‘Unchanging’ baseball: Seasons to escape, reasons to change

Bill Knight column for 7-25, 26 or 27, 2019

As the Trump mob screamed the divisive chant “Send her back!” last week, I was oddly reminded of the far less ridiculous Wrigley Field tradition of bleacher fans shouting, “Throw it back!” when opponents homer.

That and this month’s passing of Jim Bouton, the Yankees pitcher who threw so hard his cap fell off, rekindled memories of when he was a fireballer and I was a Little Leaguer, and of baseball’s changing landscape yet unchanging escape from evil, temporary but wondrous.

Bouton, who also played for Seattle and Houston, wrote 1970’s tell-all “Ball Four,” which recounted behind-the-scenes glimpses of life inside Major League Baseball.

Inside baseball for me then survives as a few childhood memories: hitting a backyard pitch from Dad through a window in a neighboring warehouse, where Dad went, smiling and saying, “I’ll pay for that!”; pitching to Dad behind the garage and perfecting a knuckleball (as much as that’s even possible), and giving up a home run in the last game of a season where I’d been the only Little Leaguer to hit one out.

(Full disclosure: As a pitcher, I faced other, better power-hitting sluggers, but the mostly right-handed hitters went deep to left field, where there was no wall at Carthage’s Williams Park – where I spent sizzling summers sipping icy Grapette pop or chilled Pepsis with peanuts dropped in the bottles. So, most long balls to left or center were doubles or triples. My dinger went over the tall, chain-link fence in right.)

When I played in flannel uniforms, the Major League Baseball Players Association existed, having formed in 1954 in a dispute over pensions. But the real struggle of ballfield democracy vs. paternalism started in 1966, when the MLBPA hired Marvin Miller from the Steel Workers, and it became a union. A year before its first work stoppage in 1972, Bouton expressed his support.

“Bouton was a pro-union man and said so,” comments Mark Gruenberg of Press Associates Union News Service. “His stands were and are anathema to baseball’s (and other) bosses [and] so was Bouton’s questioning of authority in general and the Indochina War in particular. (Not to mention his literacy and brains).”

Ken Burns’ mini-series documentary “Baseball” 25 years ago said, “At its heart lie mythic contradictions: a pastoral game born in crowded cities, an exhilarating democratic sport that tolerates cheating. It reflects a host of age-old American tensions, between workers and owners, scandal and reform, the individual and the collective.”

Now, changes seem ahead, as the Collective Bargaining Agreement expires Dec. 1, 2021, and players –workers, if wealthy ones – see an economic system needing repair.

It used to be that rookies were exploited, except for a few “bonus babies” with extra signing money, and veterans were rewarded. But in recent years, owners decided to pay most veteran free agents less than what their performances merit (exceptions this season being Corbin, Harper and Machado – all in their twenties). That’s not lost on skilled ballplayers, who reason talented athletes should earn more in their prime.

In another classic baseball book, 1955’s “Bang the Drum Slowly,” Mark Harris wrote about a star pitcher hearing management promise, “If you have a good year, we will make it back to you in 1956.”

The southpaw replied, “And when I have a good year in ’56, you will make it back to me in ’57, and I will go on being paid for the year before. This shorts me out of a year in the long run.”

Maybe more troubling for the National Pastime and its fans is that fewer owners really compete, instead juggling to keep attention and attendance without fielding the best team, so their franchises can get higher draft picks, cheaper ones. Also last week – apart from the latest round of racist tirades from the White House – Sunday’s standings showed 11 MLB teams already more than 15 games out of 1^st place, some on pace to lose 100 games this season.

As I wrote the year of the last baseball strike (1994-95), “Owners want players to control club spending by giving up the right to work for the best offer – whether salary, great fans, a bonus or a short outfield fence. Players, like any workers, should be free to work for any employer; anything else is slavery, as baseball’s old ‘reserve clause’ was indentured servitude.”

Despite likely changes, three-hour ballgames without tweets and turmoil – when the only lies on the diamond might be “hidden-ball” tricks and the only divisions the leagues’ team breakdown – will remain magnificent refuges.

