"He instinctively can find the shining greatness of our American culture and does a good job of highlighting it (although he also does have those rare lapses when he writes about hockey, but that is something caused by impurities in the Eastern waters or something)." Erik Keilholtz
Under the patronage of St. Tammany
Mark C. N. Sullivan is an editor at a Massachusetts university. He is married and the father of three children. Email
Midgets and hunchbacks as mascots were familiar features of baseball in the Deadball Era. Hunchbacks brought luck to Connie Mack's champion A's and Babe Ruth's Yankees, and a similar gnome kept by the Giants' John McGraw inspired Bill Veeck's celebrated midget stunt. (A fully-grown Giants mascot, Charles "Victory" Faust, a lunatic who presented himself to McGraw on the advice of a fortune-teller and was kept as a good-luck charm, inspired the team to a pennant in 1911.)
But the current phenomenon of players' children romping about in uniform has got out of hand, as when Dusty Baker's moppet almost got caught in a play at the plate in last year's Series. And what has become the annual scene of the Yanks' Jorge Posada trotting out little Jorge III for the All Star introductions has gone beyond cloying. Keep the kids off the field.
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