The Cubs. The Mets.

Good

bye

Leo....

Yesterday I got a call from my financial advisor, a mensch from the Windy City.

He called me because some funds I had purchased were coming due and he wanted my ok to repurchase said funds.

That's all well and good, but WOW! the Cubs had just defeated the Cards and would be playing either the Mets or the Dodgers for the National League pennant.

For those uninitiated in the woes of the North-Side Ursines, the Cubbies have not won a World Series since Teddy Roosevelt was President, way back in nine teen oh eight.

Back in 1969, the Cubs seemed ready to break their dreadful six decades of losing. They were leading the National League and seemed unstoppable. They also had Hall-of-Famers or HoF caliber players dotted through their line up.

Ernie Banks who amassed 512 lifetime four-baggers. Ron Santo, the best third baseman of his era. The quiet and powerful Billy Williams who swatted 426 homers in his career. They also had a good backstop, Randy Hundley and probably the league's best middle-infielders, Glenn Beckert at second and Don Kessinger at short.

On the hill they had the great Fergie Jenkins. And the nearly great Don Holtzman (a member of the Jewish Baseball Hall of Fame) and Bill Hands, who clocked 20 wins that season.

900 miles east, however, were Destiny's children, the Mets of New York, helmed by the quiet patience of Gil Hodges.

I was at the big ballpark as the Mets swept the Cubbies in a three-game set in late September. The Mets? Who in their previous seven seasons had finished last six times.

But the Mets went that year quickly from the "Amazins" to the "Inevitables."

They roundly kicked Chicago heinie.

And 55,000 New York accented hooligans, myself among them, derisively jeered the Cubs' manager--former manager of the Mets' predecessor teams, the Dodgers of Brooklyn and the Giants of Harlem: Leo Durocher.

We sang as the Mets rose and the Cubs sank, "Gooooooooooooooooodbye Leo, Goooooooooooodbye, Leo. Weeeeee hate to seeeeeeee you go."

The Mets won.

The Cubs lost.

And this year, they meet again.

Goodbye, Leo.

Payday in the Mexican Baseball League.

For many people, today is payday. 

I suppose no matter how old you get, or how much money you wind up making, there’s something nice about payday. We’ve lost something, I think, when paydays went electronic.  It was much nicer when someone would come around with an envelope that had your check or your paystub in it. 

I know that’s getting all Thornton Wilder, “Our Town” on you, but if I ever decided to hang up my own shingle and if I ever have a staff, I think I’d pay them all with an actual physical paycheck and an actual physical handshake.

That’s the way things went when I played ball for the Saraperos de Saltillo down in the Mexican Baseball League going on 41 years ago. I remember one afternoon in late June sitting in the locker room with a few of the other boys.

Hector Quesadillo came out with a shoebox filled with envelopes. He’d walk over to say, Issy Buentello, hand him his dough and shake his ham.

“Bueno?” Quesadillo would ask.

“Bueno.”

He went around to all the other guys. Diablo, Garibay, Sanchez, Suena, Adame. Even some of the clubhouse boys.

Hector finally made his way over to me. 

I was the newest kid on the team and the youngest at just 17.  I wouldn't be 18 for six more months. The only job I had ever had before playing ball for the Saraperos was a game room attendant at an amusement park near my parents’ apartment. I made sure no ruffians from the Bronx burned the place down and I cleared coin slots that got jammed. That paid $2.30/hr., minimum wage at the time.

Hector searched through the few remaining envelopes for mine, found it, then handed it over.

“Bien haceis, mi hijo.” You are doing well my son.

“Gracias, me gusta aqui.” Thank you, I like it here.

I opened the envelope. There were two clipped packages of bills inside. One with 2160 pesos, my meal money for the month, $12 a day while on the road for 15 days. The second sheaf was my monthly pay, 2400 pesos—about $200.

“Gracias,” I said again to Hector, shaking his hand. "Me gusta aqui."

He reached into his the side pocket of his turquoise Saraperos windbreaker. He took out two 50 peso notes, folded them in half and handed them to me. 

