Mary Hart
Posted: October 28, 2025 Filed under: baseball Leave a comment
(source, an awkward still from a video)
Reading about Dodger superfan Mary Hart, who can often be seen sitting behind home plate on the TV broadcast.
Mary Harum was born in Madison, South Dakota. She was raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Denmark. She speaks English, Danish and Swedish fluently.
She has an apartment (Wikipedia reports) in Sierra Towers, a prominent West Hollywood building:
The building is known for being more than 15 stories taller than any other building within a 2-mile (3.2 km) radius. Due to Sierra Towers’ unique positioning at the base of a hill (the same hill from which Beverly Hills gets its name), the building is the highest residential tower in the greater Los Angeles Area relative to sea level. The building is said to get its plural name from scuttled original plans to build a second tower
Can’t run baseball
Posted: April 21, 2025 Filed under: baseball Leave a comment
found in this book at a beach rental house.
Robert Coover
Posted: October 8, 2024 Filed under: America Since 1945, baseball, writing 1 Comment
The postmodernist Robert Coover died at 92. The Universal Baseball Association is the only one of his I’ve read. This is how the NYT describes it in Coover’s obituary:
Mr. Coover’s many other books included “The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop.” (1968), about an accountant who invents a fantasy-baseball game and is driven mad by it
That’s accurate enough I guess. I loved reading the book. It’s the only one of Coover’s I read, and although it’s sort of fantastical, the plot’s kinda straightforward and the setting is vivid and lived-in. I went looking for the back cover copy that was on my old edition:
He eats delicatessen.
In new editions that’s updated to “take-out,” a mistake in my opinion. I remember Fener laughing out loud when he read that off the back cover when he found it in my office. The term “b-girl” was also dated by the time I read it, it seemed to mean something like this.
Spoiler below as I recall the plot:
Waugh is playing out a season of a dice based fantasy baseball game of his own invention. A star player, a wonderful pitcher, freakishly good emerges, and Henry comes to love him. Then one night he rolls the dice and can’t believe the outcome. The player is killed by a pitch. Henry can’t believe it. It shatters his world. It seems to be sort of a metaphor for God and Jesus (J. Henry Waugh/Yahweh).
The idea of going home to your own private world was on my mind at the time I read the book, when I was a young single man in LA, I’d leave work at 6pm or whatever and walk home to my one bedroom apartment and read or work on writing scripts or novels. It spoke to me, and what spoke to me about it wasn’t the postmodernism (in fact the metaphorical stuff kinda made me roll my eyes) but the realism, the portrait of a life, the investment and absorption into a private entertainment, the sadness and loss of having the game shattered.
So, salute to Robert Coover.
Eckersley
Posted: January 7, 2024 Filed under: baseball, the California Condition 1 Commentin 2023 we happened to watch a Dodger Channel / Spectrum Sportsnet LA documentary about the 1988 World Series home run by Kirk Gibson. Probably the most famous moment in post-Brooklyn Dodger history. What impressed though was what Dennis Eckersley had to say. Eckersley threw the pitch Gibson cleared over the right field fence. Here’s what he said about how he handled the postgame interviews:
Sunday Scrapbasket
Posted: October 28, 2018 Filed under: America Since 1945, art history, baseball, sports, writing Leave a comment- Work by Ai Weiwei at Marciano Foundation:
- down the docks, San Pedro:
- Good illustration of Satan in the Wikipedia page for him:
from Strange Tales From A Chinese Studio (1740) by Pu Songling
- Looking into the history of the USA and Chile, found this.
Declassified notes Richard Helms, CIA director, took at a September 15, 1970 meeting at the White House
game plan
make the economy scream
- This is a take I didn’t know I had until I saw it expressed:
of course. these rascals hired her and they knew who she was. it didn’t work for them like it did for Fox so they threw her under the bus, but they’re no more principled than she is.
- moving books around:
- happy fate to be in attendance at the longest World Series game ever played. Beginning:
End:
Bob Marley in Boston
Posted: July 2, 2017 Filed under: baseball, Boston, music, New England Leave a comment
Because people were talking about Baby Driver, I started singing it in my head to the tune of Bob Marley’s Slave Driver.
What a song. So then I went looking for Slave Driver on Spotify. I found a recording of Bob Marley and The Wailers, Live At The Music Hall, Boston, 1978. “Easy Skanking In Boston ’78” is the title, which I don’t love saying. “Bob Marley and The Wailers Live At The Music Hall – Boston – 1978” seems like it gives you what you need?
The Music Hall is now the Wang Theatre. Photo from Wikipedia by Tim Pierce.
Somehow shocking that Boston would be the scene of a legendary Marley concert. Who was in the crowd?!
Steve Morse wrote about this recording for The Boston Globe when the album was released in 2015:
My one meeting with Bob Marley was memorable. I was sent by the Globe to interview him at the Essex Hotel in New York before his show at Boston’s Music Hall in 1978. I walked in to Marley’s room, which looked out over Central Park, at 11 a.m. It was a chaotic scene. Four or five members of his entourage were kicking a soccer ball that banged off the picture windows. Two king-size joints were being passed around. Bob sat on a couch, reading aloud from the Book of Revelation.
