after unprecedentedly speedy naming deliberations:
civil war roundtable productions
also brought to you by the 2003 winter maroon celebration ways and means committee
and poopshipdestroyer enterprises
proudly present
STEVE NASH ONE
where: 5700 S. calle de la negrapiedra, piso tres
when: saturday of reading period, in between reading period and finals. is that clear enough?
how: like this
more info to come.
is there a happier place in all of american literature than john fogerty’s back porch circa CCR’s “Sitting on my back porch”? Hint, the answer is no.
i don’t know what a sober sombrero-less jake taylor is capable of dreaming but i will be the second sparrow to alight on the david ortiz will fuck you up branch.
also: i guarantee that at some point in august, sportscenter will do a 90 second piece on how surprisingly competitive the indians are this year, after which they will lose something like eight games in a row and fall out of contention until 2004.
BASEBALL, better than diamond rings, it’s the sport of kings. oh wait that’s football. BASEBALL, better than football. there we go.
The first challenge in writing a history of the Wansley fix is understanding how and why the scandal, “celebrated at the time but since forgotten,” has long since become a historical footnote, a chestnut that receives brief mention from even professional historians of the game. There are no books or monographs exclusively addressing the scandal; it is mentioned merely as the first instance in an unbroken chain of corruption in baseball. To the modern student of the game, the sheer historical distance that 1865 represents is a daunting matter.
The historical elision of the Wansley episode began with the media, bled into the earliest baseball histories, and was not corrected until well after the genesis of academic baseball history. By 1867, corrective rhetoric regarding baseball was being utilized frequently by the press. Harper’s Weekly obliquely refers to a set of “tricks by which games have been ‘sold’ for the benefit of gamblers” in 1867, while a year later saw Harper’s refers to the 1867 article in waxing honorific as regards the election of George Sands to the presidency of the NABBP, predicting that his counsels would prevent the game from being “prostituted” to gambling concerns. A New York Times editorial of June 24, 1869 laments the “enormous sums of money said to have changed hands in betting upon the exciting games of base ball” in reference to a contemporary championship series. The frequency of rumored fixes and the historical record of rampant gambling at and around games are represented by this article; yet it makes no mention of fixing or the possibility of fixing, or the fact that a New York game (that the Times had covered less than four years earlier) was confirmed to have been fixed by gamblers. The editorial goes on to lament the fate of other sports, and suggests that baseball not be “sacrificed to the devouring spirit of gambling.” MARCH 1872 ANALYSIS HERE.
The Wansley scandal has been forgotten largely because baseball historians have never written on it for longer than a dozen pages. Early histories of the game make no mention of the scandal, as a rule. Albert Spalding omits the scandal from his 1911 work America’s National Game, although the semi-autobiographical conceit of the book may partially explain this silence. The book is a history of baseball as understood through Spalding’s participation in the sport; Spalding was a mere pup in 1865, and likely heard little of the New York scandal in Illinois. Similarly, Sporting Life editor Francis Richter does not address the question of gambling at any point in his History and Records of Baseball from 1914, although his lengthy discourse on the great pre-major league players provides an opportune time to mention Wansley and his compatriots. Alas, none of the early baseball historians see the Wansley affair as historically significant, if they see it at all.
With the scrutiny of a half-century from the media, an automatic baseball history began to appear, generated by sheer fascination more than anything else. Robert Smith points to the earliness of the Wansley affair as indication of baseball’s pre-1920 corruption. ANALYZE LEE ALLEN: HOT STOVE LEAGUE WANSLEY MATERIAL HERE Lee Allen, who served as the official historian of the Baseball Hall of Fame, from 19xx to 19xx, reinvigorated historical inquiry into the Wansley matter in his 1955 volume The Hot Stove League. Allen’s work is essential. EXPAND ON TRANSITIONAL ROLE OF ALLEN.
In academic histories of the game, the Wansley affair was initially neglected or briefly mentioned. Harold Seymour, writing the first scholarly history of the game in 1960, dedicates a single paragraph to the scandal, highlighting it as revealing the impotency of the NABBP. Seymour’s view of the scandal is a short step away from arguing that it may have had some importance in the undoing of the NABBP, but this opening was never exploited. As we have seen in the argumentation behind David Voigt’s single sin myth, the historian mentions only the Louisville fixes of 1877 in his allusion to a history “pockmarked” with corruption. One wonders why Voigt would not seize upon an opportunity to illustrate his assertions about a tradition of corruption with one of only a few confirmed incidences of game fixing. More remarkably, Voigt makes not even the briefest mention of the 1865 scandal in his lengthy three-volume history of the game, American Baseball.
Eliot Asinof neglects to mention the scandal when foregrounding the Black Sox against baseball’s fixing tradition in 1963’s Eight Men Out, insisting that serious fixing did not begin until after the advent of open professionalism. While Asinof’s work veers sharply towards amateur history, its prominence and long stead have granted it a veneer of scholastic repute that is almost wholly undeserved, considering its complete lack of annotation and frequent inaccuracy.
