Category Archives: History

A Baseball Legend Few Fans Know About

Posted on by

It was a time before radar guns, but they say his fastball was the fastest in the history of baseball. In fact, much faster. I’d never heard of him until yesterday.

From The Washington Post:

Steve Dalkowski, who entered baseball lore as the hardest-throwing pitcher in history, with a fastball that was as uncontrollable as it was unhittable and who was considered perhaps the game’s greatest unharnessed talent, died April 19 at a hospital in New Britain, Conn. He was 80 and died from Covid-19.

Mr. Dalkowski pitched nine years in the minor leagues in the 1950s and ’60s, mostly in the Baltimore Orioles organization, without reaching the major leagues. Yet, in that time, he amazed — and terrified — countless hitters with a blazing fastball of astonishing speed.

He was not a big man, only about 5-foot-10 and 175 pounds, but he possessed lightning in his left arm. He had almost a slingshot motion, somewhere between a sidearm and overhand delivery.

Ted Williams, who played against Bob Feller and other fireballers during his Hall of Fame career, was said to havefaced Mr. Dalkowski in one spring training and called him the “fastest ever.” Another major leaguer, Eddie Robinson, swung and missed at 10 pitches before he could make weak contact with one of Mr. Dalkowski’s fastballs.

“As 40 years go by, a lot of stories get embellished,” Pat Gillick, Mr. Dalkowksi’s minor league teammate and a Hall of Fame general manager, told Sports Illustrated in 2003. “But this guy was legit. He had one of those arms that come once in a lifetime”….

The fastest documented fastball in baseball history was thrown by left-hander Aroldis Chapman, currently a relief pitcher for the New York Yankees. Chapman had the speed tattooed on the inside of his left wrist: 105.1 mph.

People who saw Mr. Dalkowski said he threw at least as hard. Radar guns were not in use when Mr. Dalkowski pitched, but his catcher in the Orioles system, Cal Ripken Sr., estimated his fastball was between 110 and 115 mph.

Ripken spent decades in baseball, eventually becoming manager of the Orioles. He saw Sandy Koufax, Goose Gossage and J.R. Richard pitch, and he watched from the third-base coaching box as Nolan Ryan threw fastballs clocked at more than 100 mph.

“Steve Dalkowski was the hardest thrower I ever saw,” Ripken said.

In one game Ripken was catching, he called for a breaking pitch. Mr. Dalkowski missed the sign and threw his fastball instead. It hit the umpire in the mask, breaking it in three places. The umpire was knocked unconscious.

In 1957, when Mr. Dalkowski was 18 and in his first professional season, he tore off part of a batter’s ear with an errant pitch. That batter was Bob Beavers, then in the Dodgers organization.

“The first pitch was over the backstop. The second pitch was called a strike, I didn’t think it was,” Beavers told the Courant last year. “The third pitch hit me and knocked me out, so I don’t remember much after that. . . . I never did play baseball again.”

That was Mr. Dalkowski’s problem throughout his baseball career: He had the best arm in the game, but he could not control his pitches.

In high school, he pitched a no-hitter in which he walked 18 batters and struckout 18. Another time, in an extra-inning minor-league game, he walked 18 hitters and struck out 27 while throwing 283 pitches — far more than a team would allow a pitcher to throw today.

In 1960, when he was with a minor league team in Stockton, Calif., Mr. Dalkowski struck out 262 batters in 170 innings — an astonishing rate of 14 strikeouts per 9 innings. But he also walked 262 batters.

His pitches sometimes flew over backstops and sent spectators ducking for cover. On a dare, he threw a ball over the center field fence — 440 feet away. Another time, he won a bet with teammate Andy Etchebarren and fired a ball through a wooden fence.

He once beaned a mascot with a fastball — a scene depicted in the 1988 baseball movie “Bull Durham.” The film’s screenwriter, Ron Shelton, played in the Orioles minor league system a few years after Mr. Dalkowski, but stories about him were still being told. He based the character of “Nuke” LaLoosh, played by Tim Robbins, on Mr. Dalkowski.

“Playing baseball in Stockton and Bakersfield several years behind Dalko, but increasingly aware of the legend,” Shelton wrote in the Los Angeles Times in 2009, “I would see a figure standing in the dark down the right-field line at old Sam Lynn Park in Oildale, a paper bag in hand. Sometimes he’d come to the clubhouse to beg for money.

