Patterns Plus

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Baseball's Hot Dogs

Jim Kaplan

Baseball, the game of inches, requires precision performance and intense concentration.

Do grandstanding arid posturing constitute unfair psychological interference? In this definition of hot-dogging, Jim Kaplan presents some expert opinions on the question.

Henderson is baseball's foremost "hot dog"—and his repertoire is 3 so varied and controversial that his employers have actually put pressure on him to modify his style. This spring, the Yankees proposed banning Henderson's famous "snatch," a one-handed catch in which he snaps his glove down like a teacher scrawling a semicircle on a blackboard and finishes with it pressed to his heart.

"They said, 'Rickey, the only snatch you can make is the last out 4 of the World Series/" explained Henderson, adding that he thought he could still get away with it on occasion. "I want to show I can do more than catch. I want to show I can catch. To me, the snatch isn't hot-dogging; it's style. People say I'm a hot dog. What is a hot dog?"

Good question. "A hot dog is someone whose actions put down 5 someone on another team," says Doug DeCinces, the former majorleague third baseman now playing for Tokyo's Yakult Swallows.

"Hot-dogging is unnecessarily calling attention to yourself," adds 6 Roy Smalley, the well traveled former American League infielder.

But there's another point of view: that hot-dogging is flair and zest, 7 the very ingredients that make baseball so entertaining on the air or in person. Hot dogs contribute to baseball science, strategy and style. Some hot dogs show off; others motivate themselves; still others intimidate the opposition; most are entertaining.

Henderson may qualify on every count. "I never try to put anyone 8 down," he says. "I take my time getting into the box because I'm thinking of the pitches I'm going to get." But he knows only too well the effect his apparent stalling has. Even as imperturbable a pitching pro as the now-retired Tom Seaver got so flustered that he had to turn his back on the mound until Henderson had set himself to hit.

"Rickey has always played with flair," says Milwaukee manager 9 Tom Trebelhorn, who handled Henderson in the minors. "When he played for me, he drove the other side crazy. Now he drives me crazy."

National League managers echo those sentiments about the San 10 Francisco Giants' Jeffrey "Hac-Man" Leonard, who showcased his trademark "flap down" home-run trot (one arm pinned to his side) four times during the 1987 League Championship Series.

"[One flap down] is entertaining, a guy having fun," the unflappa11 ble Leonard has told reporters. "Anything that provides energy gets me up. Like Muhammad Ali, we'll bring out the best in our opponents, and that'll make us better."

Oh, there are many kinds of baseball hot dogs—kosher and other12 wise. Cleveland's Mel Hall used to round the bases with a batting glove in each back pocket arranged to flap "bye-bye." He has since contained his act. But there's no containing Dennis "Oil Can" Boyd, the Boston Red Sox pitcher who celebrates good fortune by variously high-fiving and low-fiving teammates, waving to the crowd, doing clenched-fist "out" calls and Michael Jackson struts, and snapping his fingers as he walks off the mound.

Oil Can (the nickname is Mississippi slang for beer can) grew up 13 playing with older men who had starred in the Negro leagues. "I had

a lead-off hitter who drag-bunted with the bat behind his back," says Boyd. "My fielders would turn [the double play] by throwing the ball between their legs. A first baseman named Bud Moore said to throw to him in the dirt so he could pick it and look good. When I punched [struck] a guy out, I'd say, 'Get outta here—next guy up.' To hot-dog was the way to play."

TV may be the biggest boon to hot-dogging since the invention of 14 mustard. Midway through the 1982 World Series, St. Louis pitcher Joaquin Andujar was struck on the leg by a line drive and carried off in apparent agony. NBC sportscaster Bob Costas raced down to the

dugout expecting to report on a broken leg. The Cardinals made faces and winked at him. "Television time," they were saying. Sure enough, Andujar returned to pitch and win the final game.

"These days there are fewer characters but more character-acting," 15 says Costas. "You can almost choreograph your own moment, and the camera will do the rest."

