• CURRENT NEWS AND INFORMATION
  
• 1999 Cosmic Season Begins (March 15)
  
• Joe DiMaggio Strikes Out (March 8)
  
• CBA Website Home Page Redesigned (March 7)
  
• 1999 Cosmic Players, Coaches, Managers, Owners (March 5)
  
• David Amram- 1999 Cosmic Player Plate (March 1)
  
• February 1999 News (Archive)
  

The COSMIC BASEBALL ASSOCIATION begins its 18th playing season today. The season traditionally opens on the Ides of March with an Overleague season opening game. The 24 cosmic teams will engage in a 162 game season, capped off on Thanksgiving Day with the Cosmic Universal Series. The CUS is a best-of-seven game affair matching the best team in the subleagues against the best team in the Overleague.

Current team standings, links to team rosters, individual player plates, and periodic statistical tables and reports will be on the 1999 Cosmic Season Main Plate. Links to posted game reports will also be available.

As CBA's 18th season begins we note that the membership numbers stand at an all time high. More cosmic player plates are available than ever before and CBA's Board of Directors is actively looking at league expansion during the new millennium. The possibility of year-round cosmic league games is also being considered. To the members and friends of the Cosmic Baseball Association: Thanks very much for your support.

Now it's time to play cosmic ball.

Joe DiMaggio, Hall of Fame baseball player, died Monday March 8, 1999 in Hollywood, Florida. He was 84 years old. DiMaggio played major league baseball for thirteen years (1936-1942; 1946-1951) and holds the outstanding major league record for the longest consecutive game hitting streak (56). He was also the first baseball player to make $100,000 in a season (1949).

Ted Williams once said, "DiMaggio even looks good striking out." What's remarkable about Joltin' Joe was how rarely he actually did strikeout. In his 13 year career from 1936 to 1951 (excluding 1943-1945 when he was in the Army Air Corps) DiMaggio accumulated 6,821 at bats and only 369 strikeouts. That means he struck out about 5% of the time. Compare that to someone like Reggie Jackson, who struck out over 25% of the time (9,864 at bats, 2,597 strikeouts) and that's a precious few swings and misses by the recently departed Joe D. In fact compared to just about any major league hitter DiMaggio's ability to make contact with the baseball was remarkable. During his record 56-game hitting streak in 1941 DiMaggio had 223 at bats and only 7 strikeouts. In seven of his thirteen seasons he had more homeruns than strikeouts.

Extraordinary baseball talent and something loosely defined as "grace" combined to enshrine DiMaggio in the hall of American cultural heroes. Some 30 years ago Paul Simon wrote the song "Mrs. Robinson" for the film The Graduate. The last line of the well-known tune tells us "Joltin' Joe has left and gone away." At the time DiMaggio was only 54 years old. He had been retired from baseball for 17 years but he was still very much around. His "Mr. Coffee" days were still ahead of him. Consistent with the theme of the film the reference to DiMaggio having gone away was meant to be symbolic of our collective cultural loss of innocence. The history of that period, of course, supports the insight. But how did DiMaggio the man become synonymous with a lost age of innocence?

Ah, baseball. What else spins like you? And Joltin' Joe, why did you have to go?

The main/welcome/home page at the CBA website has been redesigned. For those keeping track this is the 12th version of CBA's home page since 1995. This redesign effort replaces version 11 which has been online since August 27, 1998. The new page is larger and includes for the first time a series of JAVA scripts designed to change the appearance of some of the graphics as the mouse pointer traverses the image. Using a 28.8kbs modem the estimated download time for the page is 36 seconds.

The lead designer was Sarah Gluckman, a 1998 graduate of the Corcoran School of Art & Design in Washington, D.C. Lisa Townsend, a computer science major at George Mason University in Virgina provided the JAVA programming expertise. Additional design assistance was provided by Noah Lampert, a sophomore high school student at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland and Nora Cohen, an independent artist from Baltimore, Maryland.

The page has been optimized for Microsoft's Internet Explorer Version 4 and above and Netscape Version 3 and above.

A complete table of all the 1999 cosmic personnel (players, coaches, field managers, general managers, owners) has been put online. Included in the table are links to cosmic player plates. The table is in ascending alphabetical order by last name and provides team and position data for each individual.

A list of the 1999 rookie cosmic baseball players can be found on the 1999 Season Main Plate

A list of all available player plates between 1995-1999 can be found at the Index of Cosmic Player Plates.

David Amram was one of the first musicians to merge poetry and music together in the late 1950s. In what became the forerunner of the 1960s "happening" Amram began playing music while poets read their poetry. After establishing a friendship with Beat author Jack Kerouac, Amram began playing his french horn while poets like Kerouac and Jack Micheline performed on various stages in the New York Greenwich Village cafe/nigtclub scene.

In the early 1960s Amram wrote musical scores for movies including the scores for The Manchurian Candidate and Splendor in the Grass. He also collaborated with Kerouac on the soundtrack for the film Pull My Daisy.

CBA News & Information March 1999 Archive Plate
URL http://www.cosmicbaseball.com/0399news.html
Archived: April 1, 1999
Copyright © 1999 by the Cosmic Baseball Association

Email: editor@cosmicbaseball.com

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