The Pecan Park Eagle

Time Traveler One

1) In separating ourselves from St. Patrick’s Day by only a few hours now, we pause to ask: Why is it the Irish never take an iron to their shamrocks? The answer is simple. They don’t wish to press their luck.

2) Now here’s a combo medical and philosophical question:  If Tommy John had once gone through his now famous operation with a plastic surgeon, and not an orthopedic doctor, would all those pitchers who have since had the same “Tommy John” procedure have come out of the operating room also looking like him?

3)  “As a batter, I wondered why the ball kept getting bigger. – Then it hit me.”

4) A few years ago, field goal kicker Russell Erxleben of the New Orleans Saints, by way of UT in college, was having an horrendous first NFL season, missing chip shot after chip shot FG attempt, and not performing at all like the first round draft choice that he had been. The reporters were all over him, asking questions that covered the ground on everything from technique and his physical/mental shape to do the job. One day, a reporter finally pushed to know if his frustrations ever carried him close to considering suicide.

Erxleben then dropped one of the best answers upon a feckless reporter we’ve ever heard.

“I tried suicide in my mind,” Erxleben said, “but the thought went wide and to the right.”

5) “Freudian Slips” basically are unconscious slips of the tongue. Sometimes they are even better when the internal forces that set them in motion cause the speaker to actually misspeak or restructure the words he or she is using. Here are three examples:

(a) an LA radio reporter on the arrest of a jewelry store robber: “The arrest was made by Lieutenant Frank Percival, a defective of the Los Angeles police farce.”

(b) Richard Nixon, late 1960s, after another former president, Lyndon Johnson, had been quite forcefully showing him around the new LBJ Library in Austin: “A few moments ago,” Nixon began his dedication ceremony remarks, “as President Johnson was throwing me around the Library, …”

(c) In undergraduate school at UH, I once approached a girl who had become the distant object of my admiration in our student gathering spot, The Cougar Den, with what I hoped would be a simple straightforward introduction, but my unconscious mind ran things awry: “I don’t believe I’ve ever made you,” I offered. “No, and I don’t think you ever will,” she answered.

6) Once upon a time, a woman came to see me as a patient for the first time, but with a familiar complaint: She feared that her husband was fooling around and that he might soon leave her. On this day, however, that lady was followed by another new patient. She wanted to leave her husband, but feared that he would not let her go. Over fifty years of service as an individual  therapist and marriage and family counselor, I have been enriched by the constant opportunity for exposure to a couple of life’s major lessons: (a) people can’t always get what they want, but they usually don’t like the idea of feeling deprived when it comes to their sometimes extreme and unworkable needs for love or freedom; and (b) people often want the opposite of what they have because they think that is what is missing to the satisfaction of their lives. And I’m still not sure who has written the most to clarify these two salient points in life, psychologist Carl Jung or rocker Mick Jagger.

Time Traveler Two

7) Baseball is the only American team game that is truly dedicated to forever. And, as for its past, for people like me, the search for the multiple roots of baseball is far more fun than our reach for greater understanding of The Big Bang and its meaning to life as we know it today.

8) When the movie, “It Happens Every Spring,” with Ray Milland,  about a college professor who accidentally invents a wood repellant substance and then uses it to lead St. Louis in false identity to a World Series victory came out in 1949, Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler wasn’t happy about MLB offering any support to a film that shows one team excelling with the help of a foreign substance. As a result, St. Louis was not allowed to use the familiar Cardinal uniforms and caps. They had use jerseys that simply read “St. Louis” across the chest and they wore caps that bore only the initials “ST.L” on the front panel. Their ballpark was not called Sportsman’s Park. A simple “St. Louis Stadium” had to suffice.

Fortunately, the movies was simple to funny and well done to fail. Modern fans are left to wonder as they watch: How can a pitcher get away with using a glove that has a hole in the pocket the size of a half-dollar? And what about the wet sponge behind the hole? And don’t those other teams ever wonder about those curves that can do a 180 degree jump at a 90 degree up, over and down the stick at 85 MPH? How about the fact that, well, the guy that threw the ball – also threw it like a girl? Doesn’t anybody want to see the ball – or “King Kelly’s” glove? Apparently not.

Then, when the Series is won – and Kelly has to retire with a right pitching hand injury that ends his career on the last out play of the Series off a catch up the middle, he goes back to his small town college and is given a band and people celebration at the little home town where he’s known by his real name, Dr. Vernon Simpson. – And, of course, that happy celebration leads to no investigation by either the commissioner or the media. 🙂

“I … CAN’T GET NO …. SATISFAC …TION!” – MIKE JAGGER

9) “Houston Baseball, The Early Years, 1861-1961”, our SABR chapter book on the early history of baseball in Houston has now gone to print. It is expected to be available sometime in the third week in April, but all interested buyers can get their pre-orders placed through our website now and save money.