Questions About the Reading

1.What is a hot dog? Fashion your own definition, based on the essay and your personal opinions.

2.What is the difference between catching and catching (paragraph 4)? Why does Henderson want to show that he can catch?

3.What do you think the writer's opinion of hot-dogging is? Does he offer any conclusions about it?

Questions About the Writer's Strategies

1. What two similes does the writer use in his description of Henderson?

2.Identify the subjective elements in this essay.

3.What primary mode does the writer use to develop his definition?

4.What is the tone of the essay? What type of audience do you think the essay is aimed at?

Writing Assignments

1.Write an essay in which you define some other behavior in which people use different styles or about which they have various opinions, like flirting, arguing, dancing, or even walking. Try to talk to people about the behavior and use dialogue in your definition, as Kaplan does.

2.Write an essay defining the term essay. (Put this book aside and don't refer to it for help in composing your definition.)

Defining Success / Michael Korda

315

Defining Success

Michael Korda

Michael Korda has written several books with the intention of helping people get the most out of their work and their lives. The titles of his books tell you exactly what he has in mind for you—Power! and Success! But before he can tell you (as the subtitle of his first book puts it) "how to get it, how to use it," he wants to be sure you understand what it is. In the first chapter of Success! he presents this controversial definition.

Words to Know

conglomerate a business corporation made up of many different companies

degenerate decrease in quality or size grandiose large, great

relative determined in relation to something else superseded taken over, replaced

unethical lacking in honesty or principles

U t h e r s may ask how you define success. This is more difficult. Sue- •

. cess is relative; not everybody wants to put together a four-billion-dol- lar conglomerate, or become President of the United States, or win the Nobel Peace Prize. It is usually a mistake to begin with such grandiose ambitions, which tend to degenerate into lazy daydreams. The best way to succeed is to begin with a reasonably realistic goal and attain it, rather than aiming at something so far beyond your reach that you are bound to fail, it's also important to make a habit of succeeding, and the easiest way to start is to succeed at something, however small, every day, gradually increasing the level of your ambitions and achievements like a runner in training, who begins with short distances and works up to Olympic levels.

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to be dishonest, brutal or unethical in order to succeed, but a great many dishonest, brutal or unethical people in fact do succeed. You'd better be prepared for the fact that success is seldom won without some tough infighting along the way. A lot depends on your profession, of course. There is a great deal of difference between setting out to become a success in a Mafia family and trying to become vice president of a bank, but the differences simply consist of contrasting social customs and of what is the appropriate way to get ahead in a given profession or business. Whether you're hoping to take over a numbers game or an executive desk, you have to make the right moves for your circumstances. In the former example, you might have to kill someone; in the latter, you might only have to find ways of making your rivals look foolish or inefficient. In either case, you have to accept the rules of the game and play to win, or find some other game. This is a book about success, after all, not morality. The field you go into is your choice, but whatever it is, you're better off at the top of it than at the bottom.

Questions About the Reading

1.What does the writer say is the best way to succeed?

2.What does the writer mean when he says to "think of success as a journey, an adventure, not a specific destination"? Does this sentence in any way contradict what he says is the best way to succeed?

3.What does Korda mean by his statement "Morality has very little

to do with success"?

4. What does Korda suggest you do if you have to violate your moral standards to achieve success in your field?

Questions About the Writer's Strategies

1. Does the writer actually define success? If so, identify the sentenced) in which he does so.

2.What is the main idea (thesis) of the essay?

3.What are the tone and point of view of the essay? Why should we consider the writer an authority on success?

4.Do you believe that how a person becomes a success is that person's business only? Why or why not?

Writing Assignments

1. Korda focuses on success in terms of people's professions, but people can be professional successes and personal failures. Write an essay in which you define success in terms of a person's life.

2.Write an essay in which you define one of the following terms: competition, cooperation, or ambition. Give several examples. Develop a paragraph for each example.

3.Write an essay defining morality. Use whatever modes of development seem appropriate.

