Steven Rubio's Online Life

books 2023

Over the years, this blog has evolved into a place for me to write about movies, along with a weekly look at music. I used to write a lot about television, about teaching, about current affairs ... don't know why that's mostly absent nowadays. I only posted once about books this year, so it must be time for a year-end list. These are some of the books I read in 2023 ... yeah, I should say something about them, a list is useless, but whatever. If you're looking for recommendations, I suggest the books by Maureen Ryan, Annalee Newitz, and Matt Singer, along with the two memoirs, and obviously I have a thing for David Thomson.

Culture:

Peter Biskind, Pandora's Box: How Guts, Guile, and Greed Upended TV.

Michael Harriot, Black AF History: The Un-Whitewashed Story of America.

Mehdi Hasan, Win Every Argument: The Art of Debating, Persuading, and Public Speaking.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World.

Kliph Nesteroff, Outrageous: A History of Showbiz and the Culture Wars.

Maureen Ryan, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood.

Fiction:

Mick Herron, Real Tigers.

Annalee Newitz, The Terraformers.

Ursula Parrott, Ex-Wife.

Memoirs:

Elliott Page, Pageboy: A Memoir.

Sarah Polley, Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory.

Movies:

Stephen B. Armstrong, I Want You Around: The Ramones and the Making of Rock ‘n’ Roll High School.

Matt Singer, Opposable Thumbs: How Siskel & Ebert Changed Movies Forever.

David Thomson, Acting Naturally: The Magic in Great Performances. The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies. Disaster Mon Amour. The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film. Sleeping with Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire. Why Acting Matters. (Yes, I read 6 books by the same author.)

Music:

Phil Dellio, Happy for a While: "American Pie," 1972, and the Awkward, Confusing Now.

Will Hermes, Lou Reed: The King of New York.

Dave Marsh, Kick Out the Jams: Jibes, Barbs, Tributes, and Rallying Cries from 35 Years of Music Writing.

Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk.

Hank Rosenfeld, The Jive 95: An Oral History of America’s Greatest Underground Rock Radio Station, KSAN San Francisco.

Joel Selvin, Sly & the Family Stone: An Oral History.

Lucinda Williams, Don't Tell Anybody the Secrets I Told You: A Memoir.

Warren Zanes, Deliver Me from Nowhere: The Making of Bruce Springsteen's Nebraska.

Sports:

Russell A. Carlton, The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball.

Ian Herbert, Tinseltown: Hollywood and the Beautiful Game - a Match Made in Wrexham.

Joe Posnanski, The Baseball 100.

cross reading

A bit of a switch, where I take a quick look at books I've been reading. I'm reading all of the time ... I just don't get around to posting about it. Right now, I'm reading five books:

Russell A. Carleton, The New Ballgame: The Not-So-Hidden Forces Shaping Modern Baseball

Philip K. Dick, The Penultimate Truth

Maureen Ryan, Burn It Down: Power, Complicity, and a Call for Change in Hollywood

Ben Terris, The Big Break: The Gamblers, Party Animals, and True Believers Trying to Win in Washington While America Loses Its Mind

David Thomson, The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies

I suppose I should wait until I finish them before I write about them. The main inspiration for this post is the realization that I am always reading multiple books. I don't know if this is good or bad, or if it's the best way to read any particular book. I imagine that the Kindle has inspired this kind of multi-tasking ... I don't have to keep five books near me on the shelf, they are all as near as my Kindle or phone. It ends up being a bit like listening to music on shuffle play. I could mention why I am reading these books. Carleton and Terris were recommended (I have read a previous book by Carleton). I tend to read most of David Thomson's books. I've been looking forward to the Mo Ryan ever since she announced it, and it is indeed great (I'm about halfway done). I've read most of Philip K. Dick over the years ... I'm re-reading this one because I read it had predicted the AI writing that is in the news all the time these days.

I was actually reading six books, but I finished one, Pageboy: A Memoir by Elliot Page. It's honest and well-written. I probably read it mostly because I am a fan of the actor, but the book is illuminating, and I'm glad Page let me into their world.

