As some people wear their hearts on
their sleeves, Prof. Joseph Dorinson wears on each of his lapels the photo
of a baseball great.
John Henry Lloyd, a black player in
the days of segregated baseball, is on his right lapel. Jackie Robinson,
who broke the color barrier in the major leagues, is on his left.
This is not because of the Subway Series
or because a photographer is coming to take his picture; he wears the pins
all the time. We could let the professor, 63, who teaches a course on the
social history of sports at Long Island University and writes frequently
on the Brooklyn Dodgers, explain why, but he is a loquacious sort and you've
got a game to get to tomorrow night.
So let us, here in the professor's
cramped and book-filled office on the Brooklyn campus, address a matter
of great import: Why is there so much spitting in the game?
The professor is a historian, and he
seeks historical anecdote.
"Ted Williams used to spit at the fans.
Red Smith called him `the great expectorationist.' Baseball players are
not very articulate. It may be a form of verbal aggression. I think it's
— I'm guessing — it's controlled aggression. If you look at the way we
perceive heroes in our culture, we demand perfection and grace under pressure.
Maybe they can't withstand that kind of pressure."
Calling back the next day.
"I asked a friend. He says it's related
to chewing tobacco."
This is what happens during Subway
Series madness: all sorts of people are put forth as baseball experts,
and they can't tell you what you most want to know. Although perhaps we
are being unduly harsh about Professor Dorinson, an exuberant teacher who
makes self-deprecating jokes about his lack of a Ph.D. ("Sometimes I'm
called `Doctor' — I'm not even a dentist") and clearly loves the game.
Another question, then:
Why, regarding the Series, is the city
going so nuts? "Can I be a little philosophical?" Professor Dorinson pretends
to ask. Then: "It partly has to do with American society, especially in
New York, where you have different races, religions and cultures. Every
society needs a glue to hold it together."
A great long ball of a segue.
"Joseph Campbell" — this is the mythologist
and scholar — "wrote of a paradigm for the heroic life in his book. He
said a hero followed a certain behavior pattern — initiation, separation
and return — and that works symbolically with baseball.
"Timo Perez, the spark plug of the
Mets, here is a player who started in the major leagues but couldn't cut
it, so he's sent to Japan." (An error: he actually started in Japan.) "Separation,
to use the Campbell model. He comes back, is hired by the Mets though he's
a high risk and goes in as a substitute because the regular right fielder,
Derek Bell, is injured. He becomes an instant hero. This is not possible
in football, where you have to be oversized, or in basketball, where you
have to be a giant.
"Baseball allows every man" — this
seems to be spoken as Everyman — "to play the game."
Leave the emerald green grass of the
baseball dream now and travel back in time to a housing project in Williamsburg,
Brooklyn, in the 40's, where Professor Dorinson grew up and things are
far more gloomy. A "left-wing, socialist, Communist, pinko" household,
Professor Dorinson calls it, where both immigrant parents are radical Communists,
although that is not the problem. The problem is discontent.
Professor Dorinson's father, Peter,
born Pesach, a man so brave he returns to his hometown, Minsk, at some
peril to retrieve relatives and who after World War II boxes briefly under
the name Soldier Boy Dorinson, has a low-paying job in an uncle's dress
shop. A salesman? Not even, says Professor Dorinson, "a schlepper" who
carts the stock. Professor Dorinson's mother had studied to be a dentist
in eastern Europe, but in America is a factory worker.
"She had great ambitions and she couldn't
satisfy her dreams, so they dried up like a raisin in the sun," Professor
Dorinson says, lapsing into Langston Hughes. "I became her fulfillment."
Outside the house, however, there is
baseball.
PROFESSOR DORINSON sees his first game,
in 1945, when he is 8: a free game for low-income kids at Ebbets Field.
The Brooklyn Dodgers play the Boston Braves and win. A Jew like himself,
Goody Rosen, is playing center field. He hadn't known Jewish players existed.
The sun is shining, he's in the bleachers with his friends, it's electric.
He falls in love with the game, choosing as his beloved not the Dodgers
but the Yankees.
Real life has its frustrations. His
mother puts so much pressure on him, growing up, Professor Dorinson develops
a "success phobia." He flunks out of pre-med and pre-law and never does
complete his doctorate. But the game is solace. When his heart is broken,
before he finally marries and has his three kids, he finds it soothing
to hit the ball.
What did baseball do for your life,
Professor? "It enriched it immensely. It gave me, an outsider, Jewish,
radical, maybe a failure in some ways — I did not achieve my Ph.D. — but
it let me be identified with the most successful franchise in sports history.
I'm a vicarious winner when the Yankees win."
These days, he roots for the Mets —
he has always favored underdogs. But whoever wins, he will be happy. "In
this Series, you can't lose."
