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08-30-2003, 08:42 AM

Posted By: leonThis is pretty long reading but entertaining.....a fellow co-worker sent this.....if you have a few minutes it's pretty good.....and yes this was cut and pasted.....regards all In the catalog for "The Perfect Game: America Looks at Baseball," the sweet and nearly pitch-perfect show at the American Folk Art Museum, the writer Roger Angell evokes what it must have been like to visit the Polo Grounds or Yankee Stadium on a midweek afternoon in, say, 1934. There would have been no rock music blaring from loudspeakers and no flashing video scoreboard. There was no television. Fans would straggle in from work midgame to catch a few innings before heading home for supper. "Ours is a working man's entertainment," Mr. Angell writes, "and a sense of commonality between the athletes and the spectators is palpable in these mild settings." Commonality and mild settings. The exhibition at the folk art museum, which Elizabeth Warren has affectionately put together, is about both. It is not a documentary of the sport. It's an elaborate illustration of a shared love affair with a game, expressed, as love often is, through art. Baseball already is art, aficionados will say, and you know what they mean if you have watched Pedro Martínez or Mariano Rivera pitch. But it is also a game strictly governed by rules, with three outs per inning and exactly 90 feet between bases, whereas art fancies itself to be about breaking rules. That may be why many artists take to baseball: they are attracted to what is beautiful in their opposite. Because the Folk Art Museum show is a story of private and eccentric passions and not a history of the game, Joe DiMaggio and Cy Young do not tip their caps anywhere in it. But George Sosnak does. He started umpiring military games in Germany after World War II, attended umpiring school in Florida, umpired some spring training games for the Detroit Tigers, then busied himself, until he died in 1992, intricately detailing baseballs with India ink. He adorned balls with portraits of ballplayers and scenes of games, elaborately annotated. Baseball fans are obsessive about details like batting averages and pitch counts, and Sosnak's baseballs artfully manifest this characteristic state of a true fan's mind. We are also introduced in the show to the work of Lamont Alfred Pry (1921-1987), <object.title class="Movie" idsrc="nyt_ttl" value="36134">"Old Ironsides,"</object.title> who taught himself to draw and paint after being confined to the Carbon County Home for the Aged in Pennsylvania in 1968. When the home was razed seven years later, Pry's art turned up nailed to the boiler room wall. Pry drew baseball scenes. The show includes one heraldic image of two swinging batters, white and pink, with colored bunting looped across the top of the picture and two rectangles representing dugouts, inside which chairs are lined up like seats in a schoolroom. Who knows what was in the water in Carbon County, but Justin McCarthy (1891-1977) was another local son. Recovering from a nervous breakdown, he healed himself partly by drawing pictures of what he saw on television, including ballplayers. His itchy, searching line may remind art mavens of Raymond Pettibon, although the affinity, which is almost eerie, might best be described the other way around. It's an unspoken theme of the show that, as with McCarthy and Pry, art inspired by baseball is often an escape from, or a curative for, a troubled life. John Tracy, a captured Union soldier in the Confederates' Libby Prison in Richmond, Va., carved baseball scenes onto a cane to pass time and to save himself from going nuts. Ray Materson sewed. As a 9-year-old Little Leaguer in 1963, he idolized the New York Yankee team of Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Elston Howard and Whitey Ford. Thirty years later, Materson was in prison in Connecticut serving a 15-year sentence for armed robbery. He took up embroidery, of all things, improvising with the rim of a plastic plate to make an embroidery hoop. For thread he used unraveled socks and shoelaces, with scraps of boxer shorts for backing. Materson sewed sports logos, flags, a group portrait of his prison baseball team and pictures of his former Yankee heroes. They're about 3 inches by 2 inches, smaller than baseball cards, 1,200 stitches per square inch: miniature portraits of unlikely delicacy, each of which took him about 50 hours to complete. He sewed a picture of Mantle swinging for the upper deck; Tony Kubek scooping up a grounder at shortstop, with a view behind him of the bleachers packed with fans; and Clete Boyer crouching at third base, baked by sunlight, casting a shadow toward the outfield. In Materson's embroidered Proustian madeleines, it is still 1963 and the Yankees are still playing the Dodgers in the World Series, which they hadn't yet lost, and Materson is not yet in prison but still 9 years old and playing in the Little League, and it is a perfect autumn afternoon that will never end. Some people, when they are lost, find themselves through baseball or art - or as in Materson's case, through both. Much of the exhibition consists of charming paraphernalia: weather vanes, quilts, decorated bats and a spectacularly handsome cigar-store show figure by the ship carver Samuel Robb, possibly of the 19th-century slugger King Kelly. The Whitney Museum sold it off a few years ago; the Folk Art Museum, thanks to the baseball art collectors Millie and Bill Gladstone, fortunately bought it. And there are board games, banners, mechanized model players, croquet wickets, a whirligig and signs, like the red double-sided one for Red Rolfe's service station. Rolfe, the Yankee third basemen from 1934 to 1942 - and an All-Star from 1937 to 1940 - had a second job, like many players back then. He owned the Texaco franchise in his hometown, Penacook, N.H. The closest the show gets to classic memorabilia are a seat from the Polo Grounds and an ornamental terra-cotta frieze from the original Yankee Stadium. The Polo Grounds went the way of Ebbets Field, and Yankee Stadium has been modernized. Times change. The major league game, with its astronomical salaries and periodic strikes, can seem hardly to resemble the sport most of the artists here dreamed about. But baseball is still played in Mr. Angell's mild settings. The other day, as we do every summer, my family drove to tiny Waconah Park in Pittsfield, Mass. (Consider this digressionary anecdote the review's seventh inning stretch.) The park opened in 1919 and, unlike most modern stadiums, the field faces west, so occasionally there are sun delays because the batters can't see the pitchers. It used to be home to the Pittsfield Mets before they abandoned Massachusetts for Coney Island and fancier digs as the Brooklyn Cyclones. The outside of Waconah, sheathed in tatty, corrugated metal, is still painted blue with orange trim, the Mets' colors. Now the Berkshire Black Bears of the Northeast League have moved in. The evening we visited, they were facing the Bangor Lumberjacks, and the woman who had answered the phone at the stadium that afternoon swore that the game would take place even though it had been raining steadily for a week. Miraculously the rain did stop, just as she had promised, and the sky turned purple and orange over the outfield wall, which is one of those old-fashioned stadium fences covered with signs for local businesses. We chose our usual $5 seats in the horseshoe grandstand, a dozen or so open rows of weather-beaten wood benches on an old steel frame, surrounding the infield, nominally protected by a rickety tin roof. At game time, a couple of guys in T-shirts with rakes and bags of sand were still pensively readying the field, in no hurry, it seemed, while the team mascot, Tater, in a scruffy black bear costume, greeted every child and flirted improbably with the girls raffling eyeglass cleaners, compact disks and hair products from behind home plate. A detour to the men's room provided a chance to quiz one of the visiting players who was also there. He opined that while the outfield was soaked, the diamond was fine. The field certainly looked beautiful, in that satisfying way baseball diamonds do, with their improbable green grass and geometry. One of the artists in the Folk Art Museum show is David R. Mellor, the current director of grounds at Fenway Park in Boston. Mr. Mellor is in charge of rolling the grass at Fenway into fantastic patterns: the Red Sox logo, the American flag, checkerboards and stripes. The show has photographs of his work. His fields are the opposite of Waconah or maybe its apotheosis. Players can't see the patterns from the field. But folks in the stands and watching on television do. Call it folk art for the masses, which is not the worst definition of baseball. Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company