“Our manager, Joe Altobelli, would talk to him, give him some change, then come back and report, ‘That was Steve Dalkowski.’ And a clubhouse full of cocky, young, testosterone-driven baseball players sat in awe — of the unimaginable gift, the legend, the fall”….

Coaches tried everything with Mr. Dalkowski: changing his stance on the mound, his grip on the ball; they asked him to aim high or aim low, to relax as he threw. Nothing worked.
In 1962, Mr. Dalkowski was assigned to the Orioles’ Class A affiliate in Elmira, N.Y. The manager was a young Earl Weaver, who later managed in Baltimore for 17 years and went into the Hall of Fame.

Weaver encouraged Mr. Dalkowski to throw his slider for strikes and not to throw his fastball at full strength every time. When he got to two strikes on an opposing hitter, Weaver would whistle, as a signal for Mr. Dalkowski to bring his best fastball.

“Earl had managed me in Venezuela in winter ball. We got along,” Mr. Dalkowski told the Sun in 2003. “He handled me with tough love. He told me to run a lot and don’t drink on the night you pitch. Then he gave me the ball and said, ‘Good luck.’ ”

Mr. Dalkowski would go on to have his best season, with an earned run average of 3.04. He had 37 consecutive scoreless innings at one point….

The next year, in spring training, Mr. Dalkowski was fitted for a big league uniform, finally about to realize his dream.

“He had the team made easily,” Orioles manager Billy Hitchcock told the Sun years later.

But on March 22, 1963, while pitching to the New York Yankees in a spring training game, Mr. Dalkowski felt something snap in his elbow. He was 23.

He tried to come back from the injury, pitching in the minors until 1965, but the lightning was gone. During his minor league career, he won 46 games and lost 80. In 956 innings, he struck out 1,324 batters and walked 1,236.

He never made it to the majors….

After his elbow injury in 1963, Mr. Dalkowski disappeared for years. He became a migrant farmworker in California — and a down-and-out alcoholic.

After failed rehab attempts, Mr. Dalkowski’s sister brought him back to [Connecticut] in 1994. He spent the rest of his life in an assisted-living facility, within blocks of the high school baseball field where he first found glory….

Unquote.

If it was a movie, they’d find an upbeat ending. They’d probably use this:

He rose from a wheelchair last year in Los Angeles to throw out a ceremonial first pitch at Dodger Stadium.

Spinoza Made a Difference

Posted on by

Baruch (sometimes Benedict) Spinoza was a 17th century Jewish philosopher who famously referred to reality as either God or nature. Scholars have been arguing about what he meant ever since, but whatever he meant helped get him “excommunicated or expelled from the people of Israel” in 1656. In 2012, a rabbi declined to remove the ban, citing Spinoza’s “preposterous ideas, where he was tearing apart the very fundamentals of our religion”.

From Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English by Jonathan Rée (Spinoza wrote in Latin but couldn’t be left out of the book):

Christians had never taken much interest in atheism: the Bible dismissed it as the delirium of “fools”… After Spinoza, Christians would find themselves doing battle not only with heresy and heathenism, but also with sheer unbelief. Atheism was still a dangerous word, however, and it was sometimes replaced by a new coinage: deism, which implied rejecting revelation, ritual and tradition, while retaining a residual belief in an impersonal divine power, perhaps on the lines of Spinoza’s “God or nature”.

Ordinary Christians were alarmed: “at this day Atheism is slily [i.e. “slyly”] called Deism by those that are indeed Atheists”, as an English pamphleteer observed in 1695: “they would disguise it by a false Name, and thereby hid the Heinousness of it”. By that time, a clandestine network of atheistic and deistic pamphleteers was operating across northern Europe, building on Protestant contempt for Catholic superstition and extending it to religion as a whole. They used the arguments of various “new philosophers” — principally Descartes, Gassendi, Hobbes and Spinoza — to attack beliefs in miracles, apparitions and omens, and derided the doctrine of transubstantiation, which asserts the real presence of Christ’s body and blood in consecrated bread and wine.

