Baseball is America
A Child of Baseball
by
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The MBA program at University of Texas at Arlington would form an indelible and unwavering mark on my command center. It was all very good, the best experience I could have hoped for. Liberalism was conspicuously absent from the curriculum at the time except for understanding of Keynesian economics. It was rah, rah free-market capitalism all the way. Milton Friedman was an invisible giant whose ideology influenced the lecture bias. With respect to the most significant impression made on me in my area of concentration, marketing, I concluded that addictive behavior was a prerequisite for momentum sales volumes. Marketing, in effect, was a tool to emotionally manipulate the host into a thought pattern not normally explored through activation of both excess dopamine in the command center and oxytocin (the feel-good hormone). That revelation shocked me at the time. Edward Bernays, double-nephew of Sigmund Freud, knew this better than anyone earning him titles including The Father of Spin, The Father of Consumerism and The Young Machiavelli of Our Time. My real estate minor had a graduate research assistant position attached to it. Dr. Jack Friedman, who would later be the head of the Texas Real Estate Research Center at Texas A&M in College Station, was the professor I worked for. The task involved grading papers from undergraduate classes he taught, proofreading written text intended for publication in either his books or periodicals, and occasionally filling in as a substitute instructor for his undergraduate classes. Coincidentally, it was the other Friedman, Milton, arguably the Joltin’ Joe of economics, who would have the greatest effect on my thought process. The skinny on his philosophy was capitalism and democracy, working together in harmony, ensure personal freedom and efficiency, while too much government presence ensures loss of personal freedom and creates inefficiency, and it’s the businessman’s role to voluntarily exert social responsibility in business even if it means less profits. Both Goldman Sachs and Fox News contributor Tobin Smith should take note! Milton Friedman was a champion of laissez-faire in which events are allowed to take their own course without intervention; governments work best that govern least. The modern philosophy of “whatever works,” without social responsibility qualifiers, as promoted by modern progressives such as Donnie Deutsch, was foreign and toxic material to the Friedman thought machine. Friedman was an economic advisor to both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher; the heart of his teachings was his classic book Capitalism and Freedom: You have to have economic freedom in order to have political freedom. Friedman's economics requires leaders of moral character. Believe it or not, the MBA program at UTA stressed using one’s “conscience,” a.k.a. transformational ethics, to make ethical decisions. It was a time in American history when people actually had a conscience to use! As I completed the MBA program at UTA, I had the distinct impression that most Americans did not understand capitalism due to lack of education on the subject matter and that capitalism does not work in the absence of voluntary social responsibility. To a certain extent, competition forces social responsibility upon a business venture; however, transformational ethics, the ethics of conscience, must override profit maximization achieved through corrupt means. The force of political correctness was ground swelling across the Atlantic but hadn’t come ashore as of yet. That would occur in the eighties, when the radicals of the sixties were forced to get a real job, making real money. Social responsibility did not jibe with this group that would evolve into the yuppies, so instead of bombing the Pentagon, they created political correctness, which redefined the strike zone of social responsibility to be void of transformational ethics. Like a Richie Phillips-led umpire crew that invented their personal pet strike zone in ’78, political correctness would be the yuppies’ brand of social responsibility, allowing for greater operating latitude, a.k.a. liberalism. To control the process, many became business umpires, a.k.a. lawyers, so that they could make their own rules and control the strike zone location of acceptable behavior. In Judeo-Christian theology, ethical codes are actually called “laws.” A legalist is not an ethical man; he is merely a man of the law, of the letter, but not the spirit. Laws are effective in controlling behavior through punishment and reward, in which humans are degraded to “Darwin’s Pride” and treated like Pavlov’s dogs! Baseball, as a government-protected monopoly, has no direct competition. It is extremely difficult to preserve a position of substantial monopoly power without an assist from government. With no outside market influences to force baseball into the social responsibility arena, they were the model for voluntary behavior. Social responsibility and business law are separate subject matters. We learned that baseball, with it anti-trust exemption, was effectively a legal monopoly, government protected from competition. As an American icon, it was special. The reason that illegal drug use in baseball is such a big deal is due to its anti-trust exemption from the government, effectively making it a government-sponsored monopoly. Baseball has anti-trust laws to insure that it is lawful and abiding. And they blew it! They pissed all over their anti-trust indemnity.
