Maybe a Blue Cap with a White Bill and Tailfeathers

The debate about changing the Tucson Old Timer's baseball cap has reached continental proportions.

I received a note from John, a friend who lives in Minneapolis: "I saw a TOTs cap on our free table. I suppose that it was placed there by Denny Heath. I don't know if that means he isn't coming back to Tucson or just that his cap doesn't fit anymore."

John has heard about the TOTs; even more than he wants to know. He knows me, and Denny Heath, too. He and Denny live in the same housing complex.

John does not know that the TOTs have been debating whether or not to change from a white cap with a blue bill, to a blue cap with a blue bill, or to a blue cap with a white bill and tail feathers. The TOTs have modernized their game--that is to say, they use both aluminum bats and the Internet--so Denny must have heard: his hat is on the Free Table.

Whether that is an economic judgment or a fashion statement is not known. Or maybe it is just arthritis speaking to Denny.

Like the debate about infield fly rule, or the even more complex issue of whether and how to distinguish a fatal leg injury from a cranial desire not to run to second, and who and how and why to allow a pinch runner, and whether that runner can excuse himself on the basis of his own hip replacement, and whether a left hip or a right hip replacement makes a difference rounding second or third, the TOTs are not acting precipitously concerning cap replacement: cost is factored in, as is tradition, skin cancer, washability, and adjustability to accomodate the fact that head sizes swell in concert with batting averages and an occasional curve ball that actually curves.

I have spent some time in the Midwest. In corn and soybean country they call them "seed corn caps", anyway. They are often free. In fact, I have such a cap, somewhat modified.

Comments

The Sea is Rising

Let us just step back: two hundred and fifty years ago, or so, the ships of England and Spain had drifted onto a whole new continent, as they saw it, from far north to a savagely cold south; pole to pole, as if there were such things. Millions of people already lived here, some of them still hunters and gatherers; some of them very wealthy, indeed! Gold and silver stolen from the southern Americas funded Spanish and English dreams. There was land, lots of land, under starry skies above, rich land, and oil and coal and iron ore. The whole western world learned how to build industries not on simple muscle power, but on steam and oil. We farmed, too, of course. All we needed was cheap labor--slave labor from Africa, mostly, so the ships came with slave labor. Chinese labor built railroad beds where there had been rock cliffs. Europeans, long used to killing each other for good, religious reasons, brought their religious savagery with them. ...

That's all we want: fairness! Not more guns and more war! Fairness!

The five police officers who were killed in Dallas are certainly not the officers who killed innocent citizens. There is more than enough tragedy to go around. "What is happening to our country?", Mari asked this morning. I had no answer. We do have an answer. We do not want to say it. There are lots of answers, all of them pertinent. We are a racist society, like most human societies. We are a society in the midst of enormous changes-- social, political, economic--and we do not know what to do about it. We are divided unsustainably into absurdly rich, and an enormous number of crumbling middle class families, and poor. We have guns everywhere; military guns, guns just for killing people, cheap guns, heroes carrying guns into churches and supermarkets, idiots who think guns ought to be allowed in bars and schools and ball games and beauty parlors and political rallies. Our political process is almost useless. There are good people in Congress, but there...

SmokeSound

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