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
08-30-2003, 08:42 AM
For all you "artsy fartsy" folks
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