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So, what are you reading?
I’m on Gardiner’s Athletics of the Ancient World, after reading the paper Mens Sana in Corpore Sano? Body and Mind in Ancient Greece by Young which was in part very critical of him. Still going through Reagan in His Own Hand and The Future Does Not Compute.
At the beach I read Cheated about the Astros sign stealing scandal in MLB. One of the prime movers, who has been more or less shuffled out of the game as a result, was Carlos Beltran, and the book goes into his life story a lot. Like a lot of Latino players, he was signed into American pro-baseball with very limited English skills, and Beltran has always been noted as a smart, cerebral player. He was frustrated by his lack of ability to communicate, he felt like he had a head full of thoughts and no ability to tell them to anyone in the clubhouse. At best, minor league clubs might have one bilingual coach per team, and that was purely a matter of luck. 17-19 year old Caribbean players were trying to learn English on the fly, while also adapting to living in a new country, and learning the professional game.
Beltran always experienced this as a personal insult, hated that he couldn't speak to his teammates and communicate his ideas. It weighed on him every day in the minor leagues, he suffered under the shame of not being able to speak clearly. He hated it, he wanted to be able to speak and he couldn't. It was a black mark on his whole life at the time. As a star player and popular union rep later, he lead the way to instituting a policy by which every team kept a Spanish Language Interpreter on staff, the way they had for Japanese players customarily for years before. Beltran was proud of the policy, sometimes considered it his greatest accomplishment as a player.
And what struck me about the story was this: Beltran's story wasn't so extraordinary. Thousands of young Latino players had come up in the minors, as teenagers, with no English skills. And they struggled like Beltran did. And probably a hundred of them* had done as well as Beltran had in the majors in terms of success, prominence, leadership. And yet most of them hadn't taken not knowing English as a personal affront. They didn't experience it as a real problem that needed to be solved. It took Carlos Beltran to do that.
And I've been thinking about why that is. What is it that makes one person experience an affront to their race/ethnicity/group as a personal suffering, and another it slides right off? What makes one white man watch Cheerio commercials through gritted teeth, and another laugh knowingly and figure things are fine? What makes one black guy just try to live his life and get ahead, and another view every outside force as a microaggression? What makes one Latino switch hitting centerfielder say "This is an outrage" and another say "Eh, whatever?"
I'm working my way through Chris Isherwood's Berlin Stories, the book that the play Cabaret was based on. I highly recommend it. It's a really fun book, filled with not a little political insight into Weimar Germany, but mostly hijinks and picaresque. Incredibly gay, but then so were the Nazis at the outset, so plus one for pride month I guess.
I also started, but for obscure reasons am not yet finishing, Path Lit By Lightning. For a variety of personal reasons, I've always known of the stories of Jim Thorpe, so when I saw this get so many glowing reviews, I figured I'd get to it. I can see why it was so well reviewed: it's a real four quadrant book. It's an old sports book, like Monsters of the Midway or 61 or Bottom of the 34th, which is going to appeal to dudes. It's telling a progressive story of racial oppression and overcoming bias, so it's got the liberal bent. It's an investigative reporting into revisionist history with quality research going into it. And it's just a good personal biography of an interesting guy. Really works from any angle. One thing I didn't realize from prior stories: the reason Carlisle Indian School consistently beat Ivy League football teams was partly the talent and spirit of the players, partly the coaching of legend Pop Warner, but also partly that Carlisle wasn't really a college so much as a combination high school/college/vocational/finishing school with no real set curriculum or year of graduation. A lot of their players were in their mid-20s, or had unclear birth certificates. So while the Ivies were fielding 18-22 year olds, Carlisle was rolling out grown-ass 25-26 year olds. Those are important years, from a football perspective.
*Beltran is essentially 100th overall in career bWar, but he never had great playoff success or was the best player on great teams, so I think a lot of other Latinos like El Duque or Aroldis Chapman might deserve greater career credit even if they were lesser players on an overall career basis.
As a Cards fan, Beltrán occupies a funny place in the organization's history. St. Louis won the World Series in 2006, beating the Detroit Tigers in 5 games. To get there they had a grueling NLCS against the Mets, the team that figures most prominent in Beltrán's playing career. Game 7, bottom of the 9th, Cards up 3-1. Then-rookie-now-just-retired Adam Wainwright is in to close out the game for the birds.