As far as they were concerned, everything in the physical world was governed by universal laws of nature, and the Bible was no holier than any other book. “Such is human malice and stupidity” — to quote a notorious  pamphlet called the Traité des trois imposteurs — that men choose to pass their lives in duping each other and worshiping a book handed down from an ignorant nation”. Manuscript copies of the Traité circulated in Latin and French in the 1690s, promoting the idea that religion is a fraud perpetrated by “the three imposters — Moses, Jesus and Mohammed. The pamphlet grew larger and bolder as time went by, and when it was printed at the Hague in 1719, it was bound with other works under a title that was not much less provocative: La Vie et l’Esprit de Spinoza….

[Sophia, Electress of Hanover, who almost became Queen of England] spent several years mingling with scholars in Heidelberg… Above all, she became an admirer of Spinoza: she described his Tractatus as “extraordinary and entirely reasonable” and supported a plan to offer him a professorship. She was appalled when he died shortly afterwards, suspecting that he had been murdered by partisans of “faith without reason”, and reflecting that “most of the human race … lives on lies”. 

Unquote.

If you’d like to know more about Spinoza’s philosophy, including his critique of religion and the Bible, as well as his liberalism and secularism, give his Theological-Political Treatise a try. When it was published, it was denounced as “godless,” “full of abominations,” “a book forged in hell . . . by the devil himself”. Stephen Nadler’s A Book Forged In Hell: Spinoza’s Scandalous Treatise and the Birth of the Secular Age is another option. If anyone was ever born before his time, it was Baruch Spinoza.

People Have Said This Is the Best Article About the Virus

Posted on by

A science and health reporter, Donald McNeill, who specializes in “plagues and pestilences”, consulted “more than 20 experts in public health, medicine, epidemiology and history” and then wrote a long article for The New York Times. It’s called “ The Coronavirus in America: The Year Ahead”. It’s received a lot of praise. These are the parts (2,200 words or so) I found most interesting. The article has many links that aren’t included below.

What follows is divided into sections:

How Many Will Die
The Lockdowns Will End, But Haltingly
Immunity Will Become an Advantage in Society
A Vaccine Is Not Coming Soon
Treatments Are Likely To Arrive First
We Will Need International Cooperation

[ How Many Will Die ]

In fast-moving epidemics, far more victims pour into hospitals or die at home than doctors can test; at the same time, the mildly ill or asymptomatic never get tested. Those two factors distort the true fatality rate in opposite ways. If you don’t know how many people are infected, you don’t know how deadly a virus is.

Only when tens of thousands of antibody tests are done will we know how many silent carriers there may be in the United States. The C.D.C.  has suggested it might be 25 percent  of those who test positive. Researchers in Iceland  said it might be double that.

China is also revising its own estimates. In February, a  major study  concluded that only 1 percent of cases in Wuhan were asymptomatic.  New research  says  perhaps 60 percent  were. Our knowledge gaps are still wide enough to make epidemiologists weep.

“All models are just models,” Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, science adviser to the White House coronavirus task force, has said. “When you get new data, you change them.”

There may be good news buried in this inconsistency: The virus may also be mutating to cause fewer symptoms. In the movies, viruses become more deadly. In reality, they usually become less so, because asymptomatic strains reach more hosts. Even the 1918 Spanish flu virus eventually  faded into the seasonal H1N1 flu.

At the moment, however, we do not know  exactly how transmissible  or lethal the virus is. But refrigerated trucks parked outside hospitals tell us all we need to know: It is far worse than a bad flu season.

[ The Lockdowns Will End, But Haltingly ]

The next two years will proceed in fits and starts, experts said. As more immune people get back to work, more of the economy will recover.

But if too many people get infected at once, new lockdowns will become inevitable. To avoid that, widespread testing will be imperative.

Dr. Fauci has said “the virus will tell us” when it’s safe. He means that once a national baseline of hundreds of thousands of daily tests is established across the nation, any viral spread can be spotted when the percentage of positive results rises.

Detecting rising fevers as they are mapped by … smart thermometers may give an earlier signal…

But diagnostic testing has been troubled from the beginning. Despite assurances from the White House, doctors and patients continue to complain of delays and shortages.

To keep the virus in check, several experts insisted, the country also must start isolating all the ill — including mild cases.

