We here at the Manor are baseball fans. We are not rabid baseball fans; we cannot recite statistics, but we do believe that it is God's own game. We often encourage the hired men to play ball on the verdant fields during Christmas and Easter, as well as those late afternoons when they've finished the sheep shearing.
Having said that, your faithful correspondent has heard that the Mitchell Commission dealing with the use of steroids and other performance enhancing drugs will be making their findings public soon. According to Arte Moreno, the owner of the Angels and an opponent of juicing, despite the fact that one of his players is a know user of human growth hormone, says that the commission report will name names. In other words, it will name players who have been using steroids.
We here at the Manor hope that Moreno is correct in his prediction. Major League Baseball seems to be unwilling to enforce its own rules against steroid use. Perhaps the Mitchell Commission report will shame the juicers into either quitting the great game or quit using steroids. The likelihood of either event taking place is, admittedly, slight. But one can always hope that someone will do the right thing.
The steroid controversy has excited your faithful correspondent to consider the fact that baseball was not the game that it once was. Let's face it, baseball is a game that children play for free or pay to play and which adult men are played enormous amounts of money to play. Something is a bit out of balance in the equation. It's somewhat tantamount to one's little daughter playing house for the fun of it and the cast of Desperate Housewives doing the same thing for more money than the average engineer makes.
If your faithful correspondent had just a bit more cash on hand (the majority is tied up in ruby mines in Columbia and tea plantations in Ceylon) he would found a new baseball league called the Real Baseball League. The rule book of the league would be the same rule book used in 1890. The ball used would be the dead ball (making for in the park ball and home runs a real oddity instead of an expectation), gloves would be optional, pitchers could throw spitters, and the only safety equipment would be batting helmets. No batting gloves (what's wrong with friction tape or pine tar?), no elbow or shin guards (these batters are looking more and more like robots instead of men) and no drugs other than alcohol, nicotine or caffeine. And not changing the ball after every time it's hit or touches the ground. As the ball changes the game should change.
Consider the fact that the only thing that has changed in the English game of cricket in the past 200 years is that now the batsman wears a hard helmet. It's the same ball, the same bat and the same game. Baseball is not the same game that it was a hundred years ago. The plethora of home runs has made the game rather boring. Baseball has become a batters' game instead of a pitchers' and fielders' game. And we all lose by the change.
This past week the Los Angeles Times (a truly terrible major city newspaper, but even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once a day) printed an opinion/entertainment piece about the old television program Mannix. The jist of the article was that the series is a hidden treasure and was pretty much the last gasp of the "cool" private investigator. Apparently the character Mannix was a smoker, a wearer of ties and sports jackets, a listener of jazz and a drinker of scotch. In other words, he was the last of the Peter Gunn type of television P.I.s.
Yours can not remember ever having watched the series. But this may be due to the fact that he was slaving away at the mill on the night shift during the show's run. The only thing that he can remember about Mannix is that Mannix's secretary was named Peggy, which is the name of your faithful correspondent's lovely sister-in-law. Night shift workers get what they can on television and what we got at the time were re-runs of the Rockford Files at 2:30 Monday morning. Rockford was not the cool shamus. He was the common man shamus, but he was pretty entertaining.
In musing over the article it slowly dawned on your faithful correspondent that the private eye series, which was once a staple of network television (the last being the Mike Hammer series starring Stacy Keach), is no more. Instead the networks offer series about trashy suburban women (and if any trashy suburban women are reading make sure to e-mail me and I'll give you directions to the Manor), hospital soap operas and crime shows featuring government operatives in various permutations such as CSI, Missing, NCIS and 24. No private investigators.
What does this mean? While your writer is no sociologist (a truly grim and useless profession) he will take the reins and state that the change from the private detective hero to the government investigator is a signal and disturbing change. Without quoting Raymond Chandler, let it be said that the private eye was a free lancer, a man outside of society working to correct society, a knight walking down the mean streets of society to right the wrongs that the barons ignored. The government operatives work to maintain the society. They do not work to try to fix the society and the government. They ARE the government. They don't smoke. They rarely drink. They agonize about beating up or killing a villain. They are products of the 60s and 70s. They distrust the government and yet do everything they can to maintain it. The old timers like Mannix, Rockford, Gunn et al, while working for what was right did not do so for the state. They did what was right because they knew what was right. And in doing what was right was not always what was legal.
And to think that shows such as Mannix, The Rockford Files and Peter Gunn were written by men who were of the generation called square and sheep. They were more suspicious of the government than are the writers of the current crop of crime shows. Their characters didn't depend on the state to save the day.
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