The Quotidian (formerly the Diurnal Journal): Baseball (!)

September 15, 2010

Baseball (!)

The Popular Game of Baseball

Sam offered me a ticket to tonight's Giants-Dodgers game at AT&T Park in San Francisco. Years ago, with my father and my mother's father, I went to a Giants-Dodgers night game at Seals Stadium. I don't remember how we got there, drove down Harrison and parked on some side street maybe, or took a jitney down Mission Street and walked. Today I'll be taking the bus over Hwy 17 to San Jose's Diridon Station, and from there the train to AT&T Park.

So there we were, sitting high up above and well back from the field not too far down the right field line, a young guy named Sandy Koufax pitching a pretty steady game for the Dodgers into the ninth inning that night, the Dodgers sitting on a two-run lead when lo and behold a rally broke out and the Giants loaded the bases. Koufax was done. My grandfather, who brooked no dispute when it came to baseball matters, begrudged, "This young guy's a good pitcher, Koufax" as Koufax walked off. Subsequent events proved the rueful truth of this judgement to all those who despise the Dodgers of Los Angeles. They brought in Art Fowler to face Leon Wagner, pinch-hitting for the Giants. Wagner, observing as he later put it that "the bags was bulgin'," stepped up to the plate and hit a grand slam home run into the right field stands that won the game for the Giants, 6-4. It remains to be seen what tonight's game has in store. Another wondrous victory for the Giants over the Dodgers would be fine by me.

1 comment:

rampster said...: Emmett Bush was mighty impressed with Wagner to the ludicrous extreme of quoting him ad nauseam for weeks on end. I've done 'don't knowing' about that man, gone these many years.; September 15, 2010 at 9:12 AM

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For some years now I've travelled bumptiously about the internet commenting on other people's blogs under the pseudonym "peter ramus," pointedly and I regret to say at times heatedly disclosing the general shape my own intricately devised misapprehension of current events in contradistinction to the remarkable torrent of misapprehensions made known daily on that medium by everyone else.

Nominally I associate myself as much as possible with the views of those who seem to know what they're talking about, but often enough I find myself obliged, like so many others, to go on about things I'm not in the least qualified to address simply because it is my way when the opportunity presents itself. I find this shortcoming as personally irritating as it is to those I've favored it with over the years, an as yet irrepressible feature of my discourse. Thus the admittedly defensive assumption of the nom de blog, "peter ramus."

"peter ramus" isn't to be confused with Peter Ramus, another fellow entirely, who lived and died a long time ago around the sad times leading up to the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre in France, an event which saw his own undoing in the chaotic days that followed.

He was a zeolot, Peter Ramus was. He had a particular bone to pick with Aristotle over the stuff and substance of rhetoric, which led him to propose revolutionary changes in the subject and manner of teaching which prevailed in higher education in those times. A quaestio was convened, a solemn gathering of all the branches of civil society, to see what was to be done about him. The King sent a man, and the Church sent a man, and of course the University of Paris couldn't help but send one, too. Unsurprisingly, they found overwhelmingly in favor of Aristotle and against Peter Ramus. In addition, it pleased the members of the assembled body to pronounce Peter Ramus personally disagreeable and notably ugly to boot. Strictly as an aside.

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