| ELIZABETH DOOLEY PASSES ON | ||||
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Dooley inherited her love of the game from her father who it is said attended every Red Sox home opener from 1901 until his death in 1970. Ted Williams, whom she called each year on his birthday, called Dooley a "big league gal." She was the grand dame of Fenway Park.
For 39 years Dooley taught physical education in the Boston public school system. She never married. In 1956 she moved to an apartment in Kenmore Square, presumably to be in walking distance of Fenway. Despite her love for the old American League park she supported plans for the new Fenway Park. The Red Sox honored her in 1985 when she threw out the first ball at the Red Sox home opener.
She was a serious student of baseball. When she took her nephews to the game she insisted that they only ask questions during the third, fifth and seventh innings. She wanted them to study the intricacies of the sport. Dom Dimaggio, a former Red Sox player (and Joe's brother) said, "The Red Sox were her whole life from what I could gather."
She once said "I absorb baseball the way water is absorbed into a sponge." She considered herself more than just a baseball fan. She told a newspaper reporter in 1997, "A fan leaves in the seventh inning. I have always considered myself a friend of not only the Red Sox but of the whole game. Being a friend means being there from the Star Spangled Banner to the final out." Rest in peace, Lib Dooley.
[June 22, 2000]
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| SCOUTING REPORT- Presidents Look at Two for 2001 | ||||
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Our concern here is to consider which of the presidential candidates would most improve the team.
In terms of reality baseball, George W. was at one time the managing general partner of the Texas Rangers, a team in the American League. He apparently approved the trade on July 29, 1989 that sent rookie Sammy Sosa (and two other players) from the Rangers to the White Sox (and ultimately the Cubs) for Harold Baines and another infielder. Baines years later told a reporter ironically that he understood why George W. got out of the baseball business.
Gore had a near-tragic event occur on Major League Baseball's 1989 opening day. Gore took his six-year-old son, Albert III, to watch the Orioles opener in Baltimore. The boy ran into traffic, got hit by a car and was thrown 30 feet. He suffered substantial injuries. The child's legs and ribs were broken and some of his internal organs were crushed. The accident required an extended stay in the hospital. Fortunately, young Gore the third, according to his father, has had a full recovery.
Gore is a southern Democrat, and son of Albert Gore, Sr. a prominent political figure in the 1950s. Albert, Jr. was first elected to represent Tennessee in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1976. In 1984 the people of Tennessee elected Gore to the U.S. Senate. Picked as William Clinton's running mate Gore has been the Vice President of the United States since 1992. Born on March 31, 1948, he is an Aries.
Bush is a Republican and son of a former U.S. President. He is also, since January 1995, the Governor of the State of Texas. Serving as Texas' governor is the only elected political job Bush has had. Prior to embarking on his political career Bush made money with oil. Among his various business interests included his purchase of the already mentioned Texas Rangers in 1989. According to one report his original $600,000 investment in the team might now be worth as much as $10 million. Born July 6, 1946 Bush's astrological sun sign is Cancer.
In 1977 Bush married Laura Welch, a devout west Texas school librarian. Together they reproduced and have two twin daughters. Gore met Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson, also known as "Tipper", at the high school prom and after graduating from college he married her in 1970. The Gores reproduced and have four children: three girls and a boy.
Bush's slogan "A New Approach, Doing the People's Business" is patronizing at best and deceptive at worst. Gore talks in platitudes that only years of training in the hypocritical halls of Congress could refine.
Gore is an infielder with reasonable power at the plate. Bush, like his father, is a pitcher and can defintely throw the fastball by people not paying attention. The The Washington Presidents need help everywhere so there's no position edge here for either candidate. Since the Vice President is always the team's hitting coach it will be interesting to find out who Bush and Gore select as running- mates. One cannot entertain the hope that Bush or Gore will be saviors for the team. The Washington Presidents need more help then either a Gore or a Bush can provide.
The Cosmic Baseball Association does not endorse presidential candidates. However, based on a combination of cosmologic and sociologic analysis, we believe that Al Gore will most likely be the new addition to the Washington Presidents' roster next November.
