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Nine super innings: DC Superstars #10
BuckBokai was going to do a full-on review of a highlight in science-fiction sports literary history, namely the lead story of DC Super Stars #10 (1976), but the issue has proved elusive to download and more importantly has been amazingly critically analyzed by Comic Treadmill back in 2005 and recently by Baseball Prospectus, so we’ll refer you to those links.
If you haven’t been lucky enough to experience the life-changing greatest of DC Comics finally living up to their “Strange Sports Stories” franchise in form, this epic is based on an argument between the simply awesome Sportsmaster and the Huntress. This couple makes a bet stemming from a dispute in which the Huntress maintains that the bad guys never win (she must have been hip to the Comics Code Authority of Earth prime, eh?) and thus set up a superheroes vs. supervillians match.
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What if, Babe? A review of Harry Turtledove’s “The House that George Built”
Nowhere do the seemingly mutually exclusive entertainments of sport and science-fiction come closer than in that simple musing question “what if…?”
In sport, the question is often lamentably formed of second-guessing the decision of manager, general manager, umpire or player. To wit:
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“Lineup for Yesterday” by Ogden Nash
For no good reason other than this stuff should probably be recorded – and it’s public domain – here’s “Lineup for Yesterday,” an abecedarian poem by Ogden Nash written in 1949. Nash celebrates the greats from days of his youth in the clever, easy style that so drove his popularity through to his death in ’72.
You gotta love the lines on Walter Johnson and Bobo Newsom…
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The (E)X(ley)-Files: Reviewing “The Unnatural”
Obviously aliens: Josh Exley…
Those familiar with the exploits of super-secret government agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully can recall that scripts mostly consisted of a load of unlikely lines and in-references poorly delivered by the principals. “The Unnatural” is happily at least half an exception here, a standalone episode with the presence of Mulder and Scully kept to a minimum via means of a frame-story device; David Duchovny directed this one and actually incorporates some nice visual touches linking the two eras of the story.
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Joe Bauman and Josh Gibson: Real-life inspirations for Josh Exley
Upon viewing and reviewing the X-Files season six episode, “The Unnatural,” BuckBokai thought it only right to give a couple of baseball history’s more unfortunately obscure names their due: Namely, Joe Bauman and Josh Gibson.
The protagonist of the X-Files episode is one Josh Exley, a player for the Negro League’s “Roswell Grays” in 1947. The “Roswell” bit recalls Bauman, a longtime minor-league player in the lower minor-league levels for teams in Oklahoma, Texas and New Mexico. In a career interrupted by World War II, Bauman became a local attraction known for jacking long home runs wherever he played.
But 1954 was something special for baseball fans, if only the truly arcane-loving. Playing for the Roswell Rockets, Bauman torched extant home run records when he hit 72 dingers to go with a .400 batting average, 150 walks and an unbelievable 228 RBIs – in 138 games. Bauman’s homer mark stood for 47 years, until Barry Bonds topped it in 2001. Bauman, still living in Roswell, was quoted as saying that he never “thought it’d last this long, to be honest. I was watching on TV when [Bonds] hit that last one. It didn’t bother me or anything.”
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Superheroes Playing Sports is Gallery Of Awesomeness
Heads up on the online find of the week: Check out the excellently-named fan art website Bam! Kapow! for a frackin’ awesome gallery they just had to call “Superheroes Playing Sports.”
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