By 1973, the silences of Voigt and Asinof had been largely overcome. Irving Leitner posited that the unique nature of the Wansley affair, coming before the advent of de jure professionalism, has been forgotten in some part because it was hushed by a Mutuals club anxious to deflect prolonged reflection on their Tammany ties.
As baseball history specialized, more and more researches made note of the Wansley affair and what it might signify in baseball history. Melvin Adelman spends a fair deal of time with the Wansley scandal in A Sporting Time, speculating that it heightened the paranoia against gamblers and gambling in connection to baseball, a paranoia largely fueled by editorials like the Times’ efforts of June 1869 and March 1872. Charles Alexander correctly understands the Wansley affair as a harbinger of professionalism, citing Henry Chadwick’s fear that professionalism would make players “more prominent object[s] for the attack of the blacklegs.” Writing in 1994, Robert Burk highlights 1865 as the “most widely publicized hippodroming scandal of the Reconstruction era,” viewing it as an expression of literal baseball Tweedism at its high water mark, particularly Tweed’s efforts towards reinstating the tainted Mutual players.
However, the historical profile of the scandal remains mired at or below see level. Daniel Ginsburg, in his 1995 The Fix is In, addresses the 1865 scandal succinctly in a chapter entitled “The Early Days.” For a book dedicated exclusively to examining the history of baseball game-fixing, his single page on the first known scandal in history is mildly disappointing, and the author does not present a new historiographical view of the Wansley scandal. In the same year, Dean Sullivan, in his documentary history Early Innings, places the scandal as a step in baseball’s transformation into commercial spectacle. The representative document is the Clipper’s November 11 overview of the scandal, presented in its entirety, with pursuant notarization intact. This is laudable, but it is only one of 120 documents presented in the history.
live from the maroon office @ 5:06 pm tuesday evening. i have to put up the web version of the maroon before i get some work done on my BA. but i figured up would put up the web version of pete beatty before then. i was never one to put my cart anywhere other than where my horse told me to put it. you see, what had happened was…
am i the only one left who doesn’t take my “mindless approval of everything johnny cash does” vitamins? i mean, i am partial to ring of fire and he is cool, but how does this make him any better than (hank williams, lefty frizell, buck whatshisname, george jones, merle haggard, willie nelson)? i can’t fully explain this shit, but i guess for some reason the man in black mythos doesn’t really stroke my noel, if you take my meaning.
today we are going to blow out the wansley section of my BA thesis. you may not know this, but the first instance of known collusion to fix games in history was in late september 1865, when the new york mutuals threw a match to the brooklyn eckfords, 23-11. this is known to historians as the wansley affair, as mutuals catcher william wansley bribed teammates edward duffy and thomas devyr to help him throw the game. i could say more but I AM SAVING MYSELF FOR MARRIAGE.
i apologize if my previous post made anyone think i left for work without putting on my pants. not that i look down on the pantsless, i just like wearing pants. most of the time.
well, i’m not really doing my satire assignment right now. or should i say, WRITE NOW! so where can i find an MP3 of bruce/e.c./dave grohl?/little steven performing london calling at the grammys last night? anybody?
wiry cat has met the enemy, and the enemy is wiry cat’s. her bout with cat scratch fever is over as of the time i stumbled in the door last night.
on a related note, i am tired, a bit hungover, cold, pants-free, going to work right NOW
Tribe in 84: This is OUR Year
kodak see what develops
wiry cat i love you
good night internet
it’s 3:32 in the AM on a friday morning, the quality of which i can’t really speak to, having not been outside since approx 8 PM.
I sure hope wiry cat is spayed.
maybe i’ll write a short story about the men’s room in the basement of ida noyes. god damn i hate that bathroom.
have we all thanked god for ice cube recently? i think we (you) should consider something along those lines. except for the hating koreans thing. is it a fashion crime to only wear white nautica track suits with the collar flipped up? you bet. would an intelligent person hate an entire ethnic group because maybe once someone of that ethnicity wore a white nautica track suit with the collar flipped up? probably not. there, right there, we have distilled the best argument ever against racism. now bring me my white nautica track suit.
i was going to end this with a random lyric from a song, the first thing iTunes gave me to work with. Stopped in my tracks. as john cusack says in high fidelity, using other people’s poetry to express yourself is a delicate affair. and i’d feel dumb just quoting someone else to express my feelings at the moment. especially from some silly corner of pop culture like music, or the modern musical. NEXT LEVEL SHIT HAPPENING. LET’S GO WHITE SOX
speaking of: in my grammar school days, i was about anti-white sox as they grow out ohio way. as recently as my second year of college i delighted in taunting mike retzer to the point of tears after the sox got flummoxed out of the playoffs by a mediocre M’s team. and i’ve always complained that the breed of human garbage that comiskullar park attracts is particularly unfriendly to greater-clevelandites such as m’self. yet i pine, i pine somewhere in this bag of bones and weird blobby organs, i pine for the team that brought you dumb-ass slogans like “good guys wear black” (ooh, counterintuitive) and dumb-ass people like kelly wunsch and frank thomas, whom, to steal from sam’s quiver, i would punch were i to encounter him on the street. then he’d kill me, but besides the point, that one is. speaking of people punching other people: if my dad could read these words, he ‘d be liable to light me on fire and then dress up like a fireman and say he was going to help me but just punch me anyway, and then do more things like that to make me think i wouldn’t be on fire much longer, but never actually put the fire out. because once, a long time ago, my dad looked at me and said something:
“the white sox suck. fuck, man.”