[June 11, 2000]
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Jack Kerouac's Summer League | ||||
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In thinking about Kerouac and baseball it is easy to divide the study into two basic parts: Kerouac's mind-centered mostly solitary fantasy baseball game, the so-called "Summer League" which he created when he was 11 and his adolescent experience at actually playing the real game of baseball in a Lowell (Massachusetts) youth league. In this sense Kerouac's involvement with baseball spanned two universes of his life, that is, his inner imaginative world and the more outer-directed world of social relations. Of course the relationship and tension between these two worlds accounts for a lot of the fascination with Kerouac and his work. In his biography of Kerouac, Subterranean Kerouac, Ellis Amburn writes that, "In a profound sense, it was sports, more than anything else, that galvanized Kerouac as a writer." Kerouac was 11 in 1933. That was the year he entered Bartlett Junior High School, his first non-parochial educational experience. 1933 was also apparently the first time Kerouac saw a major league baseball game. His father Leo took him to see the Boston Red Sox play in Fenway Park. (Boston had two major league baseball teams, the American League Red Sox and the National League Braves. There is no doubt in my mind that Kerouac was a Red Sox fan.) Leo also introduced his son to the world of horse racing which, just like baseball, would stimulate Kerouac's young imagination. An almost immediate result of these excursions with his father to see baseball and horse racing was that Kerouac created imaginary games based on these experiences. Kerouac's "Summer League" was a fantasy baseball league that made use of two decks of cards (not regular playing cards.) The cards were designed from scratch by Kerouac. Consider this description from Kerouac's post-modern epic Visions of Cody: the cards were "crayoned in orange position by position on an ordinary card, slightly glossy." (Kerouac is describing the card for his imaginary Philadelphia Pontiacs team.) The card material itself apparently came from his father's printing shop. It would be interesting to know if each player had a card or were the cards only team-based. What statistics did the cards track? What were the dimensions of the cards? According to Gerald Nicosia's biography of Kerouac, Memory Babe, the cards were lost in 1961 when Kerouac's suitcase was stolen in Mexico. I have also seen a photocollage of some of the cards (they appear team-based) from the Kerouac Romnibus CD (thanks to Dave Moore.) Are there Kerouac baseball cards still out there? In any case, Kerouac generated entire baseball seasons for the "Summer League. Much of it while sitting alone in his Phebe Avenue bedroom. An important supplement to the imaginary baseball league was the detailed records that Kerouac kept about the games and the players. Kerouac's life-long use of notebooks can be traced to this period. Entering the data with red ink he filled up notebooks with information about the operations of the so-called "Summer League." Amburn makes a smart observation when he points out that the solitary baseball fantasy and the detailed "cosmology" that Kerouac created to go along with it called on skills that he would later use fruitfully as a novelist. The "Summer League" was peopled with attractive and exciting imaginary players such as Art Rodrigue, a star firstbaseman who off the field was apparently a great lover and Pictorial Review Jackson who was the league's most outstanding pitcher. In 1935 the Kerouacs moved from their Phebe Avenue home to a house on Sarah Avenue. This move coincided with an expansion of the fantasy baseball league to include an outdoor variation. This outdoor-based game used a steel ballbearing for a baseball and a nail for a baseball bat. Kerouac designed a baseball field in the muddy backyard of the Sarah Avenue house. He marked off circular zones that indicated an "out" if the ballbearing landed within the zone.
After the "sinister home run" Kerouac augmented his poetic use of baseball with actually playing the sport. During the summer of 1936 Kerouac and his friend Joseph Henry "Scotty" Beaulieu were co-managers of the Dracut Tigers, a civic team of his friends that competed in a league administered by the Lowell Recreation Department. Both Scotty and Jack were able athletes. Scotty was a masterful pitcher and Jack played outfield and the catcher's position. Alas, the Dracut Tigers amassed a dismal record losing 10 of 11 games. However, Jack's personal statistics were impressive: he led the team in batting average, and homeruns. He also led the team in strikeouts. This statistical profile is descriptive of a power hitter with little patience in the batter's box. The 1937 season turned out to be much better for the Dracut Tigers. In fact Kerouac's team might have won the championship title but for some clever, albeit illegal, maneuvering by the rival team from South Common. There were two outs in the ninth inning and South Common had the lead, 4-3. The Tigers were up at bat. Kerouac was on thirdbase when Ernie Noval, a poor hitter, came to bat for the Tigers. Sensing the odds were against Noval getting a hit, Kerouac decided to steal home. Jack took a large lead off the base and the catcher threw the ball down the line. But the ball flew over the head of the thirdbaseman. Seeing the overthrow, Jack took off for home. When Kerouac was tagged out by the catcher at homeplate the ruse was disclosed: the catcher had thrown a potato down the line; the game ball remained in the catcher's mitt. Jack was out, the game was over.
