Looking for Daylight in Baseball Today

“It’s a beautiful day. Let’s play two.” Those were the tantalizing words of the great Ernie Banks. He was referring to the joy of playing a daylight doubleheader in Wrigley Field.

This insight occurred to me last week while watching the Braves and Astros playing their division series in broad daylight. It was magnificent, the way baseball was meant to be played.

I know I’m swinging at windmills by even thinking about more day games, but the wonderful memories I have of my youth in Ebbets Field, Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds on daylight Saturdays and Sundays is unforgettable.

GENE COFSKY, Tarzana

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What a dark day it will be for the ethnic paranoids in this former melting pot if Cleveland and Atlanta meet in the World Series again. I have yet to hear a word of complaint from Bombay or Calcutta about Cleveland’s nickname, so just who are these people to presume to speak for some 850 million real Indians?

Perhaps it could all be resolved by renaming both Atlanta and Cleveland the Native Americans, but that probably won’t do either. In fact, our compatriots aren’t really Native Americans at all, they just happened to get here 20 or 30 millenniums before the Europeans did. The only true Native Americans are things like eohippus, which nobody seems to want to use as a nickname for some reason. Admittedly, “The Fighting Eohippi” is a bit awkward, but it’s certainly more politically correct than “The Fighting Illini,” and they’d probably win more games.

It appears that the only answer is to call every team in America the “No Names.” That way, everybody would be a “No Name” fan and we’d all be rooting for the same side for a change.

ALLEN E. KAHN, Playa del Rey