XWord Muggles Forum

Any guesses who Willie's boyhood baseball hero was? Incidentally, here's Willie's song.

Al Sisti wrote: ↑Sun Mar 14, 2021 7:34 pm Any guesses who Willie's boyhood baseball hero was? Incidentally, here's Willie's song.

Joe D.

oldjudge wrote: ↑Sun Mar 14, 2021 3:19 pm Paul Simon is an avid Yankee fan who grew up idolizing Mickey Mantle. He wanted to use Mickey Mantle in Mrs Robinson but the syllables didn’t work so he went with Joe D.

Simon got lucky. I think Joe D works better with the "Where have you gone" idea for the reasons I stated in my previous comment. Mantle was a great ballplayer, but not much of a cultural hero.

Agreed, he was a cultural icon. Connie Mack, the HOF manager who was around baseball from the 1880s through the mid-1950s called DiMaggio the greatest player who ever lived. Ted Williams, DiMaggio’s long time rival said: “DiMaggio was the greatest all-around player I ever saw. His career cannot be summed up in numbers and awards. It might sound corny, but he had a profound and lasting impact on the country”. DiMaggio had aura about him. World leaders sought his friendship.

“ In the early days, the idea that the day might come when I would sit in the owner’s box next to Joe DiMaggio would have seemed beyond even America’s capacity to fulfill dreams. Yet that is what happened, starting in the 1970s, proving America’s ability to make the impossible come true.”—-Henry Kissinger

The trouble with songs about Say Hey and Joltin’ Joe and most other baseball heroes is that they are just not very good songs. The best baseball songs have nostalgia at the core, like “There Used to Be a Ballpark Field,” made famous by Sinatra, written by Joe Raposo. (He also wrote “C is for Cookie.”) The song is explicitly a piece of nostalgia, and baseball is just a part.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OYLkum6nGM

The lyric of “Van Lingle Mungo” consists entirely of the names of baseball players from the forties and fifties, including 65A. Dave Frishberg, who wrote it (he also wrote “I’m Just a Bill”), first recorded it in upbeat version with a small band accompaniment. The version that he did years later brought out the nostalgia element; it’s a much better interpretation. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nKzobTlF8fM

Frishberg did something similar in "Dodger Blue" but with all LA Dodgers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Srj0eMDQgAs

"But I must have confidence and I must be worthy of the great DiMaggio who does all things perfectly even with the pain of the bone spur in his heel."

Ernest Hemingway, The Old Man and the Sea

Today is solution day. The theme answers were:

24A: Tim Raines
33A: Roy Halladay
44A: Jimmie Foxx
59A: Honus Wagner
65A: Early Wynn

As suggested by 77D, they are all in the Hall of Fame. The title, the dates next to the theme clues, and 1A indicate that the we should focus on who received the highest percentage of the vote for HOF election in the year that each of these players was elected. In the order above that would be Jeff Bagwell, Mariano Rivera, Mel Ott, Ty Cobb and Sandy Koufax. The first letters of their last names spell BROCK. Lou Brock was a HOFer, but alas was not the highest vote getter in 1985, the year he was elected. That distinction went to knuckleballer HOYT WILHELM, the meta answer. Congratulations to all solvers and my apologies to those in the group who are not sports fans.

Absent the like button,