DLD, May 1st, 2008:  Red

Happy May Day! If you’re reading this you’re probably not shutting down the West Coast ports with the ILWU today.

Workers (with unchecked internet slack access…call it "slackcess") of the World Unite! As most of you know, it’s International Workers’ Day! Our friends at the IWW tell us that "Most Americans don't realize that May Day has its origins here in this country and is as "American" as baseball and apple pie."

That’s all the hook I need!

Wiki sez: "The five pointed star is an ancient symbol used in the mystical traditions of Middle Eastern religions (Judaism and Christianity) to represent the heretical idea that the sacred inheres in humanity. It was for this reason that Marx and Engels, as radical humanists, were attracted to the symbol. They made it red to signify the blood lost in struggle, and to show that all humans have the same blood (ancestry) regardless of race, gender, or class."

Who knew inheres was a word? Not I!

A baseball reference search shows a whopping 136 MLB players who’ve been nicknamed "Red" or something close. Hardly any of them played for the Reds. There was a Red Woodhead, a Red Bird, and a Red Cox. Perhaps due to the ubiquity of "Red," some took secondary nicknames…our list gives us a "Curlie," a "Porky," and my personal fave, "The Nashville Narcissus," Red Lucas, who it turns out was a pretty fair player:

During his National League pitching career, Charles Frederick "Red" Lucas finished 204 of 301 starts; was one of the all-time best control pitchers, walking just 18 in 220 innings in 1933; batted .281, with six seasons over .300; and fielded well enough that he filled in 18 times at second, short, third, and left field and two managers tried to make him something other than a pitcher.

In a later era they might've called him "Chone."

As a nickname Red is charming. Also charming? Karl Marx! Or so says this State of Nature article last summer, "The Continuing Charm of Marx."

Marx as a person was apparently a heady mixture of authoritarian Robespierre and libertarian Bakunin, of poetically expansive Whitman, moral Moses and systemic absolutist Hegel.

And he always tipped well and thanked his waitress.

Everyone knows the first pro baseball team ever was the Cincinnati Reds. Here are some highlights from this fine Reds history site:

* 1869: In the first game ever played by a professional baseball team (all paid players, no amateurs), the Cincinnati Red Stockings beat the Mansfield Independents, 48-14 on June 1st. The Cincinnati Base Ball Club played the entire season with all of its players under contract. The total salary outlay was approximately $11,000

* 1880: The Cincinnati Reds are expelled from the National League, due in part to their selling beer in their ballpark.

* 1890: By the time the Reds returned to the NL in 1890 alcohol sales had become a staple of the game

* 1937: In January Crosley Field's playing surface is under 21 feet of water due to local creek flooding…Reds pitchers Gene Schott and Lee Grissom rowed a boat down Western Avenue and over the outfield wall.

* 1938: On June 15th, Johnny Vander Meer becomes the first Major League pitcher ever to throw back-to-back no-hitters

* 1954: The Reds change their name to Redlegs to not be linked with the Soviets

* 1957: The fans of Cincinnati are caught stuffing the All-Star ballot box, and vote 8 starters onto the All-Star Team. The National League would intervene, pulling 3 Redlegs out of the starting lineup

* 1960: After 6 years known as the Redlegs, the team goes back to the traditional Reds name

* 1970: A few weeks after the opening of Riverfront Stadium the stadium hosted the All-Star Game. Pete Rose would play a key roll in the mid-summer's classic that year as he scored the winning run in the 12th Inning while barreling over Cleveland catcher Ray Fosse for the deciding 12th inning run

The Reds’ occasional success has given their fans enough hope to carry on. That, of course, is their oppressively evil master plan. Hope placates, as the philosopher Herbert Marcuse famously outlined in his Theory of Repressive Tolerance. If you’ll indulge me:

Thus, within a repressive society, even progressive movements threaten to turn into their opposite to the degree to which they accept the rules of the game. To take a most controversial case: the exercise of political rights (such as voting, letter-writing to the press, to Senators, etc., protest-demonstrations with a priori renunciation of counterviolence) in a society of total administration serves to strengthen this administration by testifying to the existence of democratic liberties which, in reality, have changed their content and lost their effectiveness. In such a case, freedom (of opinion, of assembly, of speech) becomes an instrument for absolving servitude.

I think we can summarize Marcuse thusly: vanguard Giants fans never complain about Brian Sabean, because sustained, abject failure and misery is the only way to foment the revolution.