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Chapter 9 /

It's Failure, Not Success

Ellen Goodman

Not everyone agrees with Michael Korda's "get-what-you-can" mentality (see

248-250). Ellen Goodman found herself getting more and more disturbed as she read Korda's words to live by. She was certain there must be more to the truly successful Ijf

So she wrote her own definition of success and applied another term, failure, to the self serving life Korda described. Do you agree with Korda or with Goodman?

Words to Know

ambivalence simultaneously having different feelings or attitudes

bigot an intolerant or prejudiced person edits cuts out, does away with

excised removed

Fanny Farmer author of a well-known cookbook finesses glosses over

intent determined

judgmental having an opinion about something, criticizing it

Machiavellian having political principles that are based on craftiness and doing anything necessary to get ahead

machete-ing using a machete or heavy knife napalm a firm jelly used in flame throwers and

incendiary bombs

placebo a substance given as medication that does not contain actual medication

J. knew a man who went into therapy about three years ago because, as he put it, he couldn't live with himself any longer. I didn't blame him. The guy was a bigot, a tyrant and a creep.

In any case, I ran into him again after he'd finished therapy. He was still a bigot, a tyrant and a creep, but... he had learned to live with himself.

Now, I suppose this was an accomplishment of sorts. I mean, nobody else could live with him. But it seems to me that there are an awful lot of people running around and writing around these days encouraging us to feel good about what we should feel terrible about, and to accept in ourselves what we should change.

But he simply finesses the issues of right and wrong—silly words, 10 embarrassing words that have been excised like warts from the shiny surface of the new how-to books. To Korda, guilt is not a prod, but an enemy that he slays on page four. Right off the bat, he tells the would-be successful reader that:

•It's OK to be greedy.

•It's OK to look out for Number One.

•It's OK to be Machiavellian (if you can get away with it).

•It's OK to recognize that honesty is not always the best policy (provided you don't go around saying so).

•And it's always OK to be rich.

Well, in fact, it's not OK. It's not OK to be greedy, Machiavellian, 11 dishonest. It's not always OK to be rich. There is a qualitative difference between succeeding by making napalm or by making penicillin.

320 Chapter 9 / Definition

There is a difference between climbing the ladder of success, and ma- chete-ing a path to the top.

Only someone with the moral perspective of a mushroom could as- i2 sure us that this was all OK. It seems to me that most Americans harbor ambivalence toward success, not for neurotic reasons, but out of

a realistic perception of what it demands.

Success is expensive in terms of time and energy and altered beha13 vior—the sort of behavior he describes in the grossest of terms: "If you can undermine your boss and replace him, fine, do so, but never express anything but respect and loyalty for him while you're doing it."

This author—whose Power! topped the best-seller list last year—is 14 intent on helping rid us of that ambivalence which is a signal from our conscience. He is like the other "Win!" "Me First!" writers, who try to make us comfortable when we should be uncomfortable.

They are all Doctor Feelgoods, offering us placebo prescriptions in15 stead of strong medicine. They give us a way to live with ourselves, perhaps, but not a way to live with each other. They teach us a whole lot more about "Failure!" than about success.

Questions About the Reading

1. What does the writer mean when she says, "he leapfrogs over the 'Shoulds' and into the 'Hows'?"

2.What is the "qualitative difference between succeeding by making napalm or by making penicillin?"

3.What is the "moral perspective of a mushroom"? Does Korda have such a perspective, in your opinion?

4.What does success demand that makes Americans ambivalent about it? What is it about Korda's brand of success that should make us uncomfortable?

Questions About the Writer's Strategies

1.What is the writer defining in this essay?

2.Does the essay contain a thesis statement? State the thesis in a sentence of your own. What is the function of the first four paragraphs of the essay?

3.Does the writer indicate that she is being subjective? If so, how?

4.Find a simile in paragraph 10. What is its effect?

Writing Assignments

1.Write an essay defining failure.

2.Write an essay defining generosity or kindness.

