Posts Tagged ‘major League Baseball’
“I set records that will never be equaled, 90% I hope are never printed”*…
The Inimitable Ray Ratto in the always-illuminating Defector on the legend that was Bob Uecker, who died, ten days shy of his 91st birthday, on January 16…
It is not difficult to find people who loved Bob Uecker unreservedly. There is a good reason for this: He was the last genuinely and instinctively funny person in baseball history. He was the god of Milwaukee even if you include all the Green Bay Packers going back to before Vince Lombardi. He was the face and voice of baseball cinema, the man whose line-reading made “Ju-u-u-u-st a bit outside” so good that “iconic” doesn’t remotely cover its impact. Even if you’re not a seamhead, you likely came across Bob Uecker and smiled.
So Thursday’s announcement that Uecker has died at age 90, due to small cell lung cancer, came as a blow. Nine decades is a good long run, but there was never a sense that he was running out of material; Uecker was still a joy to hear on Brewers broadcasts even in Year 54 of being the voice of Wisconsin baseball for two-and-a-half generations. The reaction to his passing was unanimous in the same ways and for the same reasons that the response to Vin Scully’s death was unanimous—it was an outpouring of both sadness at the loss and gratitude for all the time we got to spend with him. In an epochally angry time in America, at a moment when it isn’t hard to find even anti-puppy polemics with a keystroke, Uecker gets a pass from most everyone. Yes he defined baseball, but he also managed to become more than merely Mister Baseball. From the moment of his first appearance on Johnny Carson’s definitive version of the Tonight Show, which Uecker earned merely by mastering the tripartite arts of comedy writing, unabashed self-deprecation, and martini-dry humor, he was recognizable as that rarest of Americans, the guy you’d sit back down to listen to even if you were already halfway out the door. Put another way, Norm Macdonald thought he was one of the funniest men he ever met. Beat that with a stick.
He did WrestleManias. He starred in a not-entirely-forgettable sitcom, Mr. Belvedere. He did Major League and Homeward Bound; he did Puppy Dog Pals and Futurama. He did beer commercials that didn’t make you want to hurl bricks through your appliances. He did a Hall of Fame speech that exceeds all other such orations by a significant margin because he’d had years to perfect it, even though his playing career was its direct antithesis. Uecker was skilled enough to remain in the major leagues for six years, and smart enough to parlay a lifetime batting average of .19973—not .200, which is what his Baseball Reference page reads—into a career. One-ninety-nine-and-change. He managed to make that his calling card until he could replace it with his far superior ability to help others enjoy their day.
Like Scully, Uecker passed through life with almost no detractors, and not just because his methodology was to beat everyone to the detracting. He gave off an aura of knowing who he was and was not. Just as important, he knew where he was and was not. Uecker was more than content with being the definition of Milwaukee, staying in the Brewers’ radio booth for more than half a century, all while doing the movies and ads and national broadcasts that somehow made him even more Milwaukee-centric. It was an act of rooting to the ground that is almost unheard of today. Uecker didn’t put a shine on the Brewers when they didn’t deserve one, but he didn’t kick them when they were down, either. That’s because he wasn’t parlaying the Brewers gig into some better team in a bigger city. Mostly, he was revered for never leaving town even when Los Angeles might have been more logistically favorable. Who knew that being grounded was the best way to fly?
There will be flurries of other tributes in the next few days, from all corners; Uecker covered a great deal of ground despite starting his public life in a perpetual squat. Unlike nearly every other athlete of his era, Uecker was actually far better and more popular at everything that wasn’t athletics-based. He got 90 years out of this simple-to-explain-and-hard-to-deliver formula, and he succeeded less by luck or planning and more by simply being what he was—the guy who made everyone happier by the simple act of entering their space…
“Bob Uecker Was Just the Best” (gift article) from @rayratto.bsky.social in @defector.bsky.social.