Illinois native was paradox: patriot, ‘traitor’ and more

Bill Knight column for 7-22, 23 or 24, 2019  

A writer and man of extremes, Illinois native Floyd Dell died 50 years ago this week. Modest, he enjoyed his celebrity yet also earned status as an influential journalist and author. Dell became a creative playwright, novelist and poet, and embraced contradictions: socialism and bohemianism, public commitment and self-absorption, the personal and political, the carefree and careless.

“A pattern of commitment and independence, of cooperation and dissent was central to Floyd Dell’s life as a public intellectual,” wrote Douglas Clayton in “Floyd Dell: The Life and Times of an American Rebel.”

Respected and reviled for supporting conscientious objections to the draft during World War I, Dell was to eventually work for the U.S. government – the government that in 1917 indicted him for treason. Often tied to urban scenes in Chicago and New York, Dell drew heavily upon youthful ideals and experiences in the Quad Cities, Quincy and Barry, Ill.

A romantic whose friends included radicals John Reed and Max Eastman, novelists Upton Sinclair and Theodore Dreiser, Catholic activist/socialist Dorothy Day and poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, Dell had been 16 when he joined the Socialist Party, giving his life meaning, he’d say: “Socialism was not a matter of economics only, but of a different life, based upon service for the common good and not on money.”

Dell also began to write as a youth: stories derived from Edgar Allan Poe, poems based on adolescent yearnings, essays built upon self-education more than schooling.

The teen-aged Dell was published in Harper’s, McClure’s and Century magazines. He lost a factory job, took one in a print shop, then got hired at the Davenport Times in 1905. Within a month, he was fired for having “no nose for news,” but was given two weeks’ notice during which he wrote about a poor woman who died at the train station, was rehired and assigned human-interest stories.

“As a reporter on a ‘regular’ paper ... one had to be an eye and an ear, an organizing memory, a pencil and a pad of paper and two fingers about a typewriter, rather than a person,” wrote Dell, who began contributing to the local Tri-City Workers magazine, where he was freer to advocate. In 1906, confused by a schism between the rather orthodox Socialist Party and the more militant Industrial Workers of the World (the Wobblies), Dell left Tri-City Workers. Then the Times fired him, and he was hired by the competing Davenport Democrat, where he worked for a year.

In 1908, Dell moved to Chicago, where he became an editor, essayist, poet and critic, championing, Mark Twain and Stephen Crane, plus newcomers such as Carl Sandburg and Vachel Lindsay.

            When cultural change erupted there from 1909-13, Dell wasn’t merely present, he was at its center.

“Writers and artists within that chaotic, immensely productive vanguard mixed cultural and social rebellion in an effort to overturn the conventions and injustices they felt governed American life,” Clayton writes. “Dell was an indispensable figure in that rebellion.”

The era was made up of “disruptive historical, economic and geographic circumstances,” Clayton continues, but Dell “set himself the task of doing justice to his own contradictory inclinations.”

In 1913, Dell left for New York and Greenwich Village, joining The Masses magazine, the earliest, best and longest-lasting radical periodical

“The hope of democratic civilization lies in the dissemination of true knowledge,” Dell wrote in 1914, after Masses editor Max Eastman and artist Art Young had been indicted for criminal libel on charges brought by the Associated Press.

Dell was in the vanguard of the avant-garde, testing tensions between art and politics. And he was armed with The Masses, which “stood for fun, truth, beauty, realism, freedom, peace, feminism, revolution,” he wrote.

After his 1917 piece about conscientious objectors, the government refused to permit The Masses from using the mails and indicted Dell and four other staffers for “conspiring to cause mutiny and refusal of duty in the military and to obstruct recruiting” under the Espionage Act. Two trials ended in hung juries.

He wrote 12 plays, countless essays, 10 non-fiction books and 12 novels, but his first novel, “Moon-Calf,” is his most memorable.

Following more than a decade of success, Dell in the ’30s suffered a decline in health and popularity. Prompted by economic and physical necessity, Dell took a position as writer and editor at the Federal Arts Project of the Works Progress Administration. Dell liked it and the work – like writing speeches for Mine Workers president John L. Lewis.

Despite highs and lows and paradoxical impulses, Dell’s life and career left an esteemed legacy.

“I never knew a more reasonable or dependable person, more variously intelligent, more agile in combining sociability with industry,” Eastman remarked, “and I never knew a writer who had his talents in such complete command.”

‘Where have all the flowers gone?’

