by Dave Barry
Baseball. For me, it’s as much a part of summer as sitting bolt upright in bed at 3:30 A.M. and trying to remember if I filed for an extension on my tax return. And the memories baseball season brings back! Ebbetts Field, for example. That’s all I remember: Ebbetts Field. What the hell does it mean? Is it anything important? Maybe one of you readers can help.
Why does baseball hold such great appeal for Americans? A big factor, of course, is that the Russians can’t play it. Try as they might, they can’t seem to master infield chatter, which is what the members of the infield constantly yell at the pitcher. A typical segment of infield chatter would be:
Hey babe hum babe hum babe hey no batter hey fire that ball hum that pellet whip that hose baby sling that sphere c’mon heave that horsehide right in there c’mon dammit we’re bored we’re really bored bored bored bored out here hunched over in these cretin pants c’mon let’s fling that orb let’s unload that globe you sum-bitch let’s THROW that ball please for God’s sake let’s ...
The infield’s purpose in chattering at the pitcher like this is to get him so irritated that he deliberately throws the ball at the batter’s face, which minimizes the danger that the batter will swing and thus put the infield in the position of having to stand in the path of a potentially lethal batted ball. American boys learn infield chatter as very young children, but the Russians have tremendous trouble with it. The best they’ve been able to do so far is “Holy mackerel, you are putting forth some likely shots now, ho ho!” which is pretty good for only five years’ effort, but hardly the level of chatter they’ll need in international competition.
Another reason why Americans are Number One in baseball is the phrases yelled by fans to encourage the players. American fans generally use the three basic phrases:
Boo. You stink. You really stink, you stupid jerk.
These phrases of encouragement have dominated baseball since the 1920s, when the great George Herman Ruth made baseball history at Yankee Stadium by pointing his bat at the stands and correctly identifying them in only four attempts. But in recent years, a large cold-air mass of change has begun to form in the North, where fans of the Montreal Expos, who all know how to speak French because there’s nothing else to do in Canada after 4 P.m., have developed some new and very competitive phrases, such as:
–Vous bumme, il y a un poisson dans votre bibliotheque. (You bum, there is a fish in your library.) —Boux. (Boo.)
Thus encouraged, the Expos have become a baseball Powerhouse. They probably would have won the World Series by now except that the players refuse to return from spring training until Labor Day.
So the United States is still the best, and you can bet the mortgage that the World Series, which is open to any city in the world that has a major-league franchise, will this year be won once again by a team consisting of U.S. citizens plus maybe two dozen guys named Julio from friendly spider-infested nations to the south. In fact, the only real problem facing major-league baseball at the moment is that everybody associated with it in any way is a drug addict. This is beginning to affect the quality of the game:
ANNOUNCER: For those viewers who are just joining us, the game has been delayed slightly because the umpires really wanted some nachos, and also the Yankees keep turning into giant birds. I can’t remember seeing that happen before in a regular season game, can you, Bob? COLOR COMMENTATOR (shrieking): THESE aren’t my crayons!
So baseball has problems. So who doesn’t? It’s still a very national pastime, and I for one always feel a stirring of tremendous excitement as we approach the All-Star Game. I’m assuming here that we haven’t already passed the All-Star Game.
What I like about the All-Star Game is that the teams aren’t picked by a bunch of experts who use computers and care only about cold statistics—what a player’s batting average is, how well he throws, whether he’s still alive, etc. No, the All-Star teams are chosen by the fans, the everyday folks who sit out in the hot sun hour after hour, cursing and swilling beer that tastes like it has been used to launder jockstraps. The fans don’t care about statistics: They vote from the heart, which is why last year’s starting American League lineup included Lou Gehrig, O.J. Simpson, and Phil Donahue.
And what lies ahead, after the All-Star break? I look for several very tight pennant races, with many games ending in scores of 4-2, 5-1, and in certain instances 2-0. In the National League, I think we’ll see a sharp late-season increase in the number of commercials wherein players employ inappropriate baseball imagery, such as, “Hit a home run against nasal discharge.” And in the American League, I look for Dave Winfield to be attacked by seagulls. As always, pitching will be the key.
Red White And Beer
Lately I’ve been feeling very patriotic, especially during commercials. Like, when I see those strongly pro-American Chrysler commercials, the ones where the winner of the Bruce Springsteen Sound-Alike Contest sings about how The Pride Is Back, the ones where Lee Iacocca himself comes striding out and practically challenges the president of Toyota to a knife fight, I get this warm, proud feeling inside, the same kind of feeling I get whenever we hold routine naval maneuvers off the coast of Libya.
But if you want to talk about real patriotism, of course, you have to talk about beer commercials. I would have to say that Miller is the most patriotic brand of beer. I grant you it tastes like rat saliva, but we are not talking about taste here. What we are talking about, according to the commercials, is that Miller is by God an American beer, “born and brewed in the U.S.A.,” and the men who drink it are American men, the kind of men who aren’t afraid to perspire freely and shake a man’s hand. That’s mainly what happens in Miller commercials: Burly American men go around, drenched in perspiration, shaking each other’s hands in a violent and patriotic fashion.
