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I remember two boys from the 1950s.
The first of them took the subway out to Ebbets Field as often as he could to see "his" team, the Brooklyn Dodgers. (When in the grandstands with his friends, he thought there was nothing funnier than to yell "Beer here!" as the fellow selling brew walked by " and then duck fast.) So many years later, I think he could still name the nine Dodger starters of that time from Roy Campanella behind the plate and Jackie Robinson at second base to right fielder Carl Furillo (known as "the Reading rifle" for his throwing arm). He'd probably put either Don Newcombe or Sandy Koufax on the mound. And in center field, of course, was the Duke (Duke Snider) who hit at least 40 home runs five years in a row, a record only otherwise reached in that century by Babe Ruth and Ralph Kiner. In 1957, he hit two in his final game in Brooklyn as his team prepared to head for the West Coast and become the Los Angeles Dodgers (the rats!).
The other little boy of those years spent time ducking and covering under his desk preparing for an event he only half-grasped, the potential nuclear destruction of his hometown, New York City, by our mortal Cold War enemy, the Russians. He went to the movies to see atomically irradiated giant ants invade Los Angeles (Them!), space ships destroying whole planets (This Island Earth), and this world being turned into an atomic wasteland (On the Beach). He read post-apocalyptic novels like A Canticle for Leibowitz. Asleep at night, he dreamed about nuclear explosions and felt the heat of destruction broil his body. He read with a certain fascination about what Americans who had built their very own personal bomb shelters might do if the neighbors tried to squeeze in when facing impending nuclear doom. (Shoot 'em!)
Of course, that "he" was me. In the terms TomDispatch regular, author of SportsWorld: An American Dreamland, and former New York Times sports columnist Robert Lipsyte lays out today, those were my own two versions of the Big Bang. More than half a century later, strangely enough, I've disarmed one of them. (I no longer watch my formerly favorite team, the Mets.). The other, unfortunately, the potential nuking of this planet, I can't do much about. I only wish I could. But as baseball's World Series approaches, along with a world series of nightmares from hell in Ukraine, let Lipsyte tell you more. Tom
Home Runs First
How the Four-Bagger Leads to the Real Thing
The time has come to ban The Bomb.
Of course, all those nuclear ones in the arsenals of the "great" powers, but " since I'm a sportswriter by trade " let's start with the home run. Call it a four-bagger, a dinger, a moon shot, or (in my childhood) a Ballantine blast for the beer that sponsored so much baseball. One thing is certain, though: the dream of the game-changing home run has shaped our approach to so much, from sports to geopolitics. Most significantly, it's damaged our ability to solve problems through reason and diplomacy.
So, consider banning both The Bomb and the home run as the first crucial steps toward a safer, more peaceful world.
For 102 years now, since Babe Ruth first joined the Yankees, we've been heading for this moment when a frustrated American lunatic might potentially try to take this country hostage by threatening violent civil war, while a frustrated Russian lunatic tries to take the world hostage by threatening to annihilate it.
Saving both the country and the world by disarming the lunatics can only be accomplished via the careful little steps that no longer seem to be a priority either in the playbooks of baseball or in the arsenals of liberal democracy. Over the past decades, they've largely been discarded in favor of the idea of the big bang, be it for deterrence, intimidation, or, in two horrendous moments in 1945, actual big bangs that created the politics of mutually assured destruction as a forever possibility.
How did that happen? In sports, blame it on baseball, which gave up much of its original artistry for the triumphal explosion that now overrides all else, potentially wiping out both past mistakes and future hopes. To set a proper example, the home run should be cancelled if the world is to be saved.
It's easy enough. Just change the rulebooks so that a ball hit out of the park doesn't count. It's not even a ball or a strike, just a nothing, another missing baseball. Get over it.
Bombs Away!
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