Road Apples by Tim Sanders
April 16, 2012

Where have you gone, O.K. Ockafur?



There are sports which are fun to play, and sports which are fun to watch. Football, for example, is a game most of us love to watch, but know darned well we couldn’t play.

Golf, on the other hand, is often called a sport, despite the fact that it isn’t unusual to see white-haired grandparents shuffling around the golf course, shouting “FORE, DAMMIT!” at no one in particular. Golf may be a lot of fun to play, but it is an excruciatingly boring game to watch. All of that whispering by TV commentators merely adds to the impression that grandpa is out there on the greens somewhere, sleepwalking, and they don’t want to wake him.

Then there is baseball, which lies somewhere between football and golf, action-wise. Your grandfather, who wouldn’t survive ten seconds of an NFL game, could last for several innings in a major league baseball game as long as a) nobody hit a ball in his direction, or b) he just let the opposing pitcher throw strikes and didn’t hurt himself by swinging at one. When a couple of football players get into a scuffle on the field, they are immediately separated. Their teammates seldom pile on, because they are tired. When two baseball players get into a squabble, however, both benches invariably empty and the diamond is full of multi-million dollar major leaguers wanting to get in on the action. That is because your average major leaguer often goes for an entire game either standing around, waiting for someone to take pity on him and hit something in his direction or sitting in the dugout, waiting for his turn at bat. All of that waiting, waiting, waiting has made him–fine, muscular, steroid-packed physical specimen that he is–antsy.

I seldom watch baseball anymore. When I was a kid, my team was the Detroit Tigers. It wasn’t easy being a Tiger fan in the ‘50s and early ‘60s, because the Tigers hadn’t won a pennant in my lifetime. The Yankees had Roger Maris and Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford and so on. They papered their clubhouse walls with American League pennants. What we had, mainly, was Al Kaline. Then in 1968 the Tigers won the pennant, and came from a three games to one deficit to beat St. Louis in the World Series. I can still remember a number of the players on that 1968 Tiger roster, including Al Kaline, Micky Stanley, “Stormin’ Norman” Cash, Denny McClain, Bill Freehan, Gates Brown, Jim Northrup, and of course “Roly Poly” Mickey Lolich.

But baseball is the kind of game where, once you lose track of a team, and lose track of its players, you lose interest. My last vivid baseball memory was that Monday evening in 1974 when Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s home run record. I was working late in Atlanta, and I heard the crowd go crazy at Fulton County Stadium, only a few blocks from my office.

But, given my low threshold for boredom, and my dislike for statistics with acronyms like RBIs and BAs and ERAs, I seldom watch the game anymore. I do, however, love baseball lore, and stories of the good old days when real baseball players, guys like Gehrig and DiMaggio and Williams, were larger than life. That’s why one of my all time favorite books is “The Great American Novel,” by Philip Roth. It has been around for nearly 40 years now, but I’ve been around for longer than that, so to me it is still a very refreshing, absolutely hilarious look at baseball.

“The Great American Novel” is narrated by a 90-year-old retired sports writer, “Word” Smith, who travels every year to Cooperstown to protest a great wrong which has been done to players and fans alike. His contention is that up until 1946 there was a third major league, the Patriot League, but that all records of the league were expunged from the history of baseball. Names of Patriot League greats like Luke “the Loner” Gofannon and Smokey Woden, who rivaled Ruth and Cobb in their day, were deleted from the history books.

The story chronicles how, when the owner of New Jersey’s Port Ruppert Mundys, old Glorious Mundy, dies in 1931, his sons begin selling off their team’s legendary players and replacing them with bargain basement types. The advent of World War II, with many of baseball’s best players going overseas, only accelerates the disintegration of the league. In 1943, when the Mundy brothers lease their stadium to the War Department as a troop embarkation center, the Port Ruppert Mundys become a team without a home, and are forced to play all 154 games that season on the home fields of opposing teams like Wyoming’s Terra Incognita Rustlers, Ohio’s Asylum Keepers and Wisconsin’s dreaded Kakoola Reapers. They lose all but 20 games.

“Word” Smith’s narrative takes us with him on his season-long road trip with the Mundys and their hapless players. There is, for example, a peg-legged, foulmouthed catcher named Hothead Ptah, who is skilled at enraging hitters and disrupting their concentration. There is also Bud Parusha, the one-armed outfielder, who has learned to catch the ball in his glove, remove it with his teeth, drop the glove and rifle the ball to the infield. Unfortunately, sometimes the ball gets stuck in his teeth, and two teammates are forced to extract it, by which time any throw to the infield would be futile. There’s also the aging relief pitcher acquired from the Mexican League, Chico Mecoatl, who suffers from arthritis. Each time he delivers a pitch, he emits a rather jarring “Eeeeep!”

And there’s the pitcher named Jolly Cholly Tuminaker, which sounds suspiciously like “Roly Poly” Mickey Lolich to me. And the two battling midget relief pitchers, loveable Bob Yamm and obnoxious O.K. Ockafur with an “over-sized head” and an ego to match. (The midget gimmick was actually used in 1951 when St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck sent 3 ft. 7 in. Eddie Gaedel, wearing jersey no. 1/8, to the plate against Tiger pitcher Bob Cain. Veeck told Gaedel that if he even attempted to move the bat off his shoulder, there was a sniper on the stadium roof, ready to shoot him.)

So if you enjoy madcap hilarity, puns, and wordplay, and are a baseball fan without a team, go to the Internet and order a copy of “The Great American Novel.” The Port Ruppert Mundys might be just what the doctor ordered.