what's that in my brain?

Hank Aaron: A new book out about him -- The Last Hero, by Howard Bryant.
(Pantheon)
The New York Times Review of Books features a piece by the Review's editor, Sam Tanenhaus, telling about Hero.
I may never get to read the book, but this review is lovely -- good reading.
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Calling Bryant's book "illuminating and rigorously researched" Tanenhaus writes,
"Baseball's true golden age appears, increasingly, to have been the 1950s and '60s, decades of change that left many fans fearing the game was being taken away from them or becoming something they scarcely recognized. The innovations have been well documented, and often lamented: the franchises that deserted New York and its scruffy urban pastures for the shiny lure of California; the dwindling number of afternoon games, played in weekday heat, in favor of televised night contests, with their floodlit lunar glare; the decline of the multitiered farm system and its flavor of the county fairground."
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When reading this review, I came across names and I felt surprised that I KNEW them. I'm not a follower of baseball -- neighbor kids and I played in back yards when I was between the ages of 9 and 13. I vaguely remember baseball cards -- did the neighbor guy have them? Boys at school? My cousins? And I don't even remember if my father watched baseball games on TV. If he did, I don't remember it.

Yet the names in the article were all comfortably familiar. I'm like, "Sure! I know that name -- yeah, heard of him, too!" -- Hank Aaron; Ty Cobb; Jackie Robinson.

Satchel Paige; Willie Mays; Joe DiMaggio; Mickey Mantle; Babe Ruth. Even a baseball commissioner -- Bowie Kuhn -- somehow his name was even familiar to me. Really have no idea why. Some thoughts, ideas, names seep into our consciousness through the culture and our surroundings. Our family, church, school, cook-outs.

And the arts covered baseball, too. "Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?" Simon and Garfunkel sang in "Mrs. Robinson" (in movie, The Graduate). I was so amused to read, upon DiMaggio's passing, that he'd been very irritated by that line in the song, demanding, "What do they mean by that? I haven't gone anywhere!"

And there's that poem about Babe Ruth; I can remember Willie Mays having a guest appearance in an episode of "Bewitched" that I saw in re-runs; and in old black-and-white movies, there are often witty (and sometimes snarled) comments about the Dodgers leaving Brooklyn -- an awareness forms, even if you didn't pursue the knowledge.

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