I did manage to catch some of the baseball All Star Game last night. When I heard the news yesterday morning about former Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, I had to smile at the timing. Back in his heyday in the 1970s and 80s, if the Yankees didn’t make it to the World Series in a particular year Steinbrenner would always pull some stunt right in the middle of the series (fire his manager, berate his team captain, whatever) to steal the headlines away from the teams still playing for the championship. So of course the man would pass away on the day of the All Star Game, assuring that all the coverage would focus not on the mid-season classic, but on the Boss.

Yankees’ fans clearly held the man in great affection. As a Twins’ fan and therefore a congenital Yankees’ hater, I generally despised him and everything he stood for as a baseball owner. But as several tributes I’ve read point out, wouldn’t it have been great to have a Twins’ owner as committed to winning as Steinbrenner was with the Yankees? Anyhow, I imagine he is up in heaven now (or, given the Damn Yankees thematic here, down there below), trying to rehire Billy Martin.

The very odd Nagoya sumo tournament got underway Sunday. Something like a quarter of the wrestlers in the top two divisions are suspended or banned due to the gambling/yakuza scandals, and NHK has gotten all holy about this and is refusing to televise the bouts live. Yokozuna Hakuho will no doubt take the title, as usual–on Tuesday he broke his own personal record of 32 consecutive wins. But with so many of the usual faces sitting this one out, the tournament should generate some unusual results. For starters, it’s a terrific opportunity for lower ranked wrestlers to leapfrog up the rankings.

Other than that, what have we been up to? Last Saturday night, we headed downtown to catch the Grant Park Orchestra play a free concert in Millenium Park under the energetic baton of female conductor Xian Zhang. We liked the program very much, as did Tribune critic John von Rhein and Sun-Times critic Andrew Patner. They played a piece by the contemporary composer Chen Yi, Prokofiev’s “Suite from Love for Three Oranges,” and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2 in D Major. Didn’t mind the raindrops or the firetruck sirens hardly at all. It must be summer.

The rains came back, delaying the start by nearly two hours. First pitch, scheduled for 7:10, wouldn’t take place until 8:51. But I didn’t mind much: I love just sitting in a ballpark, and the crowd was mostly in a jovial mood. It was Polish-American Culture Night on the South Side, and a local folk dance company entertained us on the big screen as rain continued to fall. Through the marvels of cell phone technology, our 14-year-old located a classmate sitting two sections over. It continued to be hot and steamy: the rains didn’t pack enough fury to knock the humidity out of the air, but rather added to it. As you’ve probably heard, it’s been a little hot in the northern U.S. the last few days….

As usual with baseball, the little quirks are what stand out in memory: watching the grounds crew before the game deal with the infield tarp, which had ponded over with several inches of water in places, for example. Or seeing Polish-American former Yankee star Bill “Moose” Scowron (and his tiny tow-headed granddaughter) throw out the ceremonial first pitch. They showed the Twins-Blue Jays game on the big screen through the rain delay, and I had to check my natural instinct to cheer when Minnesota scored (everyone around me booed, of course).

When the baseball finally got underway, Jake Peavy pitched for the Sox against Jered Weaver for the LA Angels. Our youngest is an Angels fan, so to bug her I started cheering for the White Sox (as a born Minnesota Twins fan, this took some effort). The Sox started the scoring early: Juan Pierre led off the bottom of the first with a double, stole third, and then trotted home on an Alex Rios sacrifice fly.

In the top of the 2nd, in the middle of Mike Napoli’s at-bat, Peavy started walking toward the White Sox dugout immediately after releasing a pitch. He stopped at the foul line, turned back toward the pitchers mound, but then halted again. Something was wrong. Manager Ozzie Guillen came out to check on him, and quickly Peavy resumed walking toward the dugout. They announced several innings later that he had strained a muscle in his back.

Tony Pena took over pitching duties for the home team. We enjoyed seeing Torii Hunter, one of our favorites since his Minnesota Twins days, hit three singles, the first two barely leaving the infield. It felt odd to watch Matsui Hideki wear a Los Angeles uniform: in my mental geography, he will always belong to the Yankees.