The site link is http://brightskypress.com/product/houston-baseball/

10) “It’s More Than Just A Game” by broadcaster Greg Lucas will be available soon. Lucas has turned his love of baseball and his voracious hunger for the impressive, but lesser known back stories of baseball history loose and he has come up with what will likely be one of the most entertaining and informative books on baseball’s many lesser known, but most incredible people and their many quite varied accomplishments. – Stay tuned for more ordering information.

“I COULD NOT DERIVE ANY SATISFACTION EITHER, BUT LOOK AT MY HANDS! – I SHOULD HAVE PLAYED BASEBALL! …. I COULD HAVE THROWN ANY PITCH IN THE BOOK AND PUT SOME JUNGIAN HONEY ON IT TO BOOT!’ – DR. CARL JUNG

And have a nice Tuesday, everybody! Here’s a little poem that fits in with some of the subject matter above. It wrote itself through me as a young man while I was batting my own head against that ancient wall of misunderstanding we often have about looking for our “other half” in the soul of another. It describes the lesson that leads to the freedom we need, to have or have not, a soul mate:

Destiny’s Demise

You were not the rest of me,

And I was not your destiny,

But coming on like destiny,

Desperate for the rest of me

Almost got the best

… of me and you.        

(copyright)

One of the Original 80 metal Buffalo Medallions from Buff Stadium in Houston (1928-1961)

Notebook Observations …

1) Stan Musial played his last game in the big leagues 50 years ago last Sunday on September 29, 1963.

2) Tampa Bay defeated Texas last night by a 5-2 count in a special one-game extension of the regular season to determine which club moves forward as the second wild card in the American League playoffs.

3) Evan Longoria in the Texas game was the 7th time he has homered in his club’s last regular season game, pulling him into a one-homer lead over the great Stan Musial in this arcane record category.

4) The Rangers‘ loss to the Rays assures their fans that their club will not disappoint them again in the World Series for the third year in a row.

5) The 2013 performance of the San Francisco Giants is proof that the World Champs in two of the previous three years (2012 and 2010) were not put together as a dynasty, but as a patchwork short-term peak champion that was capable of winning two World Series in three years and then going to seed.

6) Hopefully, the disastrous 2013 record of the Houston Astros has proven to club ownership and management that they can ill afford to let everything go to hell for a fourth year in a row. 2013 wasn’t merely a crash, but a total implosion of hope, awareness, contact, and caring among fans for the fortunes of their club. It was practically impossible to build any affinity for a roster that changed almost daily. All a fan could know for sure was that the new player coming in was going to be another minor leaguer coming in to try and prove himself. Most fans could not even follow the team because of the most screwed-up, greed-driven television plan in club history – and most of those who could get the games stopped watching sometime during the summer, leaving the team with a TV audience of an optimistic 900 fans per game by season’s end. Signing Lance Berkman and a few legitimate lower cost free agents could have been enough to avoid a third straight 100 plus losses season in 2013, but the Astros chose to gut every cost they could find and cast their fates to the widely whispered plan for returning to contention by 2015. That 15-game asteroid-weighted losing streak that took the boys to the finish line this year more truly suggests that the club will be lucky enough, George Springer notwithstanding,, to be even on a clear road to mediocrity by 2015.

7) There used to be a guy named Jackie Price who could do amazing things with a baseball. He made his living at ballparks showing off these skills and even made a motion picture short subject feature which played the whole country showing off his entire amazing routine. Friend Mike McCroskey saw Price in that movie at the late August showing of old baseball films in August at the Museum of Fine Arts, but neither of us could remember his name at the time we discussed it the other day. It finally bubbled up from the ooze of my ancient memories yesterday. (The ooze is always the first place I look for the answer needed for most ancient questions. Then I go to Google, if that fails – and also to check on my memory. I just went there for confirmation – where I learned that Price had been a seven game big leaguer, once upon a time, and to be reminded that he was known in his act as “The Clown Prince of Baseball”.

I saw Jackie Price perform at Buff Stadium once. He shagged fly balls in the outfield while also driving a jeep to catch up with the fungoed baseballs. He caught a fastball pitcher while his back was turned to the mound and he was bent over looking for the ball between his legs. He pitched three baseballs simultaneously through three separately hanging rubber tires from about 60 feet, six inches away. He did all kinds of amazing and dangerous things as the crowd “ooohed” and “awwwed”.

It was a simpler time. And our minds were more simply entertained.

8) Many times, when I start feeling a little disconnected from all the sweet spots of my happy times as a kid and young man in Houston, I think of the eighty metal buffalo medallions that once rimmed the high exterior grandstand walls at old Buff Stadium. They were there before and after my earliest of times. And a few have survived to this day. They are each permeated with the vibrations of all the organ music that ever played in the old park. They were there for all the peak up and down moments of my baseball kid fan seasons with the Houston Buffs.  And when I think of them again today, I am no longer alone and disconnected from the heart of my early sandlot baseball joy. I am home.

9) Have a great Tuesday, everybody!