now me (squeaky-voiced, still decompressing from the terrors of puberty): “yeah, they fuckin suck. i bet their gay” (i often made mental grammatical errors, being an ill-read lad)
[ceding from pseudo-fiction to completely made-up]
dad: “that’s a dirty word, son, some of your relatives are bodacious homos.”
me: “WHAT A FOOL I HAVE BEEN.”
so that’s the whole story just replace ‘bodacious homos’ with ‘White Sox/White Sox boosters’ and you have in your mind the key to a troubled life in letters.
good night to northeast ohio
vitaly “ukraine train” potapenko
#52
it’s 8:29 in the am on a very pretty Thursday morning, and I am going to go read all of Candide, provided i can find the roger pearson translation somewhere at this cow’s head. i have class at noon. Wiry Cat is locked in the closet pending the cessation of her being in heat. this has resulted in loud yowling sounds coming from the closet all night. this may seem cruel but i can assure the faggy animal-lovers out there that it is actually much more cruel to have a cat in heat in your room than it is to lock the cat in the closet. are people ever in heat?
week-old rice krispie treats and progresso minestrone soup make for a dynamic breakfast. my face is really scratchy due to my refusal to shave in the past seven days.
another thing: Ghost World is a terrible, unpleasant, jerky film made by idiots for their ugly friends.
I concur that 24 Hour Party People is quite dope but I’m not sure how one can take an anti-American read on it. Other than the fact that Manchester is in England and thus the film’s events could not have happened in this country, since it would involve moving a city with several dozen helicopters, or using Manchester, NH as a stand-in, which would ruin everything. that’s really the only anti-american perspective i’m getting.
but it is a neat movie, both for people who like fun good-timey movies and people who like to hate america and cite weird cultural criticism to hide their america hating. so me and moacir enjoyed it. JUST KIDDING
Victor Martinez vs. Josh Bard. YOU ARE NOT READY FOR THIS SHIT.
I’m geeked for Season Preview articles on the coming year of baseball.
I forgot to forget to remember, something something. SHUT THE FUCK UP CAT SHUT UP SHUT UP
Does anyone want to buy an annoying wiry cat for 30 pieces of silver or OBO?
WITH THAT: SOME OLD CRAPPY VOLTAIRE
the following things are played out:
math
science
juggling
assuming other people care about your opinions, save for opinions regarding music and sports. exempted are me and other people who have newspapers or similar outlets for controlling the opinions of others.
now, i’m not crazy about the present administration of the united states, but i was getting tired of free society. not that i think this is the best way to kill free society, but it was a sick dog, ifyouknowwhati’msayinghere.
aw, i hate all of you. today i said something political and i got a dirty taste in my mouth. I HATE
the desert’s quiet, cleveland’s cold. so the story ends.
all the federales say, we could have had him anyday…
i got the chats right now but it is four in the morning… i guess this is because i didn’t feel like talking all day saturday or sunday.
also, i told most relevant people this story already but:
i ran into my friend chris on sunday, on my way up the stairs to work at 5 pm. he gave me a cookie, which was a nice thing to do. i accepted the cookie and ate most of it before chris said “they’re laced!” in his own charming way. as i chewed the large bite of cookie, i did notice it tasted like a certain psychotropic drug which i have done a few times before. having eaten most of the cookie, i figured i might as well finish the fucking thing, so i did. four hours later, i was still stoned. it was the longest shift of my life. i had so much trouble counting change. i don’t think i said anything at all except mumbling “i am stoned” to ashley, who said “huh?” and i gave up on talking until about 10 pm. then i did laundry. but it was fun, the whole accidental drug abuse.
if baby cat is reading this: baby cat i love you also, just not as much as wiry cat. GODDAMN I LOVE WIRE-Y CAT.
well, i just froze this computer and in the process it ate a long post about various things that i had done wrong and right in the last 24 hours, which was a healthy dose of self-congratulation cut with a shorter but nonetheless vital list of things i had fucked up, which included being paranoid and resenting all of you for unspecified reasons.
one thing i will bother to rewrite:
I am in firm support of Wiry Cat. I ignore prevailing anti-Wiry Cat agitation and maintain strong ties to the sovereign nation of Wiry Cat. She is my friend, and she is imparting weird celestial/interdisciplinary cat secrets to me in my sleep. I am on some shit here. The cat does not need to talk to her doctor, she does not need to talk to no shrink. when her baby’s beside her. I LOVE YOU WIRY CAT.
