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The Day Gandhi Pinch-hit for the Yankees

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In honor of April Fool’s Day and the start of the new Major League Baseball season, I’m re-reading and sharing a very clever New Yorker sketch–Chet Williamson’s “Gandhi at the Bat,” in which the writer imagines a ballgame where the Mahatma, or the “Nabob of Nonviolence,” one of many funny names the author assigns him, played an inning with the 1933 Yankees, including Babe Ruth.  I love the whole piece, especially the set-up. The sketch is viewable below. You may hit the pause button in the blog’s slideshow to read each page (Apologies to Mr. Williamson, who I want to add has had a very interesting career, and The New Yorker for scanning and screen-grabbing my old clipping.)New Yorker baseball sketchChet Williamson sketch

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This Week at The Great Gray Bridge

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In the past week at this blog, I’ve written about the best TV ad of the presidential campaign thus far; a brave woman in Alaska who fended off an aggressive grizzly bear; the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema of Austin, TX, which is entering the NYC market only a couple blocks from my office; the great Canadian band Library Voices; Sarah Silverman’s bawdy video that pokes fun at right-wing casino magnate Sheldon Adelson; a new album from Bob Dylan; the award-winning CBC radio host, Jian Ghomeshi; Greenland’s worryingly shrinking Petermann Glacier; a young chess master and Franconia College classmate of mine who vanished in 1978 under mysterious circumstances; the late, great baseball writer, Robert Creamer, who chronicled the life of Babe Ruth; the sweet severance deal Mitt Romney arranged for himself from Bain Capital; the moving book I’ve been reading by Rob Sheffield, my #FridayReads yesterday; and my own personal history, including the story of how during a teenage road trip my brother Joel and I happened to adopt our longtime black lab Noah, pictured here with me.

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Robert Creamer, RIP–Babe Ruth Biographer

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The great baseball writer, Robert Creamer died this week at the age of 90. According to the NY Times obituary by Douglas Martin, I am far from the only reader to have found his biography, Babe: The Legend Comes to Life (originally published in 1974), to be among the best sports books I’ve ever read. An excerpt from a review in Sports Illustrated is printed on the cover of the Penguin Sports Library edition from 1983, the one I read: “The best biography ever written about an American sports figure.”

Two stories from the book have stayed with me all these years and I relate them here after being led to the exact page number in the book by the blog Unquiet Heart, where the proprietor is evidently also a fan of Creamer’s 1974 book. Quoting then from page 186 in my old copy of the book:

“Invited by [a] Mrs. Adler to attend a benefit she was running, Ruth dutifully put in an appearance. “Mrs. Adler, beamed on the monied throngs who gently pressed around him, and helped make the affair a smashing success.  When it was over Mrs. Adler thanked him profusely for his time and effort.  The Babe waved his hand.  ‘Oh, shit, lady, I’d do it for anybody,’ he said.
“Another time, he accompanied [baseball executive] Ford Frick to a formal dinner party.  Frick said that Babe would always move slowly at first when he was at affairs of this sort, watching, noting, finding out how you did things before doing them himself.  A rather splendid asparagus salad was served. Babe’s eyes sidled around until he saw which fork was to be used.  He casually lifted the fork, poked at the salad and then without touching it put the fork down and pushed the plate an inch or so away in dismissal.
‘Don’t you care for the salad, Mr. Ruth?’ his hostess asked.
‘Oh, it’s not that,’ he replied, his voice elegant and unctuous.  ‘It’s just that asparagus makes my urine smell'”

Creamer also wrote Stengel: His Life and Times, which I haven’t read yet, but which I hope to someday.

 

 

 

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