When I Was a Scholar

[Originally posted in May 2017 on the Pacific Coast league 1930-1960 Facebook group, responding to this photo of the original editions of Richard E. Beverage's books on the Hollywood Stars and Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League. spt+]

The Stars book I bought in the early '80s directly from Richard Beverage through the mail, but when I inquired about the Angels book, it was long out-of-print and he had none available. Occasionally I'd inquire at used book stores in the San Fernando Valley, but no luck. In 1988 I headed up to the Lutheran seminary, which has graduate student privileges at Cal.

So in a University library one day on a lark I looked up "The Angels" and, sure enough, they had one copy -- at the Bancroft Library. That's a non-circulating, research library. No checking out books. You can't even go in the stacks to see it. One of the librarians gets it for you. You aren't allowed pens or pencils, even to make notes (they will make copies for a fee), and you don't leave until you return it. And they don't do this for just anybody, even a graduate student, holding a Cal library card. No you have to first register as a researcher, completing a form that remains on file declaring to the Bancroft who you are and your field of study! Gee, I just want to read something about the team my dad fell in love with when he was a boy.

Then it hit me -- I'm a divinity student at the Graduate Theological Union. And so I put down that I was researching angels. And I got to read the book.

Advertising Algorithms: Still Not Ready

Inspired to action by Bishop Barron's comments on Fleming Rutledge's The Crucifixion, I added the book to my Amazon Wish List a few moments ago. The Rev. Rutledge is a retired Episcopal priest who has long had a reputation as an excellent preacher and orthodox theologian. I had heard her speak at the Center for Catholic and Evangelical Theology's conference "Who Do You Say That I Am? Following and Proclaiming Jesus Today" a few years ago and was suitably impressed. She is both an engaging speaker and serious Christian theologian.

Seeing my interest in this book, as a matter of course Amazon wants me to sell me similar merchandise. The question is, what might be "similar" to 700 page book that was the Academy of Parish Clergy's "Reference Book of the Year" for 2015 and is highly recommended by theologians like Robert Jenson and Stanley Hauerwas. Why, a pick from... Oprah!

I'm guessing the algorithm's categories are "female" and "spirituality." Which takes me back to a saying I learned in my 8th grade computer programming class, GIGO -- "garbage in, garbage out."

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P.S. Turns out today is the anniversary of the senseless shooting death of the young Angels outfielder (and fellow CSUN alum) Lyman Bostock in 1978. The first of the "promoted stories" at the bottom of that page is a photo of a lovely young woman and the headline "37 Shocking Celebrity Cup Sizes You Couldn't Have Guessed." Ahh, those algorithms...

Not the Best Beginning

Oh, my! This is an inauspicious way to begin the new season. Los Angeles Angels hitting coach Don Baylor, behind the plate to catch the ceremonial first pitch, breaks his leg. You may not want to watch the video, but it's hard to imagine the 1979 American League Most Valuable Player being that fragile, even at age 64.

(Ah, the Orange County Register reports, "In 2003, Baylor was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a bone marrow cancer that weakens the bones. He reportedly went into remission the next year.")

Then the 3-2 score over Seattle when I finally get to listen via XM Radio beginning in the 6th inning ends up a 10-3 blowout for the Mariners....

Oh, the Agony! Oh, the Memories!

Oh, my, that was ugly. My Los Angeles Angels are playing the A's in Oakland. I turned on the A's broadcast last night, thanks to XM Radio, when I went to bed. It was 6-2 in the 6th inning, and Albert Pujol's second homer in the 7th made it 7-2. Then suddenly, the A's scored 4 in the 8th, and tied it up in the 9th. Extra innings.

I fell asleep with the radio still on, woke up, and the game was still going. Repeat a couple more times One of the of the things being in the Midwest for a West Coast game is that as the hour gets later in California, it is 2 hours later in Peoria. It was now past midnight on the West Coast.

And as the poor A's announcers, Ken Korach and Ray Fosse, tried to think of what to say about a game that wasn't ending, where the teams were running out of players, where the Angels scored in the 15th, only to have the A's tie it up again -- at the top of my mind was another Angels-A's game in Oakland.

