Bess shows us how scholars can...

W. P. Kinsella’s Butterfly Winter: Towards Gothic Baseball Fiction

W. P. Kinsella’s Butterfly WinterTowards Gothic Baseball Fiction Chifen Lu (bio) This essay aims to point out the so far ignored Gothic elements in the Canadian writer W. P. Kinsella’s novel Butterfly Winter. Long acclaimed as the most representative magical realist baseball fiction writer, Kinsella nevertheless infuses distinct Gothic characters, settings and themes into this last baseball work. The protagonists—the twin baseball players Julio and Esteban Pimental—partake in the enchanting literary tradition of the Romantic Gothic doubles, which have been recurrent in fiction at least since the eighteenth-century. The Hall of Baseball Immortals, a fictive Caribbean version of the Baseball Hall of Fame, alongside its adjoined “wound factory,” distorts the revered pantheon of baseball gods to a Gothic haunted house, locked attic, freak show tent or torture room. While Dr. Noir, the great dictator who is also a medically-trained torturer, assumes a role comparable to the sadist Bluebeard, Quita Garza reminds us of the typical Gothic heroine who is often punished for her excessive curiosity, dangerous desire for forbidden knowledge and her transgression across the tabooed boundaries delineated by the patriarchal order. These Gothic elements, among others, derail Butterfly Winter from the generic conventions of sports fiction, making it eccentric, intriguing and worth further investigation. What’s more, as the last part of the article will elaborate, the Gothic aspect of Butterfly Winter is rendered rather complex and ambivalent by an opposing textual movement towards mythification in the later part of the story. The fundamental contradiction between the Gothic and the mythic makes this work rather problematic. This article demonstrates how the two distinct sets of aesthetics and ideologies co-operate to communicate Kinsella’s peculiar view of baseball or “play” in a broad sense. Different from Kinsella’s favorite physical setting of most of his previous baseball stories—rural American locales—Butterfly Winter is set in central America, more exactly in a nonexistent imaginary country, Courteguay, self-claimed [End Page 83] to be located between Haiti and Dominican Republic. In this tiny Caribbean island country, the air is permeated with tropical exoticism and vivacious whimsies. The military dictator, Dr. Lucius Noir, after a bloody overthrow, seized the political power and began to drive the Western forces away, putting Christian priests to exile, then cloaking the nation in pre-modern superstitions and wizardry. The first half of the novel is hence profuse in occult practices such as curses and shape-shifting magic. It is in such thick fantastic air that magic happens on the daily basis, doing all kinds of tricks to the characters of the story. The paired heroes, the Pimental twins, are born in a supernatural manner, likening them to many demigods in ancient myths. Being born in full baseball outfits and with miniature baseball equipment, their subsequent lives are filled with more magical occurrences, both in the sportive careers and in their involvement in political turmoil. One of the novel’s remarkable traits is its intricate interweaving of sports and politics. Pitching themselves to the international baseball stardom, the Pimental brothers also concern themselves closely with the Courteguayan politics. Their magical athletic careers are contrastingly interwoven with political realism, as Harriet Zaidman notes: “Although the story is full of humor, satire and irony, it also mirrors the history of Central America and the succession of tinpot dictators the US helped install there for 100 years. The political sickness that plagued Central America infests the paradise of Courteguay, too, with similar violent, cruel results at the hands of a former chiropractor.”1 Attempting to explore the Gothic elements in Kinsella’s work, I am nevertheless very aware that this approach has been rarely adopted in previous criticisms. 2 So far the most commonplace critical approach to Kinsella’s work has been identifying the religious and mythical motifs in his baseball narratives. Allen E. Hye dedicates one entire chapter to Shoeless Joe in The Great God Baseball (2004), which is tellingly subtitled Religion in Modern Baseball Fiction. The approach remains prominent in recent research; for example, Brian Aitken directs the reader’s attention to “the mythical element” in Kinsella’s work that “conveys his religious vision and offers some insight into how...