“Poco mas, mi hijo. Un bono.”  A little more, my son. A bonus.

I had hit two doubles the night before. For that, Hector had awarded me an extra eight dollars.

He shook my hand again.

I’ve had thousands of paydays since then. All of them bigger. And dozens of bonuses, naturally more than eight dollars.

But I’ve never had a payday that meant more than that first one.

Crisis management.

For about the past 96-hours I've been dealing with an assignment that's not been making the progress it should be making.

That's a round-about way of saying we've created a lot of decks but not a lot of work. And certain people in both the agency and at the client are, rightfully, getting fed up.

So, people have sprung into action.

Project Managers have descended like mosquitoes on a bare forearm in the Amazon.

About four times a day there's a hot sheet issued.

About six times a day, half hour check-ins are stuck on everyone's calendar, regardless of what else they have on their calendar.

People are running like mad on various hamster wheels.

Perseverating. Finger-pointing. Back-stabbing.

About 35 years ago, I worked as a night-shift cashier in a large liquor store just off of Rush Street in Chicago. I would arrive just before 4PM, walk to the back, find my cardboard time-card and punch in.

There were two things I really liked about that. One was the feeling of "official-ness" I got from my time-card. It was made of a heavy grade of paper and it was not to be trifled with. Neither was the ca-chunk of the time-clock stamping your card. These were symbols of authority made of real hard-core materials. And everyday I wanted to be paid, I had to, in a sense, hand something in to be stamped.

Too often in our business we deal in vapor.

We say, amorphously, that we are "working on something," or "we have a few ideas," or "some thoughts."

But, guess what, we hand nothing in. We literally show up empty-handed.

I think our business and our world would be better off if we always had to show up to meeting with an actual physical manifestation of things we had done or were working on.

Some copy on a sheet of foolscap.

So scrap artwork, a sketch or doodle.

The outline of a spot or a long-form piece.

All on a piece of paper.

That you need to hand in.

And get stamped.

Like a time-clock.

It works.

Reflections on baseball and advertising.

For about my entire lifetime, people have been declaring the sport of baseball dead. It's declined of course since its Babe-Ruthian heyday when it was the only game in town. It was a game built for the 19th and early 20th Centuries. Wide open spaces and no time clocks. It's no longer the "National Pastime," football is, or masturbation,  or mass murder, but as evidenced by the four playoff games on television yesterday, the old game keeps on ticking.

I fairly OD'd on baseball yesterday, watching the better portion of the Cubs vs. the Cards and the Astros against the Angels. By the time the game I wanted to watch, the Mets vs. the Dodgers came on, if I watched any more horsehide, I would have exploded like a fat man at a pie-eating contest.

In all, though, the game looked healthy. The level of play was good. Pitchers were strong, and hitters were larruping line drives into the October ether. Cut off men were hit, bases were stolen and one Cub hit a foul out to Sheffield Avenue, reportedly landing in a platter of Mrs. Polchevski's pierogis. Further, despite all the proclamations on the death of baseball, the game seems a necessary antidote to the din of football.

Football is like a rush-hour commute on the Long Island Expressway. Everyone out there is marked for fiery death. Baseball still meanders, and there's something nice in that.

I suppose somewhere in all this there is a parallel to advertising. It's been declared dead as often as baseball. It's supposed to be a relic of a bygone time. To hear the neo-hipsters tell it, we all grew up hypnotized by the boob tube, bombarded by the same messages over and again on the three networks until our brains were programmed to really fret about ring around the collar.

None of that was ever true, of course. We made fun of advertising then as we disparage it today. It presents a false, usually idealized image of the world, but really, we've always known that at some level we were being lied to. You only need pick up a Mad Magazine from the 50s, 60s or 70s, to kill the myth that my generation grew up as complacent demoral chugging automatons.

I guess the point is simple and a spin on Winston Churchill's statement that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others.

Advertising sucks. Television sucks. Consumerism suck. Interruption sucks. Football sucks. Baseball sucks. The LIE sucks.

