Presumably, most others here know (or at least suspect) that I am a fan of George Will. He is exceedingly cerebral. Very few others--perhaps Rich Lowry, Richard Brookhiser, and the late William F. Buckley Jr.--can compare to him, in this regard.
What many may not realize, however, is that Mr. Will is an avid baseball fan--to phrase it as mildly as possible. In fact, on several occasions, he has mused that he does politics just to support his baseball habit. (His 1990 bestseller,
Men at Work: The Craft of Baseball, stands as a tribute to this fact.)
A recent interview with his fellow conservative, Hugh Hewitt--as regarding his latest book,
A Nice Little Place on the North Side: Wrigley Field at 100--makes for a very good read.
Following are a few of Mr. Will's comments from this interview:
Now here’s the thing. You go to the really modern ballpark, and the scoreboard makes keeping score kind of irrelevant, because there’s so much information up there. But Wrigley Field has that old hand-operated scoreboard, and they don’t have all that stuff. And no Major League scoreboard has the statistic that I think’s most important, which is first pitch strikes. So I always mark down how many first pitch strikes to each batter the pitcher throws, and that makes me think that I’m doing something that only I can do. ...
The Cubs won the Cold War, and I’ll tell you how it happened. In 1919, William Wrigley, after whom the ballpark is named, bought Catalina Island off the coast of Southern California. In 1921, he sent his team out there to do spring training. In 1934-35, in the mid-30s, a radio broadcaster who did the Cubs games by recreation talked to his station in Des Moines and said look, would you send me to Catalina Island to cover the Cubs spring training? His name was Dutch Reagan. They sent him out there, and while he was out there, he said you know, I am going to try and get a screen test. He got a screen test, and became Ronald Reagan, became a movie star, stayed around long enough to get disgusted with the politics of Hollywood, became a conservative, gave the famous speech for Goldwater in ’64, ran for governor in ’66, got reelected in ’70, ran for president in ’76, got elected in ’80, won the Cold War, and that’s why the Cubs won the Cold War. ...
I would never call Stan Musial Stan, and I knew Bob Feller. And I always referred to him as Mr. Feller. You know, if you gave Bob Feller back the four years that he lost to the Second World War, that would be at least 80 more wins, and almost everyone would say he’s one of the greatest two or three pitchers who ever lived. ...
Well you know, baseball in the early days was a rough sport, full of people who fought their way out of the mine of Pennsylvania and elsewhere to get into baseball. It wasn’t until about fifteen years ago that California passed Pennsylvania as the state that had provided the most Major League Baseball players. Baseball was an escape in a hard America with hard working conditions, and they fought like tigers to keep their jobs against the young people coming up. ...
I grew up in Champagne, Illinois, midway between Chicago and St. Louis. And at an age too tender to make life-shaping decisions, I had to choose between being a Cub fan and a Cardinal fan. All my friends became Cardinal fans and grew up cheerful and liberal. And I became a gloomy, embattled conservative, partly because Harry Carey, who was the Cardinals broadcaster, was so insufferably supportive of the Cardinals. Now I understand that’s the job of the play by play broadcaster. But he sort of drove me into the arms of the Cubs, and therefore ruined my life.
Mr. Will does note, however, that there is an upside to being a Cubs fan: One is really never disappointed, since one always has very low expectations--even in those (rare) years in which the Cubs appear to be faring quite well.
The entire interview is remarkably good (albeit rather lengthy). For those with the extra time necessary to read and fully disgest it, here is the link:
Not An April Fools' Joke: Tribe Wins Opener With A Shutout And George Will On Bud Selig And The Commissioner's Job « The Hugh Hewitt Show