I just ordered up two more books, although I won't put them into shuffle play just yet:

Julie DiCaro, Sidelined: Sports, Culture, and Being a Woman in America

Nick Greene, How to Watch Basketball Like a Genius: What Game Designers, Economists, Ballet Choreographers, and Theoretical Astrophysicists Reveal About the Greatest Game on Earth

As you can see, there's not much reason for this post, but there you are.

what to pass on

They're all over our neighborhood: little "loan libraries", small cubbies where you can leave a book and take a book. I often think I should leave something, except virtually every book I have bought and read for the past several years has been for my Kindle, and thus has no hard copy.

But there is a bookshelf next to where I am typing this, filled with books from the pre-Kindle era. Nothing new, but at some point in my life these were books I actually read. And as I look at them, I realize they are a bit like a time capsule of my life back in the recent day.

There are reminders that I was once in the PhD program in English, like The Education of Henry Adams and Faulkner's Light in August.

There is one of the anthologies that includes an essay of mine (in this case, James Bond in the 21st Century). And the screenplay to Do the Right Thing.

There's Chronicles, Volume One by Bob Dylan. Also Dead Elvis by Greil Marcus.

Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination by Susan J. Douglas (I used to teach Mass Communications at Cal).

And if I squint, I can see The Society of the Spectacle by Guy Debord, and Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin, which includes "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction".

How does this compare to what I read now? Here are a few of the  books I've read recently on my Kindle:

The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics by Tim Harford.

Foreverland: On the Divine Tedium of Marriage by Heather Havrilesky (a favorite author of mine).

Take Up Space: The Unprecedented AOC by The Editors of New York Magazine.

The Science of Baseball: The Math, Technology, and Data Behind the Great American Pastime by Will Carroll.

Slow Horses by Mick Herron (we just watched the TV series based on the book).

Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game by Craig Calcaterra.

 

roger angell, 1920-2022

It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitive as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look -- I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring -- caring deeply and passionately, really caring -- which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete -- the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball -- seems a small price to pay for such a gift.

-- Roger Angell

music friday addendum: charlie bertsch, "listening for the future"

My review of Charlie Bertsch's new book, Listening for the Future: Popular Music for Europe is now up on The Battleground website. It begins:

Charlie Bertsch begins the illuminating introduction to his new book Listening for the Future by posing a question: “What do we ask of popular music? The book, which collects music reviews he has written for The Battleground, attempts to answer that question.

I hope you read my review, and then read Charlie's book, not necessarily in that order. Meanwhile, here is the bio I provided:

Steven Rubio has lived in Berkeley, California for almost 45 years. He has family roots in Andalucía, and he spends as much time as possible there. He recently saw Patti Smith at the Royal Albert Hall, which made for an interesting cultural juxtaposition. But he is also looking forward unironically to an upcoming Billie Eilish concert.

revisiting the constant gardener

When John le Carré died last month at the age of 89, I thought to read one of his novels. I remembered seeing the film of The Constant Gardener many years ago, and decided that would be a good choice to read. Thus, when I say I am "revisiting" The Constant Gardener, I'm referring to the movie, not to the book, which I read for the first time.

A couple of things stand out in my writing about the movie the first time through.

Robin likes to tease me because I always lose track of the plot in spy thriller type movies. She, of course, prefers the complicated plots, the more the merrier far as she is concerned (and she reads a lot of books in the genre as well). So there's always a point in the middle of one of these movies where I put it on pause and ask her "do you understand what the hell is going on?" and she looks at me like I'm a moron and says "duh." She didn't watch The Constant Gardener with me, though, so when I got to the part where I finally had to admit to myself that I didn't know what was going on, I had no one to talk about it with.