3.Write an essay in which you define something by saying what it is not. Possible topics might include fishing ("Fishing is not a pastime for the impatient . . ."); voting ("Voting is not a chore, nor is it a spur of the moment act. . ."), writing ("Writing is not as hard as it seems, and it should not be threatening..."); winning or losing; or being rich or poor.

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What Is Intelligence, Anyway?

Isaac Asimov

Many of us think that intelligence is something one is simply born with, or that it has to do iviih doing well in school or scoring highly on IQ tests. But did you ever stop to think about what IQ tests really measure? In the essay that follows, Isaac Asimov asks us to rethink our definition of intelligence.

Words to Know

aptitude ability

arbiter someone who has the power to judge complacent self-satisfied

intricate elaborate KP kitchen patrol

oracles people able to foresee the future or make prophecies

raucously loudly

•

Questions About the Reading

1. What does the writer mean when he says, "My intelligence, then, is not an absolute but is a function of the society I live in?"

2.What distinction does the writer make between being educated and being smart?

3.Do you think the repairman is smarter than the writer? Why or why not?

Questions About the Writer's Strategies

1.What mode of development does the writer use in paragraphs 5 and 6? What is the purpose of these paragraphs?

2.Does the writer actually define intelligence? If so, state his definition in your own words. If not, explain why not.

3.In paragraph 6, the writer says he made the scissoring motion "indulgently." What does this tell you about his attitude toward the joke? Why is his attitude ironic?

4.Does the essay contain a thesis statement? If so, where is it located? If not, state it in your own words.

5.Is the repairman a symbol? If so, what does he represent?

Writing Assignments

1.Imagine a society in which intelligence is measured by how well people can work with their hands and fix machinery. Write a definition of intelligence for that society.

2.Write an essay defining the term joke. Use examples to illustrate your definition.

3.Pick one of the following concepts and define it in an essay: beauty, truth, wisdom, or quality.

Migraines

Joan Dtdion

For people who have never experienced one, it is difficult to understand what a migraine headache is. In the following essay, taken from The White Album, Joan Didion defines migraines, explains their causes and cures, and tells how she has learned to live with them.

Words to Know

aphasia inability to speak cerebral of or related to the brain

contraindications indications that something is inadvisable

contretemps embarrassing incident convalescent healing

debility weakness

euphoria a feeling of well-being

histamine a substance used to dilate, or enlarge, the blood vessels

incapacitating disabling

lobotomy surgery to cut nerves in the brain predisposition a tendency or inclination vascular of the blood vessels

yoga a Hindu discipline

X hree, four, sometimes five times a month, I spend the day in bed with a migraine headache, insensible to the world around me. Almost every day of every month, between these attacks, I feel the sudden irrational irritation and the flush of blood into the cerebral arteries which tell me that migraine is on its way, and I take certain drugs to avert its arrival. If I did not take the drugs, I would be able to function perhaps one day in four. The physiological error called migraine is, in brief, central to the given of my life. When I was 15, 16, even 25, I used to think that I could rid myself of this error by simply denying it, character over chemistry. "Do you have headaches sometimes? frequently? never?" the application forms would demand. "Check one." Wary of the trap, wanting whatever it was that the successful circumnavigation of that particular form could bring (a job, a scholarship, the respect of mankind and the grace of God), I would check one. "Sometimes," I would lie. That in fact I spent one or two days a week almost unconscious with pain seemed a shameful secret, evidence, not

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merely of some chemical inferiority but of all my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers, wrongthink.

For I had no brain Junior, no eyestrain, no high blood pressure, 2 nothing wrong with me at all: I simply had migraine headaches, and migraine headaches were, as everyone who did not have them knew, imaginary. I fought migraine then, ignored the warnings it sent, went id school and later to work in spite of it, sat through lectures in Middle English and presentations to advertisers with involuntary tears running down the right side of my face, threw up in washrooms, stumbled home by instinct, emptied ice trays onto my bed and tried to freeze the pain in my right temple, wished only for a neurosurgeon. who would do a lobotomy on house call, and cursed my imagination.

