Clocks Moved Sunday: Time Begins Today

“If asked where baseball stood amid such notions as country, family, love, honor, art and religion, we might say derisively, ‘Just a game.’ But, under oath, I’d abandon some of these Big Six before I’d give up baseball.”

From “Why Time Begins on Opening Day,” by Thomas Boswell.

Add opening day: Since writing that book in 1984, Boswell, a Washington Post sports columnist, has become recognized, along with Roger Angell and Roger Kahn, as one of baseball’s poet laureates.

Here was his paean to Dodger Stadium, where time begins today, when the Dodgers open the season against the Giants:

“From the promontory of Chavez Ravine, the City of Angels sprawls at night beneath Dodger Stadium in all directions, a diadem of colored lights. The rubies and emeralds of traffic blinkers, the neon diamonds of a thousand midnight burger joints, create a twinkling crown around the Dodgers’ fortress.

“Dodger Stadium is a blue palace on a hill, a Spanish stucco place of clean colors and sharply defined heroes. It stands outlined against the night sky, beckoning to the city below with muffled roars that roll down the gorges like thunder.”

Trivia time: What singer-songwriter composed “Take Me Out to the Ball Game?”

SABR rattling: Newsstands are filled with baseball previews, and, for the second year in a row, one of the most thoughtful can be found in L.A. Weekly. And it’s free.

Among the articles is one about the Society for American Baseball Research, which has 6,000 statistic-addicted members, including political commentator George Will, former Atty. General Richard Thornburgh and comedian Billy Crystal.

SABR, according to writer Allen Barra, has been able to rewrite the record books, such as the time that Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller asked the organization to help him find a strikeout that he was sure had never been credited to him.

After searching through the archives of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, SABR found that Feller had a strikeout in his first major league appearance, a relief stint, that was never recorded. The official scorer went to the bathroom and missed it.

More SABR: The organization also discovered an error in the record books from 1910 that, if corrected, would give that season’s American League batting title to Nap Lajoie instead of Ty Cobb.

But when confronted with the information, then-Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ruled that Cobb would remain triumphant, thus leaving unspoiled his string of nine consecutive batting titles, because of a “hypothetical statute of limitations.”

An anonymous SABR member, Barra reported, said: “Bowie would have found a place waiting for him on the Warren Commission.”

Trivia answer: Jack Norworth.

Add Norworth: He was a singer and dancer in New York in 1908, when, inspired by an advertisement he spotted in a subway car extolling the virtues of an afternoon at the Polo Grounds, he decided to write a song about baseball. Thirty minutes later, it was done.

When he used the song in his act that night, the crowd loved it so much that it demanded he sing it over and over again. He knew then that he had captured the essence of going to a game, although he had never been to one himself.

Quotebook: The late Bill Veeck: “Baseball is almost the only orderly thing in a very unorderly world. If you get three strikes, even the best lawyer in the world can’t get you off.”