Tigers Beat Twins! 3 to 2!

A Mr. Inge, recently called back up from the farm system and batting .157 was up in the bottom of the ninth for the Detroit Tigers. The score was tied 2-2 and it was looking like extra innings.
I was at the game with my friend.

I had not paid much attention to baseball since 1994 or thereabouts. During the eighth inning I was looking from where we stood in the stands down on the fans below us, and there were numerous patrons wearing shirts with the names of players on.
One in particular was " INGE ", which I took for a joke meaning the playwright Inge. I thought there might be some people with "ODETTS" on theirs, or "ALBEE"... "WILLIAMS" would be good: there would be the ambiguity between "Ted" or "Tennessee".

So I enquire, and my pal, Mike, sez...

...and I do mean "sez"! He has kept up with baseball and has a familiarity, at least, with the players on the teams, whereas I only knew of the Tigers catcher, Avila... I knew he was a "cracker jack" player, too. That's about it.
But Mike was different. So being in a group of about 30,000 similarly minded baseball buffs for a couple of hours, Mike tended to get a case of "Subway Series"... which is what I call the tendency to talk like Leo Durocher when one explains the finer points of the game to the clueless.
It put me in mind of one of the cannier Dead End Kids - say, Whitey - trying to explain the complexities of urban life to his snobbish cousin - say, Percival, named after Percival Lowell, the astronomer -  from Boston whose "mater" had decided to visit Brooklyn on a one-day hop from the Cape for unexplained reasons....

...so Mike sez that Inge is either loved or hated. A great natural athlete, Mr. Inge has a dismal batting average which drove many of his erstwhile fans and allies to despair. In fact, he had been sent down to Toledo, the Tigers' AAA farm team, and had only recently been recalled for the push for the pennant.
There was more, but it was variation on this theme: sort of Beowulf had showed up at Hrothgar's Hall and had brought a hostess gift of the wrong vintage sword, and all the nobles and serfs now looked at him with considerable jaundice.

So Mike absents himself briefly after the Twins go down in the top of the ninth, comes back when the first two Tigers have gone down with two pitches, and up comes Mr. Inge. So I look and then rock back and forth a bit, wondering how long this game might last.
Mike says, "Are there two outs already?"
I nod.
He adds, "And Inge is up!"
I say "I think he's going to win it for them."
He says "More likely he'll strike out!"
And he did not really say that; he more snorted it... contemptuously... as a wild boar might snort contemptuously at, well, just about anything.
Less than forty seconds go by, bingo! Home run, game over. Mr. Inge is a hero again.


Moral:
Story is important and it is much stronger than people believe. Most people think Narrative is what chatterboxes do after the real, important, substantial... and MUTE!... stuff is done.
Not so.
The Inge story was Irony, an ironic reversal: just as we may reverse from riches to rags, we may turn from rags to riches. In essence, Horatio Alger wrote Irony, too, although we do not usually think of it that way. We usually reserve Irony for the fall from blessedness.

One hour before his home run, I had never even heard of Inge, but I took the story I had heard and made a reversal and a happy ending. Mike went with the already existing story of gloom and doom. Obviously, the Fates prefer happy endings, when they have gotten their fill of retribution!
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Spring Training

 

 Una delle quattro stagioni di Vivaldi:  Primavera e il Baseball

Jim Bunning, Hall Of Shame

Jim Bunning is a Senator from Kentucky who is holding up passage of the Presidential Records Act Amendment of 2007 for reasons he thus far has kept secret. He apparently wants Mr. Bush to keep his tawdry little secrets to himself in order to facilitate Bush and Rove's re-writing of a shameful history of deceit. I remember Jim pitching for the Detroit Tigers. I recall he did well against the New York Yankees at a time when the Yankees were a veritable powerhouse. Well, Jim, Whitey Ford was not only a better pitcher, he was a better person, and would have been one heck of a better Senator than you can ever hope to be.