We stayed long enough to see Rios blast a home run to left field in the bottom of the sixth, giving Chicago a 2-1 lead. As always, they lit off fireworks behind the scoreboard in center to celebrate the homer. By then it was after 10:30 p.m. and our youngest had summer school in the morning, so we headed for the parking lot. We listened on the radio as Andruw Jones hit his 399th career home run in the seventh, giving the Sox a 4-1 lead. The drive back to Hyde Park took exactly one inning, and I watched the eight and ninth on television in the comfort of our air-conditioned family room. Chicago won, 4-1.

I have tickets to see the Phillys and Cubs at Wrigley a week from Friday. No more rain, please. And, as long as I’m putting in my weather requests, is a nice Canadian cold front too much to ask for?

Sad news from Los Angeles re the passing of legendary basketball coach John Wooden. One of the pleasures of teaching at UCLA in the late 1990s and early 2000s was that every once in a while you would walk past the great man on campus, still quite spry in his 90s. “Don’t give up on your dreams,” he once said, “or your dreams will give up on you.”

Kan Naoto, the new Prime Minister of Japan, was actually our local Diet representative when we lived in Fuchu-shi in western Tokyo from 2005-2007. We used to see posters of his face all around the neighborhood at election times. And now I live just a few blocks from the residence of the current President of the U.S. Apparently, I am fated to haunt the neighborhoods of power….

Finally, here’s a lovely new feature on one of the last Kinks’ music videos, “Lost and Found” (1987). A rarely seen clip based largely on Ray Davies’ cinemaphilia, it takes up a lovely, melancholic tune, and the folks at the Kast Off Kinks website have tracked down several people involved in filming the video. Be sure to check out the video and the interviews there, but for now let me leave you with another video of the Kinks ‘performing’ the song ‘live’ in a late 1980s television appearance:

Let me trace it back to a week ago tonight. I (or whomever it was) caught the Ike Reilly Assassination in concert at Lincoln Hall. Shooter Jennings (Waylon’s boy) opened with a surprising paranoid set of Southern-fried prog-rock-country, and then Ike and his band took the stage. His parents were in the house, he announced, and it was all in all a fine show. Shooter came on stage to perform the wonderful duet, “The War on the Terror and the Drugs,” included on Ike’s most recent album. If you haven’t heard it yet, stop whatever it is you are doing immediately and click on the following video:

The next day was my anniversary, and we celebrated by watching our daughter play Lucy in a middle-school production of “Snoopy! The Musical.” Our offspring performed wonderfully well, and the show itself is great fun, including complex ensemble songs like “Edgar Allan Poe” (see video from another production below) and “Clouds.”

On Saturday afternoon, I was at the Joffrey Ballet, taking in “Eclectica,” their spring program: Gerald Arpino’s 1971 piece, Reflections, plus two world premieres: Jessica Lang’s pretty awesome Crossed , a meditation on religion and spirituality in which the dancers duck around large moving stage sets, and James Kudelka’s Pretty BALLET, also quite striking. One reviewer calls it “the most intellectually engaging Joffrey program in recent memory.” Call me engaged.

I then jumped into the car and drove to Sparta, Wisconsin, where I spent the night in a dive motel that shall remain nameless. Only the sheets have been changed to protect the innocent. The next morning, I drove up the Mississippi River to Stockholm, Wisconsin, to pick up some of my mother’s paintings for a new retrospective exhibition. I’d forgotten how pretty that part of the country is. I spent the rest of the day tracking down more paintings for the show across central Minnesota — Edina, St. Paul, North Branch.

Monday morning I helped set up the exhibit in the Art Gallery at Lakeview Hospital in Stillwater, Minnesota–where my mother, my sister, and I were all born. It’s a wonderful collection of 14 of my mother’s best works, many of which haven’t been shown publicly for years. It will be open through June 29, and there are new prints and cards of my mother’s paintings for sale in the hospital gift shop. Details on hours and how to get there can be found here.

Monday evening found me at Target Field, the new home of the Minnesota Twins. While ingesting far too much animal protein, I watched my favorite baseball team clobber the Detroit Tigers. Wilson Ramos, the Twins’ fine young catching prospect, got three hits in his second Major League game, this after he collected four the night before in his debut, thereby setting a new rookie record and sending Twins’ fans into a mild frenzy. It’s a fine new ballpark, too, with many thoughtful details, inside and out. I didn’t mind the raindrops that fell intermittently through the evening, not one bit.

