Visions of Summer's Game of Glory
By RICHARD F. SHEPARD
Published: February 16, 1990
MORE than two years on the road.
Small towns, big towns. Hard to remember after all this time, but one thing sure, you always had 'em on their feet, rooting. And now the big tomorrow. Major league stuff. New York. Not Yankee Bronx or Dodgers Flatbush or Mets Flushing, but the core of cosmopolis, Fifth Avenue and 42d Street.
It's a bigger field than most, the New York Public Library. Tough crowd to get a cheer from. At the crack of a book, the whole place slides into silence, like Ty Cobb stealing third. And now, we're coming to bat. Baseball. The national sport, maybe even religion. In this place the slabs are real marble. Tough house for ''Diamonds Are Forever: Artists and Writers on Baseball.'' Game time: tomorrow through April 21, in Gottesmann Hall, on the first floor, and no one's even thinking about a lockout. After that, it's back to the road, Boston, La Jolla, Scottsdale, places like that into 1992.
This is classy stuff. Heavy hitters. No klutzy, gum-choked grunts for the after-game viewers. All-Stars like Claes Oldenburg, Elaine de Kooning, Andy Warhol, John Marin, Red Grooms and Raoul Dufy (That Frenchman, yachts and horses? Got to Boston somewhere along the line, 1950, painted the park there.). That's for starting pictures. Warming up in the pen, no bull, John Updike, Roger Angell, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, William Kennedy, Wilfred Sheed and Red Barber, up in the catbird seat. A hundred and twenty roars from the culture crowd, in word and image, all baseball.
It is a pick-up team fielded by Peter H. Gordon, the curator, with Sydney Waller and Paul Weinman, and organized by the New York State Museum in association with the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service. Began touring Sept. 16, 1987, bankrolled by the American Express Company.
Let Mr. Gordon (off the sports pages, he rates a Mr.) explain how, after seeing how the ball bounced, he came to visualize what he has actually made real. In the 168-page book that not only stands by itself but is also a catalogue of the show, he writes:
''I knew then that our baseball exhibition must be about the artist's and writer's personal insight into baseball, not the art or social historian's analytical view of the game. . . . Next, we needed to focus the exhibition on a single, central question. . . . 'What is it about baseball that fascinates and touches us so deeply?' '' In the New York Public Library, this is locker-room talk. The curator has split his lineup into five divisions.
First, ''The Place,'' where they play the game. Face-to-face things, like Lewis Hines's photograph (1914), ''Playground in a Tenement Alley,'' and Ralph Pasanella's oil ''Night Game - Yankee Stadium, 1961,'' with literary snippets like one by W. P. Kinsella (from ''Shoeless Joe''): ''As I look around the empty park, almost Greek in its starkness, I feel an awesome inarticulate love for this very stadium and the game it represents.''
Second part: ''The Equipment,'' bats, balls, bases and gloves, through the eye of the benched observer. Claes Oldenberg's sketchy 1973 ''Mitt.'' Or Roger Angell, catching the ball in mid-history, in his writing in ''Five Seasons'': ''Like most institutions, it is considered inferior in its present form to its ancient archetypes, and in this case the complaint is probably justified; on occasion in recent years it has actually been known to come apart under the demands of its brief but rigorous active career.''
Part 3: ''The Players.'' Across the seasons, with DiMaggio, Ernie Banks, Graig Nettles, Wally Joyner. Go figure out Jim Nutt's ''Ron Kittle, 1985,'' an abstract hot curve in colored pencil, with a big K on the face as tribute to his rep as frequent flier in strikeouts. No K's on ''Babe Ruth, c. 1938,'' Nickolas Muray's photograph of the retired swat sultan back in his Yankee stripes, gripping his bat, hanging tough, maybe he was going to belt the photographer with it. And then there's the geometry of stripes, bats and balls giving a square look to the game in Gerald Garston's 1981 painting ''Spring Training.'' Also, Updike, in classic sports-writing high gear, with a passage from ''Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu'' that ends: ''On the car radio as I drove home I heard that Williams, his own man to the end, had decided not to accompany the team to New York. He had met the little death that awaits athletes. He had quit.''
In fourth place, ''The Action,'' that's body movement, blurry speed and fast calls. Nelson Rosenberg's undated fast-streaking watercolor and gouache ''Out at Third.'' Ron Cohen's 1978 ''Willie Mays,'' old No. 24 in acrylic, the ball landing fast into the mitt. And the Rev. W. A. Sunday, the ex-ball player turned preacher and known as Bill Sunday, writing, ''That day we played Detroit, and in that game I prayed my first prayer.''
Now, bottom of the fifth, ''Something Else,'' which is more out of the ballpark and tells you what baseball means to each and all of us, as Jacques Barzun, in a quote (from his ''God's Country and Mine'') says, ''Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.'' The art has more knuckle-ball delivery, too. Strong and full of mood, like Jacob Kass's 1985 ''Picking a Team,'' an oil painting actually done on a real saw blade, or Eric Fischl's 1979 nude batter (but with cap), an oil called ''Boys at Bat.''
Message to Scalpers: Forget It
It's a free show, Mondays through Saturdays, 10 A.M. to 6 P.M., guided tours daily at 12:30 and 2:30 P.M.; information: 930-0501.
All that's only first game of a double, could call it a triple-header at the library. They're making it a three-month season over there. Come March 31, they'll have ''Play Ball! Baseball's Early Innings,'' through May, in the Edna Barnes Room on the second floor. More for the game's scorekeepers. About 100 things from in-house, from the library's fantastic memory lane paved with books, photos, prints, baseball cards, newspapers and a dispute about how baseball got its start.
On that opening day, at March's end, the public will be throwing out the first ball during ''Baseball Day at the Library''; batting and pitching cages outside the Fifth Avenue door, between the lions, Mets superstars signing everything but contracts, contests, all between noon and 4 P.M.
Then there's the three lectures, with a starting lineup of Ira Berkow, a sports columnist of The New York Times, on April 23; George F. Will, already sold out, on May 2; and Bowie Kuhn, who has a May 15 date to tell all about being a baseball commissioner. Admission: $5 a talk. Information: 930-0571.
No night games at the Donnell Library Center, the library with a fine auditorium at 20 West 53d Street (621-0619), but a lot of them in darkness at noon. These are 26 films, free admission and all with a baseball peg, at midday or 2:30 P.M. on Tuesdays, March 6 through April 24.
That's mid-Manhattan in its springtime of pre-season. Mudville, back to the showers.