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Rocky Rhodes

Rocky Rhodes: Lowlights for the Highlanders

After losing Tuesday’s series opener at Fenway Park, the Yankees are 0-6 this year against Boston, a mark of futility they hadn’t achieved since before World War I. So I thought it would be instructive to get some perspective on that era from a man who was there: America’s oldest living sports writer, Rocky Rhodes. His weekly sports column, “The Cat’s Pajamas”, still appears in 7000 newspapers nationwide when not bumped for “The Lockhornes Meet Drabble” or “Classic Police Calls”.

rocky.jpgFrankie, my favorite orderly here at the rest home, let me watch SportsCenter in the break room last night (all it cost me were a couple of Vicodins), and I saw that the Yanks had their worst start against the Sox since 1912. I remember that time like it was yesterday, because in my advanced state of dementia, I’m often convinced that it’s still 1912. I also frequently fear that giant squirrels will steal my medicine, but that’s another story.

Back then, the Yankees were still called the Highlanders. That’s because one of their alternate home uniforms had a kilt instead of pants. To this day, the 1912 Highlanders have the lowest steal total for a year: one. That one base was stolen by Frank “Crazy Legs” Doogan, who was immediately rushed to the hospital thereafter with an injury I won’t describe here, though it still haunts my nightmares.

The Highlanders were a colorful bunch. They were always joking around and playing pranks, like hitting each other with cream pies and setting fire to the neighborhood stable. They had guys like Joe “Shaky Lips” Miller. Hans “Vinegar Arm” Schaefer. Steve “Hominy Grits” Jones. Fred “Lackawanna Hoodoo” Smith. Nate “Shoe Stealer” Arden. They also had a great utility player, Luigi Russo, who was known affectionately as “The Fucking Wop”.

Their best pitcher was Mike Hagerty, also known as The Giant Mouse. He loaded up the ball with a special mixture of spit, licorice, tobacco juice, castor oil, and his own blood. It was sure hard to hit, because batters didn’t want to come within ten feet of the mess he put on the ball. One guy hit a homer off of him and was laid up for the rest of the season with hepatitis.

The Highlanders had a patented double-play combo where second baseman Harry “Ol’ Knobby” Hooper would feed the ball to shortstop Billy “Tiny Toes” Tyler for the first out, then Tyler would zip the ball at the head of the guy running to first. Back then, if you were knocked unconscious, regardless of the cause, you were called out.

That’s why so many catchers had mitts made of brick or cinder block. They caused a lot of passed balls, but nothing was better for knocking a runner at the plate out cold. In a few years, though, they had to ban the really hard gloves. So many skull-crushings at the plate slowed down the game, because you had to call the morgue to remove the body, which took forever in the day of the horse-drawn hearse. Not to mention all the grieving widows laying wreathes at the plate and whatnot.

A fun bunch, the Highlanders were, but they were no match for Boston. The team wasn’t known as the Red Sox yet. Sometimes they were called the Beaneaters, sometimes the Pilgrims, sometimes the Ralph Waldo Emersons. Then, the Henry David Thoreaus, or the Nathaniel Hawthornes. That was eventually shortened to a more convenient, catch-all nickname: The Transcendentalist Literature Enthusiasts.

Within a few years, they started wearing crimson stockings, and I referred to them in my column as the “Boston Encarnadine Foot-Coverings”. The name stuck! Albeit in a different and far less unwieldy form.

Boston had some great sluggers, like Bobby “The Robert” Tompkins, who clubbed 8 four-baggers in 1912–and only one of those bombs was cow-assisted! Back then, if the ball was eaten by an animal grazing in the outfield, it was scored a home run. The sports world lost a real star when he was gored by a bull at Briggs Stadium in 1921.

Boston also had Jim “Occasional Lighning” Brady, who hit 45 triples that year. He was an expert at pulling the ball all the way into the left field corner. Then, when the fielders ran after the ball, he would run from first to third in a straight line. He’d usually jump-kick the shortstop on his way there, for good measure.

Was it legal? Absolutely not, but back then nobody played by the rules. That’s what made it so damn fun! Pitchers would lob balls made of dry clay to the plate. Batters used to stand 20 feet from the mound and dare the ump to move them back. It was a like a marvelous chess game, but with a lot more heavy drinking. And punching. And the occasional on-field suicide.

But those days are gone forever, and nothing’s gonna bring them back. Except for my senility-induced time-slippage. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to shoo a giant squirrel away from my Flomax.

Baseball, Rocky Rhodes

Rocky Rhodes: Gas-Drinkin’ Heroes of Yesteryear

Grant “Rocky” Rhodes is America’s oldest living sportswriter. He first rose to prominence in 1916, when he declared Yankee Stadium “The House that Ruth Built,” even though Ruth still played for the Red Sox and Yankee Stadium didn’t exist. He holds the world’s record for most consecutive days spent in a hat. His weekly sports column, “The Cat’s Pajamas”, appears in 7000 newspapers nationwide when not bumped for “Hints from Heloise” or “Funky Winkerbean”. Today, he graces Scratchbomb with his nine decades of sports wisdom to comment on baseball’s latest scandal.

rocky.jpgBeen a while since I took up the ol’ Underwood. I been outta commission for almost a year. It all started when my favorite attendant, Frankie, took a little vacation. Frankie’s my favorite because he always throws in a little extra something in your daily meds.

Unfortunately, the home brought in some numbnuts to take his place, and this schmuck gives me exactly what it says on my chart. Little did I know I’d developed a bit of a chemical dependency on one of my pills, a little blue one that makes my liver pain slightly less unbearable.

