Ballcaps
Not to go all Andy Rooney or Jerry Seinfeld on you, but what’s the deal with baseball caps? When I was a kid, I loved wearing caps, and it was a real treat to get to wear a cap that had my favorite team’s insignia on it. And it would almost physically hurt to wear a Yankees’ cap, or a cap with the insignia of any team I detested. To this day, if I meet a stranger wearing a Yankee cap, he’s got a long way to go to gain my trust.
But lately I’ve discovered that I hate ballcaps in general. Maybe it’s a hair-loss issue, but my scalp feels itchy and sweaty if I spend more than three minutes with a cap on my head, which I sometimes need to do, as when I’m walking straight into the sun. I need some eyeshade, so I put a cap on, but after a short time I remove the cap because it feels like my head is encased in a wool blanket, and I endure the sun’s glare as best I can.
I still remember wearing a cap all day long in summer camp. It was liberating, especially on the ballfield where knowing how to shade my eyes on a popup into the sun was a necessity of life. Maybe little kids, too young to play ball, didn’t have baseball caps made in their sizes, so it was a marker of my maturity at age 8 that I could pull off the ballcap look? I remember shaping the bill so that it looked maximally cool, the brim almost bent into a curve. That was a cool look, and the cap itself acted as a shield from the sun’s rays, providing a bit of crucial shade as I stood out in the hot sun.
Now, though, wearing a cap just sucks. No upside at all. Must be getting old.
Bullcrap
OK, for those of you who remember the passage I wrote previously on Sandy Koufax nailing Lou Brock with a fastball, in Don Drysdale’s colorful tellings of that incident, I present you with the excerpt below from page 308 of David Halberstam’s October 1964, containing several errors of fact and interpretation. I leave it to you to figure out what is majorly off in Halberstam’s version, and what is only slightly off. The "103 games" in this heroic description of Brock’s high tolerance of pain refers to the period since Brock joined the Cardinals in the infamous mid-season Ernie Broglio trade:
Brock was with the Cardinals for 103 games and played in 103 of them; his body, benefiting that of a base stealer, ached all over, particularly in his shoulder, where he had been hit by a Sandy Koufax fastball. This incident was celebrated by the ever-joyous Don Drysdale, who yelled his approval from the dugout—"All right! All right!"
Halberstam’s careless writing about factual matters is scary to me when I think (and David Kaiser confirmed in the Comments of my "Veeck as in Dreck" piece) that he is no more careful when he writes about weighty international matters in his prize-winning journalism, but I try not to let it affect my blood pressure too much. Still, I’ll be interested in seeing if you can spot the major and minor errors in the quoted sentences.