Tuesday, I drove back to Chicago, picking up along the way our oldest from his dorm to haul him home for summer vacation after his freshman year at college. Then yesterday I helped host the great historian Harry Harootunian for a couple of very stimulating talks here at the University of Chicago. The day ended at a restaurant in Chinatown, with good food and lively talk with our visitor and several colleagues.

After all that, I woke up this morning and looked in the mirror, and it was me again. Welcome back, and don’t forget to turn off the lights when you leave again.

“A lot of people have to thank him. We made a lot of money because this guy had the guts to cross the barrier and do what he did.”

Minnesota Twins’ second baseman Orlando Hudson has stirred up a hornets’ nest (well, more accurately, he made a fairly mild statement which the media did its best to use as a stick to prod a swarm of angry hornets) by pointing to the continuing relevance of race in Major League hiring decisions. It’s not the superstars that are the issue here: they get contracts no matter what their skin color. It’s the marginal players, the bench-warming pinch hitters and bottom-of-the-bullpen pitchers, where you can most clearly see this.

The most intelligent response I’ve seen to Hudson’s remarks so far comes from the terrific blogger “Twins Geek” (John Bonnes), who writes:

It’s legitimate to debate the degree which race bias might play when predominantly white front offices evaluate free agents like [Jeremy] Dye and [Gary] Sheffield. It may be significant, or maybe it isn’t. But before that conversation takes place, we need to welcome people, ballplayers included, that raise the issue. We need to recognize that biases exist, and not construct straw dogs that can be easily torn down. We may not get to the truth, but we’ll at least raise some awareness, and on this day, sports fans should be all about awareness.

Check out Bonnes’ whole post here — it’s well worth your while.

This all brings back to mind the best thing I’ve ever read on the subject: former major leaguer John Poff’s remarkable essay, “Donnie Moore: A Racial Memoir.” Originally published in 1995 in Elysian Fields Quarterly (Vol. 14, No. 1; ordering information here), Poff’s memoir provides a remarkably frank, self-reflective account of how for a ballplayer in the 1970s “the consciousness of race pervaded everything in a baseball locker room.”

If you played with or against black ballplayers, you became friends possibly and you might share concerns, values, dope, and yet in all your conversations there was the ongoing subliminal buzz–you’re black, you’re black, you’re black.

Written in the wake of Donnie Moore’s tragic death in 1989 (Moore shot his wife and then turned the gun on himself), Poff gives us a powerful, honest reflection, including of the ways that players of all ethnicities use racism as a tool for acquiring a competitive edge. The impact of racial stereotypes in sports is in fact incredibly complicated and, as both Bonnes and Poff note, we won’t get anywhere in understanding it if people aren’t allowed to raise the issue.

Some interesting science and technology news that’s caught my eye lately:

The lunatic notion that genetic codes found in nature can be patented is finally facing skeptical court scrutiny, the New York Times reported last week. For the sake of culture and scholarship, we really need to curb the voracious appetite for infinitely expanding intellectual property claims, and this seems a modest step in the right direction.

Are the problems faced by scientists trying to gear up the Large Haldron Collider actually the work of a Terminator sent from the future in a desperate attempt to head off an unwelcome scientific development? The possibility has been suggested in a series of recent scientific papers, Time magazine reports.

Finally, a whole slew of new technological devices and digital scientific analytical techniques are being applied to baseball. The conclusion from statistical crunching of multi-angle digitized tracking of pitches over the course of an entire season? That good pitchers paint the corners, while bad ones hang it over the plate. Now they’re turning their attention to batters and defenders and will not doubt reach many revolutionary hypotheses, such as declaring that batters should try to hit the ball with the sweet spot of the bat and that fielders should try to catch the ball with both hands. Ah, the marvels of science.

In the meanwhile, play ball! The Twins kick off their season tonight in Anaheim.