You never find out exactly why these men spend so much time shaking hands. Maybe shaking hands is just their simple straightforward burly masculine American patriotic way of saying to each other: “Floyd, I am truly sorry I drank all that Miller beer last night and went to the bathroom in your glove compartment.” Another possible explanation is that, since there are never any women in the part of America where beer commercials are made, the burly men have become lonesome and desperate for any form of physical contact. I have noticed that sometimes, in addition to shaking hands, they hug each other. Maybe very late at night, after the David Letterman show, there are Miller commercials in which the burly men engage in slow dancing. I don’t know.
I do know that in one beer commercial, I think this is for Miller—although it could be for Budweiser, which is also a very patriotic beer—the burly men build a house. You see them all getting together and pushing up a brand-new wall. Me, I worry some about a house built by men drinking beer. In my experience, you run into trouble when you ask a group of beer-drinking men to perform any task more complex than remembering not to light the filter ends of cigarettes.
For example, in my younger days, whenever anybody in my circle of friends wanted to move, he’d get the rest of us to help, and, as an inducement, he’d buy a couple of cases of beer. This almost always produced unfortunate results, such as the time we were trying to move Dick “The Wretch” Curry from a horrible fourth-floor walk-up apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side to another horrible fourth-floor walkup apartment in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, and we hit upon the labor-saving concept of, instead of carrying The Wretch’s possessions manually down the stairs, simply dropping them out the window, down onto the street, where The Wretch was racing around, gathering up the broken pieces of his life and shrieking at us to stop helping him move, his emotions reaching a fever pitch when his bed, which had been swinging wildly from a rope, entered the apartment two floors below his through what had until seconds earlier been a window.
This is the kind of thinking you get, with beer. So I figure what happens, in the beer commercial where the burly men are building the house, is they push the wall up so it’s vertical, and then, after the camera s
tops filming them, they just keep pushing, and the wall crashes down on the other side, possibly onto somebody’s pickup truck. And then they all shake hands.
But other than that, I’m in favor of the upsurge in retail patriotism, which is lucky for me because the airwaves are saturated with pro-American commercials. Especially popular are commercials in which the newly restored Statue of Liberty—and by the way, I say Lee Iacocca should get some kind of medal for that, or at least be elected president—appears to be endorsing various products, as if she were Mary Lou Retton or somebody. I saw one commercial strongly suggesting that the Statue of Liberty uses Sure brand underarm deodorant.
I have yet to see a patriotic laxative commercial, but I imagine it’s only a matter of time. They’ll show some actors dressed up as hardworking country folk, maybe at a church picnic, smiling at each other and eating pieces of pie. At least one of them will be a black person. The Statue of Liberty will appear in the background. Then you’ll hear a country-style singer singing:
“Folks ‘round here they love this land; They stand by their beliefs; An’ when they git themselves stopped up; They want some quick relief.”
Well, what do you think? Pretty good commercial concept, huh?
Nah, you’re right. They’d never try to pull something like that. They’d put the statue in the foreground.
Why Not The Best?
Excellence is the trend of the eighties. Walk into any shopping-mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the bestsellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you’ll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don’t Steal It, etc.
The message of these books is that, here in the eighties, “good” is no longer good enough. In today’s business environment, “good” is a word we use to describe an employee whom we are about to transfer to a urinal-storage facility in the Aleutian Islands. What we want, in our eighties business executive, is somebody who demands the best in everything; someone who is never satisfied; somebody who, if he had been in charge of decorating the Sistine Chapel, would have said: “That is a good fresco, Michelangelo, but I want a better fresco, and I want it by tomorrow morning.”
This is the kind of thinking that now propels your top corporations. Take the folks at Coca-Cola. For many years, they were content to sit back and make the same old carbonated beverage. It was a good beverage, no question about it; generations of people had grown up drinking it and doing the experiment in sixth grade where you put a nail into a glass of Coke and after a couple of days the nail dissolves and the teacher says: “Imagine what it does to your teeth!” So Coca-Cola was solidly entrenched in the market, and the management saw no need to improve.
But then along came Pepsi, with the bold new marketing concept of saying that its carbonated beverage was better, a claim that Pepsi backed up by paying $19 trillion to Michael Jackson, the most excellent musical genius of all time according to the cover story in Newsweek magazine. And so the folks at Coca-Cola suddenly woke up and realized that, hey, these are the eighties, and they got off their butts and improved Coke by letting it sit out in vats in the hot sun and adding six or eight thousand tons of sugar, the exact amount being a trade secret.
Unfortunately, the general public, having failed to read the market surveys proving that the new Coke was better, refused to drink it, but that is not the point. The point is, the Coke executives decided to strive for excellence, and the result is that the American consumer is now benefitting from the Most vicious carbonated-beverage marketing war in history. It wouldn’t surprise me if, very soon, one side or the other offered to pay $29
trillion to Bruce Springsteen, who according to a Newsweek magazine cover story is currently the most excellent musical genius of all time, preceded briefly by Prince.