I was 12. Angel road games in Oakland (and Minnesota) were always televised in those days, and 1971 was to be our year for an American League Western Divison pennant. But the season was going down the drain fast. In those days I would usually sit in front of the TV keeping score, but for some reason I didn't have a score card that night. Good thing, as that game went past 1 am, too, long after I'd gone to bed fallen asleep with my transistor radio plugged into my ear.

In the morning I awoke. 20 innings! 1-0. Tony Congliaro, who had gone 0-8, retired before the Sun had risen. It was a game that reflected the frustrations of the 1971 season, one filled with hope at the beginning -- when this Angels fan had committed to listening closely to each and every game. It was, as Angels history tells, a season of one weird disaster after another, beginning several years of futility. It would be 1978 before we had a winning record.

I was actually half awake at 3:30 this morning (Central Daylight Time) when, in the bottom of the 19th, A's 1st baseman Brandon Moss hit his second home run of the game. Angels lose. 10-8. 6 hours, 32 minutes -- the longest game (by time) in A's history. Portents of things to come? The Angels are supposed to be contending for an AL pennant, but our 9-16 record after 25 games is tied for the worst in team history. Angels' center fielder Peter Bourjos pulled a hamstring and is on the disabled list.

I hope I don't remember this game as well 42 years from now.

Opening Day!!

The President of the United States tosses the first pitch for Opening Day for the Washington Nationals.



Alas, the comments to this YouTube video are pretty crude, and miss the point. Mr. Obama is our President, it's the beginning of the baseball season, and it's a grand tradition. Show some respect for the Office, the Game, and the Tradition -- and just enjoy it.

And tonight, I'll be listening to my beloved Los Angeles Angels on XM Radio...

The West Is Won!!!

Guess who just won the American League West for the fourth time in the last five years?










The other Los Angeles baseball team isn't doing too badly, either.

Fair weather strikes again

You know that I am a Los Angeles Angels fan -- it not only goes back to some of my earliest blog entries, my first baseball cap -- I can't remember a time before I had it, so I must've been 3 when I first got it -- was from the original expansion Angels, blue with a red bill and intertwined "LA," and the cool silver/white halo on top. (Please, Mr Moreno, please!!!) Jimmy Fregosi, Bobby Knoop, Rick Reichardt, Bob (later "Buck") Rodgers, Jay Johnstone, Aurelio Rodriguez, Roger Repoz, Dean Chance, Bill Rigney (hmm, lots of Rs), those are my guys.

But an afternoon at Grandma-and-Grandpa's often had Vin Scully describing the Dodger game in the background, "brought to you by Farmer John Hot Dogs, proud sponsor of the Dodgers" and maker of the world famous Dodger Dogs®. My first professional baseball games were at Dodger Stadium where, my Angels cap long-disappeared (and too small anyway), I bought a Dodger cap with my very own money when I was 10. I still have it.

In 1988 we were sitting in the lounge of PLTS' Beasom Hall watching the first game of the World Series. The whole world knew that the Oakland A's were going to win that Series, and in Berkeley everyone's an A's fan. Except the Angel fan from LA, watching because he likes watching baseball (though he has no dog in this particular game) and the company. And then, Kirk Gibson comes to bat as a pinch hitter. (Go ahead, read it, for the author's got it just right.) For when the crippled former Tiger put that ball over the fence, well, Tibbetts is an LA boy and the Dodgers are the home town team. Everybody was shocked. One was overjoyed.

Okay, I'm a fair weather Dodger fan. And, yes, I'll always have a longing for anything that reminds me of home. But who'da thunk 2 weeks ago that the Los Angeles Dodgers, a once-proud franchise that has been in chaos since O'Malley sold out to Murdoch and Lasorda had to retire, would now be managed by Joe Torre.

It's time to get a new Dodger cap. And 2, not just one, bobbleheads.

Wait 'til next year!

Oh my, what an ugly way to end what had been a wonderful season. Yes, I listened to the whole thing on XM radio with the hometown announcers. Boston 9, Los Angeles Angels 1.

After the Cubs lose to the Diamondbacks, ending their season. (Theological content here on TitusOneNine. And Canon Harmon lives in South Carolina!)