"Uncle Charlie", Waino's other nickname from an old-time term for the curveball his career was known for, sees José Valentín first. Valentín is batting 7th, this is the weakest part of the Mets' lineup and the dream set for a quick save. Valentín has a .271 average, a .330 on-base percentage and in the regular season just shy of twice as many strikeouts as walks. He's gonna swing, and he does on the first pitch, a fastball, lofting a ball into center for a single. Pressure's on.
Endy Chávez is next. Chávez by profile is the same story as Valentín, just a little better. .306 average, .338 OBP, 24 walks vs 44 strikeouts. He'd been weak in the playoffs in hitting but among outfielders that year only Andruw Jones exceeded him in Defensive Runs Saved, Jones' 24 to Chávez' 22, so this a guy you keep in the lineup even if he's not hitting that well. But he does there: Waino throws the curveball, no chance he's giving up back to back hits, so it's a ball, curveball again for a called strike, and with the batter off-balance common thought says cross 'em blind from breaking to the heat, fastball again, but Chávez is ready, line drive to left field, runners on first and second.
Cliff Floyd pinch hits, strikes out looking on 6 pitches. José Reyes next, lines out on 5 pitches. Paul Lo Duca comes up and gets pitched around with a walk on 5 pitches. Now it's Beltrán's turn. Game 7, Bottom 9th, 2 outs, bases loaded, just one good single ties it, and at the plate is one of the all-time great postseason hitters, what happens? Strike, foul, Uncle Charlie catches him looking. Cards go to the World Series, trouncing the Tigers including then-rookie Justin Verlander.
Cards win the World Series again in 2011. Tony La Russa retires, Albert Pujols goes to the Angels, Mike Matheny comes in and looking for something to help cover the loss of La Máquina, John Mozeliak (*spit*) signs one Carlos Beltrán. Despite losing the greatest Cardinal since Stan Musial, the Cards had power. My all-time favorite Cardinal in Matt Holliday was always a basher, Allen Craig who posted an insane, #2-all-time .454 average with runners in scoring position in 2013, shoulda-been-2013-MVP Matt Carpenter, defensive GOAT Yadier Molina whose offense peaked in 2012/2013, and Beltrán. In his two years he had 56 homers, slashing .283/.343/.493 and was good for 6.2 bWAR. For the unfamiliar, you can interpret this as "very good." He was exactly what the Cards needed and the fans took to him quickly, myself definitely included. Big fan, even today. Cards don't sign him in 2014, he spends three years with the Yankees, a year with the Rangers, and his final playing year with the Astros as they win their first World Series in 2017.
Then it's 2019, Astros are again in the World Series against the Nationals. The sign-stealing scandal breaks and soon enough all fingers point at Beltrán. He's one of the very few people who received punishment. The Astros "lost" $5 million, yeah they probably made a billion off the ring; they lost first and second round picks in '20 and '21, 30/30 GMs would trade two years of all picks for a ring; Jeff Luhnow, AJ Hinch and Alex Cora got suspended for 2020, lol lmao, appropriate those ended up being fake suspensions for a fake season; and Beltrán, who had just been tapped as manager for the Mets, stepped down.
At first I thought MLB was depressingly cavalier about the cheating. It fit with my model of MLB and the owners as a bunch of shitheads hellbent on ruining the point of the sport, but something wasn't sitting right, and then it started to break--oh, the Red Sox were cheating, as were the Yankees, and so, it seems, were a lot of teams in baseball. I don't think the Cards or Cubs were but I think an uncomfortable number of teams were cheating, and while the Astros' trash cans may have been the most glaring example, I think of it as a Lance Armstrong situation. Most teams were cheating, the Astros were the strongest, so they got the most out of it. It also lines up with the lack of real punishment: MLB considered it, the Astros threatened lawsuits that would reveal 10+ teams were cheating, and so they agreed on a slap on the wrist for being the ones who got caught, but nothing lasting.
Also the Astros beat the Dodgers in 2017, that's a W for fans of 29 teams. And maybe I want to rationalize the flaws of the guy I still like, but the question "Why didn't the Dodgers' astronomically wealthy ownership raise hell?" sure is answered neatly with "They were cheating too."
Martino goes into this extensively in the book. While a lot of other teams were engaged in sign-stealing using replay rooms that bordered on illegal, but concludes that none were as extensive or as team-supported as the Astros.
I do think the Astros were also disliked for hitting "betray" on Baseball culture in other ways. The Lastros era was the worst MLB example of open tanking, which is a disease on American sport which I truly hope teams adopt the obvious solutions to solve.
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On the subject of cheated, that Nats/Astros series was an excellent world series.
HOWIE DO
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