Most of Jack's last two years in high school were devoted to football. En route to Columbia with his football scholarship he spent a preparatory year at the Horace Mann school and there are several photographs of Kerouac in a Horace Mann baseball uniform. Like many creative people Kerouac was attracted to the mysteries of the game of baseball. In Kerouac's case, his elaborate "Summer League" fantasy baseball game helped him as a child to escape from the traumas of life . Baseball also stimulated and enchanted his imagination. And it provided him with some very profound training in the field to which he dedicated his life.
Jack Kerouac is an outfielder for the Dharma Beats. Andrew Lampert [June 10, 2000] | ||||
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Website Hosting Problems (Update) | ||||
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New member servers have been succesfully brought online to alleviate current page loading issues. Expect to see improved performance and faster page loads as the system returns to normal operations.This should improve access to our site. While other hosting options are being explored we plan to keep parts of the website both at Xoom and at Verio (clark.net). June 15, 2000 Update: The Xoom.com Technical Support Forum posted the following status message today: Member server problems persist today with no ETR given for repair. Expect long page load times, 404 errors, and intermittent missing graphics problems. Updates posted as they are received.These "member server problems" have persisted for nearly a month. But have become much worse recently. The indications are not positive that Xoom.com is going to recover soon. Since a lot of the Cosmic Baseball Association's website pages were moved to Xoom.com servers in April, a lot of the pages will be difficult to load. This situation will persist until Xoom gets itself repaired or we find another, more reliable, cost-effective host. It's not easy being a parasite in this culture. June 11, 2000 Update: Part of the Cosmic Baseball Association's website will be migrated back to the Verio (the old clark.net) servers. Up to 10 megabytes will be stored at Verio (clark.net) and the balance, some 40 megabytes will be stored for the moment on the raggedy servers at Xoom.com. Xoom's level of technical service lately can only be described as poor-to-miserable. Access to 500 megabytes of storage for free is a wonderful deal until you remember you get what you pay for. In addition to the technical problems our graphic designers are not happy with the ubiquitous "XoomBar" that displays at the top of every page. The "XoomBar" is part of the deal for the free storage. More recent material and selected older pages will be stored on Verio's (clark.net) servers and the rest of the site will be at Xoom until we can figure out a better solution. We apologize to our visitors for any inconvenience encountered when trying to access the site. We are looking for a more permanent solution.
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External Recommendations | ||||
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T-Shirt Samples | ||||
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For more information about T-shirts, please [June 1, 2000] |
| June 2000 Archive | ||
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June 25 Bohemians Draft Pinkwater | ||
The Eden Bohemians, the Cosmic Baseball Association's team of interesting writers, have drafted children's book writer Daniel Pinkwater, according to an announcement released today by the team's general manager Henry Miller. The Bohemians needed a pitcher to replace the retiring Derek Wolcott after this season. Pinkwater has described himself as the "guru for those who don't listen." He has written over 80 books for children and he also has a job as a radio personality on the "All Things Considered" national public radio network. Born in 1941 in Memphis, Tennessee Pinkwater graduated Bard College in 1963. He wanted to be a sculptor but after studying that art form for 4 years at college, his teachers suggested another creative pursuit. After a short stint as an illustrator he became a professional writer. He told an interviewer that he was inspired by the work in Mad Magazine. It's always interesting to find out what other writers read. In addition to Mad, Pinkwater reports he spent 15 years continuously reading Herman Melville's Moby Dick, another great work of American literature. Related Links
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June 23 New Cosmic Player Plates | ||
The Euro-American white man and his values of commerce and gain were antithetical to the more spiritual native Americans like Crazy Horse. Known variously as Tashunca-uitco and Tasunke Witko and born in the year that the great rush to the gold out west began (1849) he became a leading patriot and fearless warrior for his people, generally known as the Sioux Indians. There are no known photographs of Crazy Horse. He didn't permit pictures to be taken. This is in keeping with a soul-centered culture like the Sioux. Crazy Horse joined the Wonderland Warriors, the Cosmic Baseball Association's team of distinguished and notorious soldiers, last season as an infielder. He is the team's starting second baseman this season. Click here to visit Crazy Horse's Season 2000 Cosmic Player Plate.
