"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
As the major-league baseball teams passed the season's one-third mark last week, the leading pitcher was neither Bob Feller, Hal Newhouser, Harry Brecheen nor Ewell Blackwell, nor any of the other established celebrities of the mound. On the figures, the best pitcher was a hooknosed, six-foot left-hander named Warren Spahn; habitat Braves Field, Gaffney Street, Boston...
At the station break, the announcer said: "This is Boston, baseball capital of the country." In his State Street office, a white-haired broker told his secretary that he would be in conference with his radio until the game was over. Attendance at Braves Field, home of Boston's National League leaders, passed 1,305,000-breaking all records. Youngsters bivouacked outside Fenway Park all night to be sure of seeing the American League-leading Red Sox. From as far as Lima, Peru, requests for World Series tickets flooded in. Beantown, which has never had a series all its own, was suffering from double-pennant fever last week-and loving it...
In Boston, everything but the schools, the squirrels and the elevated trains stopped running. The Braves were playing their first World Series in 34 years. The 41,000 seats in Braves Field had long since been sold out. In Boston Common, a battery of 100 television sets was being set up to give more Bostonians a look...
Son of a wallpaper salesman in Buffalo, Spahn was just ripening in the minors when he went into the Army in 1942. A combat engineer, Spahn won a battlefield commission and was wounded by shrapnel in the action to repair the Remagen bridge for the first troops to cross the Rhine. Spahn shrugs off both the wound ("It was only a scratch in the foot'') and the promotion ("I got it only because all our officers were killed")...
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Catbird in the Nosebleed Seats actually has found where old 1940s and '50s radio broadcasts go, and has posted a number of them with a baseball theme.
An episode of the Fred Allen Show from 1945, for example, features Leo Durocher as a guest and a takeoff on Gilbert & Sullivan set in Ebbets Field. You do get a sense of how different the world was then when Fred Allen and Durocher crack jokes about the recent bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Steve Keane at the Eddie Kranepool Society comments:
As far as a sporting event goes, the Super Bowl may be the worst of all. You can’t even mention the Super Bowl in the same sentence as the World Series. It does not have the drama or storyline of an NBA or NHL 7 game series or the final round of the Masters.
There are two things you can count on with the Super Bowl. When it’s over, the following week pitchers and catchers will report to Florida and Arizona camps and at least two or three players from either team will get arrested sometime during the week after the game.
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