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About the Book
BASEBALL IS AMERICA explores America's Favorite National Pastime and American culture through a trilogy of books: "A Child of Baseball" bats leadoff. Baseball, the belly-button of society, is a metaphor for America capturing both the heartbeat of its direction and reflection. An empirical account of the personal life experience of an amateur baseball “lifer” born into the 1955 Boys of Summer environment are shared. The journey begins with the 1894 birth of the author's grandpa, an attendee of the 1919 World Series; making stops in Bolshevik Russia, Nazi Germany, central Jersey, Oklahoma, Iowa, Minnesota, Texas, Louisiana and Florida. Through baseball, cultural issues including religion, race, drug underworld, American male character and family life are explored. The backdrop incorporates metaphorical pitch recognition of Karl Marx seasoning into the cultural sub-systems of the American superstructure and uses the Yankees and Reds to mark time in American history. The deeper subliminal message delivered posits Christian religion as a socialization tool that yields to the forces of secular socialization and derivatives thereof. The fallout distances America from Founding principles as a Constitutional Republic while redefining right and wrong into a metaphorical strike zone of nose-to-the-toes and wide. Synthetic enhancement, tenets of both Hitler and Stalin for superiority purposes, is traced through time in the baseball culture while implying that secular socialization has conditioned Americans to normalized cheating and scandal. Political correctness as a tool to fundamentally transform Americans into groupthink mentality as One Global Family governed by the New World Order is avoided. Symbolism, baseball-speak, numerology, simile, nickname, euphemism and metaphor applications create a thought provoking and intriguing word sleuth effect exploring topics deep down in places we don’t talk about at parties. Satire and cynical humor strategically integrated buffers acid discussion of controversial issues. The 500-page book consists of seven parts titled FAR AND AWAY, THE WAY WE WERE, DAMN REDS, THE WONDER YEARS, COWBOYS AND CALIFORNIANS, FIELD OF DREAMS and FOREVER YOUNG.
About the Author
Victor Alexander Baltov, Jr. is an empirical writer offering baseball views from a “natural” player’s perspective. Diamond time over six different decades was accumulated as an extremely competitive pitcher, center-fielder and shortstop. The author steps into the metaphorical batter’s box of chin music as a lone crusader in the quest to right a major wrong of society, normalized acceptance of cheating in baseball, in the vein of Curt Flood and free agency and Jackie and racism. Nicknamed “Balls” on his mid-70’s Cowboy baseball team, his ball playing experiences in the Garden State, Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana and Florida provide metaphorical field-level and game-speed perspective on culture war issues. Houston, an epicenter of synthetic ballplayers of all ages, was the stage for both later life senior ball as a player and youth ball as a coach. The author was a #1 overall draft pick as a pitcher in the same college league that the Rocket participated in and was not. He tallied just shy of 200 amateur mound victories against fewer that 60 defeats. Being an offspring of a Daughter of the American Revolution who worked in a high security position in the FDR administration and a father born into the Christian cleansing campaign known as the Bolshevik Revolution, his convictions are deep-seated with baseball viewed as a strike zone of Supernatural versus Marxian materialistic ideologies. Intimate knowledge of the sources of synthetic enhancement, the Hitler and Stalin regimes, exists. His father grew up under the harsh brutality of the Lenin/Stalin Communist regimes and fought in Operation Barbarossa during WW II against the Nazis and as a Polish Combatant fought against the Soviets and what they stood for as a rogue warrior. The personalities of the author’s university mascots, Cowboys and Mavericks and Dead Ball Era grandpa is reflected in his writings. His focus is on Founding principles with a value system weighting genuine experiences over material possessions. His personity is the epitome of the anti-Marx!