Realizing I was in over my head, I waited a while before daring to ask Marley about his music. He agreed to talk, shut the Bible, quelled the soccer noise, and stated his worldview: “Everything is going to be united now. Everything is going to be cool. Forget the past and unite.”
Marley’s response to a country politically divided and stricken with gun violence was notably cooler and more Christian than the NRA’s response.
|
” |
Two months later he’d be in Boston.
(Minute 34-38 or so a good sample)
June 8, 1978 was a Thursday, a hot night, 89 degrees. The Red Sox had an off day, but that weekend they’d start a ten game win streak on the road in the West Coast.
The Sox would win 99 games that year, but lose a one game playoff to the Yankees at home in Fenway Park.
Ned Martin would call the game for WITS radio.
Years later he’d die of a heart attack in a shuttle bus at the Raleigh airport on his way home from Ted Williams’ memorial.
good poem
Posted: November 5, 2016 Filed under: baseball, the California Condition Leave a comment
by:
Is this a survey or the chant of a cult?
Posted: June 17, 2016 Filed under: baseball, Boston, New England Leave a comment
At Fenway Park for Jason Varitek bobblehead day, I stopped to fill out a two page survey. Here’s the bottom of page 2:
The whole survey had a bit of a hypnotism vibe:
If you’re an official card-carrying member of Red Sox Nation ($14 a year) you can watch batting practice from on top of the Green Monster:
Fenway is just so wonderful. From the wall of former Red Sox logos, one of the more unsuccessful efforts:
Orioles outfield coach Wayne Kirby kept giving emphatic instructions that, as far as I could tell, were heard by nobody:
The Red Sox encourage you to follow “the time-honored tradition of keeping score.” A very Zen activity, recommended. I developed my method during my Roxbury Latin playing career, when I was judged more valuable for my tactical/strategic and historical mind than for my hitting/fielding abilities.
Doesn’t that just tell the whole story. A tough night for Boston but any night at Fenway is a good time.
I feel grateful to the Boston Red Sox.
I feel thankful for the Boston Red Sox.
I feel a sense of gratitude towards the Boston Red Sox.
(contact me if you wish to purchase a Varitek bobblehead, $6000 obo)
Trivia: who is the second-longest tenured baseball announcer?
Posted: June 2, 2016 Filed under: baseball, the California Condition Leave a comment
Bryce Duffy/Corbis Outline from http://www.aarp.org/politics-society/history/info-2016/vin-scully-voice-of-the-dodgers.html
First place is Vin Scully of the LA Dodgers.
As a Boston transplant who doesn’t care about the Dodgers, it took me a long time to join the Cult of Scully. The tales of his greatness and my own listens didn’t rank him above Red Sox announcer Sean McDonough, in my opinion.
But I’ve come around. Some milestones on my journey: Karina Longworth citing Vin as an influence (along with Elvira! and two others I forget) in this Longform interview.
Co-worker Joe talking up Scully, in particular his 1965 Sandy Koufax perfect game call.
Vin Scully has been in the Baseball Hall of Fame since 1982.
Really enjoyed this SB Nation profile of Scully by Cee Angi. So much goodness:
Scully’s work is researched, but never rehearsed. There are all those index cards, but none of them are filled with grandiose soliloquies; his fear is that such preparation would cheapen the moment and cause him to say something disingenuous. “I never do that,” Scully said in a recent interview on New York’s WFAN radio. Referring to his call of Hank Aaron’s record-breaking 715th home run in 1974. “I really concentrate on the moment… I’m afraid that if I tried to prepare, I’d be so eager to get my marvelous words out onto the air [that] I might do it prematurely and be wrong.”
Check it out at the source, great photos as well.
How about Giants announcer John Miller doing Vin Scully in Japanese?
Anyway, the second-longest tenured MLB announcer is ALSO at the Dodgers!
It is Jaime Jarrín, who’s been doing the Spanish language broadcasts for 54 years.
When the Dodgers moved to Los Angeles in 1958, KWKW, where Jarrin was the news and sports director, picked up the Spanish language rights for the games. The original broadcast team included Rene Cardenas, Miguel Alonso and Rodolfo Hoyos Jr. and they were joined by Jarrin in 1959. For the first six years, they did not travel with the team but would recreate the games on radio while listening to the English-language broadcast in a studio. In 1973, after 14 years with the Dodgers, Jarrín became the club’s number-one Spanish-language broadcaster.
Bill Murray Hall Of Fame Speech
Posted: November 28, 2012 Filed under: America, baseball, comedy Leave a comment
Way over my three minute limit, but 2:20-3:45 is pretty great.
HT today’s NY Times interview:
Q. Did you ever think that the lessons you first learned on the stage of an improv comedy theater in Chicago would pay off later in life?
A. It pays off in your life when you’re in an elevator and people are uncomfortable. You can just say, “That’s a beautiful scarf.” It’s just thinking about making someone else feel comfortable. You don’t worry about yourself, because we’re vibrating together. If I can make yours just a little bit groovier, it’ll affect me. It comes back, somehow.
“high as a Georgia pine”
Posted: April 14, 2012 Filed under: baseball Leave a comment
ht our Toronto office. Apparently some debate about the veracity of this story but here at The Hely Times we print the legend.
Helytimes 
