Paul Sassone

Do you know what pitcher in 1959 struck out 18 Cubs in nine innings? Do you know which White Sox player holds the record for being hit by a pitched ball during a single season?

I don’t. But Rick would. And Randy and Tom and Howard.

They talk baseball, a language in which I am not fluent.

Oh, I know the rules, watch baseball on TV or at the ball park and I played sandlot ball as a kid. I can do baseball. I just can’t talk it, which is a handicap for an American male.

To be a real American man, to truly fit in, you have to be able to talk sports, particularly baseball. Baseball lends itself to talking because it is a sport that lives and breathes statistics. And statistics are comparisons, how one thing is better than, or relates to, another, how one player or team is better than, or relates to, another. And this is the stuff of conversations.

I know, I’ve been listening to these conversations — mostly friendly arguments, really — all my life.

Over lunch at work, Rick and Randy and Tom and Howard would debate the merits of the 1964 Yankees or the 1986 Phillies. I’d smile, nod and lift a forkfull of stuffed pork chop into my baseball-ignorant mouth.

I never could memorize sports stats. I never really tried. I guess I never had the interest or saw the benefit. Yet, I could give a detailed plot synopsis of each of the four operas in Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen.”

Alas, my interests always have been in such areas as classical music, literature and history. And come on now, would a bunch of guys on lunch break want to hear how Alberich stole the gold from the Rhinemaidens? Or would they really want to debate which of Dickens’ novels is the best?

So, you see in some ways I always have been an isolato, to borrow one of Melville’s coined words … . See, there I go again!

But maybe, just maybe, I have discovered a way to be one of the boys. I have discovered how to talk sports, how to talk baseball.

Sort of. Do you know anything about the Fat Men’s Baseball Team? Well, I do.

Organized by the Fat Men’s Amusement Co. of Waterloo, Iowa, the Fat Men’s Baseball Team toured the Midwest during the early 20th Century. The club played against teams with players of regular size and sometimes teams with very short or very tall players. For example, the team played “a base ball struggle” against a team of tall players called the Thicks vs. the Thins on Aug. 21, 1913.

And statistics? You want statistics?

The team’s catcher was named Baby Bliss. He weighed 640 pounds. Other team members were Frank C. Knee, manager, 450 pounds; Earl Holm, 350 pounds; Wolfgang Schmidt, 426; E.J. Sheehan, 390; M.V. Hinds, 400; Charles P. van Luven, 375; Finley Howrey, 325; J.R. Brownett, 370.

Total weight of team estimated at 3,735 pounds. But, as the Hull Index, an Iowa newspaper noted, the team “will steal bases and slide as gracefully as men of more moderate avoirdupois.”

But not everyone was amused by the amusement company’s team, nor by some traveling women’s teams,

A Sept. 24, 1910 article in the Milwaukee Sentinel headlined “Baseball Travesties,” declared, “Baseball is too great a game to travesty. These exhibitors that go about the country posing as baseball players because of some physical defect or because they represent a sex generally not concerned with the actual playing of baseball, ought not to be patronized …”

Such games, the article continued, “ought to be prohibited in some manner, if not by baseball rule, then by statutory provision.”

OK, Rick, Randy, Tom and Howard. I can now discuss baseball. Want to have lunch?

(Oh yes, the pitcher who struck out 18 Cubs was Sandy Koufax. The Sox player most hit by pitches was the late Minnie Minoso.)