But, looking back, I think I did understand what was going on ... I just kept expecting some cheesy Hollywood crap and when it didn't come, I was confused. All of the characters are shaded in gray ... some are closer to "good" than others, but their motivations and actions are not always obvious the way they would be in a crappier movie. Same thing with the plot ... while much of the mystery, such as it is, is easy to understand and pretty clear from the beginning (at least the international intrigue parts), I kept waiting for silly plot twists, even when they never came.

What I'm trying to say is that The Constant Gardener is a very good movie that works in subtle ways, that I think I picked up on those subtleties, but I lack confidence in my ability to "read" thrillers so I convinced myself I wasn't getting it when I was.

This time around, my wife did watch with me, so I could have asked her what was going on. But I had just read the book, so I didn't need her help. In other words, one of the things that stood out the most for me in my earlier viewing (what's going on) was irrelevant in this revisit.

It took a while for the primary character to become clear in the book ... le Carré switches points of view, and it is only gradually that we realize Justin is the one. In the movie, you know right away, because Justin is played by Ralph Fiennes, who is the star of the cast. The film was just as impressive the second time around. Rachel Weisz won a Supporting Actress Oscar, beating out Amy Adams (Junebug), Catherine Keener (Capote), Frances McDormand (North Country), and Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain). She is indeed wonderful, but I'd note that Ralph Fiennes is also excellent (Philip Seymour Hoffman won Best Actor that year for Capote). I first watched The Constant Gardener about a year before I saw City of God for the first time. The latter movie was also directed by Fernando Meirelles (along with Kátia Lund) ... a friend had bugged me for years about how great it was, and when I finally got around to it, my friend was right ... I ended up putting it at #20 on that 50 Fave Films list I made ten years ago. The Constant Gardener was the first movie Meirelles directed after City of God.

[Letterboxd list of the top movies of 2005]

catching up: the last five books i've read

I'm always reading one or two books, but I never write about them. So here are a few words about the last five books I've read, starting with the one I just finished.

Simon Wells, She's a Rainbow: The Extraordinary Life of Anita Pallenberg: The Black Queen. It's probably impossible to write a boring book about Anita Pallenberg, and in fact, I stuck with She's a Rainbow for no other reason than to see what Anita was up to next. I feel like Wells overstates her importance, but I did buy this book, released this year, so obviously I find her interesting. Of course I wanted to read about Performance, and it's there, although Wells doesn't offer much new. It's nice to have her whole story in one place, but I wish the book were better. Wells is an idiosyncratic writer who sometimes seems to be unaware of how to structure a sentence, although I finally realized it's just one quirk, repeated endlessly. A sentence will suffice for evidence: "Draped over her old friend, musician Richard Lloyd, at Xenon’s, one opportunist snapper, Ron Galella, captured a truly derelict Anita as she vainly attempted to avoid the camera’s lens." No, Simon, Ron Galella was not draped over Richard Lloyd.

Anne Helen Petersen, Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. I've long been a fan of Petersen, who has a PhD in media studies and who studied the history of the gossip industry. In an interview, Petersen said, "After I turned in my dissertation, I was hungry to write in a non-academic way ... [I] began writing pieces on the intersection of celebrity, feminism, and contemporary media for other places as well—all while working as a full-time academic. The academic job market is rough—and when the visiting professorship I had ended, I couldn’t find another job. But I had been subconsciously building a 'life raft' of sorts away from academia for years with my writing." Her Facebook page, "Celebrity Gossip, Academic Style", is a must-read, as is her newsletter, "Culture Study". Can't Even does an excellent job of identifying burnout, but I wasn't always convinced that millennials are notably different re: burnout than the rest of us.

Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are. Even with things I read only recently, I tend to forget rather quickly exactly why I chose a particular book to read. Such is the case with Everybody Lies. Stephens-Davidowitz calls himself an "internet data expert", and in this book, he explains why he thinks "Big Data" (i.e. all the stuff Google knows about us and everything else) is crucial to understanding our world today. In the Internet/Google era, there are no small sample sizes. Everybody Lies is a first step ... the data is so immense, and there are so many questions to be asked. As for the "Everybody Lies" part? Stephens-Davidowitz stakes his claim from the start: "The power in Google data is that people tell the giant search engine things they might not tell anyone else."

