‘The Big Slump’ - hits and errors in baseball mystery fiction

 Bill Knight column for 10-14, 15 or 16, 2021

 

Major League Baseball’s postseason is underway toward a possible deciding game of the World Series on NOVEMBER 3 (!), after which I’ll start my winter routine of reading murder mysteries.

But the National Pastime probably won’t figure in most of them.

Many past mystery writers using baseball as a key part of their fiction grounded into routine outs, popped up, choked. With apologies to Raymond Chandler, these authors “slumped the Big Slump.”

However, such failures probably were less a result of their reliance on a handful of predictable conventions than simply a lack of attempts for them to build on.

Previous disappointments in baseball mystery fiction had little literary foundations. Aside from the obscure 1934 movie whodunit “Death on The Diamond” and a handful of juvenile books and short stories, the phenomenon is generally about 50 years old. Since, I’ve read dozens of baseball mystery novels, most from the 1980s and ’90s. Two of the best are recent, written by old friend Dennis Hetzel, who penned 2014’s “Killing the Curse” (loosely about the Cubs, politics, a sports-talk host, a crazed fan) and 2017’s “Season of Lies” (with some of those characters, plus an approaching comet, religious zealots and terrorism threats).

For some authors, it may have seemed that linking baseball and crime was “The Natural.” The sport has a calming familiarity, reaching deeply into the American psyche, as author Kevin Kerrane writes: “After Vietnam, beyond football, in spite of Astroturf and designated hitters and megabucks, we keep finding the game again every time we lose it – rediscovering it not only in major-league parks, but in every corner of the country, on innumerable streets.”

Indeed, baseball can inhabit the “mean streets” of modern, hard-boiled detective novels, as developed by Chandler and Dashiell Hammett before him.

But it’s not easy, so using baseball as a device for detective fiction has been difficult.

 “None are very good,” comments Paul Adomites, editor of “The SABR Review of Books,” published by the Society for American Baseball Research. “They have to fit the formula for the genre, but they have to get the baseball right, too.”

A successful baseball mystery author agrees – with reservations.

 “There’s no doubt that baseball offers us that great tradition of memory and love, of imagined youth and boyhood stories,” says William Brashler, co-author of the Duffy House series of baseball murder mysteries. “Baseball is a nostalgic game filled with mythic heroes.

“As far as baseball mysteries, there haven’t been many practitioners,” he adds. “It’s changed dramatically.

“Most mystery readers – most readers – are women,” Brashler continues. “Some women follow sports, and some are baseball fans, but not most. So writers using baseball can get anxious that the vast majority of readers out there prefer the parlor room to the locker room, the scent of arsenic to the odor of liniment, and so on. [But] you’ve got to satisfy baseball fans, who know the genuine article.”

Baseball mysteries must be convincing in atmosphere and detail, unlike other genres, Adomites says.

 “Everyone in American society knows something about baseball – even if they hate the game,” he says. “Too many authors do their ‘research’ in an afternoon, but writing about baseball isn’t like fantasy. Stephen King can create a creature out of whole cloth, but with baseball, you have to know your stuff.”

The “sub-genre” has common elements.

Ballplayers are murdered in “Gamemaker,” “Dead Pull Hitter,” “Squeezeplay,” “Murder in Wrigley Field,” “The Screwball King Murder,” “Strike Three, You’re Dead,” and “The Devil to Play.” Owners are targets for killers in “Murderers’ Row” and “Beanball.” Players are blackmailed in “The 7th Game,” “Mortal Stakes,” “Dead in Center Field” and “Seven Games in October.”

Pitched baseballs kill people in “Beanball” and “Strike Zone.” Bats are the weapons of choice in “Three Strikes and You’re Out” and “Dead in Center Field.” In addition to inimitable weapons, baseball mysteries offer captivating personalities.

 “Baseball lends itself to character. Every team has colorful characters that we turn into composites. There’s an unlimited well of characters for us,” says Brashler, whose non-mystery baseball titles include character-driven works such as a Josh Gibson biography and the novel “The Bingo Long Traveling All-Stars and Motor Kings.”

Ultimately, Brashler says, “Baseball is a game. It doesn’t count to read too much into it. In baseball mystery fiction, the reader gets a crackling good read with a little baseball thrown in – and there’s a dead body.”

