Baseball as Religion: What's Left

      Neil Marshall became one of my favorite film directors with the release of his British Horror-action adrenaline feast, "Dog Soldiers".  If you've seen The Descent, Centurion, Doomsday, The Reckoning, the most recent Hellboy, or episodes of Westworld or Game of Thrones, you're familiar with the man's skillful work.  Soldiers  concerns a military unit, out on maneuvers, that encounter a hellish canine nightmare.  But Neil isn't all about werewolves, fisticuffs and gunfights, he has a heck of a knack for dialogue.  In one of cinema's all time great monologues, Sean "Albert Pennyworth from Gotham" Pertwee, unleashes a story of how one of the men in his former UK unit, deeply entrenched in Afghanistan, had decided to get a tattoo of Satan, ("Ol' Scratch himself") on his personhood.   This bloke, literally blown apart by an IED in the desert, left only one piece complete.  Yes, that "bit" with Beelzebub himself etched in his skin, remained in its entirety.  I'll leave what happens after this jolly piece of storytelling to your imagination, or your time in viewing it.  Because the exclamation point is artwork.

                                           

     One of the most stupid things that ever happened in the history of man was when Harry Dalton, who had built the 1982 World Series version of the Milwaukee Brewers, decided the way to fix the struggling 1983 version was to trade James "Stormin' Gorman" Thomas to the Cleveland Indians (Now the Guardians) for Rick Manning.  I still remember the news coverage of this blasphemous act, when Milwaukee News reporters found Gorman sitting in a Milwaukee pub, getting ripped, near tears, trying to dull the pain.  He, and The Brew City, were not a happy collective.

     This trade did not help the team one damn iota.  They weren't able to replace Gorman "in the aggregate" as Brad Pitt's Billy Beane puts it in Moneyball.  This is in reference to recreating the numbers of one Jason Giambi, who had been lost to the New York Yankees in free agency like everyone else in baseball who has a great final year of their contract.  (See:  Milwaukee Brewers' CC Sabathia).  Gorman's run production never came close to being consistently approached, actually.  The Brewers dovetailed into mediocrity, never to return until Ryan Braun and Prince Fielder led them out of the murk in 2008.  This card I have of Gorman,  I am pictured holding below, shows what he looked like in that bar interview, to a certain extent anyway.

        

Gorman bounced from Cleveland to Seattle, then back to Milwaukee for one final season, where he hit below .200 but flexed that legendary muscle with 10 more homers in limited at bats.  The organization and Gorman, a South Carolina native, never really separated, as Thomas is always around. He's often hanging about in front of Gorman's Grill at the former Miller Park, jawing with fans, chuckling, and signing autographs.  I did that with him myself one day.  Gorman and I had a nice conversation and he signed the bill of my Brewers cap. 

The next morning, I woke up, walked to the living room, and lying upon the floor was the decimation of that hat.  The remains of an assault from my German Shepherd puppy, was a collection of shredded blue, yellow, and gray fabric, cardboard, and plastic mesh.  

One piece remained.  About the size of a baseball, Gorman's signature fitting, in it's entirety, within that fragment. 

Neil Marshall would have been impressed.  It wasn't ol' scratch, but many pitchers of the 70's and 80's felt that Gorman Thomas and his incredible power, and ability to hit in the clutch, was the devil himself.

And Milwaukee still sees him as a baseball angel. Sort of a memory of a time when we captured, and oh, so briefly held the national baseball spotlight.