This striving for excellence extends into people’s personal lives as well. When eighties people buy something, they buy the best one, as determined by (1) price and (2) lack of availability. Eighties people buy imported dental floss. They buy gourmet baking soda. If an eighties couple goes to a restaurant where they have made a reservation three weeks in advance, and they are informed that their table is available, they stalk out immediately, because they know it is not an excellent restaurant. If it were, it would have an enormous crowd of excellence-oriented people like themselves, waiting, their beepers going off like creckets in the night. An excellent restaurant wouldn’t have a table ready immediately for anybody below the rank of Liza Minnelli.
An excellence-oriented eighties male does not wear a regular watch. He wears a Rolex, because it weighs nearly six pounds and is advertised only in excellence-oriented publications such as Fortune and Rich Protestant Goer Magazine. The advertisements are written in incomplete sentences, which is how advertising copywriters denote excellence:
“The Rolex Hypetion. An elegant new standard in quality excellence and discriminating hand-craftsmanship. For the individual who is truly able to discriminate with regard to excellent quality standards of crafting things by hand. Fabricated of 100percent 24 karat gold. No watch parts or anything. just a great big chunk of gold on your wrist. Truly a timeless statement. For the individual who is very secure. Who doesn’t need to be reminded all the time that he is very successful. Much more successful than the people who laughed at him in high school. Because of his acne. People who are probably nowhere near as successful as he is now. Maybe he’ll go to his twentieth reunion, and they’ll see his Rolex Hypetion. Hahahahyahahahahaha.”
Nobody is excused from the excellence trend. Babies are not excused. Starting right after they get out of the womb, modern babies are exposed to instructional flashcards designed to make them the best babies they can possibly be, so they can get into today’s competitive preschools. Your eighties baby sees so many flashcards that he never gets an unobstructed view of his parents’ faces. As an adult, he’ll carry around a little wallet card that says “7 x 9 = 63,” because it will remind him of mother.
I recently saw a videotape of people who were teaching their babies while they (the babies) were still in the womb. I swear I am not making this up. A group of pregnant couples sat in a circle, and, under the direction of an Expert in These Matters, they crooned instructional songs in the direction of the women’s stomachs. Mark my words: We will reach the point, in our lifetimes, where babies emerge from their mothers fully prepared to assume entry-level management positions. I’m sure I’m not the only person who has noticed, just wandering around the shopping mall, that more and more babies, the really brand-new modern ones, tend to resemble Lee Iacocca.
Making The World Safe For Salad
I’ve been thinking about technology of late, because, as you are no doubt aware (like fudge, you are), we recently celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Etch-a-Sketch. I think we can all agree that, except for long-lasting nasal spray, this is the greatest technological achievement of all time. Think, for a moment, of the countless happy childhood hours you spent with this amazing device: Drawing perfect horizontals; drawing perfect verticals; drawing really spastic diagonals; trying to scrape away the silver powder from the window so you could look inside and try to figure out how it works (Mystery Rays from space, is what scientists now believe); and just generally enjoying the sheer childhood pleasure of snatching it away from your sister and shaking it upside down after she had spent 40 minutes making an elaborate picture of a bird.
Think how much better off the world would be if everybody—young and old, black and white, American and Russian, Time and Newsweek—spent part of each day playing with an Etch-a-Sketch. Think how great it would be if they had public Etch-a-Sketches for you to use while you were waiting in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles. And imagine what would happen if, instead of guns, our young soldiers carried Etch-a-Sketches into battle! They would be cut down like field mice under a rotary mower! So we can’t carry this idea too far.
/> So anyway, as I said, this got me to thinking about technology in general. Too often—three or four times a week, according to some figures—we take technology for granted. When we drop our money into a vending machine at our place of employment and press the button for a tasty snack selection of crackers smeared with “cheez,” a nondairy petroleum subproduct approved for use on humans, we are blithely confident that the machine will automatically, much of the time, hurl our desired selection down into the pickup bin, using a computerized electronic snack-ejection device that gives our snack a bin impact velocity of nearly 70 miles an hour, which is what is required to reduce our crackers to a fine, dayglow-orange grit. We rarely stop to consider that without this device, the only way the vending-machine manufacturers would be able to achieve this kind of impact velocity would be to use gravity, which means the machines would have to be 40 feet tall!
Of course, not all technology is good. Some is exactly the opposite (bad). The two obvious examples of this are the hydrogen bomb and those plastic “sneeze shields” they put over restaurant salad bars for your alleged hygiene protection. I have said this before, but it needs to be said again: Sneeze shields actually spread disease, because they make it hard for a squat or short-armed person to reach back to the chick peas and simulated bacon, and some of these people inevitably are going to become frustrated and spit in the House Dressing (a creamy Italian).
But this does not mean we should be against technology in general. Specifically, we should not be so hostile toward telephone-answering machines. I say this because I own one, and I am absolutely sick unto death of hearing people say—they all say this; it must be Item One on the curriculum in Trend College—”I just hate to talk to a machine!” They say this as though it is a major philosophical position, as opposed to a description of a minor neurosis. My feeling is, if you have a problem like this, you shouldn’t go around trumpeting it; you should stay home and practice talking to a machine you can feel comfortable with, such as your Water Pik, until you are ready to assume your place in modern society, OK?