* Bob Uecker, in his Hall of Fame speech
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As we honor the authentic, we might spare a thought for Henry Louis “Hank” Aaron; he died on this date in 2021. Considered one of the greatest Major League baseball players in history, he spent 21 seasons with the Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves in the National League (NL) and two seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers in the American League (AL). At the time of his retirement, Aaron held most of the game’s key career power-hitting records. He broke the long-standing MLB record for career home runs held by Babe Ruth and remained the career leader for 33 years, until Barry Bonds surpassed his famous total of 755 in 2007. He hit 24 or more home runs every year from 1955 through 1973 and is one of only two players to hit 30 or more home runs in a season at least fifteen times.
Aaron and Uecker were teammates in Milwaukee…
“Right now I’m having amnesia and déjà vu at the same time. I think I’ve forgotten this before.”*…
Before humans stored memories as zeroes and ones, we turned to digital devices of another kind — preserving knowledge on the surface of fingers and palms. Kensy Cooperrider leads us through a millennium of “hand mnemonics” and the variety of techniques practiced by Buddhist monks, Latin linguists, and Renaissance musicians for remembering what might otherwise elude the mind…
In the beginning, the hand was just a hand — or so we can imagine. It was a workaday organ, albeit a versatile one: a tool for grasping, holding, throwing, and hefting. Then, at some point, after millions of years, it took on other duties. It became an instrument of mental, not just menial, labor. As a species, our systems of understanding, belief, and myth had grown more elaborate, more cognitively overwhelming. And so we started to put those systems out into the world: to tally, track, and record by carving notches into bone, tying knots in string, spreading pigment on cave walls, and aligning rocks with celestial bodies. Hands abetted these early mental labors, of course, but they would later become more than mere accessories. Beginning roughly twelve hundred years ago, we started using the hand itself as a portable repository of knowledge, a place to store whatever tended to slip our mental grasp. The topography of the palm and fingers became invisibly inscribed with information of all kinds — tenets and dates, names and sounds. The hand proved versatile in a new way, as an all-purpose memory machine.
The arts of memory are well known, but the role of the hand in these arts is often overlooked. In the twentieth century, beginning with the pioneering work of Frances Yates, Western scholars started to piece together a rich tradition of mnemonic practices that originated in antiquity and later took hold in Europe. The most celebrated of these is the “memory palace” [see here]. Using this technique, skilled practitioners can memorize vast collections of facts by nesting them in familiar places (or “loci”): the chambers of a building or along a well-known route. (To make these places more memorable, a bizarre image is often added to each one, the more jarring the better.) It is an odd omission that hand mnemonics are rarely mentioned alongside memory palaces. Both techniques are powerful and broadly attested. Both are adaptable, able to accommodate whatever type of information one wants to remember. And both work by similar principles, pinning to-be-remembered items to familiar locations.
The two traditions do have important differences. Memory palaces exist solely in the imagination; hand mnemonics exist half in the mind and half in the flesh. Another difference lies in their intended use. Memory palaces are idiosyncratic in nature, tailored to the quirks of personal experience and association, and used for private purposes; they are very much the province of an individual. Hand mnemonics, by contrast, are the province of a community, a tool for collective understanding. They offer a way of fixing and transmitting a shared system of knowledge. They serve private purposes, certainly — such as contemplation, in the case of the Mogao mnemonic, or calculation, in the case of Bede’s computus. But they also have powerful social functions in teaching, ritual, and communication…
The five-fingered memory machine: “Handy Mnemonics,” from @kensycoop in @PublicDomainRev.
* Steven Wright
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As we give it (to) the finger, we might recall an occasion for counting that required no fingers at all: on this date in 2015, a baseball game between Chicago White Sox and the Baltimore Orioles at Camden Yards set the all-time low attendance mark for Major League Baseball. Zero (0) fans were in attendance, because the stadium was closed to the public due to the 2015 Baltimore protests (over the death of Freddie Gray while in police custody).
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