Savage Conversations (an excerpt)

photo : everett collection historical / alamy stock photo 50 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2016 Savage Conversations (an excerpt) by LeAnne Howe P resident Abraham Lincoln gave the order to execute thirty-eight Dakota Indians in Mankato, Minnesota, for their actions in the Dakota War against white settlers who had first stolen their lands, then their rations, and raped their women. At 10 a.m. on December 26, 1862 the synchronized hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas was, and continues to be, the largest mass execution in United States history. Four thousand settlers attended the execution. After the mass burial, the bodies of the American Indians were dug up by a local doctor and used as medical cadavers. Fast-forward eleven years to November 1873. Dr. Willis Danforth of Illinois treats Mary Todd Lincoln for “nervous derangement and fever in the head.” He notes peculiar symptoms. Mrs. Lincoln tells him that someone is removing wires from her eyes, especially the left one, and the bones from her cheeks. She attributes the fiendish work inside her head to an Indian spirit. Nightly, she claims, he lifts her scalp and replaces it by dawn, sometimes cutting a bone out of her cheek. “The Indian,” she says, “slits my eyelids and sews them open, always removing the wires by dawn’s first light.” Mrs. Lincoln’s nervous condition becomes legendary , much to the dismay of her only surviving son, Robert Lincoln. In May 1875, Mary Todd Lincoln goes on trial in Chicago for insanity. Judge Marion Wallace presides. Robert Lincoln testifies against her. The jury deliberates for ten minutes before bringing in a verdict. They recommend that she be placed in an asylum. Robert Lincoln escorts Mary Todd Lincoln to Bellevue Place Sanitarium on Jefferson Street in Batavia , Illinois. Once there she’s ensconced in the private residence of the home at Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Mary Todd Lincoln continues to blame an American Indian spirit for her madness. special section gulf lit LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) is the author of Choctalking on Other Realities (2013), winner of the inaugural 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; the novels Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007); Shell Shaker (2001), winner of the American Book Award (2002); and the poetry collection Evidence of Red (2005). The excerpts here are from her current manuscript, Savage Conversations. She is the Edison Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Georgia. *Source: Mark E. Neely Jr. and R. Gerald McCurry, The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln, 7. 1 / And I believe her * * * Long Night’s Moon June 1875 Bellevue Place Sanitarium, 333 S. Jefferson Street, Batavia, Illinois 4 a.m. Mary Todd Lincoln’s rooms. Many candles light the room. The air is hot and stifling. Savage Indian With a long rope, he shackles her legs to the chair for the 57th time tonight. Gar Woman. That is your true name. Gar feed at night, Sometimes eat their eggs. We were all once fish The scent of woman during copulation reminds us. Mary Todd Lincoln Vulgarity at last, just like my Mr. L. He once asked me why a woman was like a barrel. Savage Indian He shrugs. Mary Todd Lincoln She giggles. You have to raise the hoops before you put the head in. Savage Indian He breathes deeply through his nose. Snorts the bad air. Leaves her side, walks around her bedroom. Mary Todd Lincoln Fiend, he was my lover, father, and comedian. Savage Indian He sniffles and pinches her things. The nit comb on her bureau intrigues him the most. Fishy in here. Mary Todd Lincoln She smoothes the wrinkles of her sour nightdress, the one she’s worn since March 12, 1875. Ghoul, Specter, Poltergeist, Banshee, You are the fishy one. Savage, at last be gone from my head! Savage Indian Quiet, someone is coming. Mary Todd Lincoln No doubt the Wandering Jew, Nightly he steals my pocketbook.* Savage Indian Hush! Be still. He moves in close, gently caresses her face. Takes a sharp flint from his leather pouch, slits the soft skin above each eyelid, and then sews it firmly open with a thread of silver filigree. Mary Todd...