The worst Notre Dame football team in anybody's memory beats UCLA, 20-6. Ugh!

Out of the depths I cry to you:
O Father, hear me calling.
Incline you ear to my distress
In spite of my rebelling.
Do not regard myh sinful deeds.
Send me the grace my spirit needs;
Without it I am nothing.
      (stanza 1, Out of the Depths I Cry to You,
      Martin Luther, tr. Gracia Grindal,
      paraphrase of Psalm 130, LBW hymn #295)

But then there's this: the 41-point underdog Stanford Indians, er, Cardinal upset the USC Brain Surgeons: 24-23!!

Alleluia!!!

My soul is waiting for the Lord
As one who longs for morning;
No watcher waits with greater hope
Than I for his returning.
I hope as Israel in the Lord;
He sends redemption through his Word.
We praise him for his mercy.
      (stanza 4)

Wait 'til next year!

But there is good news...

In our home while growing up, on the davenport lamp table by the front door we kept, during the baseball season, bobbleheads of the Dodgers and Angels. And, as taught by Grandpa Hutchinson, when the team won a game the doll looked out, while when they lost, the doll turned away in shame.

Well, in my youth we saw the back of the Angel more often than not. But, even though they lost this evening, the Angel faces you now for -- the Los Angeles Angels have won their third American League Western Division pennant in four years.

And that's something to celebrate!

Oh. How about this World Series: the Angels and the Cubs???

Home, Sweet, Home

Several years ago a friend looked at my home page and observed that I really must love Los Angeles. I've not lived there since 1988, and must confess that image of home in my mind is more from the '60s than the early 21st century. Nevertheless, I do.

I was deeply touched last week when reading Ray Bradbury's 1974 introduction to Dandelion Wine. He was writing about Waukegan, but while reading it I was thinking of places I've lived: Canoga Park; that part of Van Nuys at Sepulveda and Roscoe near the Busch Brewery; Helena, Montana; the South Side of Peoria. Nearly 30 years ago, a woman in my home church said I had been "born 40." And while I wouldn't deny the compliment she was offering me, I'm glad I've never lost touch with little boy inside of me.

Here's Bradbury:

I was amused and somewhat astonished at a critic a few years a few years back who wrote an article analyzing Dandelion Wine plus the more realistic works of Sinclair Lewis, wondering how I could have been born and raised in Waukegan, which I renamed Green Town for my novel, and not noticed how ugly the harbor was and how depressing the coal docks and railyards down below the town.

But, of course, I had noticed them and, genetic enchanter that I was, was fascinated by their beauty. Trains and boxcars and the smell of coal and fire are not ugly to children. Ugliness is a concept that we happen on later and become self-conscious about. Counting boxcars is a prime activity of boys. Their elders fret and fume and jeer at the train that holds them up, but boys happily count and cry the names of the cars as they pass from far places.

And again, that supposedly ugly railyard was where carnivals and circuses arrived with elephants who washed the brick pavements with mighty steaming acid waters at five in the dark morning.

As for the coal from the docks, I went down in my basement every autumn to await the arrival of the truck and its metal chute, which clanged down and released a ton of beauteous meteors that fell out of far space into my cellar and threatened to bury me beneath dark treasures.

In other words, if your boy is a poet, horse manure can only mean flowers to him; which is, of course, what horse manure has always been about.

Perhaps a new poem of mine will explain more than this introduction about the germination of all the summers of my life into one book.

Here's the start of the poem:

Byzantium, I come not from,
But from another time and place
Whose race was simple, tried and true;
As boy
I dropped me forth in Illinois.
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan, there I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium

The poem continues, describing my lifelong relationship to my birthplace:

And yet in looking back I see
From topmost part of farthest tree
A land as bright, beloved and blue
As any Yeats found to be true.