It’s just as exciting as the spring of 1988. After our first World Series championship the preceding fall, Garrison Keillor reported in a classic New Yorker piece about how the team had spent the off-season doing volunteer work on a farm for troubled youth they established with their championship bonuses (see also here). Garrison also noted our front office had been busy that off-season:

Sent a couple in their mid-forties to the San Diego Padres in exchange for Duane (Madman) Mueller (29, 280 lbs., 6’2”, right/right, a.k.a. Mule, Hired Hand, The Barber). Duane is a big secret because after he was suspended by the Texas League for throwing too hard he played Nicaraguan winter ball for three years and then spent two more doing humanitarian stuff, so scouts forgot how, back when he was with the Amarillo Compadres, nobody wanted to be behind the plate, Duane threw so hard. His own team kept yelling, “Not so hard, Man!” If that sounded dumb, then you never saw him throw: he threw hard. A devoted Lutheran, he never ever hit a batter, but in one game a pitch of his nicked the bill of a batting helmet and spun it so hard it burned off the man’s eyebrows. No serious injury, but big Duane took himself out of organized ball until he could learn an offspeed pitch. He’s from Brainerd, Minnesota, where he lives across the street from his folks. His mom played kittenball in the fifties and had a good arm but not like her son’s. She thinks he got it from delivering papers and whipping cake mix. “I’d sure hate to have to bat against him,” she says.

I’m ready, man. Bring it on, folks, bring it on.

In the meanwhile, spring has arrived in Chicago (never mind those snowflakes falling outside the window as I write these words). I celebrate by listening to Minnesota Twins spring training games in the afternoon at my office. I’m pretty optimistic about the coming season, despite noises being made by local White Sox fans….

In the category, “It’s bloody well about time”: Universal betting on lower prices to boost CD sales.

Ray Davies continues to wow them on his current tour. MSN.com reports that “Ray Davies rules on second night of SXSW.”

The coming week should be a hectic one for me. I’m in Philadelphia on Monday and Tuesday for the NCC 3D conference, then up to Princeton for the “Rethinking ‘Hihyo’: Postwar Literary Criticism and Beyond” workshop, then back down to Philadelphia on Thursday for the 2010 AAS Annual Meeting.

I leave you with the late Alex Chilton. I saw him play with the reunited Big Star seven or eight years ago at Royce Hall on the UCLA campus. It was a joyous occasion, especially when they covered The Kinks’ “‘Till the End of the Day.” Ray Davies dedicated that song to Chilton in his performance at SXSW this week (where Chilton had been scheduled to play) and spoke from the stage about how Chilton had visited him in the hospital after he was shot in New Orleans. A great songwriter and a wonderful voice: so long, Mr. Chilton.

Even darker, this is the week we learned the Minnesota Twins may have to live without relief ace, Joe Nathan. There are some viable replacement candidates already on the roster, including the marvelous Pat Neshek, back after an injury-related break of nearly two years, and Francisco Liriano has been tantalizingly good so far. But the loss of Nathan has Twins’ fans literally offering up parts of their own bodies in hopes of resuscitating Nathan’s pitching arm.

On the bright side, I’m taking Satoko to see Ray Davies in concert tonight at the Riviera. The last show we saw by him here in Chicago, a little more than a year ago, was transcendent, and reports from previous gigs on the current tour are quite positive. Here’s a little taste of what’s in store for me:

Probably the biggest story going in to the basho is that, barring a miracle, this is almost certainly the last hurrah for the great Chiyotaikai. After two losing records in a row, he has lost his rank of ozeki. He can regain it with at least ten wins this time around, but that seems highly unlikely, and he’s promised to retire if he falls short. He’s always been a tsuppari-style fighter, battering his opponents with powerful arm thrusts, but in the last year or so his blows have lost their sting. According to reports from Japan, his training was going pretty well until about a week ago, when he injured his arm. It will also be interesting to see if ozeki Kotooshu or sekiwake Baruto are able to make their move up to the next level, but in both cases we’ve been waiting for that moment for some time now. I’m not holding my breath.

In the “think spring” category, the recent retirement of pitching great Randy Johnson has led to an interesting tribute over at The Hardball Times: a word cloud of the names of all the batters Johnson struck out over the years, with font size reflecting the number of times each batter has whiffed at Johnson’s pitches. And I leave with you some nice old video of Chiyotaikai in better days, knocking off Asashoryu in an exciting match to clinch the March 2003 tournament championship.