Tuesday, October 26, 2010
The Giants Win The Pennant! The Giants Win The Pennant!
No, it's not 1951, although Russ Hodges's famous call of Bobby Thomson's pennant winning home run comes to mind. But with a called third strike on Ryan Howard, the 2010 Giants have won the pennant after a series of very tense, dramatic play-off games with a superior team, the Phillies, and I am exhausted. As a result, I have let things slip here and, with the World Series starting in San Francisco tomorrow, I don't know how soon I will be back on track. I will not grow a beard and dye it black. Nor will I wear a rally thong, but I have caught Giants Fever. I am in a state of delirium that makes it difficult to concentrate on anything other than baseball, and so Bobo Newsom and Safe On Third will have to be put aside for now, while I follow the exploits of Posey, Lincecum, Cain, Lopez, Wilson, Sanchez (Freddie and Jonathan), Bumgarner, Uribe, Torres, Burrell, Huff, and Cody Ross.
Thursday, October 14, 2010
More Baseball In A Purple Haze
Baseball is still very much on my mind, and I had intended to provide a few anecdotes about Bobo Newsom in my post today, but my plan was sidetracked after I went to see Robin Williams perform his stand-up act live last night before a sold-out crowd at the Berkeley Repertory Theater. It was an exhausting experience for I spent two hours laughing, and it's hard to even remember all the topics that were covered because Robin Williams's mind is so quick, his wit so sharp, and his energy seemingly unlimited, as he keeps moving quickly from one subject to the next. I do recall, however, that he did describe in wonderful detail what it must have been like for the late Dock Ellis of the Pittsburgh Pirates, when he pitched a no-hitter while hallucinating on LSD. Intrigued by this story, I decided to save Bobo Newsom for another day. I did a little research and found that, indeed, it was on June 12, 1970, that Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter against the San Diego Padres. While high on LSD. Ellis walked eight batters and hit one during this game. In a 2008 interview that was excerpted on the Public Radio Program, Weekend America, Ellis explained in great detail what he actually had experienced in his "purple haze." He said that he took Benzedrine to try to even things out right before he warmed up, that sometimes he saw his catcher. Jerry May, and sometimes he didn't, that the ball kept changing in size and weight, that for much of the game he had no idea what the score was, and that he had no interest in holding runners on base. For more about this see Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging '70s by Dan Epstein, published by Thomas Dunne Books, an imprint of St. Martin's Press, LLC. Also check out a wonderful animated short made by James Blagden,"Dock Ellis & the LSD No-No." This film uses parts of the soundtrack of the Ellis interview of 2008. The URL is www.dockshort.com/dockshort/.
Monday, October 11, 2010
Go Giants!!!
Baseball is very much on my mind these days, because the San Francisco Giants are up, two games to one, in their division playoff series with the Atlanta Braves. It's an exciting time for Giants fans like myself, hoping that the team's fine pitching by Lincecum, Cain, and Sanchez, will lead them to the National League Championship Series against the Phillies and, perhaps, beyond to the World Series.
Of course, in my novel, Safe On Third, baseball also plays an important part. Percy, one of the central characters is a sportswriter who covered the New York Giants of the Polo Grounds and John McGraw for many years, and several scenes are actually set at ballgames in 1940, including a spring training game and an opening day game at Griffith Stadium, with President Roosevelt in attendance along with the main fictional characters in the book, as the Senators play the Red Sox.
Yes, I like baseball very much, and in an earlier, unedited version of Safe On Third, I indulged myself by following closely the American League pennant race in 1940 on a parallel track with the presidential campaign. That 1940 race was quite exciting. The Yankees were favorites. They had won four straight pennants and four consecutive World Series titles. Cleveland and Detroit traded the lead back and forth with the Yankees right behind them, and finally the Tigers, who had finished fifth the year before, won the American League championship. Thanks to the hitting of Hank Greenberg and Rudy York, along with the pitching of Bobo Newsom, Tommy Bridges, and Schoolboy Rowe, Detroit won the pennant and went on to face the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series.
There are still references to Newsom in Safe On Third, but in earlier versions of the novel, Bobo Newsom played a larger role, actually appearing in several chapters. He was an interesting “character,” and he comes to mind now, because we are once again in the midst of exciting October Baseball, and I am reminded that October 8th was the 70th anniversary of the Detroit Tigers' 2-1 loss to the Cincinnati Reds in the seventh game of the 1940 World Series. Bobo was the losing pitcher that day, starting on only one day of rest, after winning the first and fifth games for the Tigers. (After his first Series victory, Newsom's father died that same night, and Bobo went on to win the fifth game, a shutout for his dad, before losing game seven.)
Allow me to explain that Louis Norman "Bobo" Newsom was a big, burly, undisciplined righthander from Hartsville, South Carolina, who won twenty games three times and led the league in losses four times over the course of his 20-year major league career. Newsom was an eccentric, flamboyant, superstitious, and boastful workhorse, not always friendly, not gifted or eloquent, who changed teams sixteen times. Newsom liked to talk about himself in the third person. He addressed everyone as "Bobo," and adopted that as his own nickname. His best season was 1940, when his record was 21-5, and his ERA was 2.83, the second lowest in the American League that year.
Of course, in my novel, Safe On Third, baseball also plays an important part. Percy, one of the central characters is a sportswriter who covered the New York Giants of the Polo Grounds and John McGraw for many years, and several scenes are actually set at ballgames in 1940, including a spring training game and an opening day game at Griffith Stadium, with President Roosevelt in attendance along with the main fictional characters in the book, as the Senators play the Red Sox.
Yes, I like baseball very much, and in an earlier, unedited version of Safe On Third, I indulged myself by following closely the American League pennant race in 1940 on a parallel track with the presidential campaign. That 1940 race was quite exciting. The Yankees were favorites. They had won four straight pennants and four consecutive World Series titles. Cleveland and Detroit traded the lead back and forth with the Yankees right behind them, and finally the Tigers, who had finished fifth the year before, won the American League championship. Thanks to the hitting of Hank Greenberg and Rudy York, along with the pitching of Bobo Newsom, Tommy Bridges, and Schoolboy Rowe, Detroit won the pennant and went on to face the Cincinnati Reds in the World Series.
There are still references to Newsom in Safe On Third, but in earlier versions of the novel, Bobo Newsom played a larger role, actually appearing in several chapters. He was an interesting “character,” and he comes to mind now, because we are once again in the midst of exciting October Baseball, and I am reminded that October 8th was the 70th anniversary of the Detroit Tigers' 2-1 loss to the Cincinnati Reds in the seventh game of the 1940 World Series. Bobo was the losing pitcher that day, starting on only one day of rest, after winning the first and fifth games for the Tigers. (After his first Series victory, Newsom's father died that same night, and Bobo went on to win the fifth game, a shutout for his dad, before losing game seven.)
Allow me to explain that Louis Norman "Bobo" Newsom was a big, burly, undisciplined righthander from Hartsville, South Carolina, who won twenty games three times and led the league in losses four times over the course of his 20-year major league career. Newsom was an eccentric, flamboyant, superstitious, and boastful workhorse, not always friendly, not gifted or eloquent, who changed teams sixteen times. Newsom liked to talk about himself in the third person. He addressed everyone as "Bobo," and adopted that as his own nickname. His best season was 1940, when his record was 21-5, and his ERA was 2.83, the second lowest in the American League that year.
I have more to add about Bobo Newsom. I would like to share some anecdotes and background information about him that I had to remove from Safe On Third, and I shall do so in my next post.
Go Giants!!!
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