Last night, I started reading Buck O’Neil’s autobiography, “I Was Right on Time,” which he wrote back in ‘95. Lots of great stories and passages, especially ones revolving around names, a theme which begins with the opening line — “Call me Buck.”

Here are some passages along that theme:

At one time, we had three or four leagues playing all at once, the Negro National League, Negro American League, Negro Southern League, Negro Western League, and so on….

And we had names. We had Fox and Piggy and Bunny and Possum and Groundhog and Rats and Mule and Frog and Burro and Early-bird and Goose and Turkey. Turkey, whose name you’ve already come across, was really Norman Stearnes, one of the greatest hitters and strangest men I have ever had the pleasure of knowing. They called him Turkey because of the way he flapped his arms around when he ran. You expected Turkey to take off and fly when he was running, but I was more fascinated by his devotion to hitting. Turkey carried around his bats, a thirty-four-incher and a thirty-five-incher, in a special bat case, like they were violins. One time, after a tough loss, the Monarchs were in the hotel eating dinner, and the manager, Frank Duncan, asked me to go check on the Gobbler — that’s another thing we called Turkey, you see. So I knocked on the Gobbler’s door and he said, “Come in,” and there he was, sitting in the middle of his bed dressed in his pajamas talking to his bats. He said to the 34-incher, “I used you and only hit the ball up against the fence.” Then he turned to the 35-incher and said, “If I had picked you, I would have hit the ball over the fence and we would have tied the game.” Strange man, but Turkey’s another guy who belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Man, did we have names. We had Sea Boy and Gunboat, Steel Arm and Copperknee, Darknight and Skin Down, Mosquito and Jitterbug, Popsickle and Popeye, Suitcase and, of course, Satchel. Our trainer with the Monarchs was Jewbaby Floyd — I can’t recollect why we called him that, and I can’t remember what his real first name was. There were some pitchers with great nicknames, Steel Arm Davis, Ankleball Moss — that’s where that mean sonuvagun threw the ball from, his andkles — and Cocaina Garcia. Cocaina, whom I used to face down in Cuba, got his name from his wicked curveball, which made all us hitters go numb.

As for my own names, well, there are some pretty simple explanations for them — and some pretty complicated ones, too.

[And then, later on.]

It seems like half the teams in black baseball were called the Giants. There were the Bacharach Giants, the Lincoln Giants, the Brooklyn Royal Giants, the Brooklyn Cuban Giants, the Cuban X Giants, the Philadelphia Giants, the Pittsburgh Giants, the Chicago Giants, the Chicago American Giants, Cole’s American Giants, Gilkerson’s Union Giants, the Celeron Acme Colored Giants, the Shreveport Acme Giants, the Page Fence Giants, the St. Louis Giants, the Harrisburg Giants, the Mohawk Giants, the Baltimore Elite Giants, the Columbus Elite Giants, the Columbia Giants, the Twin City Giants, the Quaker Giants of New York, the Zulu Cannibal Giants … among others.

The Reason there were so many Giants was that many newspapers across the country refused to print pictures of black people, But there were a lot of excellent black teams around, and they were a big attraction, even in predominantly white towns. So Giants became a code word. If you saw a placard in a store window or an advertisement in the newspaper announcing that the River City Giants were coming to town to play the local semipro team, you knew right away that the visisting team was a black one. I think everybody in the Negro leagues was a Giant at least once. I was a Giant three times!

(back to me)

Reading these long lists of names reminded me of the catolog of ships from the Iliad. I used to think of that passage as evidence that the poem was, in fact, divinely inspired — no mortal could really list all those names. But reading O’Neil’s book and imagining him reciting all that information to his ghost writer, maybe it’s not so improbable. I can imagine a group of Greeks gathered around an old Homer. He’s telling them these amazing war stories, when all of a sudden he just starts going off about all these ships and tediously sharing which ship was headed by which captain. At first the audience is rapt, then they become a little bored and antsy, but as it goes on and on, they just become stupified by what a list this man is able to recite.

Maybe it’s not necessary to think of Homer as a divinely inspired bard, maybe you can just think of him as an Abraham Simpson type.

Perhaps the ability to catalog the names of yesteryear is a gift that comes with old age.

Buck O’neil certainly had that gift.

here’s a scene from a little one-act i wrote about the fall of saddam.

and here’s me singing a song i wrote about the red sox after they lost the 2003 alcs.

I may not have invented the internet, but i started champagne-gate!

here and here

it’s great to be blogging again!

if only j. michael neal were doing better…

Warning: This image is not directly Eben’s avatar, but a scholarly reconstruction. Until my freedom-of-avatar-information request is processed, i’ll never know exactly what furry creatures Eben is hiding in the corner of his avatar.

sucks

Wow! This is amazing. I found Luke’s deleted message in my internet cache. I can’t believe it — my first scoop. I feel like that guy who broke the monica lewinsky scandal, or that blogger who busted dan rather during typewriter-gate.

The text in its entirety reads:

$

by: Sancho’s Panties

the league is messed up. everyone is going to get their 50 back. the winner of the playoffs gets to make the rules for next year’s league (if anyone still wants one then). i had fun playing this year, and hope that we can establish another league next year, that has more rules. in the end fantasy baseball is just a means for us all to keep in touch and talk shit while collectively enjoying baseball. there is no reason for anyone (especially me) to get bent out of shape and pissed off. the keeper league project bombed a bit. next year we’ll get it right.

-Luke

Message: 967 of 967

It’s not really all that bad of a post, but i could see how eben would delete it. i feel sorry for the guy: spending all night reversing me and brian’s trade — if only he knew that it could have been fixed in three easy steps:

a) change the trade deadline to “none”

b) have brian and i repropose the trade

c) process the trade

That’s all assuming that the trade deadline can be changed after it has passed. Otherwise, there was no choice but eben’s painfully tedious one…