Savage Conversations <em>(an excerpt)</em>

photo : everett collection historical / alamy stock photo 50 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2016 Savage Conversations (an excerpt) by LeAnne Howe P resident Abraham Lincoln gave the order to execute thirty-eight Dakota Indians in Mankato, Minnesota, for their actions in the Dakota War against white settlers who had first stolen their lands, then their rations, and raped their women. At 10 a.m. on December 26, 1862 the synchronized hanging of thirty-eight Dakotas was, and continues to be, the largest mass execution in United States history. Four thousand settlers attended the execution. After the mass burial, the bodies of the American Indians were dug up by a local doctor and used as medical cadavers. Fast-forward eleven years to November 1873. Dr. Willis Danforth of Illinois treats Mary Todd Lincoln for “nervous derangement and fever in the head.” He notes peculiar symptoms. Mrs. Lincoln tells him that someone is removing wires from her eyes, especially the left one, and the bones from her cheeks. She attributes the fiendish work inside her head to an Indian spirit. Nightly, she claims, he lifts her scalp and replaces it by dawn, sometimes cutting a bone out of her cheek. “The Indian,” she says, “slits my eyelids and sews them open, always removing the wires by dawn’s first light.” Mrs. Lincoln’s nervous condition becomes legendary , much to the dismay of her only surviving son, Robert Lincoln. In May 1875, Mary Todd Lincoln goes on trial in Chicago for insanity. Judge Marion Wallace presides. Robert Lincoln testifies against her. The jury deliberates for ten minutes before bringing in a verdict. They recommend that she be placed in an asylum. Robert Lincoln escorts Mary Todd Lincoln to Bellevue Place Sanitarium on Jefferson Street in Batavia , Illinois. Once there she’s ensconced in the private residence of the home at Bellevue Place Sanitarium. Mary Todd Lincoln continues to blame an American Indian spirit for her madness. special section gulf lit LeAnne Howe (Choctaw) is the author of Choctalking on Other Realities (2013), winner of the inaugural 2014 MLA Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; the novels Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story (2007); Shell Shaker (2001), winner of the American Book Award (2002); and the poetry collection Evidence of Red (2005). The excerpts here are from her current manuscript, Savage Conversations. She is the Edison Distinguished Professor of American Literature at the University of Georgia. *Source: Mark E. Neely Jr. and R. Gerald McCurry, The Insanity File: The Case of Mary Todd Lincoln, 7. 1 / And I believe her * * * Long Night’s Moon June 1875 Bellevue Place Sanitarium, 333 S. Jefferson Street, Batavia, Illinois 4 a.m. Mary Todd Lincoln’s rooms. Many candles light the room. The air is hot and stifling. Savage Indian With a long rope, he shackles her legs to the chair for the 57th time tonight. Gar Woman. That is your true name. Gar feed at night, Sometimes eat their eggs. We were all once fish The scent of woman during copulation reminds us. Mary Todd Lincoln Vulgarity at last, just like my Mr. L. He once asked me why a woman was like a barrel. Savage Indian He shrugs. Mary Todd Lincoln She giggles. You have to raise the hoops before you put the head in. Savage Indian He breathes deeply through his nose. Snorts the bad air. Leaves her side, walks around her bedroom. Mary Todd Lincoln Fiend, he was my lover, father, and comedian. Savage Indian He sniffles and pinches her things. The nit comb on her bureau intrigues him the most. Fishy in here. Mary Todd Lincoln She smoothes the wrinkles of her sour nightdress, the one she’s worn since March 12, 1875. Ghoul, Specter, Poltergeist, Banshee, You are the fishy one. Savage, at last be gone from my head! Savage Indian Quiet, someone is coming. Mary Todd Lincoln No doubt the Wandering Jew, Nightly he steals my pocketbook.* Savage Indian Hush! Be still. He moves in close, gently caresses her face. Takes a sharp flint from his leather pouch, slits the soft skin above each eyelid, and then sews it firmly open with a thread of silver filigree. Mary Todd...

‘Don’t mention (them) again’! Shame, the Black Eagles Incident and Winds of September

Abstract The 1997 Black Eagles Incident of the Chinese Professional Baseball League (CPBL) marks the Edenic fall in the history of baseball in Taiwan. Since the Black Eagles Incident, the nationalist discourse of glory had been intertwined with the narrative of shame. Having been immersed in the spirit of triumphalism in the early 2000s, baseball in Taiwan was again beset by a series of large-scale game-fixing scandals in the latter half of the 2000s. The neologism mozaiti – ‘don’t mention again’ – was coined as a response by desperate fans. This article reads Lin Shu-yu’s 2008 film Jiujiang feng/Winds of September, a baseball story of initiation and disillusion featuring a former professional baseball player’s cameo appearance, against this backdrop. The film visually frames a phantasmatic space in which the ‘not-to-be-mentioned’ fallen hero is staged to perform his failure and guilt. In so doing, his affect of shame is exchanged with his fans’ through that cinematically imagined, constructed phantasmatic space. In this sense, the image of baseball in the post-martial-law era is internalized within one’s adolescence and familial (especially father-and-son) relationship. In Winds of September, one’s faulted youth and troubled family ties are reconciled through coming to terms with the baseball scandal.

Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball by Roger Kahn

Reviewed by: Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball by Roger Kahn Robert A. Moss Roger Kahn. Rickey & Robinson: The True, Untold Story of the Integration of Baseball. New York: Rodale, 2014. 292 pp. Cloth, $25.99. Roger Kahn, author of The Boys of Summer, now gives us Rickey & Robinson and the breaking of baseball’s color line. A more precise title would be “Rickey, Robinson, and Me,” for this is Kahn’s very personal take on events, more a memoir than a history. A 1982 book with a similar title, Rickey and Robinson: The Men Who Broke Baseball’s Color Barrier (Harvey Frommer, Taylor, reprinted 2003), and based on extensive interviews, is more objective, while Kahn’s version emphasizes his interactions with the protagonists, beginning in 1952 when he covered the Brooklyn Dodgers for the New York Herald Tribune. His narration is not linear, often circling off to include anecdotes, background history, and speculation. However, the text is so readable that one bears with Kahn’s ramble from one memory or anecdote to another. There is much warmth, as well as more than a little bile, in Kahn’s rendition. The story of baseball’s integration, however, is hardly “untold.” Among many books dealing with the subject are Chris Lamb, Blackout (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004); Jules Tygiel, Baseball’s Great Experiment, expanded ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Jonathan Eig, Opening Day (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2007); Arnold Rampersad, Jackie Robinson (New York: Ballantine, 1997); and Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Perhaps sensitive to these “told” stories, Kahn dismisses Tygiel’s classic as “earnestly researched but ultimately plodding” (254), while Eig “does not understand what went on in 1947” (254). What Kahn brings to the table are his relations with Rickey and Robinson over many years and his judgments on their character, motivation, accomplishments, and contemporaries. Unfortunately, the text is not footnoted, sometimes making it difficult to disentangle facts from assertions. Although Rickey is seen as “greed-driven” (2) and “a practicing feudal lord” (10), Kahn holds that, in the matter of integration, Rickey performed a “monumental deed of moral courage,” (13) defying “centuries of whites-only tradition . . . against wide and ferocious opposition” (15) and the negative front presented [End Page 174] by fifteen other team owners. Earlier, when Rickey ran the Cardinals, he did nothing about integration. St. Louis was a southern city; the time and place were not right. Brooklyn was different: “Baseball should lead by example because it is a quasi-public institution,” said Rickey, “and, particularly in Brooklyn, I am not so sure about the quasi” (25). Robinson himself was eloquent on Rickey: “He spoke of barriers to be broken and how to break them. He spoke of bigotry and hate and how to fight them. He spoke of great things to be done and how to do them” (104). Robinson stated another time, “Vicious men may insult him, foolish men may make fun of him and petty men may not understand him. But when the vicious, the foolish and the petty men are forgotten, Mr. Rickey will be remembered” (185). Notwithstanding these paeans, Kahn details the relentless attacks on Rickey by Daily News columnists Dick Young and Jimmy Powers, both of whom he rightly castigates. Bizarrely, however, he questions whether Rickey, building the Pirates in 1954, might have expressed antisemitic tendencies in not tendering Sandy Koufax a more competitive contract than Brooklyn. Athletes like Jesse Owens, Mack Robinson (Jackie’s older brother), and Joe Louis prepared the nation for integrated sports, but it was the death of obstructionist commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis that enabled the integration of baseball. One year after his death, Rickey signed Robinson in 1946 and sent him to Montreal. Opposition came from the Sporting News, which editorialized that Robinson was too old and unskilled; from Bob Feller, who maintained that Jackie would not hit; and from various nimby (“not in my backyard”) team owners. In Montreal, Robinson paced the International League in hitting (.349) and stolen bases (50) and led the Royals to victory over Louisville in the Little World Series. Kahn maintains that Robinson’s Montreal season...