Nick Hornby, Just Like You: A Novel. I rarely read fiction, but I almost always read Hornby, who hooked me with his first book (Fever Pitch, which happened to be non-fiction). Hornby was the first writer to be tagged within the genre "Lad Lit", and to be honest, it fits. To my eye, he has gotten better with his female characters, and he's certainly not afraid to move outside of what he might immediately know. Just Like You is the story of a romance between a 42-year-old white woman and a 22-year-old Black man. Like a lot of Hornby's fiction, the characters are believable, but the story feels a bit slight. That could just be me.

Kim Gordon, Girl in a Band: A Memoir. Makes an interesting pair with the Anita Pallenberg biography, in that Pallenberg's influence in the music world was based mostly on her relationships with musicians, while Gordon's place in music history comes from her membership in Sonic Youth. I've never been the biggest Sonic Youth fan, but I enjoyed reading about the life of a "girl in a band" from the girl's perspective. And Gordon's book revolves less around gossip than does the Pallenberg bio. The lesson, it appears, is that if you want it told right, tell your own story.

 

music friday: phil dellio, you should've heard just what i seen

This book is one where the subtitle tells you a lot: "Pop Music at the Movies and on TV". Phil covers a lot of ground, from the first three chapters on Mad Men to the last chapter on Donovan (yes, that Donovan), inspired by the appearance of "Hurdy Gurdy Man" in Zodiac, a movie he loves. Phil Dellio is the right person for this book, because he has lived the movies and the television and the music for a long time, and he worked as a teacher so he knows how to get our attention and then sneak a little learning in with the enjoyment.

Funny thing is, as much as I love Phil's writing, he starts off with something that I've always disliked. He's trying to decide how Mad Men will end, which a lot of us were, to be sure, myself included. But then Scott Woods emails Phil with an idea, and "as soon as I read it, I realized [it] may even be more important to me than what happens to Don: what song does Mad Men go out on?" I once had an essay published about the show House, where I complained that the series was not top notch because it always fell back on what at our house we called "The Song", something to emphasize what we had seen, something I inevitably found unnecessary and even insulting (what, we don't get it without help?). It's no coincidence that my all-time favorite show, The Wire, relied almost exclusively on diegetic music with the exception of an end-of-season montage.

But, as I knew would be the case, none of this matters when reading the book. Because Phil has things to say about the music and the films or series, and those things are interesting, and the ways he connects the music to those films and series is enlightening, regularly showing me a new way to think about the music, the visuals, or both. Sometimes the connections are startling, like when he finds that Diana Vreeland reminds him of Pauline Kael. Vreeland is a good example for another reason ... I have no interest in her, didn't know the movie he was talking about, but have been thinking obsessively about the Vreeland/Kael comparison since I read it.

Which is one way of saying that it doesn't always matter if you aren't familiar with a particular text, because Phil will get you thinking about it anyway. I knew most of the music, and especially with songs that have been overplayed over the years, it's a pleasure just to read someone putting those songs into a different context. The chapter about Donovan is one of my favorites, because I was a fan back in the 60s, and have long felt that he was underrated due to his spacey-hippie image. Phil jumps on this, calling it a "misguided caricature" that hippie music "was all sunshine and light", followed by a discussion of Donovan. The obvious starting point for me is "Season of the Witch", one of the truly frightening songs of that era. But Phil talks about "Mellow Yellow" and "Sunshine Superman" and "Hurdy Gurdy Man". "Season of the Witch" only sneaks in when Phil quotes Greil Marcus, who shares my feelings about that song. What this does is send me back to other Donovan songs ... I'm still certain "Season of the Witch" is his masterpiece, but now I'm listening to Donovan's entire catalog with a different ear, all thanks to Phil Dellio and Zodiac.