It all sucks. Except they suck less than all the others.

Which is why millions of people ate billions of Doritos and watched men in double-knits battle into the night.

Just.

About 30 years ago I had a writing mentor in the business called Ed Butler. Ed had plied his trade at Doyle Dane--and done some notable VW ads there. But he really hit his stride when he joined Ally & Gargano when he did outstanding work on Travelers Insurance.

Ed was a craftsman. With him, there was no rushing of copy. And a good last line was about as important as the Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima. You had taken the hill against the enemies of our profession: crassness, speed and apathy.

Getting approval from Ed on a piece of copy wasn't that hard, however. He respected my taste and liked my writing. As long as I did what I thought was a good job, as long as I had a good in and a good out and not too many damned things the client demanded, I was ok.

Ed told me this story once that I've thought about often. He was working at an agency called Marschalk and they were pitching against Della Femina for the Chemical Bank account. Before those agencies and that bank were merged out of existence, all three entities were good-sized companies. Chemical was one of the largest banks in New York.

Ed told me that the tagline he had created for the pitch was "The Chemistry's Right at Chemical." Which he thought was pretty good. Until he saw the tagline Della Femina presented: "The Chemistry's Just Right at Chemical."

That "just" to Ed made all the difference. "I knew we were beaten," he said. "Their line was so much better."

I suppose this story in our current uncaring epoch sounds quaint and musty.

But, like I said, it's always stuck with me.

Because the people who care about touches and nuance are the people you want to work for and the people you want to emulate.

With consolidation of everything afflicting our business, as well as the painful crush of faster deadlines, we have to do all we can to hold onto our standards.

If only because they're so easy to abandon.

More baseball memories.

The American baseball playoffs started last night in something called the "wild card" game--the teams in the fourth and fifth position in each league would play each other, the winner advancing another round. The loser going home, presumably in disgrace.

The game pitted the Yankees against the Houston Astros and was won, in a convincing manner, by the Astros, who held the once-mighty Yanks to just three hits. The Astro's pitcher, a gritty left-hander called Dallas Keuchel, limited the Yankees batsmen to just three hits over six innings. Keuchel is bewhiskered as if he were playing for the old "House of David" barnstorming team. But he, and three other Astro arms, who came in and shut the Yankees down in innings seven, eight and nine, did the job last night.

Another game happens tonight, this time pitting the Pirates of Pittsburgh against the Cubs of Chicago. The Cubs have not won a World Serious, as Ring Lardner's rook would say, since, well, since Ring Lardner was writing, back in 1908, a woebegone streak of 108 years.

Of course, the Astros, in their 55 year history, have never won a series. So if you're a fan of Cinderella stories, you're pulling for a Cubs-Astros final, but the likelihood of that is slim.

Speaking of the House of David nine, they were a be-whiskered baseball troupe of decades gone by, members of a devout religious order in Benton Harbor, Michigan and hirsute acolytes of the Spirit of Shiloh, regarded as the Seventh and last messengers.

I never got to see the House of David play, but Keuchel last night, at least let me pretend.

When I was a kid, there was a barnstorming team called Eddie Feigner, "The King and His Court," who would travel the country and offer to take on "all comers."

Feigner was, perhaps, the greatest softball pitcher in the history of the game, and was so dominant that his "court" consisted of just four other players who would take on full teams of nine. Feigner is credited with 9,743 victories, 141,517 strikeouts, 930 no-hitters and 238 perfect games. In a celebrity charity softball game he struck out Willie Mays, Willie McCovey, Brooks Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Maury Wills and Harmon Killebrew in a row.

I saw them play a team made up of local stars in a small White Plains stadium in the late 1960s when I was just a boy. He spent much of the game pitching from second base, rather than the mound, yet struck out the majority of beer-bellied firefighters and cops he faced.

Baseball is all-too-serious and professional for antics these days. Pitchers' arms are multi-million dollar investments and the games are too do or die to allow us to let our hair or our beards down.  But I enjoyed myself, last night, watching Keuchel, tie up the hated Yankees.

Story telling.

