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Notes -
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.
On the subject of cheated, that Nats/Astros series was an excellent world series.
HOWIE DO
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