To top it off, Phil and Scott Woods are building a "clipography" on YouTube. You can find it here. It's just two long-time, opinionated friends talking about music and movies. It's quite casual, and you might not want to binge-watch all the videos at once. But it's fun to watch. Here's their talk about Almost Famous:

And here, for the zillionth time, I post the clip they refer to:

I realize I've never written about Almost Famous. Not sure why ... I certainly think about it a lot. My feelings intellectually about the movie are in line with what Phil says about Greil Marcus in their Clipography: Cameron Crowe, god love him, was an example of what went wrong at Rolling Stone. And the way Crowe works Lester Bangs into the story ... well, I suspect Philip Seymour Hoffman got him right, and for all I know, Bangs and Crowe were good buddies, but Lester Bangs was not about the Rolling Stone of the post-Crowe era. I love Almost Famous because I love Hoffman as Lester ... I am irritated by Almost Famous because of what it does to the Lester I admire.

Meanwhile, if I did a book like Phil's, then sure, 'Tiny Dancer" would have to be there. I'd have to watch movies for a specific reason if I was going to create a long list, though ... what would I include? Mick Jagger as Turner singing Robert Johnson in Performance? Virtually the entire movie Mean Streets? Fred and Ginger dancing cheek to cheek in Top Hat? My brain hurts just trying to come up with examples, which shows just what a remarkable feat Phil Dellio has pulled off in his book.

shelter in place

When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves. In this respect our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they haven’t taken their precautions. Our townsfolk were not more to blame than others; they forgot to be modest, that was all, and thought that everything still was possible for them; which presupposed that pestilences were impossible. They went on doing business, arranged for journeys, and formed views. How should they have given a thought to anything like plague, which rules out any future, cancels journeys, silences the exchange of views. They fancied themselves free, and no one will ever be free so long as there are pestilences.

-- Albert Camus, The Plague

throwback thursday: jim bouton 1939-2019

Jim Bouton died yesterday. I wrote about his classic book, Ball Four, back in 2012. I'll re-post it here.

Ball Four, Revisited

This wasn’t the first time I revisited Jim Bouton’s book about the 1969 Seattle Pilots baseball team. He seems to come out with a new edition every decade or so, and I generally re-read it then. This time around, my birthday came up, I saw there was a Kindle version, I put it on my wish list, and my baseball-loving sister got it for me (thanks!).

Ball Four is of interest, even to a non-fan of baseball, because of its historical importance as one of the first sports books to reveal what the game was “really” like. It wasn’t the first … not sure what is, although Jim Brosnan wrote two similar books in the early 60s, The Long Season and Pennant Race, that have long been favorites of mine. Nowadays, it might seem quaint to realize there was a time (the early 70s) when the baseball establishment could be in an uproar because Bouton (and his co-writer, Leonard Shecter) talked about players cussing and taking amphetamines and getting drunk on their off-days (and sometimes their on-days). Brosnan went through the same thing, although as I recall (not having re-read his books for a few years … perhaps it’s time) his books didn’t have quite as much a feel of exposé as Bouton’s did.

But most of the interest for the non-fan comes from that historical impact. The diary aspects, with its chronicling of the drudgery of a six-month season, are great for baseball aficionados, but I don’t suppose others would care. Having said that, Ball Four ultimately works because it is a book filled with characters, and the fact that they are real people makes it even better. Apparently Joe Schultz, manager of the Pilots, was angered by his portrayal in the book. Which is sad, because Schultz comes across as a great character, someone placed in an impossible situation (managing a poor, expansion ball team that lasted only one season before moving to Milwaukee) who used an idiosyncratic use of language to cajole his team into whatever heights they might possibly reach.

That’s what is most enjoyable about revisiting Ball Four, reading once again about Bouton and Schultz and the rest. The response of the time is historically interesting, but in the end, what I like best is Joe Schultz telling the guys, “Boys, bunting is like jacking off. Once you learn how you never forget.”