So one day, I ask this guy for some extra, and he says no dice. What happened next is kind of a blur, but apparently I went insane with rage over being denied my fix. I remember poking him in the eye with my cane, and throwing my colostomy bag in his face, but the rest is kinda hazy. Next thing I know, they got me in detox to get the junk outta my system.

Y’ever see The Man with the Golden Arm? Yeah, it’s nothing like that. Frank Sinatra, you let me down a third time. I’d give you a piece of my mind if you weren’t dead.

* Long-time Rocky readers know the first time was when Frank convinced me to buy an Edsel. I won’t spill the beans about the second. Just know that it involves Jilly Rizzo, and I will take it with me to my grave.

Bottom line is, I ain’t exactly one to talk when it comes to drugs. And I’m sick as hell about writing up this Alex Rodriguez fella. The guy’s a head case. Back in my day, they would have locked him up on general principle. This country really started going to hell when FDR repealed the Lock ‘Em Up on General Principle Act.

I’ll tell you one thing, though. I just don’t understand this generation of athletes, shooting themselves up with steroids and horse semen and whatnot, trying to gain an advantage. In my day, athletes didn’t take performance enhancers. They took performance limiters.

Babe Ruth ate everything that wasn’t bolted down. Jim Thorpe drank high-test gasoline before track meets. Bobby Jones had his caddy whip him with a cane in the back the thighs before he hit the links. (I heard some nasty rumors about that last ritual, but I won’t repeat them here.)

You know why Lou Gehrig had to retire? It wasn’t because ALS robbed him of his ability to play. It’s because the disease actually made him more able-bodied than most other players. Back then, it was considered cheating if you didn’t come to the plate full of bathtub gin and missing at least one toe.

It was a badge of honor to succeed while handicapping yourself. Why did you think the Black Sox threw the World Series in 1919? They wanted to see if they could still win the thing while actively trying to lose it. They weren’t the first team to throw a game, not by a long shot. They were just unlucky enough to get caught. And to accept thousands of dollars from gangsters in order to do it.

I just wish all these kids involved with this stuff would come clean. That’s what we did back in my day–someone catches you with your hand in the cookie jar, you fess up. Or, alternatively, you stonewall the cops, then catch the next steamer bound for Brazil.

I guess it’s no use complaining about the way the world has changed. While I was getting clean, this guy from NA taught me a prayer: God grant me the serenity to accept the things I can’t change, the carriage to something about the weather, and the gonads to know what’s what.

I got no idea what that means, but it still makes twice the sense of anything else in this crazy world. At least until Frankie gets the med shift again.

Football, Rocky Rhodes

Rocky Rhodes: Everything Old Is New Again

Grant “Rocky” Rhodes is America’s oldest living sportswriter. He first rose to prominence in 1921, when he struck an early blow for civil rights with his groundbreaking article on the Negro Leagues (“Colored Players Not Totally Inhuman”). His weekly sports column, “The Cat’s Pajamas”, appears in 7000 newspapers nationwide when not bumped for “Hints from Heloise” or “Gardening Weekly”. Today, he graces Scratchbomb with his nine decades of sports wisdom to talk about Sunday’s NFC Championship game.

rocky.jpg

We got this one attendant at the home, Frankie. A little stupid, but a good kid. So this morning he tells me that the Giants are playing the Packers in the NFC championship game. “That probably reminds you of old times, huh?” he says. “Back in the days of Vince Lombardi and stuff like that. I bet Lambeau Field was a pretty exciting place to be back then.”

Sure, it was exciting, if your idea of exciting is freezing your nuts off in the middle of Ass-Nowheresville. Ask a sportswriter his idea of hell, and he’ll say “Green Bay.” That place makes Amish country look like Weimar Berlin. I knew a guy who cut off his pinky rather than go there for the ’61 NFL Championship. A week of eating nothing but cheese and brats and I 0couldn’t get unblocked if I stuck a stick of dynamite up my rear end.

It was nothing like the championship games of the real old NFL. I mean, the real Paleolithic days, when there were no helmets, cheerleaders, or common sense. Guys sacrificed their bodies and minds every Sunday, for little money and even less notoriety. But I’m sure all of them would do it all over again if they could, and if their softened brains could still grasp the concept of decision making.

You wanna talk about a championship game? In 1937, I saw the Providence Steamroller beat the Chicago Cardinals 2-0 in the parking lot of a Studebaker dealership in Davenport, Iowa. It was definitely the best damn football game I’ve ever seen, and I’m sure my fellow spectators, all three dozen or so, would agree.

1937 was the year the NFL tried to increase scoring by changing the ball’s shape to oblong. Before that, it was angular, metallic and sharp. Of course, the old shape was totally impractical, but the league held on to it for a long time because they paid a lot of money to some fella named Calder to design it.

Of course, they hadn’t started filling the balls with air yet. No siree, they still filled ’em up with good ol’ fashioned concrete. The only score in the game came when the Cardinals’ quarterback dropped dead from exhaustion in his own end zone. A linebacker tripped on his corpse and fell on it to record the safety. He was the championship’s only casualty, which was quite rare in those days. Most every game back then would end with at least three guys in the morgue.

Providence’s star player was Stan “Running Back” Wisniewski. He was the perfect man for the team’s patented “run straight up the middle” offense. Stan only averaged 1.2 yards per carry, but he still led the league in yardage every year–mostly because they handed him the ball on every single play.

Back then, you were allowed to  call one play in your first game of the year, and you had to stick with that same play all season. It would be another few years before Weeb Ewbank invented something called “strategy”.

“Yup, you really missed out by being born so late,” I told Frankie. “Those were the days where men were men, and football was football. You’ll never get to see something like that in your life so long as you live.”

“Yeah, but I also don’t have to pee in a bag,” he said.

Touché, Frankie.