Waukegan, visited by me often since, is neither homelier nor more beautiful than any other small midwestern town. Much of it is green. The trees do touch in the middle of streets. The street in front of my old home is still paved with red bricks. In what way then was the town special? Why, I was born there. It was my life. I had to write of it as I saw fit:

So we grew up with mythic dead
To spoon upon midwestern bread
And spread old gods' bright marmalade
To slake in peanut-butter shade,
Pretending there beneath our sky
That it was Aprodite's thigh . . .
While by the porch-rail calm and bold
His words pure wisdom, stare pure gold
My grandfather, a myth indeed,
Did all of Plato supersede
While Grandmama in rockingchair
Sewed up the raveled sleeve of card
Crocheted cool snowflakes rare and bright
To winter us on summer night.
And uncles, gathered with their smokes
Emitted wisdoms masked as jokes,
And aunts as wise as Delphic maids
Dispensed prophetic lemonades
To boys knelt there as acolytes
To Grecian porch on summer nights;
Then went to bed, there to repent
The evils of the innocent;
The gnat-sins sizzling in their ears
Said, through the nights and through the years
Not Illinois nor Waukegan
But blither sky and blither sun.
Though mediocre all our Fates
And Mayor not as bright as Yeats
Yet still we knew ourselves. The sum?
Byzantium.
Byzantium.

Waukegan/Green Town/Byzantium.

Green Town did exist, then?

Yes, and again, yes.

from "Just This Side of Byzantium," pages ix-xii of Dandelion Wine.

I hear the voice of Ray Bradbury -- yes, I've heard it on the radio and TV -- while reading this.

And, just to make this entry's title more appropo, while I'm typing this up I'm Iistening on XM Radio to my Los Angeles Angels play the Dodgers, as Spring Training is winding down, in the annual Freeway Series. Since the game is at Chavez Ravine (Dodger Stadium), it's the home team's announcer: Vin Scully. (Alas, the score is 6-1 Dodgers, bottom of the 3rd.) Maybe I am a little boy again!

"You really live on the South Side of Peoria?" I get asked. Yup, right next to the church. Wouldn't have it any other way. I wonder what the kids playing outside going to remember of this coming summer 2007?

Home, Sweet, Home.

Mr. Angel

He is, by any account, Mr. Angel.

Tim Salmon has been to this franchise what Tony Gwynn was to the Padres, what Cal Ripken Jr. was to the Orioles, what Kirby Puckett was to the Twins.

He has been the homegrown star who started and stayed right here, loyally remaining with one team and one franchise for the duration of his career.

A case could be made for him as the most consistent player in the 45-year history of the organization. But what has made him so endearing, so wildly popular that fans are standing and cheering for him every night on this final homestand before he retires, isn't so much the long list of impressive numbers he has put up.

It is more about Salmon, the person. It is more about the way he has conducted himself, on and off the field. For 15 years in Orange County, Salmon has pounded the ball and pounded the pavement, always there to help with all sorts of causes and charities.

Read here for the rest of this article by Steve Bisheff of the Orange County Register.

It was August 1992. Having graduated from seminary, accepted this call as Parish Pastor at Zion, and making the final arrangements for my upcoming ordination, I was temporarily living with Mom & Dad in the West Hills/Canoga Park home I'd been raised in. That meant I could again listen to the games of the baseball team that had been my favorite since I was a little boy, the California Angels -- originally, and now again, the Los Angeles Angels. I didn't catch the game the night Tim Salmon made his debut -- that was the night of my sem roommate's wedding rehearsal dinner -- but I would catch others over the next 3 weeks until I was on the road to Peoria. Like other Angels fans -- there weren't a whole lot of us in those days -- I had big hopes for this new right fielder, and I was able to follow his Rookie-of-the-Year 1993 season as well as the Peoria Journal Star would report it.

Tim Salmon's legacy as an Angel includes memorable moments both on and off the field. The biggest on-field was the Anaheim Angels winning the 2002 World Series (which I watched on TV while chatting with my Mom and sister at the end of the day Zion celebrated my 10th Anniversary of ordination and as their pastor). Some of his off the field legacy is listed here in his offical baseball biography. The one I find most interesting is California's Responsible Fatherhood Campaign. Not mentioned there is part of his testimony to the Christian Faith.

Last Wednesday night came the 299th Home Run of his 15-year career, all with the Angels. Thursday he announced his retirement. I'll catch tonight's game on XM Radio, rooting for him to hit #300 tonight. The Angels' season, and Salmon's playing career, end tomorrow afternoon, while I'll be part of the Peoria Life Chain.