by Freida Marie Crump
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Greetings from the Ridge.
Okay, baseball is my favorite. Given a list of things to do on a sunny October afternoon, sitting in front of the TV and watching any sport would be way down on the list, but if you tied me down and made me watch, I’d turn my eyes toward the baseball diamond.
In the first place, I can see what’s going on. Professional basketball seems like one play repeated over and over for two hours. I think that’s why they’d have to add the temper tantrums by the overpriced babes of the game. The NBA needs something to keep the fans’ interest.
Football is just too confusing. Everybody moves at once and until the network superimposes the scrawled white lines on the screen I have no idea where the ball went.
The trouble with hockey is that… well, it’s hockey.
I only turn the TV to a soccer game when I’m going to be out of the house.
But baseball… basically one man facing down another with only minimal padding and usually played right out in the elements …now that’s still a sport. And it’s still a major part of our culture. Professional football, for all its hype and billion buck budgets, has not provided us with the iconic names such as Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, or Ted Williams.
Nor will it ever.
I cannot imagine at a Christmas dinner some 50 years hence, a grandfather reaching over and patting his grandson on the head and saying, "Freddy, I can remember my dad taking me to the game where Ben Roethlisberger of Pittsburgh passed for 254 yards against Houston. It’s a moment I’ll remember forever." Nope. The kid will say, "Who?"
Baseball teams have history. Football has contracts and franchises.
Baseball players have tradition. NBA players have product endorsements.
And most importantly, baseball hasn’t evolved. If you go to a major league park today you’ll see the same game your great-grandfather watched on unpainted bleachers in the 1940s. You and great-grandpa have something to talk about and a basis of comparison.
And this lack of evolution in baseball is the reason for what is still the sport’s black eye… the spitting.
The Discovery Channel has a program called "The World’s Dirtiest Jobs." The show’s brave host has been seen this season doing everything from cleaning out septic tanks to scraping pigeon poop off buildings in New York City. I’ve sent the show a new idea: have them interview the folks who must clean out major league dugouts and bullpens. The major league Spit Scraper must have a job description right up there with massaging Attila the Hun’s saddle sores.
It wasn’t so bad back in the days before there was a camera hidden in every dugout, planted in the pitcher’s mound, and stuck in the ear hole of the catcher’s mask. Now we get to see the boys spit close up. We see the dribblers, the long-distance shooters, the between the legs pingers, the step-out-of-the-batter’s-box-and-flingers, the cup dribblers, the non-cup dribblers, the chin wipers, the beard gatherers, the mitt moisteners, and the good old-fashioned goober-gaggers who can still put on arch on their projectiles and hit a base path with some accuracy.
Maybe this is why Grandpa never took Grandma to the ballpark. He knew that her sense of decency couldn’t stand the sight of grown men emptying their mouths onto the otherwise unsullied grass.
Last summer I watched a Little League game in which a three-foot second baseman spent the game spitting air. His mouth was dry and he wasn’t old enough to chew tobacco, but he knew that spitting between his legs was a much a part of the sport as hitting and fielding. The poor kid spent seven innings spitting nothing, yearning for the day when he’d be a star and could turn the dugout at Busch Stadium into a slime pit.
It was different back when the players will still spitting something significant. Once major league baseball players started losing their bottom jaws to cancer in the last three decades, the actual percentage of chaw users has dwindled significantly. Spitting has little bravado when you follow the spittle with a large pink bubble. That’s pansy spitting.
I know a fellow who lost left leg in a corn picker but every Sunday morning he would rise early and polish both of his shoes. Sort of like spitting the memory of Ty Cobb. For gosh sakes boys, swallow.
You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door but you’ll enjoy the trip.