For an interesting, positive contemporaneous review of the book from a perhaps surprising source, check out Robert “Dean of American Rock Critics” Christgau’s piece, “Bouton Baseball”:

Bouton is the kind of iconoclast who is so insecure in his chosen isolation that he seems to delight in making other men look foolish. To an extent, this may be salutory. Even the most skeptical fan forgets that those names in the newspapers and figures on the screen are as frail as you or me, and this oversight is compounded by the daily dope from journalists whose living depends on acquiring more dope tomorrow. But it's hard to say how essential such an illusion may be to the continued power of the game. The baseball men who complain most bitterly about this book never claim it is untrue, only unfair--because it examines baseball's errants so steadfastly--and injudicious--because it reveals what the kids are better off not knowing. Unfair it isn't: Bouton obviously loves baseball and despite his snittiness he describes his fellows with generous appreciation. But injudicious? I don't know. Theoretically, a player is judged by what he can do on the field--the game itself is the thing. But even more than other sports baseball requires not just technical esteem but an investment of emotion, and emotion is best invested in people, however faultily perceived. I don't think the glowering visage of Sal Maglie will ever fill me with awe again.

This wasn’t the first time I revisited Jim Bouton’s book about the 1969 Seattle Pilots baseball team. He seems to come out with a new edition every decade or so, and I generally re-read it then. This time around, my birthday came up, I saw there was a Kindle version, I put it on my wish list, and my baseball-loving sister got it for me (thanks!).

Ball Four is of interest, even to a non-fan of baseball, because of its historical importance as one of the first sports books to reveal what the game was “really” like. It wasn’t the first … not sure what is, although Jim Brosnan wrote two similar books in the early 60s, The Long Season and Pennant Race, that have long been favorites of mine. Nowadays, it might seem quaint to realize there was a time (the early 70s) when the baseball establishment could be in an uproar because Bouton (and his co-writer, Leonard Shecter) talked about players cussing and taking amphetamines and getting drunk on their off-days (and sometimes their on-days). Brosnan went through the same thing, although as I recall (not having re-read his books for a few years … perhaps it’s time) his books didn’t have quite as much a feel of exposé as Bouton’s did.

But most of the interest for the non-fan comes from that historical impact. The diary aspects, with its chronicling of the drudgery of a six-month season, are great for baseball aficionados, but I don’t suppose others would care. Having said that, Ball Four ultimately works because it is a book filled with characters, and the fact that they are real people makes it even better. Apparently Joe Schultz, manager of the Pilots, was angered by his portrayal in the book. Which is sad, because Schultz comes across as a great character, someone placed in an impossible situation (managing a poor, expansion ball team that lasted only one season before moving to Milwaukee) who used an idiosyncratic use of language to cajole his team into whatever heights they might possibly reach.

That’s what is most enjoyable about revisiting Ball Four, reading once again about Bouton and Schultz and the rest. The response of the time is historically interesting, but in the end, what I like best is Joe Schultz telling the guys, “Boys, bunting is like jacking off. Once you learn how you never forget.”

For an interesting, positive contemporaneous review of the book from a perhaps surprising source, check out Robert “Dean of American Rock Critics” Christgau’s piece, “Bouton Baseball”:

Bouton is the kind of iconoclast who is so insecure in his chosen isolation that he seems to delight in making other men look foolish. To an extent, this may be salutory. Even the most skeptical fan forgets that those names in the newspapers and figures on the screen are as frail as you or me, and this oversight is compounded by the daily dope from journalists whose living depends on acquiring more dope tomorrow. But it's hard to say how essential such an illusion may be to the continued power of the game. The baseball men who complain most bitterly about this book never claim it is untrue, only unfair--because it examines baseball's errants so steadfastly--and injudicious--because it reveals what the kids are better off not knowing. Unfair it isn't: Bouton obviously loves baseball and despite his snittiness he describes his fellows with generous appreciation. But injudicious? I don't know. Theoretically, a player is judged by what he can do on the field--the game itself is the thing. But even more than other sports baseball requires not just technical esteem but an investment of emotion, and emotion is best invested in people, however faultily perceived. I don't think the glowering visage of Sal Maglie will ever fill me with awe again.