roy edroso

Too Much Motor for the Chassis. Tinkers to Evers to Chance, I relay this great baseball story via Paul Campos of Lawyers Guns and Money. The baseball scholar Steve Treder, heretofore unknown to me, tells the tale of Steve Dalkowski, an immensely gifted though erratic pitcher who never got to the majors but is known as the hardest thrower of them all.

There are a lot of “characters” in baseball, but Dalkowski is — I was going to say the Malcolm Lowry of baseball, but Lowry got out Under the Volcano. And Fred Exley got out A Fan’s Notes. There are no farm leagues for writers and, writers being what they are (god damn them), they are less apt to publicly admire the gifts of colleagues who fell by the way. But many pros testify to Dalkowski’s wicked stuff in the minors, above which he was never able to rise.

He allegedly had a 110 mph fastball — Ted Williams, after the one time he challenged him in batting practice, pronounced him the fastest he’d ever faced. An observer said you couldn’t even see the ball on its way to the plate. His placement was shaky, though. In Treder’s telling, Dalkowski’s pitches “once tore off part of a batter’s ear” and put an umpire in the hospital for three days. He walked about as many as he struck out. He never learned anything like control.

This was apparently true of his personal life as well. The Dalkowski drinking stories Treder recounts are almost unbelievable. (“The next night they just carried him off the mound in the fourth inning.”) He makes Billy Martin look like Cal Ripkin Jr. Dalkowski is still alive but, Treder says, “due to permanent brain damage from all the alcohol, Dalkowski retains little memory of much of his life.”

He has been cited as the inspiration for Nuke LaLoosh in Bull Durham and Rick “Wild Thing” Vaughn in Major League. I admire both movies, but those characters are cheerful winners acting out more or less traditional uplift narratives — conquering wildness in one case, exploiting it in another. Dalkowski was irremediable and unsalvageable. After baseball he worked on farms and on his drinking till he was worn down completely. Treder suggests he was mentally disabled, unable to cope with the simplest needs of social life or baseball. Basically he was a mustang, a wild horse that couldn’t be broken, and though we are accustomed to think of such creatures as symbols of indomitable spirit, they are also very poorly suited to the reins and we all know what happens to anything and anybody like that. This is not to plead victim status for Dalkowski, but to say how things are.

Look at him here, during a youthful tryout with the Orioles, and later with the minor league Red Wings. Does he look like a happy man? What sort of man does he look like? He doesn’t seem violent or aggressive in the ways we are accustomed to seeing heat-throwers in the present day. He looks like someone more plagued by than comfortable with his gifts — as a youthful acquaintance once described Eugene O’Neill, someone with “too much motor for the chassis.”

There’s a very fine account by a minor league player who faced Dalkowski here: “Later, I was awarded a Bronze Star for my actions in Vietnam, but I should have gotten a Silver Star for spending 20 minutes in a batting cage with Steve Dalkowski.”

“So I said ‘When you interview people, sometimes you’re stuck with people whose work you don’t like.’ And he said, ‘And then you hate it.’ I said, ‘No! I love it! The best interviews are with people whose work I hate, or have contempt for.’ Because I go looking for something else, you know? As an interview, as a human being. The best interview I think I ever had was Tony Orlando.

“I was going to interview Tony Orlando - I was aquiver. How was I going to relate to this person on a human level? Well, he’s a big star. And well, he knows how to relate to people on a personal level. As revolting as I think what he does is, or what he looks like is, you don’t get to be that (way) unless you’ve got something cooking, and he really had something cooking. And we really hit it off. It was great, and I hated when it was over. I wanted to be his friend, he wanted to be mine. We had a great time. Tony Orlando! (Laughter.) I’m waiting for my chance to interview Marcel Proust and they gave me Tony Orlando! You make the best of it. That’s what it’s all about, is making fun with what you’ve got. So It’s up to people to decide what they’ve got and they’ve got so much.” — Danny Fields, interviewed by Perfect Sound Forever.

Review of The Forbidden Apple. I got back in the paper again with this review for the Village Voice of Kat Long’s very fine The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex & Sin in New York City, a history of the local sex and smut trades and their opposition from the 1870s onwards. I wish I’d had twice as much room to talk about it. I will add here that the book at first seemed to me plodding at times — I thought: Do we really need the names of all the parkways and expressways Robert Moses built? — but Long’s patient accretion of detail does two very useful things: it buys extra credibility for the story, and stylistically it mimics the slowness of historical progress; every considerate pause reminds the reader that history comes not with the rush of narrative, but fitfully, which is why good histories are needed to make sense of its ebbs and flows. The book is too short to give us a sense of the ebbs, so the mini-longueurs act as rests that simulate them.

I wish also that I could have threaded something about Donna Dennis’ excellent Licentious Gotham: Erotic Publishing and Its Prosecution in Nineteenth-Century New York into the review, but it came to me too late. The book covers the city’s porn trade before the period covered by Long at great and edifying length. Among other things, I learned from it that one of the first (perhaps the first) dirty book in America was a 1795 edition of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey, ornamented with lascivious engavings, and that the first recorded moral scold of the city in that era, John McDowall, was not only roundly mocked and caricatured for his efforts, but his periodical Journal cataloguing and warning of New York’s sins and snares was itself condemned by a grand jury as “injurious to morals, offensive to taste, and degrading to the character of our City.” Would that our city fathers had such moxie now!

New York Tea Party. It’s rare that I get time to go out and cover events for Runnin’ Scared, so I was happy to retrieve for readers this account of the February 28 “Tea Party” protest of Obama and his financial policies at City Hall Park. The lavishly quoted speakers give a fair impression of the tone of the loyal opposition at this moment. One speaker was enraged that I had not asked his name (which he pointed declined to give in his rambling address). It took some restraint not to tell him, “Who cares?” I followed up with a column on the Tea Party epiphenomenon.

Moral Degenerate. I’ve been too busy to post here much, so it’s Greatest Hits time. Over the past two weeks alicublog has had some popular items, but the one I liked best addressed an essay by young Republican Matthew Continetti. His essay sought to revive old-fashioned conservative moral dudgeon by clamping to the breast of the movement contemporary heroes to which it had no demonstrable ties, except that heroism is, in the minds of such people, a conservative possession by squatters’ rights. It ties in a way to my post about CPAC — but let’s take it one step at a time. For more background than I had room to give on Continetti, see here.

Tonight is Oscar Night. I enjoy watching these things, and may liveblog at Runnin’ Scared. I have made my usual predictions, despite having seen but few of the movies up for major awards. Here are my takes on Frost/Nixon, The Wrestler, The Dark Knight, and Milk.