…The Bills have a player named Rousseau and the Broncos have a player named Locke. Voltaire is on Injured Reserve…

A desultory (I get to use that word once a year) first half–15-8, which is a softball score–turned into a thriller second half in Monday Night Football:

Near game’s end: Bills 22, Broncos 21. The Broncos seemingly go 4 and out on an incomplete pass…

WAIT!

Pass interference on the Bills! First down and within field goal range. The Broncos rush their field goal team onto the field with seven seconds left. The hurried kick is wide right. Game’s pretty much over…

WAIT!

The Bills had twelve men on the field! The second field goal attempt is good: Broncos 24, Bills 22. THE KICKER, WIL LUTZ, IS A FOOTBALL HERO!

* * *

…Poor Bills. Poor QB Josh Allen, who is great hiding in the cornfield in that TV commercial. He had a dreadful night: a fumble and two interceptions…

* * *

…The Bills have a player named Rousseau and the Broncos have a player named Locke. Voltaire is on Injured Reserve…

* * *

…I like the Bills, but just a little bit, because Buffalo’s near Ontario, where my Irish great-grandparents once lived…

* * *

…I am still boycotting the PGA, thanks to Crown Prince Mohammed ibn (“Just use a surgical saw!”) Salman al Saud of Saudi Arabia and The Kingdom’s heavily moneyed role in professional golf…

* * *

…They used to tell me that the sound of thunder was angels bowling in heaven. Now you can tell your grandkids that it’s Bobby Knight throwing chairs…

* * *

…Was there a World Series this year? I don’t CARE. Oh, nuts: Congrats to Bruce Bochy, who has the biggest hat size in baseball and is an excellent manager…

* * *

…In College Ball, there are actually TWO Pac-17 (or whatever the number is. Doesn’t matter. They’ll all be in the SEC within two years.) teams in the Top Ten: Oregon and the Husky Puppies.

My father-in-law Gail was a University of Washington Husky Puppy–that’s him in the photo with Coach Howard Udell in the late 1940s…

* * *

…My Alma Mater, Mizzou, will be invited to a Bowl slightly more prestigious that the Mucinex/Dow Chemical/Colace Poopin’ a Pineapple Bowl after a convincing win over Tennessee…

* * *

…I am ready for some Women’s NCAA Basketball because they pass and have plays and strategery and stuff…

* * *

…The last time the Summer Olympics were in Paris was in 1924, when Hemingway was there as a correspondent for the Toronto Daily Star and writing short stories in clean well-lighted place.

That’s Hem, with Shakespeare and Co. bookstore owner Sylvia Beach (he was recovering from a skiing accident) out in front of the bookstore, which faces Notre Dame. The cathedral, not the football team.

There’s a cafe next door, Les Deux Magots, where you can get a latte the size of a soup bowl and gaze thoughtfully at the cathedral, just like Hemingway did. Except he was drinking a Pernod.

Sorry. Back to sports…

* * *

…Megan Rapinoe was injured in her last professional game. That stinks. Roland Messier is NOT a soccer player. He is a pastry chef. I looked it up…

* * *

–30–

Stalin expels Leon Trotsky from the Soviet Union; Trotsky eventually will be assassinated in Mexico. What followed in the USSR was the assassination of the truth, unfortunately, a recurring theme in history—including today.

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My Facebook friends already know that I have desperate crushes on classic movie stars—Lauren Bacall, Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Hedy Lamarr, Ingrid Bergman, Ginger Rogers and Vivien Leigh, to name a few. I have no idea why I missed Rita Hayworth, so let’s make it official. She was both beautiful and charistmatic, and the woman could dance, as Fred Astaire discovered in rehearsing for You’ll Never Get Rich (1941). She was a natural:

Fred Astaire’s seemingly inexperienced costar was anything but intimidated. “She learned steps faster than anyone I’d ever known,” he noted. “I’d show her a routine before lunch. She’d be back right after lunch and have it down to perfection. She apparently figured it out in her mind while she was eating. (Grunge.com)

And don’t tell Ginger, but…

Shortly before his death in 1987, Fred Astaire told interviewers that Rita Hayworth was categorically his favorite dance partner.

Wow.

Some YouTuber with way too much time on his hands decided to create a video with scenes from You’ll Never Get Rich to the music of…wait for it…Led Zeppelin’s “Rock and Roll.” I think that was actually time well spent.

This is not like other Hallowe’ens.

