Immortals Do Die

Lew Burdette Dies at 80
Burdette would pitch in the Major Leagues for 18 seasons, going 202-144 with a 3.66 ERA. The bulk of career was spent with the Braves, though he also pitched for the Cardinals, Cubs, Phillies and Angels, including going 7-2 as a 39-year-old in 1966 for California. He was a two-time All-Star and the MVP of the '57 World Series.

[from Major League Baseball News]

Ironically, I happened to be cataloging a 1951 Three I League baseball I'm selling that comes from the Quincy Gems, a Yankees affiliate who were league champions that year. In looking up info on the Gems, I came across Lew Burdette's name--he was signed by the Yankees in '47 and was sent to the Three I League to the Quincy Gems. Burdette's record in Quincy was so impressive he was brought up to the Majors. He pitched his first season for the Yankees; Warren Spahn was on that team, too, but then Lew was traded to the Boston Braves, where he pitched uneventful ball for a couple of years until the Boston Braves became the Milwaukee Braves when the whole team caught fire in the middle '50s, when Lew had his best years, winning 20 games two years in a row, 1958 and 1959.

http://www.baseball-reference.com/b/burdele01.shtml

From 1956 to 1961, Lew won 114 games; he was MVP in National League 56, 57, 58, 59. Burdette was in two World Series, 57 and 58 against the New York Yankees, winning in 57, Lew was the MVP, and then losing the next year. After the 58 World Series, it would be 33 years before the Atlanta Braves finally got back in the World Series.

So old Lew Burdette is dead. There was nothing like watching the Milwaukee Braves in those days, with big Eddie Matthews and a guy named Hank Aaron hitting mighty homeruns and Warren Spahn and Lew Burdette led the majors in pitching--plus when the Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee, the Braves set a National League attendance record.... Goodbye, Lew.

I Had Meant to Write About Babble
Babble. I always assumed it came from the Tower of Babel (in Akkadian it’s bab-ilu (accent over the “a”) meaning “gate of god”) fable as spieled out in that great Jewish tome the Christians turned into their Holy Babel...oops, Bible in the grand Book of Genesis, said to have been written by Old Holy Moses himself (what’s this “book,” 20 pages? and what did Moses write it on? and where was Moses’s library? uh-oh, I’m reverting back to my days of reading Thomas Paine, especially his great piece of skeptic thinking, Age of Reason, in which he totally destroys whatever little reason there was for such a fabulous history in the first place—all, by the bye, woven from the ancient cloth of Mesopotamia myth.

[A The Daily Growler aside: There are now in Afghanistan daily suicide bombings all over the country; it is said Afghanistan before Georgie Porgie Bush decided it was the ‘cause of 9/11, even though there were no Afghanistanis involved in the attacks seldom if ever, even at the height of the struggle against the Soviets (where all of this actually comes from--why even Brother Osama was in Afghanistan; how the Taliban got control of the country—it takes more than growling to get at what’s happening to all of us these days—it takes going for the throat, going for the sure solution, dammit…WHEW. I gotta shake like a just-wet wolf---shake it out. I mean all of this bullshit is nervewracking. Reason tells you this is all done on cardboard—like a cartoon comes from being cardboard sketches early day painters used to get an idea of what their final canvas should look like—even when cartoons became comic strips they are done on cheap sheets of newsrag—newspaper paper is watered down cardboard…OK, I’m beating a dead horse.]

Babble is defined as “1 a: to talk enthusiastically or excessively b: to utter meaningless or unintelligible sounds” (from my good ole Webster’s Collegiate, 10^th edition). Aren’t words without definition—or even sentences without definition “unintelligible sounds”? Like a Christian preacher preaching—it’s the same as a dog wildly barking—you have to be able to define the babble of it all to get any point to their need of attention.

And it’s all about a need for attention. Why am I wasting so much of my valuable time posting this shit every day—and I’m up over 300 postings now—and they are beastly long postings, too; I’m so full of babble—“growling enthusiastically” and certainly perhaps excessively. [I suddenly have the urge to play the piano—tickling my plastic ivories into melodious babble.]

thebabblinggrowlingwolf
for The Daily Growler