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.

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!!!