Twiggy was the "it" girl, the "face of 1966" as defined and determined by the fashion and glamour industries in the middle of the 20th century's most rebellious decade. She was "discovered" shampooing hair in a suburban London beauty parlor at 17. Her thin, flat-chested appearance enwrapped in a Mary Quant mini-skirt became a distinctive uniform for the emerging pubescent baby boomers desperate for a unique identity. The Psychedelphia Woodstockings, the Cosmic Baseball Association's team of interesting 1960s personalities, brought Twiggy up last season and she showed some remarkable stamina for such a small pitcher (5'4", 90 lbs.). Click here to visit Twiggy's Season 2000 Cosmic Player Plate.
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) has sometimes been called the "father of the motion picture." He was the photographer who snapped the pictures of a running horse and demonstrated that all four of the horse's feet were airborne. After starting out as a landscape photographer Muybridge became famous for his work with motion photography. He also became infamous for the October 1874 murder of his wife's lover, a crime for which he was acquitted by a San Francisco jury. Muybridge was drafted as a rookie infielder for this season by the Bhutan Vanguards, the Cosmic Baseball Association's team of painters and photgraphers. Click here to visit Muybridge's Season 2000 Cosmic Player Plate.
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June 18 Superbas Fire Flockhart, Hire Imus | ||
It was bound to happen. When a team is a paltry 34-42 in the won-loss column and sitting in the Middleleague cellar, nine games away from upstairs, something has got to give. Calista Flockhart, embattled field manager of the Telecity Superbas, CBA's team of television stars, was given her walking papers by team owner Howdy Doody.
Imus has little or no known baseball experience. And Chris Farley, the team's coach has to be wondering what the future holds for him. Also, if the Superbas problems stemmed, as some claim, from a lack of discipline, well, then, the players might be in for a rude awakening. They will find Don Imus a much different breed than the introspective Flockhart.
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June 16 Create a Cosmic Game | ||
Visitors to the Cosmic Baseball Association's website can now create a cosmic baseball game between two teams of their own choosing, real or imagined. An online form requesting team names, players and positions initiates the cosmic game simulation. Simulations take 24-48 hours. Box scores of the simulated games will be posted at the website so that the creators can see the results of the cosmic game they initiated.Visit the Cosmic Game Simulation Form to begin creating a game.
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June 14 Bush Likes Rocker | ||
A man named Bush suggested yesterday that controversial baseball pitcher John Rocker would not get the call for an ambassadorial post. But, he added, "I still like the man as a pitcher."
This wasn't George W. Bush the governor of Texas and the presumptive Republican presidential candidate. These comments are from Mr. E.J. Bush of Milton Florida. (And as far as we can tell, E.J. is not related to George W. or his brother, Jeb, governor of Florida.) E.J. Bush was attending a minor league baseball game June 13 in Richmond, Virginia. It was the last game that John Rocker would play for the Class-AAA Richmond Braves, ending the troubled pitcher's brief stint down in the so-called "bush" leagues. Rocker returns to the big league Atlanta Braves tomorrow. E.J. Bush is visiting relatives in Virginia. He's 72 years old and uses a portable oxygen tank when he visits the ballpark. When asked for his reaction to the comments Rocker made to a magazine writer last Winter, Bush answered, "I don't think he should have said what he said. He should have been a little more diplomatic."
Here's a news flash: baseball doesn't transcend reality, which means it doesn't rise above morality. John Rocker has every right to spew venom or to become effusively open-minded and charming. And the fans and the commentators have every right to form and express opinions. Our opinion of John Rocker is not flattering. We wouldn't want him on our cosmic baseball teams.
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June 11 Projects in Progress | ||
A slew of new projects are in various stages of completion. Post-modern essayist and poet Perry Lindstrom is working on something new. He writes, "The work will be an attempt to recreate the conversation and mood of the meeting that took place in the late 1930s between Leon Trotsky and Andre Breton and of course the interactions with Diego Rivera and Frieda Kahlo with whom they were staying. I thought at first to make it a play, but decided to make it more of a meditation -- a la Flaubert's Parrot, but probably without the fictional narrator. " The painter Robert LaVigne is working on a piece about Natalie Jackson, a Beat-related personality that died prematurely. Everyone assumed her death was a suicide. Photographer Jessie Numata is continuing to evolve her concept piece, "Nude Transcending a Stare" which the Cosmic Baseball Association hopes to put on complete display in the near future. Volume 19 of the Journal of the Cosmic Baseball Association is already taking shape and it has an estimated September 2000 publication date. As always we are on the prowl for poetry, essays and other web-suitable work. For more information about contributing, send an email to the editor@cosmicbaseball.com
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June 10 Selling Out | ||
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Email: editor@cosmicbaseball.com
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For 55 years one thing was certain: If the Boston Red Sox were playing at home in Fenway Park then Elizabeth "Lib" Dooley could be found watching the game in a seat in Box 36-A. It is quite likely that Dooley holds both the all time record for attendance by a fan at a major league park and the all time record for continuous attendance by a fan at a major league park. She attended over 4,000 games, starting in 1944. On June 19, several hours before her favorite baseball team got severely beat 22-1 by the rival New York Yankees, Ms. Dooley passed away. She was 87.