Imagine Lennon as Choctaw Code Talker: Indigenized Beatles in LeAnne Howe's Miko Kings

NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Imagine Lennon as Choctaw Code Talker 89 MICHAEL SNYDER Imagine Lennon as Choctaw Code Talker: Indigenized Beatles in LeAnne Howe’s Miko Kings CHOCTAW POET, playwright, and novelist LeAnne Howe published her third book, Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story, in 2007. This engaging and insightful novel tells of a Choctaw and Sac and Fox writer from Ada, Oklahoma named Lena Coulter, who in 2006 attempts to uncover the lost story of the Miko Kings, an early twentieth-century Indian Territory baseball team. As Lena’s knowledge deepens, she works at unraveling a mystery to explain why the team’s star pitcher, Hope Little Leader, who is Choctaw, becomes involved with gamblers and “throws”—that is, deliberately loses—a baseball game in October 1907. This is no ordinary ballgame: it is a symbolically charged contest upon which a great deal is at stake. For this Indigenous team’s opponents are none other than Custer’s old gang, the Seventh Cavalry, and the game occurs shortly before Indian Territory is swallowed up by Oklahoma statehood, during a period in which the Curtis Act of 1898, which imposed allotment policy upon the so-called Five Civilized Tribes, had been put into effect and was taking a toll on Choctaw tribal communalism. Lena Coulter is prompted to undertake her investigation upon discovering a mailbag full of old documents cached in the wall of her Ada home. She begins to peruse these documents, which in turn spurs her to research a broad array of materials in order to recover this piece of Choctaw and Indian Territory history. As the Choctaw author D. L. Birchfield states, “Choctaw history must be pieced together from many different sources.”1 Lena subsequently experiences visitations from Ezol Day, the brilliant niece of the Miko Kings’ co-owner, Henri Day. A prodigy, Ezol has unlocked secrets of language, time, and space that allow her to counsel Lena. Ezol’s ability to move freely in time becomes a metaphor of traditional Choctaw experiences of temporality as conjoining the past, present, and future at any given moment.2 The reader comes to see Ezol Day as the true author of the story as she guides Lena’s quest and composition , asking her questions, and offering her clues. In a Choctaw or Chahta sense, Ezol serves as the “metaphorical iti fabassa, the center pole of the story of Miko Kings, ever-in-motion, connecting multiple worlds at once,” Howe explains in an essay collected in Choctalking on Other Realities. Michael Snyder NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 90 One perplexing task that Ezol Day assigns Lena Coulter is to “find John Lennon” and to “find out what happened” to him.3 Thus begins a chain of symbolic associations between the Indigenous, in particular the Choctaw, and Lennon and The Beatles that extends across much of the novel. To some readers, the significance of the Lennon and Beatles references remains nebulous , as though the reader is “looking through a glass onion,” to quote a song Lennon penned for The Beatles.4 To others, the mystery of the Fab Four’s presence in the novel has even seemed a red herring or a missing puzzle piece. Howe seems to be “Choctaw code talking” in her engagement of Lennon and The Beatles, and without many clues, we must attempt to crack the code by viewing the novel in a Choctaw context as much as possible. LeAnne Howe herself acknowledged the novel’s intriguing lacuna in conversation and wrote in an e-mail to the author, “John Lennon is the missing chapter!”5 In our endeavor to make sense of the concatenation of baseball, Beatles, and Natives in Howe’s rich novel, we are led to engage further related topics, gender diversity and same-sex desire, which are important in both the novel’s project of Choctaw historical recovery and in John Lennon’s life. If John Lennon is “the missing chapter,” with metaphorical pages left blank, it is left to the reader to locate meaning in these references in co-­ creation with the author. As the reader and Lena scramble for clues, attempting to connect points into a meaningful constellation, unsure to...

“The Lord and the Center of the Farthest”: Ezol's Journal as Tribalography in LeAnne Howe's <em>Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story</em>

“The Lord and the Center of the Farthest”: Ezol's Journal as Tribalography in LeAnne Howe's <em>Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story</em>