Cartoon pens really have been mightier than swords

 Bill Knight column for 10-11, 12 or 13. 2021

 After a recent visit to two Chicago exhibits (one showing two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Bill Mauldin and the other a display of dozens of Chicago’s comic artists), I returned to find a modest treasure: a copy of 1952’s “The Herblock Book” autographed by a cartoonist hero: Herblock.

“Chicago Comics: 1960s to Now” (which recently closed at the Museum of Contemporary Art) featured vivid examples from 42 comic artists, including Lynda Barry, Dan Clyne, Chester Gould, Nicole Hollander, Jay Kinney, and my friends Jay Lynch and Skip Williamson, a wide-ranging blend of styles and subjects especially noteworthy in its sampling for the 1960s “underground comix” era.

In “Drawn to Combat: Bill Mauldin & the Art of War” (at the Pritzker Military Museum and Library through spring), the long-time Chicago Sun-Times cartoonist is shown to have never relented from social-justice issues or gritty depictions of life in foxholes, from World War II through Watergate. Wounded in action and awarded a Purple Heart, he drew Willie and Joe, two everyday GIs coping with dangers and bureaucracy alike. His skewering of U.S. presidents was nonpartisan, from Eisenhower through Bush I. His illustrations on 1990’s Desert Storm were as biting at his take on the Soviet Union. He retired in 1991 and died about a decade later from complications of Alzheimer's disease; he’s buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

But Herblock wasn’t mentioned in either show, an awkward oversight, especially close to the Association of American Editorial cartoonists yearly convention Oct. 8-9.

Herbert Block – born in Chicago 112 years ago this week (he also died in October: Oct. 7, 2001) – deserves a prominent exhibition – despite his comment, “People who make a hobby of collecting editorial drawings occasionally express a preference for ‘something that will always be good.’ [But] writers have remarked that pieces written to be good for all time usually turn out not to be very good for any time.”

Herblock was excellent in the moment, making his perspective timely and timeless.

Block, who used the pen name Herblock since he was a teenage cartoonist, was inspired by family members. His father drew for Judge and other magazines, and he and Herbert’s older brother had been Chicago newspapermen. After working as a police reporter with Chicago’s City News Bureau, Block began cartooning with the Chicago Daily News when he was 19. Four years later, he became the Newspapers Enterprise Association’s only editorial cartoonist, commenting on poverty, fascism and current events. During the early 1940s, NEA tried to soften Block’s bold jabs at tyranny, but the cartoonist wasn’t censored. He won the first of three Pulitzer Prizes for work done in 1941 and was drafted in 1943. After World War II, Block was hired by the Washington Post, where he worked the rest of his career.

During the 1950s, Herblock anticipated social issues that lasted for decades, commenting on nuclear proliferation, Civil Rights, and corruption. He also attacked dictators of all stripes, Right and Left, and criticized what he saw as demagoguery. He targeted figures like Louisiana’s corrupt populist politician Huey Long, Catholic priest and Right-wing radio commentator Father Charles Coughlin, Vice President Richard M. Nixon, and U.S. Sen. Joe McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Activities. One of the first to stand up to the Red Scare (Herblock is credited with coining “McCarthyism”), he emboldened others of all political leanings to be outspoken.

A civil libertarian, Block believed that there was something wrong about a handful of congressmen deciding who and what was un-American. In fact, Herblock’s caricatures of McCarthy and Nixon, with shady faces, reportedly annoyed both men. McCarthy started shaving twice a day, and Herblock’s caricature of the GOP politician outraged Nixon from his House election campaign in 1950 to his 1974 resignation as President.

“No editorial cartoonist in American history, not even 19^th century political cartoonist Thomas Nast, made a more lasting impression on the nation,” wrote Library of Congress curator Harry Katz.

With humor and insight, Herblock tackled controversial topics throughout his career, but his second Pulitzer in 1954 was for his running graphic commentaries on HUAC and McCarthyism. Besides recognition by his peers, Herblock earned widespread popularity: More than 300 newspapers were using his cartoons by the 1990s. His commitment and consistency encouraged others to take on McCarthy, as well as Southern racists, Nixon and many more targets.