In the past we have looked at events such as "namesakes," that is, how many major league baseball players exist or existed with the same last name as a presidential candidate? Bush wins this category, 5-1. Owen Bush (1908-1923), Joe Bush (1912-1928), Guy Bush (1923-1945), Randy Bush (1982-1993) and Homer Bush all played in the big leagues. Homer came up to the big leagues with the Yankees in 1997 and he is currently playing with the Toronto Blue Jays. There is only one known Gore big leaguer: George F. "Piano Legs" Gore who played for a variety of teams (almost all of them in the National League) between 1879 and 1892. 
Both are mainstream, run-of-the-mill politicos. Neither one is a visionary and while media analysis suggests vast differences, the truth is that the difference between Republicans and Democrats isn't remarkable. Both Gore and Bush are middle-aged Caucasian men from families of privilege. They are both part and parcel of the so-called "ruling class." Maybe the citizens of the United States don't know it yet, but the desire for visionaries is growing. George W. Bush and Albert Gore, Jr. are most definitely not visionaries, political or otherwise.
Although the American writer Jack Kerouac was a high school football star
and went to Columbia
University on a football scholarship the great game of the
quadrature had a more significant and creative influence on him than
football.
It was while playing the outdoor game one afternoon, sometime presumably in
1936 that the "sinister end-of-the world-homerun" occurred. The ballbearing
was hit with such force that it cleared the entire Sarah Avenue playing
field and got lost in the bushes near his old house on Phebe Avenue. This
homerun and the loss of the ballbearing, according to Kerouac, marked the
end of the league. It also meant something more profound. Fifteen years
later Kerouac would write in Doctor Sax, "I always thought there was
something mysterious and shrouded and foreboding about this event which put
an end to childish play-- it made my eyes tired-- 'Wake up now Jack--face
the awful world of black without your aeroplane balloons in your hand.'"
Kerouac would of course go on to chart and send reports about his excursions
into "the awful world of black."
Jack played one more season of baseball in Lowell. For the summer of 1938
he and Scotty organized both a junior and senior team. The junior squad
won their division's championship. Kerouac batted a phenomenal .385. The
senior group lost the championship by one game. As a reward Jack and the
team went to Fenway Park and watched the Red Sox beat the St. Louis Browns,
9-5. Incidentally, Jack's friend Joseph "Skippy" Roberge played on the
senior version of the Dracut Tigers in 1938. Roberge would later play three
war-interrupted seasons with the Boston Braves (1941-42, 1946.)
I don't know if baseball, real or imagined can teach us anything. It can, as
Kerouac's experience suggests, provide a rich number of metaphors that
artists can mine while trying to find out the relationship between the inner
life
of the mind's imagination and the outer life that is awash with real people
and events. Such a relationship can be confounding. It's in the nature of
artists like Kerouac to try and find some meaning between the two worlds. His "Summer League" represents an early inquisitive approach.
After Flockhart's firing, the puppet owner announced the hiring of controversial media personality Don Imus. What's controversial is that Imus is mostly known as a radio talk show host, not a television star. But he has also been on television, courtesy of the MSNBC channel. since 1996. And he was an original VH1 television disc jockey. So his credentials and experience meet the requirements of joining this team of television personalities.
Born July 23, 1940 John Donald Imus, Jr. began his radio career on June 1, 1968 in Palmdale, California. His New York radio career began in 1971. He has been married twice. He had four daughters with his first wife Harriet but that marriage ended in 1979. In 1994 he married Deidre Coleman and together they have one son Frederic Wyatt Imus, born July 3, 1998. Also in 1998 Imus created the Imus Ranch Foundation, a charity which supports a New Mexico ranch designed for children with cancer. 