This year, the spirits of the Dead
Are so recently dead
That they haven’t the chance
To return in the night--
They don’t know they’ve died--
So they live with us still.

[Lewiston, Maine.
“Meat Assaults” in Ukraine.
The Holit Kibbutz.
Al-Zarah, Gaza.]

The world is too much with us,
Televised with people
Alive every night,
They live in blue light.
They whisper to us urgently,
Where are we?

What have you done?

I guess last night’s Game 1 of the World Series was a thriller. The Rangers won with an 11th inning walk-off hit of some sort. I don’t know what kind. Schindler’s List was on another channel. And a high-school football game on another. Jack Osbourne was investigating UFO’s in Utah on one more. There was always CNN.

Yes, I am having a snit. I don’t care who wins this year’s Series. I don’t have a dog in this fight. I hope both teams lose.

Here’s why: MLB’s best teams have already been eliminated. Here are the grim outcomes:

These teams were a combined 1-13 in the 2023 playoffs:

1. Atlanta Braves: 104-58 (lost NLDS 3-1)
2. Baltimore Orioles: 101-61 (swept in ALDS)
3. Los Angeles Dodgers: 100-62 (swept in NLDS)
4. Tampa Bay Rays: 99-63 (swept in Wild Card Series)
5. Milwaukee Brewers: 92-70 (swept in Wild Card Series)

I don’t why this is so, other than star players played terribly. Clayton Kershaw was shelled more than Omaha Beach. Ronald Acuña Jr. wielded a bat that looked like an al dente spaghetti noodle. He was two for 14. The best teams weren’t the best teams at the exact time they needed to be. That’s baseball, I guess. I just hated the way the season turned out.

Just to make myself feel better, I will Wax Nostalgic in my Baseball Snittery. This is Sandy Koufax pitching in the 1963 World Series:

And this is Randle McMurphy calling the 1963 World Series:

And the 1963 World Series was a terrible World Series. The Dodgers, after years of Brooklyn humiliation, with the exception of 1955, swept the Yanks 4-0.

I don’t even need winners to be a baseball fan. The Series that made me a semi-Red Sox follower was lost by the Red Sox in 1975. The Cincinnati Reds won in seven games. But in what many called the greatest game Series history –Game 6–the Sox gave up six runs to lose a 3-0 advantage. Then they tied the game 6-6. In the bottom of the twelfth inning, Sox catcher Carlton Fisk came to bat. What followed passed into legend, etc.

Cuckoo’s Nest demonstrates how vital baseball was to us when I was a kid. A little before, in 1956, Mr. Adams was the principal of Harloe Elementary—he pitched softball on the playground from his wheelchair—and he made sure that lessons were finished in time so that the staff and their students could watch the Series, when the Yanks got their revenge. Those kids saw Don Larsen pitch his perfect game.

Even though two teams I don’t like—one named for a venomous snake, the other for cops who wear Stetsons and big badges (who fought the Comanche, firing their Colts from the saddle at full gallop, but were inert at Uvalde Elementary), I might manage to watch one or two games, if only for what I owe baseball for all the pleasure it’s given me. And World Series coverage has improved so much from Mr. Adams’ time and my childhood, with their black and white static cameras. I have to admit that I love to see close Series games nowadays in the late innings, when the fans are as much fun as the players. The images of what’s on the field are juxtaposed by images of fans in their rally caps, or chewing on the bills of their rally caps, holding their hands over their eyes or even waving those stupid towels. All of them demonstrate the bond between fans and The Game.

But baseball apparently doesn’t have the hold it did on kids— or on Oregon mental patients. A CNN writer suggested why this is so:

I completely understand Enten’s central point: viewership is fragmented. We constantly see advertisements for what look like riveting television miniseries from networks that might as well be on Mars. We subscribed to Netflix once but retreated once the charges for it and the other networks we’d accidentally added started to appear on our credit card. We are neither hip nor affluent.

But competitive video gaming is twice as popular as baseball? I don’t get that. I would rather watch mold grow on bread. No sport—whether it be Ty Cobb spiking a defensive player or Babe Ruth consuming his fourth in-game hot dog—can generate the kind of stories (Roger Angell, Roger Kahn, Doris Kearns Goodwin) the way that baseball can. But competitive video gaming probably oustrips reading, too

What’s far more serious to me is that we are so fragmented, and in so many ways, that baseball is no longer the communal experience it was, for example, at Harloe Elementary in 1956 or in 1963.

If you build it, they will come, the voice told Costner’s Ray Kinsella. If only that was true today.

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