It was a long time before I began thinking mechanistically enough 3 to accept migraine for what it was: something with which I would be living, the way some people live with diabetes. Migraine is something more than the fancy of a neurotic imagination. It is an essentially her reditary complex of symptoms, the most frequently noted but by no means the most unpleasant of which is a vascular headache of blinding severity, suffered by a surprising number of women, a fair number of men (Thomas Jefferson had migraine, and so did Ulysses S. Grant, the day he accepted Lee's surrender), and by some unfortunate children

as young as two years old. (I had my first when I was eight. It came on during a fire drill at the Columbia School in Colorado Springs, Colorado. I was taken first home and then to the infirmary, at Peterson Field, where my father was stationed. The Air Corps doctor prescribed an enema.) Almost anything can trigger a specific attack of migraine: stress, allergy, fatigue, an abrupt change in barometric pressure, a contretemps over a parking ticket. A flashing light. A fire drill. One inherits, of course, only the predisposition. In other words I spent yesterday in bed with a headache not merely because of my bad attitudes, unpleasant tempers and wrongthink, but because both my grandmothers had migraine, my father has migraine and my mother has migraine.

No one knows precisely what it is that is inherited. The chemistry 4 of migraine, however, seems to have some connection with the nerve hormone named serotonin, which is naturally present in the brain. The amount of serotonin in the blood falls sharply at the onset of migraine, and one migraine drug, methysergide, or Sansert, seems to have some effect on serotonin. Methysergide is a derivative of lysergic acid (in fact Sandoz Pharmaceuticals first synthesized LSD-25 while looking for a migraine cure), and its use is hemmed about with so many contraindications and side effects that most doctors prescribe it only in the most incapacitating cases. Methysergide, when it is prescribed, is

Migraines / Joan Didion

327

taken daily, as a preventive; another preventive which works for some people is old-fashioned ergotamine tartrate, which helps to constrict the swelling blood vessels during the "aura," the period which in most cases precedes the actual headache.

Once an attack is under way, however, no drug touches it. Migraine 5 gives some people mild hallucinations, temporarily blinds others, shows up not only as a headache but as a gastrointestinal disturbance,

a painful sensitivity to all sensory stimuli, an abrupt overpowering fatigue, a strokelike aphasia, and a crippling inability to make even the most routine connections. When I am in a migraine aura (for some people the aura lasts fifteen minutes, for others several hours), I will drive through red lights, lose the house keys,, spill whatever I am holding, lose the ability to focus my eyes or frame coherent sentences, and generally give the appearance of being on drugs, or drunk. The actual headache, when it comes, brings with it chills, sweating, nausea, a debility that seems to stretch the very limits of endurance. That no one dies of migraine seems, to someone deep into an attack, an ambiguous blessing.

My husband also has migraine, which is unfortunate for him but 6 fortunate for me: perhaps nothing so tends to prolong an attack as the accusing eye of someone who has never had a headache. "Why not take a couple of aspirin," the unafflicted will say from the doorway, or "I'd have a headache, too, spending a beautiful day like this inside with all the shades drawn." All of us who have migraine suffer not only from the attacks themselves but from this common conviction that we are adversely refusing to cure ourselves by taking a couple of aspirin, that we are making ourselves sick, that we "bring it on ourselves." And in the most immediate sense, the sense of why we have

a headache this Tuesday and not last Thursday, of course we often do. There certainly is what doctors call a "migraine personality," and that personality tends to be ambitious, inward, intolerant of error, rather rigidly organized, perfectionist. "You don't look like a migraine personality," a doctor once said to me. "Your hair's messy. But I suppose you're a compulsive housekeeper." Actually my house is kept even more negligently than my hair, but the doctor was right nonetheless: perfectionism can also take the form of spending most of a week writing and rewriting and not writing a single paragraph.

