Salon.com > Major League Baseball

Returning to Chicago three decades later

Mon, 15 Apr 2013 14:00:00 +0000

My previous dispatch from my cross-country road trip driving Miss Sadie to New York left off as I headed to a baseball game – my San Francisco Giants just happened to be in Chicago, and I’d bought great tickets, between the Giants dugout and the bullpen. It turned out to be the perfect place to marvel and kvell and lament and celebrate my life since I left Chicago, not quite 30 momentous years ago.

Chicago isn’t technically along I-80, but I had to make the detour, since my trip west to San Francisco 28 years ago began there. I knew I could stay with my friend Jim Rinnert, who has an amazing house with his partner Brent. Long ago they gave me an invitation to stay with them that wouldn't expire. Jim and Brent are dog people – they always have several adorable, eccentric rescues, and they were excited to meet Sadie. “You’ve always been a dog person – without a dog!” Jim tells me once he sees me and Sadie together. It's true -- I loved Jim's dog Bo when he used to take him to In These Times. The company of a dog compensated for the sometimes delay in paychecks. And Sadie utterly loved Jim and Brent.

Waiting for the gay Jackie Robinson

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 16:00:00 +0000

Whoever the gay equivalent of Jackie Robinson will be – and according to some sources, we may get several of them at the same time – he (or they) is almost certainly already playing professional sports, and may well be an established star. Robinson’s history-making Major League Baseball debut in 1947 was enormously dramatic, of course, but lacked that level of shadowy intrigue: No one wondered whether Stan Musial or Ted Williams might abruptly announce that he’d been black the whole time, like the tormented hero of a Faulkner novel. (Although, given the bizarre history of race in America, who really knows? There were a handful of earlier cases when baseball teams tried to “pass” light-skinned African-American players as Native Americans – and that’s a terrific movie idea if I’ve ever heard one.)

Mental health’s “coming out” party

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 01:00:00 +0000

As anyone who has ever experienced a panic attack well knows, one of the most difficult aspects of managing anxiety disorders is having to do it in secret, for fear of being labeled a freak. I can personally attest that such a fear often makes the problem worse, compounding generalized worry with the specific concern that you will be ostracized.

This is why the last year has been so important for the 40 million Americans like me who the National Institute of Mental Health says periodically suffer from anxiety-related disorders. It was a year that saw these all-too-common ailments emerge from the shadows.

It started in professional sports, a particularly difficult arena for a mental-health coming out party. After all, it's a machismo-dominated world where showing any signs of weakness is usually depicted as nothing more than a personal failing or a lack of "toughness."

Yet, last April, San Francisco Giants first baseman Aubrey Huff put himself on the disabled list for an anxiety disorder and courageously opened up to that city's newspaper about his struggles. Then came what the New York Times called "one of the more frightening — and remarkable — rounds of golf ever caught on video" -- the one in which Charlie Beljan competed in (and eventually won) a PGA tournament while experiencing a five-hour panic attack. His attack was so severe, in fact, that upon finishing a golf round, he had to be carted away in an ambulance.

The Mormon James Frey

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:43:00 +0000

  This is not a story about Manti Te’o. He is, after all, a 21 year-old kid caught up in something—a cruel and elaborate hoax? a fabrication?—that no one yet seems to have a total grip on. Yet.

This is a story about a man named Paul H. Dunn.

Paul H. Dunn was a high-ranking leader in the LDS Church during the 1970s and 1980s. He gave public talks, as LDS Church leaders are expected to do, and wrote over fifty books.

In a couple of those books, Dunn described how he had played baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals. That he’d pitched to Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and rubbed elbows with Stan Musial.

He also told stories about his service in World War II. He said that he was one of six soldiers out of his battalion of 1,000 to have survived the war. He said a buddy named Harold Lester Brown had died in his arms on Okinawa—prayers on his lips--and that Dunn himself had helped bury the body.

Stories like these made Paul H. Dunn one of the best-loved motivational speakers in the world of Mormonism.

First in war, first in peace, first in the National League

Fri, 05 Oct 2012 16:28:00 +0000

It’s a blazing hot Sunday afternoon on Half Street, Southeast, just outside of Nationals Park. The heat is nothing new for D.C., though. Washington’s summer scorchers were well known to even the capital’s earliest residents — an assemblage of land speculators, slaves, and government workers — but this Sunday feels especially sticky and unbearable. Not even the breeze off the Anacostia River helps. Despite the weather, packs of baseball fans crowd Half and First and N streets, many clad in sweat-stained jerseys and red wool hats stitched with a curly “W.” Vendors mill around makeshift tents and collapsible tables set up along the sidewalks; some stands teem with T-shirts and jerseys, some with bottled water, “ice cold, ice cold,” and some with the traditional peanuts and Cracker Jacks. Unanchored entrepreneurs roam the area, their arms lined with knockoff caps, hawked to the tirelessly repeated tune, “Five dollars, get your five-dollar hat here, five dollars.” Streams of potential buyers file off the humid, underground Navy Yard Metro, up the station’s escalators, and out into the daylight. Scalpers wade through the crowds chirping, “Tickets, tickets, tickets.”