Etc., etc.
1—Of course I generally agree with Joe Posnanski's riff on Pete Hamill's embarrassing claim that Willie Mays represents a time when 'the only performance-enhancing drug was joy,' but two points. First, the really risible thing about this line isn't that it ignores the fact that Mays and many of his peers used performance-enhancing drugs, but that it evokes a whole complex of ideas about Mays as a sort of overgrown 12-year-old that always were and still really are kind of fucking racist. Mays was a man, prone to jealousy, bitterness, resentment and the rest of the full range of complex human emotions, not the grinning eunuch he's so often been made out to be. It beggars belief that in 2010 he's still being implicitly held out as 'the good Negro,' but so it goes.
Second, I don't think Pos is quite right to say that steroids 'were not readily available' when Mays played ball. There are well known stories about the San Diego Chargers forcing players to take steroids before the NFL-AFL merger, and I've never for a second believed that steroids entered the game with Canseco and peers. I will buy that they entered the sport later than they did elsewhere, because baseball always had a culture of belief that training for strength would hurt your game, but there's a lot of circumstantial reason to think they were being used as early as the 1960s.
2—It really is quite bizarre that George Orwell has become something of a conservative icon, and while I like Matthew Yglesias titling his post 'George Orwell Was a Socialist,' he could be even more emphatic about it. Here, for example, is a famous Orwell essay from 1941 in which he argues for the nationalization of 'lands, mines, railways, banks and major industries' and the limitation of income so that 'the highest tax-free income in Britain does not exceed the lowest by more than ten to one' as preliminary steps toward the society he'd like to see.
3—This will be of extremely limited interest to anyone who isn't a Chicagoland cyclist who enjoys long rides through scenic industrial decay, but this is a really nice article on the Calumet-Sag Trail. I can't wait to ride it.
5 Comments
Reader Comments (5)
Sandy Koufax and Joe Torre sat down at L.A.'s Nokia center for a chat and the moderator (TJ Simers) asked Koufax if Koufax ever took performance enhancers. Koufax said something like, "I took whatever the doctors gave me, but when they stopped giving it to cows and horses I stopped taking it".
Also, here's an enjoyable review of Hamill's piece
Also, Orwell died too young to become conservative. As the post-war Austerity dragged on and the Socialist failed, I think he would have recognized that socialism was an idea in search of nonexistent leaders. He'd already inkled that:
Capitalism leads to dole queues, the scramble for markets, and war. Collectivism leads to concentration camps, leader worship, and war. There is no way out of this unless a planned economy can somehow be combined with the freedom of the intellect, which can only happen if the concept of right and wrong is restored to politics
But he died a staunch collectivist, no doubt. Check out the link and his review of Hayek, where Orwell gives a little, but not too much, admiration to Hayek.
I've always thought that while Orwell would have moved to the right it would have been in the direction of some sort of idiosyncratic anarchism. He always had sympathies that way. Also worth keeping in mind how different socialism looks from a 1940s European perspective—the concentration of power vs. liberty issues were just different given questions of scale in a country the size of the UK ca. 1950 than they are in the US in 2010, and given that sometimes I think he wouldn't have gone to the right at all. Either way I just wish pundits would stop making zombie Orwell say things he clearly didn't think, whether or not he would have gone on to think them.
That Koufax line is priceless and goes to a real issue, which is that doctors were just dosing players up with all kinds of shit in those days. As far as I know no one can really tell what the hell was in the shots that kept Mickey Mantle on the field, but I'd be a bit less than surprised if there were some anabolics somewhere in there.
"but that it evokes a whole complex of ideas about Mays as a sort of overgrown 12-year-old that always were and still really are kind of fucking racist."
Tim, can you flesh that out a little? I've never heard any of that, can you explain what you mean/where that comes from?
David - spend a little time googling "Willie Mays plays stickball in Harlem" and you'll understand the point Tim is making.
I read a lot of baseball books when I was a kid - admittedly most of them aimed at kids and young adults - and Willie Mays was always depicted as a simpleton - very similar to the (mostly erroneous) stories about dumbbell, illiterate Shoeless Joe Jackson.
Boy did I hate that Hamill piece- will we ever escape the nostalgia of whiny Brooklyn Dodger fan? Couldn't they die off already? The worst thing about this crowd is that most of them (like Hamill, obviously) don't even like baseball - because if they did, they would've attended more games; the Dodgers would've made more money, and there would've been no reason for the Dodgers to move to LA (where they immediately began drawing hundreds of thousands of more fans than they ever did in Brooklyn).