Bill Knight column for 7-18, 19 or 20, 2019

It’s doubtful that the United States would be considered the aggressor if fighter pilots shot down an Iranian drone over Lake Michigan. Yet the Trump administration is using Iran’s June 20 downing of a U.S. spy drone apparently near its coastline as one of several excuses for going to war.

The U.S. drone was eight miles from Iran, so the country had the right to control its airspace under international law, wrote Ashley Deeks and Scott R. Anderson at “Lawfare,” saying, “Practice suggests that a state can use force against unmanned drones that have entered its airspace without consent.”

The risky rush to yet-another military conflict is unpopular. Last weekend, nationwide antiwar protests included demonstrations in Chicago, Champaign and Carbondale, and on Friday, the House approved a bipartisan measure requiring Trump to get Congress’ OK for military action against Iran.

Republican Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida commented, “If my war-hungry colleagues [are] so certain of their case against Iran, let them bring their authorization to use military force against Iran to this very floor. Let them make the case to Congress and the American people.”

The House action follows the Defense Authorization Act of 2019, which states, “Nothing in this Act may be construed to authorize the use of force against Iran or North Korea.”

Also Friday, Pew Research showed veterans doubt the merits of the “forever war,” with majorities saying military conflicts weren’t worth fighting in Afghanistan (58%), Iraq (64%) and Syria (55%), mirroring Americans overall.

And hundreds of faith leaders signed an open letter demanding a return to the multinational Iran deal (the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action), ending trade sanctions, and establishing safeguards for shipping in the Persian Gulf.

Tension with Iran isn’t new, but the current threat is tied to Trump reneging on that agreement, not in Iran’s responses. His escalations try to create justification for more war. A rough timeline:

* Last year, Trump unilaterally pulled out of the Iran deal (to spite Barack Obama, according to former UK ambassador Kim Darroch);

* after a year without the deal, Iran in May said it would resume uranium production;

* Trump ordered non-emergency government personnel to leave neighboring Iraq because of possible hostilities;

* he sent a carrier group with 7,500 troops, a squad of bombers, and 2,500 more troops to the region;

* he tweeted a threat of genocide (“If Iran wants to fight, that will be the end of Iran”), violating international law and the U.S. War Powers Resolution;

* four merchant ships on May 12 were damaged in the Gulf of Oman, and Iran denied involvement, calling it a provocation;

* on June 13, tankers from Japan and Norway were attacked and Iran again said it wasn’t responsible (a Japanese shipping executive also disputed the U.S. description, and the military news site Task & Purpose reported, “Not a single U.S. official has provided a shred of proof linking Iran to the explosive devices found on the merchant ships”;

* the drone was shot down, and the next day Trump ordered retaliation, then changed his mind;

* Trump imposed four new sanctions (all violating the UN Charter, which prohibits economic sanctions as acts of aggression); and

* he then ordered a campaign of cyber-attacks on Iran.

The U.S. government since 1947 has tried to overthrow foreign states more than 70 times, according to Boston College international politics professor Lindsey O’Rourke, and exaggerations and lies aren’t new, according to Gareth Porter, author of “The Untold Story of the Iran Nuclear Scare,” who noted that two frequent accusations – that Iran caused some 600 U.S. fatalities in Iraq and that Iran furnished roadside bombs to Shiite guerrillas – are false, reporting that Lebanese and Iraqi sources say the Shiiites instead copied Hezbollah techniques.

Illinois Congressman Mike Quigley (D-5^th Dist.), from the Intelligence Committee, commented, “Members feel that [National Security Adviser John] Bolton is up to his old tricks, [engaging] in a war on a unilateral basis based on questionable, politicized intelligence.”

A top UK general, Chris Ghika, contradicted Trump officials, saying there is no increased Iran threat in Syria, and European diplomats asked for “maximum restraint” rather than Trump’s maximum-pressure strategy.

The danger is real. It’s unlikely Iran would retreat like Iraq in the 1991 Gulf War. Iran has 500,000 active-duty troops plus 1.5 million militia, so however they’d respond could profoundly damage Middle East security.

“There’s no strategic reason for either side to go to war, but war could absolutely result,” said Phyllis Bennis of the Institute for Policy Studies.

“When will they ever learn?” sang Seeger (and the Kingston Trio, Joan Baez, Peter, Paul & Mary and others). “When will they ever learn?”