You want your Commies and baseball? I gotcher Commies and baseball right here!

Apparently (sez Wiki) this franchise in the Three-I League (Illinois-Indiana-Iowa) was actually named the Commodores, after Barbary War hero Commodore Stephen Decatur, but everyone always called ‘em the Commies, even through the McCarthy era.

It’s a rich vein I’ve tapped. Here, legendary economist John Kenneth Galbraith proclaims "Baseball: Socialist as Apple Pie." Unfortunately it’s not as much fun as it sounds.

Here, the Daily Worker touts its largely unacknowledged role in MLB’s integration. I’ll let them tell it:

The integration of baseball didn’t start, though, with Brooklyn’s interest in Robinson in 1945, but with a campaign that began as early as 1936 in which the communist Daily Worker, today known in the US as the People’s Weekly World, played a leading role…

In July 1935, under the directives of the Third International, Communist Parties were encouraged to join "popular fronts" with other leftist groups…One of the ways employed to court a working-class audience was the coverage of sports.

Lester Rodney became the sports editor and used the back pages to promote coverage of both features and results of the main sports alongside a critique of the unjust society in which sports were played.

Rodney’s initial crusade to desegregate baseball in 1936 was a lonely one…This didn’t prevent the Worker from petitioning followers and fans and eventually amassing over a million names protesting over blacks’ exclusion from the sport. By 1938, banners demanding the end to Jim Crow in baseball were being carried at the Communist Party’s annual May Day parade in New York…

The "sports-minded voter" was appealed to in a New York pamphlet that depicted a black soldier killed in action, with the message, "Good enough to die for his country, but not good enough for organised baseball."

…Finally, in 1945, the Brooklyn Dodgers made Jackie Robinson the first African-American to be picked for a major league team….In 1947, Robinson took his place in the Brooklyn Dodgers line-up. Rodney was proud that the Daily Worker alone had touted him for the major leagues as early as 1939 when he was still in high school. A veteran baseball writer had said to him: "You guys can take a bow," when Robinson’s name was announced in his first game with the Dodgers.

Sadly, discourse about sports intellectualism from days gone by only serves to remind how far we’ve devolved into

Hopefully the blogs will save us.

And maybe they will! Here’s a triple threat—baseball, blogs, and Cuba! "Pete Bjarkman is the Peter Gammons as well as the Harold Seymour and Bill James of Cuban League and Cuban National team baseball," offers an unattributed quote on the front page of his cool blog, updated from his various world travel hotspots, including frequent trips to Cuba, where "his photo now hangs on the wall of the downtown (Havana) Hotel Telégrafo in that building's Honor Wall of Distinguished Guests." Maybe this site is old hat to some of you, but I just found it and I’m delighted. Bjarkman’s the guy who authoritatively debunked the "Fidel as MLB prospect" myth a few years back. Here’s an analysis of the Socialist Baseball Concept and its effect in building fan identity with their hometown ballclubs.

A’s and Red? 1972? 1990? Naw, there’s really only one choice here:

OK, maybe two choices:

Did you know that Brits hate redheads (or as they call ‘em, Gingers)? It’s true.

"Photographer Charlotte Rushton has been chronicling the UK's redheads for a book, Ginger Snaps. Of the 300 she snapped, only two have been spared bullying because of their hair. She herself has suffered verbal abuse from complete strangers.

"I was on the Tube, pregnant, and I was really humiliated by this drunk yob. He was shouting 'do the cuffs and the collars match?' He got right up into my face. You don't do that to other people."

She believes the phenomenon is long-standing and uniquely British in its most virulent form."

Won’t somebody please think of the children? Even the red-headed step ones? Why yes, actually…Bip Roberts will! The former big leaguer and one-time red-clad Oakland Skyline High Titan has returned as the new head baseball coach. And they’re 10-0 so far!

"He's doing a good job as far as getting kids involved," said (Skyline AD Don) Ardissone..."He's doing it outside of Skyline too ... trying to do a lot of teaching and clinics to get more kids involved in baseball."

Ardissone also recognizes Roberts' ability to connect with his players not only as a former major-leaguer who was a career .294 hitter, but also as an African American male who overcame the challenges and pitfalls of urban life.

"He survived with his mom and grandma leading the way," Ardissone said. "It's like a lot of the kids."

So now I’ve done Blue and Red. I suppose that leaves White. Perhaps after the A’s next roster purge.

Proceed. From each according to his and her dumpability, to each according to his and her internet slackcess needs.