In this country, patients who test positive are asked to stay in their homes, but keep away from their families.

Television news has been filled with recuperating personalities like CNN’s Chris Cuomo, sweating alone in his basement while his wife left food atop the stairs…

But even Mr. Cuomo ended up illustrating why the W.H.O. strongly opposes home isolation. On Wednesday, he revealed that his wife had the virus.

“If I was forced to select only one intervention, it would be the rapid isolation of all cases,” said Dr. Bruce Aylward, who led the W.H.O. observer team to China.

In China, anyone testing positive, no matter how mild their symptoms, was required to immediately enter an infirmary-style hospital — often set up in a gymnasium or community center outfitted with oxygen tanks and CT scanners.

There, they recuperated under the eyes of nurses. That reduced the risk to families, and being with other victims relieved some patients’ fears…

Still, experts were divided on the idea of such wards. [One called for] mandatory but “humane quarantine processes.”

By contrast, [a Harvard epidemiologist] opposed the idea, saying: “I don’t trust our government to remove people from their families by force.”

Ultimately, suppressing a virus requires testing all the contacts of every known case. But the United States is far short of that goal.

Someone working in a restaurant or factory may have dozens or even hundreds of contacts. In China’s Sichuan Province, for example, each known case had an average of 45 contacts.

The C.D.C. has about 600 contact tracers and, until recently, state and local health departments employed about 1,600, mostly for tracing syphilis and tuberculosis cases.

China hired and trained 9,000 in Wuhan alone. [It’s been] estimated that the United States will need at least 300,000.

[ Immunity Will Become an Advantage in Society ]

Imagine an America divided into two classes: those who have recovered from infection with the coronavirus and presumably have some immunity to it; and those who are still vulnerable.

“It will be a frightening schism,” … a World Health Organization special envoy on Covid-19, predicted. “Those with antibodies will be able to travel and work, and the rest will be discriminated against.”

Already, people with presumed immunity are very much in demand, asked to donate their blood for antibodies and doing risky medical jobs fearlessly.

Soon the government will have to invent a way to certify who is truly immune. A test for IgG antibodies, which are produced once immunity is established, would make sense… Many companies are working on them.

Dr. Fauci has said the White House was discussing certificates like those proposed in Germany. China uses cellphone QR codes linked to the owner’s personal details so others cannot borrow them….

As Americans stuck in lockdown see their immune neighbors resuming their lives and perhaps even taking the jobs they lost, it is not hard to imagine the enormous temptation to join them through self-infection, experts predicted. Younger citizens in particular will calculate that risking a serious illness may still be better than impoverishment and isolation.

“My daughter, who is a Harvard economist, keeps telling me her age group needs to have Covid-19 parties to develop immunity and keep the economy going,” said Dr. Michele Barry…

It would be a gamble [since] even slim, healthy young Americans have died of Covid-19.

[ A Vaccine Is Not Coming Soon ]

Even though limited human trials of three candidates — two here and one in China — have already begun, [Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases] has repeatedly said that any effort to make a vaccine will take at least a year to 18 months.

All the experts familiar with vaccine production agreed that … that timeline was optimistic… The record is four years, for the mumps vaccine.

Researchers differed sharply over what should be done to speed the process. Modern biotechnology techniques using RNA or DNA platforms make it possible to develop candidate vaccines faster than ever before.

But clinical trials take time, in part because there is no way to rush the production of antibodies in the human body.

Also, for unclear reasons, some previous vaccine candidates against coronaviruses like SARS have triggered “antibody-dependent enhancement,” which makes recipients more susceptible to infection, rather than less….

A new vaccine is usually first tested in fewer than 100 young, healthy volunteers. If it appears safe and produces antibodies, thousands more volunteers — in this case, probably front-line workers at the highest risk — will get either it or a placebo in what is called a Phase 3 trial.

It is possible to speed up that process with “challenge trials.” Scientists vaccinate small numbers of volunteers, wait until they develop antibodies, and then “challenge” them with a deliberate infection to see if the vaccine protects them.

Challenge trials are used only when a disease is completely curable, such as malaria or typhoid fever. Normally, it is ethically unthinkable to challenge subjects with a disease with no cure, such as Covid-19.

But in these abnormal times, several experts argued that putting a few Americans at high risk for fast results could be more ethical than leaving millions at risk for years….

