2025 Readings 76

 I've often commented on my relationship with baseball, which I used to have such a childlike love. It's also true that I simply don't care much about it anymore, at least major league baseball. I haven't gone to a big league game in years, and even though I have the baseball package I might watch a few games a year. Recently Janet and I watched a series of Toronto Blue Jays games, but that was entirely her doing. Now, I'm perfectly happy to go to a Vermont Lake Monsters or Vermont Mountaineers game, which, I would argue, shows that I still love the game in its purest form. I still think it's the perfect sport, or at least the perfect sport that doesn't feature a rouge. Real baseball has become a metaphor for everything that's wrong with America, just as I think for the longest time it was a metaphor for everything that was right about America. In this case, it's the gross inequality of American life, which we happily accept as the price that one pays for "freedom." So, a small market team like the Reds can compete, if they're lucky, for a couple times in the space of a decade before they have to trade away all the young talent they picked up during their years of dumping. In that way it's much like the impossibility of anyone poor actually benefitting from the American  dream anymore (and don't get me started on the sport's promoting and celebrating of gambling, even on Reds games, which shows an extraordinary lack of awareness of its own history). Having said all that, again, I like the idea of baseball. With that in mind, I just finished Brian Mulligan's The 1940 Cincinnati Reds: A World Championship and Baseball's Only In-Season Suicide. In their long history the Reds have won five championships, which isn't many in a history that stretches back a century and a half, but it's better than no championships (I'm looking at you, Vikings). Of the five, even Reds fans tend to forget about the 1940 champions. Everyone remembers the 1919 Black Sox championship season (I still think the Reds would have won, that was a very good team) - and of course the 1975 and 1976 Big Red Machine teams (which, as all right-thinking individuals know, was the great team of all-time), and the inexplicable wire to wire, sweep the mighty Oakland A's, 1990 team. However, most folks, including me, don't really know much about the 1940 team. It's a pity, because it's a great story. They had made the series in 1939, but were swept by a great Yankees team, and clawed their way back the next year, coming back from a 3-2 deficit, and being trailing late in game 7, to win their first championship in over twenty years. It's also the only one of their five championships that they actually won in Cincinnati. Plus, the team faced the tragedy of catcher Willard Hershberger committing suicide in the middle of the season. Anyway, it's a fascinating story, and Mulligan does a nice job telling it. I'd definitely recommend it, even if you aren't a Reds fan.