Brooks Brothers, the famed clothier--reputed to be America's oldest is running an ad campaign that makes me just hate the brand.

It features the line: "What's your Brooks Brothers Story." That alone is enough to make be retch.

But it's the relativism of the word "story" that really sickens me.

Just as everyone is not a:

Chef,
photographer,
writer,
artist,
comedian,
baseball player,
athlete,
fork,
etc.

not everything is a story.

Go fuck yourself, Brooks Brothers.

The long game.

You can tell a lot about a person and a team, or organization, when you’re in the middle of a 19-inning baseball game.

We were embroiled in one 40 summers ago when I manned the hot corner for the Saraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican Baseball League. We were playing the Pericos de Puebla, the Puebla Parakeets, in Puebla in their little hatbox of a stadium, Hermanos Serdan.

It was early September and obvious at that point that neither the Saraperos nor the Pericos  had the most oblique chance of winning more games than we lost. We were each well-entrenched in the bottom third of the league standings, trying to finish our dismal seasons with a modicum of integrity and dignity.

In other words, it was a game that meant nothing. It didn’t matter in the standings, as I said, and it hardly mattered to anyone’s personal stats. When you play a season of 140+ games, there are bound to be some that matter less than others, and this, to be clear was two of them. I say two, because 19 innings is more than twice as long as one normal game (not that any game is normal.)

In the second inning, after being sent down 1-2-3 in the first, we went up two zip on the strength of a double by our leftfielder, Garibay, and a long homerun, my ninth of the season, by me.

They came back and halved our lead in the fourth and tied us with another run in their half of the sixth.

We were swatting the ball with some authority, while our arms were mowing their men down. We were threatening to score almost every inning, but somehow we kept pulling bonehead plays, like being tossed out trying to steal or being thrown out advancing by a good chuck from the outfield.

In any event, we were knotted at two at the end of the sixth and then, nothing. Neither the Pericos nor the Saraperos put a man across the plate from the seventh inning till the 19^th, when we squeezed a run in on a bunt single from Brutus Cesar and a run scoring double by Garibay.

I had my ups next and hit another long ball to left center, like the homerun I hit—almost to the exact same place, only two feet shorter, and it was snagged on the warning track by their centerfielder Jhonnie Spatola, who later played two seasons in the big leagues for the Detroit Tigers.

Like I said, you can tell a lot about your team and your teammates when you’re in the middle of an almost eight-hour ball game and you’re suffering through 16 consecutive scoreless inning.

First we were, as I said, swatting the ball well and we were all sitting on the edge of our bench cheering each other on. But as the evening went on our brains and our bones got tired.

If, say Buentello, our backstop got on and was left stranded by Angel Diablo, our all glove, no bat short stop, we’d get on Diablo’s case. We were stranding men left and right—getting on and unable to bring anyone across with the winning run. We were all getting up in each other’s asses.

“You suck, Diablo.”

“No, you suck, Adame. A fly ball would have brung Bustamante in and we’d be home right now.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, fuck you.”

By the 14^th inning, it was already past midnight and we were all bone-tired and at each other’s throats. Things only got worse in the 15^th, 16^th, 17^th and 18^th.  Everyone one was ragging everyone else, cursing their very existence and wishing they had taken over for their old man in his butcher shop rather than becoming a ballplayer and playing in front of something like 240 people in Pueblo, Mexico at 2AM.

Finally, in the top of the 19^th, Salome Rojas, our cleanup, whose bat had been quiet for the night and was something like 0 for 11 on the evening, got a clean opposite field squib and hustled as much as his limbs could move his 250-lb. frame.

Hector yanked Rojas off first and put in a rook, Canizerro to pinch run, and a good thing. I was up next and whiffed, but Bustamante, a pinch hitter followed me, batting for Miguel Torres, and he ripped one to right that bounced to the wall and brought in Canizerro with the go ahead.

3-2.

We sent Sanchez out in the bottom of the 19^th, usually a starting pitcher, but the only arm we had left. Canizerro, by this time, had been put in at left while Bustamante filled in at first with Garibay off to right to accommodate all our batting and running substitutions.