As arduous as testing a vaccine is, producing hundreds of millions of doses is even tougher, experts said.

Most American vaccine plants produce only about 5 million to 10 million doses a year, needed largely by the 4 million babies born and 4 million people who reach age 65 annually…

But if a vaccine is invented, the United States could need 300 million doses [assuming 30 million of us are immune] — or 600 million if two shots are required. And just as many syringes.

“People have to start thinking big,” [one doctor] said. “With that volume, you’ve got to start cranking it out pretty soon.”

Flu vaccine plants are large, but those that grow the vaccines in chicken eggs are not suitable for modern vaccines…

European countries have plants but will need them for their own citizens. China has a large vaccine industry, and may be able to expand it over the coming months. It might be able to make vaccines for the United States…

India and Brazil also have large vaccine industries. If the virus moves rapidly through their crowded populations, they may lose millions of citizens but achieve widespread herd immunity well before the United States does. In that case, they might have spare vaccine plant capacity.

Alternatively, [another doctor said] the government might take over and sterilize existing liquor or beer plants, which have large fermentation vats: “ any distillery could be converted”.

[ Treatment Is Likely To Arrive First ]

In the short term, experts were more optimistic about treatments than vaccines. Several felt that so-called convalescent serum could work.

The basic technique has been used for over a century: Blood is drawn from people who have recovered from a disease, then filtered to remove everything but the antibodies. The antibody-rich immunoglobulin is injected into patients.

The obstacle is that there are now relatively few survivors to harvest blood from [note: in New Jersey at least, you have to be under 60, among other requirements]….

[A treatment involving] monoclonal antibodies … recently came very close to conquering the Ebola epidemic in eastern Congo, [and] are the most likely short-term game changer…

The most effective antibodies are chosen, and the genes that produce them are spliced into a benign virus that will grow in a cellular broth.

But, as with vaccines, growing and purifying monoclonal antibodies takes time. In theory, with enough production, they could be used not just to save lives but to protect front-line workers….

Having a daily preventive pill would be an even better solution, because pills can be synthesized in factories far faster than vaccines or antibodies can be grown and purified.

But even if one were invented, production would have to ramp up until it was as ubiquitous as aspirin, so 300 million Americans could take it daily.

[Some keep suggesting] hydroxychloroquine and azithromycin… All the experts agreed … that no decision should be made until clinical trials are completed.

Some recalled that in the 1950s inadequate testing of thalidomide caused thousands of children to be born with malformed limbs. More than one hydroxychloroquine study has been halted after patients who got high doses developed abnormal heart rhythms.

“I doubt anyone will tolerate high doses, and there are vision issues if it accumulates,” [one doctor] said. “But it would be interesting to see if it could work [like pills used to prevent H.I.V.].

Others were harsher… “It’s total nonsense,” said … a former director of medical and biodefense preparedness at the National Security Council. “I told my family, if I get Covid, do not give me this combo.”

Chloroquine might protect patients hospitalized with pneumonia against lethal cytokine storms because it damps down immune reactions, several doctors said.

That does not, however, make it useful for preventing infections, as [some have] implied it would be, because it has no known antiviral properties.

Several antivirals, including remdesivir, favipiravir and baloxavir, are being tested against the coronavirus; the latter two are flu drugs.

Trials of various combinations in China are set to issue results by next month, but they will be small and possibly inconclusive…

[ We Will Need International Cooperation ]

A public health crisis of this magnitude requires international cooperation on a scale not seen in decades. Yet [the president] is moving to defund the W.H.O., the only organization capable of coordinating such a response.

And he spent most of this year antagonizing China, which now has the world’s most powerful functioning economy and may become the dominant supplier of drugs and vaccines. China has used the pandemic to extend its global influence, and says it has sent medical gear and equipment to nearly 120 countries [including the United States]….

“If [the president] cares about stepping up the public health efforts here, he should look for avenues to collaborate with China and stop the insults,” said … an economic historian… [A doctor added:] “What if they come up with the first vaccine? They have a choice about who they sell it to. Are we top of the list? Why would we be?”

Once the pandemic has passed, the national recovery may be swift…

The psychological fallout will be harder to gauge. The isolation and poverty caused by a long shutdown may drive up rates of domestic abuse, depression and suicide.