But not all perfectionists have migraine, and not all migrainous peo- 7 pie have migraine personalities. We do not escape heredity. I have tried in most of the available ways to escape my own migrainous heredity (at one point I learned to give myself two daily injections of histamine with a hypodermic needle, even though the needle so fright-

ened me that I had to close my eyes when I did it), but I still have migraine. And I have learned now to live with it, learned when to expect it, how to outwit it, even how to regard it, when it does come, as more friend than lodger. We have reached a certain understanding, my migraine and I. It never comes when I am in real trouble. Tell me that my house is burned down, my husband has left me, that there is gunfighting in the streets and panic in the banks, and I will not respond by getting a headache. It comes instead when I am fighting not an open but a guerrilla war with my own life, during weeks of small household confusions, lost laundry, unhappy help, canceled appointments, on days when the telephone rings too much and I get no work done and the wind is coming up. On days like that my friend comes uninvited.

And once it comes, now that I am wise in its ways, 1 no longer fight 8 it. I lie down and let it happen. At first every small apprehension is magnified, every anxiety a pounding terror. Then the pain comes, and

I concentrate only on that. Right there is the usefulness of migraine, there in that imposed yoga, the concentration on the pain. For when the pain recedes, ten or twelve hours later, everything goes with it, all the hidden resentments, all the vain anxieties. The migraine has acted as a circuit breaker, and the fuses have emerged intact. There is a pleasant convalescent euphoria. 1 open the windows and feel the air, eat gratefully, sleep well. I notice the particular nature of a flower in a glass on the stair landing. I count my blessings.

Questions About the Reading

1. When the writer was younger, why did she lie about the frequency of her headaches?

2.Explain the meaning of the last sentence in paragraph 3.

3.Why is the writer grateful that her husband also suffers from migraines?

4.How has the writer learned to cope with her migraines?

Questions About the Writer's Strategies

1. What is the predominant mode of development used to define migraines?

2.Does the writer actually tell what a migraine headache is? If so, locate the sentences in which the definition appears.

3.Identify the simile used in paragraph 8, and explain what it means.

4.The writer switches from the first person 7 in paragraph 4. What person does she switch to? Why does she do this?

Writing Assignments

1.Write an essay defining an everyday ailment from which you sometimes suffer, such as the common cold or the flu.

2.Write an essay defining the term coping, using an extended example from your own life, like a medical condition, a physical handicap, the death of a loved one, or a significant failure you have experienced. (If you cannot think of an example from your own life, perhaps you could draw your example from a friend's life.)

3.In an essay, describe perfectionism. Include at least three examples of the forms it can take.

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Chapter 9 / Definition

What Is a Drug?

Andrew Weil and Winifred Rosen

The topic ofdrugs raises strong emotions in most people. But what do we mean by a drug?

Is chocolate a drug? How about salt? In the following essay from Chocolate to Mor- phine:UnderstandingMind-ActiveDrugs,AndrewWeilandWinifredRosenquestion ourbeliefsaboutdrugs.

Words to Know

adhere stick to

arbitrary determined by whim and not by reason

1VJ. ost people would agree thayieroin is a drug..It is a white powder 1 that produces striking changes in the body and mind in tiny dosesj But is sugar a drug? Sugar is also a white powder that strongly affects the body, and some experts say it affects mental function and mood as well. Like heroin, it can be addicting. How about chocolate? Most people think of it as a,.food or flavor, but it contains a chemical related to caffeine, is a stimulant, and can also be addicting. Is salt a drug? Many people think they cannot live without it, and it has dramatic effects on the body.

A common definition of the word drug is any substance that in srrull 2 amounts^produces significant changes in the body, mind, or bothj This definition does not clearly distinguish drugs from some foods. The difference between a drug and a poison is also unclear. All drugs become poisons in high enough doses, and many poisons are useful drugs in low enough doses. Is alcohol a food, a drug, or a poison? The body can burn it as a fuel, just like sugar or starch, but it causes intoxication and can kill in overdose. Many people who drink alcohol crusade against drug abuse, never acknowledging that they themselves are involved with a powerful drug. In the same way, many cigarette addicts have no idea that tobacco is a very strong drug, and few people who drink coffee realize the true nature of that beverage.