Mangled Forms | Woodstock Times - February 19, 2008

Mangled Forms - John Thorn

As a youngster, growing up in the Midwest, I played and loved baseball.  When I left home, I did what 90% of former baseball players do, I played when I could, but I devotedly followed the game.  In baseball, the fans love statistics.  Without the Internet, stats simply were not at our fingertips, so we dropped serious money on books.  Most fans had one of these three books:  1) The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, 2) The Baseball Encyclopedia, and 3) Total Baseball.  The latter was edited by John Thorn, the author of this essay.

John Thorn's best book, according to me, was co-written by Pete Palmer, called The Hidden Game of Baseball.  This book unveils new statistics and new ways of viewing and measuring how effective players really were and how they compare with modern (at the time of publication) players.  All very fascinating and somewhat wonkish, of course, but if you love baseball, you'll know what I mean.

Mr. Thorn has a column in the Woodstock Times called Play's the Thing.  He writes about sports and upstate New York.  Here he takes a look at Fleischmanns, New York.  The town, Griffith's Corners, was renamed for the Fleischmann brothers from Cincinnati, who built a ball field there.

Mr. Thorn reminisces about the town, where he lived as a kid, and looks at its history back at the turn of the 20th century.  He speaks of the grand hotels that served as summer getaways for the big city denizens who couldn't enjoy air conditioning (because AC didn't exist.)  The Catskills were cool and the air was clear in the heat of July.

The essay isn't overly touching or nostalgic.  Mr. Thorn uses a Stephen Hawking opinion on what a black hole does to matter, the mangled forms of the title, as a metaphor for what arson and time have done to Fleischmanns.  I understood the connection, though it was a stretch without visual evidence or words to help it resonate a bit more, but if it was meant to lure me to the Catskills, well, I might just go there.

After I swing by Cooperstown.