Even political perspectives may shift…. In the periods after both wars, society and incomes became more equal. Funds created for veterans’ and widows’ pensions led to social safety nets, measures like the G.I. Bill and V.A. home loans were adopted, unions grew stronger, and tax benefits for the wealthy withered.

If a vaccine saves lives, many Americans may become less suspicious of conventional medicine and more accepting of science in general…

 

Something Joyful for a Change

Posted on by

Maybe I should put different kinds of things on this blog. Maybe I will. But with our ongoing crisis — I don’t mean the virus, I mean You Know Who in the White House — it’s hard to feel like anything else is ever worth mentioning.

So I was killing time on YouTube this morning and their algorithm(s) suggested one of those “Listening to Something for the First Time” videos. The idea is that someone who has never heard a song that’s familiar to some of us, or most of us, hears that song for the first time and immediately gives their reaction. Often, it’s a song an older generation knows very well. Or it’s music the person in the video wouldn’t be expected to appreciate.

I’ve never watched one of these videos all the way through. But the one that popped up today was a young black man hearing the Beach Boys’ “Don’t Worry, Baby” for the first time. I was a little worried that he’d think it silly or old-fashioned (it’s from 1964) or that he’d view some of the lyrics as dumb. It is, after all, a combination love song/car song — the guy being in love with his girl, and worried about a drag race — that, in my opinion, is wonderful, even sublime.

Check out his reaction:

About the song.

A Man Without Qualities

Posted on by

Well, I’ve had the virus, been hospitalized and am now very, very happy to be back home, seeing sunshine again.

In a hospital bed, you have a lot of free time. Hanging around; waiting for your next meal (Saint Barnabas’s simple offering of a plain, almost juiceless cheeseburger, a side of macaroni and cheese, steamed broccoli and a brownie was almost sublime); being visited every so often by hospital staff, well-guarded and unrecognizable deep inside their personal protective gear; them giving you “just a little pinch”, checking your vital signs or asking about your current state of affairs; being given that anti-malaria drug for a while apparently for no good reason; “wearing” that silly “gown” that won’t stay on; dozing off; occasionally losing an electrode; wondering when the hell you will get out of there.

I didn’t turn on the TV in the eight days I was there. (Nor, after they moved me to a double room, did my roommate, who was in worse shape than I was.)

I did look at news on my phone. It wasn’t good.

Aside from the obvious, the thing that got me the most was how people who have power or cultural significance are being so nice and respectful to the monster child.

Of course, they do point out his deficiencies. Larry David quoted in The New York Times:

You know, it’s an amazing thing. The man has not one redeeming quality. You could take some of the worst dictators in history and I’m sure that all of them, you could find one decent quality. Stalin could have had one decent quality, we don’t know!

Fran Lebowitz in The New Yorker:

Every single thing that could be wrong with a human being is wrong with him.

Tom Nichols in The Atlantic:

[He] is a spiritual black hole.

But have you ever seen a quote in which someone demanded that he resign? The acting Secretary of the Navy said something very bad and was quickly hit with demands to go. He left. Why not call on the worst president in our history to go too? If someone is so totally and dangerously unfit for a job, shouldn’t our political and cultural leaders have demanded his resignation, over and over again?

I know, the Electoral College put him there and (of course) odds are he wouldn’t go. Nevertheless, it’s remarkable how his resignation never comes up in our national conversation.

Another aspect of his benign treatment that especially bothered me (from my prone position) was (and still is) the daily “briefings” he’s been doing. I don’t know which organizations are part of it, but he’s allowed to spew and blather, unfiltered, to America whenever he chooses. It is truly outrageous. They broadcast his rallies from beginning to end during the 2016 campaign. Now they’re repeating the offense with these mini-rallies. He promotes himself, attacks and attacks, lies, spreads nonsense and they’re allowing him to do it. He is the president, but that makes it worse, since he speaks to some of us with authority. It is amazingly reckless that they’re letting him do it.

It’s a beautiful spring day here in New Jersey from an aesthetic perspective. Governor Murphy reports we’re at 58,000 cases, with 7,600 hospitalized, 1,700 in critical condition and 2,200 dead.

Please be safe and be kind.