How the Russians Invented Baseball and Other Essays of Enlightenment. - book reviews

National Review, Nov 24, 1989 by Priscilla L. Buckley

How to Russians Invented Baseball

JOHN LEO'S Wanda and Ralph exchanges--feminist v. male chauvinist--so risible when they first appeared in Time a decade ago, when emergent feminism was the comic's delight, are, alas, dated; but John Leo's at once zany and sophisticated humor remains irresistible. He bushwhacks his readers with unexpected apercus, turning the commonplace and mundane upside down, reshaping it in unexpected ways. On the difference between plain English and journalese: "In journalese the word chilling has the very solemn task of modifying scenario (in nuclear-war stories), reminder (in crime stories), and effect (any story on AIDS or the imminent repeal of the First Amendment), whereas in English it is merely something one does with white wine." On the Russian invention of baseball: "Lapta, as it has been known for the last sixty or seventy Soviet penant races . . . evolved from the famous sporting rides of the cossacks, games occurring spontaneously on the Russian steppes with peasants hurling stones up at the fabled horsemen in stones up at achieve outs, while the free-swinging cossacks, many of them boasting nine- or ten-village hitting streaks, were responsible for most of the offense." In Soviet baseball, a player does not dispute orders from a coach, as an unfortunate third baseman from Minsk, who so far forgot himself as to yell, "Stick it in your ear, comrade coach," found out. He was "dragged from the Cosmodrome by large men in bulky suits, executed, and later brought to trial." On bird watching: the reason one sees so few birds in wilderness areas is "that a great many birds do not like the wilderness any more than you do." And on his friend Rudy, who spots a "northern beardless tyrannulet" at a spot where none should be: "This is the birding equivalent of Greta Garbo coming up to you in the street and asking you out." My favorite is Leo's universal baseball league: regional playoffs pit the Sydney Green-streets of the Australian League against the Cannes Do of the West Europe League (and the Holland A's v. the Burma Shaves, the Kiev Chickens v. the Delhi Catessens) and culminate in a world championship in which the Mysore Feet of the Oriental League could defeat the Wellington Beefs (also of the Australian League).