It was obvious to us that this wasn’t our best defensive line-up, but after 19 innings, we were playing who we had and running on fumes.

Sanchez grooved one that I just missed getting a mitt on and their leadoff was on with an inning opening double. Sanchez gave their next batter an intentional walk, hoping we could get a double play, instead their guy hit a long fly to left that Canizerro lost in the lights and dropped and their guy at second scored on aggressive running and a throw from left that missed the cut-off man.

It was knotted again, 3-3. At least it was tied for a minute. Until a line drive to Bustamante tied him up and that error let in their fourth run, their winning run.

                       

Saraperos       0 2 0    0 0 0    0 0 0    0 0 0    0 0 0    0 0 0   1  -  3   21   3

Pericos           0 0 0    1 0 1    0 0 0    0 0 0    0 0 0    0 0 0   2  -  4     6   0

We had lost.

19-innings, eight hours. And empty.

The homerun I’d hit to put us ahead back in the second, 1/3 of a day ago meant nothing now.

I walked with Hector to the locker room.

“Homeruns de ayer no significan nada hoy,” he said.

Yesterday’s homeruns mean nothing today.

Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam.

Last night, amid the typical crisis of work at work, I left earlier than everyone else--at half past seven. I had a good excuse.

Serendipitously my first two friends from high school happened to be in the city. We were a small rumble of kids when we were 13. 44 years have passed since then without the three of us getting together, but the planets aligned last night and together we got.

We went to an Italian place down the block from my apartment. It's a fairly typical upper east side restaurant. The portions are small and the prices are huge.

Of course, none of that mattered.

We sat at a cramped table--three old men, a little grey at the edges, a little soft in the middle--and we were ninth-graders again.

We did last night what we did then. We told jokes, confessed secrets, presented baroque stories we remembered about growing up. Each of us in our own way is--in the parlance of today--an excellent story-teller. And by application, each of us, in our own way, is a good listener.

We know, intuitively I suppose, that good stories--real stories--are like wine. They need air to bring out their full flavor. And just maybe, again like wine, they grow with age.

Like I said, it had been literally 40 years since we had last been together--at someone's high school graduation party. Where we all were too drunk. And driving home we made another kid sit in the back with his head out the window because, as they told me I said, "he just threw up his pancreas."

40 years is a long time. And truth be told--logistics and distance and responsibilities being what they are--it might be the last time the three of us are together. None of us are what you might call a "joiner." We are all three avoiding our high school reunion later on in October.

No, we had our reunion last night.

The laughter and the pain of growing up.

The laughter and the pain of being a grown up.

We thrashed it around for four hours.

Toward the end of the evening, I told my friends that I remembered a line from the movie "Stand by Me." At the end of the flick--a look back on a boyhood adventure, the narrator says "I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone."

Does anyone?
-

Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam

(The brief sum of life forbids us the hope of enduring long - Horace)

THEY are not long, the weeping and the laughter,

            Love and desire and hate:

I think they have no portion in us after

            We pass the gate.

They are not long, the days of wine and roses:

            Out of a misty dream

Our path emerges for a while, then closes

            Within a dream.

            --Ernest Dowson

Yer out!

Yesterday was a shitty day.

A really shitty day.

A shitty day that's followed about eight weeks of shitty days.

A bunch of us are in the throes of launching a fairly gigantic amount of new work.

The deadlines are as tight as a fat man's belt.

Approvals like getting water from a stone.

Frustrating.

In any event, I was feeling downright   l   u   g   u   b   r   i   o   u   s.

And as I was walking to the men's room, past the ping-pong table, an errant ball bounced quickly and wildly by me.

All at once I was 17 again and back in the Mexican League.

I deftly back-handed the speeding ball, without breaking my stride. Out of my peripheral vision I saw one of the ping-pongers coming toward me to fetch the ball.  I flipped it to in a perfect gentle parabola.

We made the perfect double-pay.

It was 40 years ago.

When things were so much simpler.