Appropriately, he worked for the Post and Creators Syndicate until he died, never at a loss for subject matter. Or talent.

The Herb Block Foundation continues his legacy, awarding grants and prizes recognizing “defending the basic freedoms guaranteed all Americans, combating all forms of discrimination and prejudice, and improving the conditions of the poor and underprivileged.”

Media with too few journalists use outside news reporters

 

Bill Knight column for 10-7, 8 or 9, 2021

 As newsrooms lose journalists, solid reporting suffers. Luckily, good investigations occasionally arise from independent researchers, and, fortunately, skeletal news media sometimes pick up the stories.

Two recent examples both uncover sectors of the insurance industry making millions more than usual during COVID.

First, Illinois’ Better Government Association, the nonpartisan watchdog group, this summer showed that the state’s five for-profit insurance companies that run Illinois’ Medicaid program collected millions in extra revenues based on typical estimates, not from actual direct medical services, which many people have postponed during the pandemic.

Written by BGA senior investigative reporter David Jackson, a former Chicago Tribune reporter, the comprehensive piece says that the 2020’s shutdown of the economy resulted in some 480,000 lost jobs and new Medicaid clients, but no corresponding level of new care.

“Illinois’ five Medicaid insurance contractors — called Managed Care Organizations, or MCOs for short — reveals the unprecedented surge in profits from April 2020 through December 2020,” Jackson reported.

Three of the corporations (IlliniCare Health Plan, Meridian Health Plan of Illinois, and Molina Healthcare of Illinois) reported a combined $282 million increase in profits in Illinois during those nine months of the pandemic, compared to the same months in 2019. The other two (Aetna Better Health of Illinois, Inc. and Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Illinois) also reported big gains, but their apparent windfalls are less clear because their financial reports include non-Medicaid patients.

“If those numbers end up bearing out, we will be recouping a significant amount of money from the plans,” Illinois’ Department of Healthcare and Family Services director Theresa Eagleson told the BGA.

HFS could recover $120 million, her office said.

State Sen. Dave Koehler (D-46^th) is trying to reduce future payments to reflect excess payments, which he estimates at 20%.

“Our two hospital systems here in Peoria verified that their revenues were down during the height of the pandemic because everybody was not doing electives,” Koehler, an assistant majority leader, told the BGA. “We don’t really have a managed care system in this state; we have a managed payment system.

“If we are able to reallocate excess profits from these companies, we can help hospitals stay open and keep providing lifesaving care in our low-income and rural communities,” said Koehler, who introduced Senate Bill 455 in February.

However, critics of his bill say the state already has ways to recover overpayments, and the measure has been in the Assignments Committee since mid-April.

Elsewhere, an analysis of auto insurers by the Center for Economic Justice and the Consumer Federation of America weeks ago found that auto insurers nationally ended 2020 with “windfall profits of at least $29 billion” based on the premiums they took in and claims they paid compared with the average of four previous years. Also, insurers collected $42 billion more in 2020 while providing only $13 billion in policyholder refunds that they called “premium relief” during the early stage of the pandemic.

Internally, insurers were generous with their “windfalls.” For example, Northbrook-based Allstate increased compensation to Chief Executive Officer Thomas Wilson by 7.7% in 2020 (to $21.1 million), and

Bloomington-based State Farm likewise in 2020 gave its CEO Michael Tipsord an $18 million bonus to his $2.1 million salary, the groups reported.

Despite publicity about refunds to policyholders, most Illinoisans have seen little, the groups said.

Other states (California, Michigan, New Jersey and New Mexico all require refunds in such situations, but in Illinois it’s more of a suggestion.

The Illinois Department of Insurance last year issued two bulletins “to encourage insurance companies to provide relief to assist Illinois consumers during the pandemic.”

Consumer Federation insurance expert Douglas Heller commented, “I hope there’s a lawmaker that’s calling the insurance commissioner and saying, ‘How do we change that law?’ because this is really unacceptable.”

Indeed, reforms are needed; in auto insurance and in health insurance (especially Medicaid).

And also in news-media ownership, whose financial decisions have increasingly meant newsrooms have been forced to rely on others to do the basic reporting that historically was generated by working journalists.