Archive for April 7th, 2006

Making It In the Bigs

2

glasscastle - April 7, 2006 @ 9:12 pm · Sports

First man up, our Cuz, Scott Feldman. Now, it is rare
enough to find a Jew in professional sports, let alone a Feldman in major
league baseball.  According
to Jewish Major Leaguers,
there are only 13 Jewish players currently on major league rosters, including
Scott and three Red Sox: Adam Stern,
Gabe Kapler and Kevin Youkilis They may be shorthanded Wednesday night,
first day of Passover.

But it was the first time we had seen our own last name
plastered across the back of a real Major League Baseball uniform, in
a game, on the mound. We had a slight but not altogether unpleasant
sense of unreality. Could this guy be the first Feldman to reach the
Show?

We whipped out our cell phone and called our father,
known in his youth as Small Facts Feldman. Had there ever, in the 130
years of major league baseball, been a player named Feldman?

Sure, Small Facts advised, there was Harry Feldman,
a right handed pitcher for the New York Giants in the 40′s. We looked
it up, and there he was; Harry played six seasons in the bigs, ’41-’46,
and compiled a 3.80 ERA over a diabolical career spanning exactly 666
innings.

But old as we are getting, that was before our time,
and during the ensuing 60 years there was nary a Feldman to be found.
Until last year, when Scott burst on the scene. He only has 12 innings
pitched so far, but sports a gaudy 1.50 ERA and is looking good, so far.

Coincidentally, one of the most popular Dowbrigade postings
of all times (How
Jews Got Their Names) concerns the origins of many
popular Jewish surnames.

The chances we are actually related to Scott or Harry
(or Marty) are slim.  Feldman
was a "boat name" adopted by thousands of Eastern European Jewish immigrants
during the last great wave of immigration, 1890-1910, mostly by folks
who wanted America-sounding last names, but didn’t want to abandon their
easily identifiable Jewishness. Nevertheless, we feel a pleasant fraternal
pride when we read "Feldman" across that broad back on the mound.

MLB player page for Harry

MLB player page for Scott

Dowbrigade All Name Team

2

glasscastle - April 7, 2006 @ 2:16 pm · Sports

The
always interesting New England Patriots have presented the Dowbrigade
with a difficult dilemma.  We had almost resigned
ourself to the rude realization that our attempt to compete in the ESPN
Fantasy Football League with an "All-Name" team was a misconceived and
doomed experiment from the start, and well-consigned to the dustbin of
brilliant ideas, idiotically implemented. And then, the Patriots had
to go and convince Martin
Gramatica to come out of retirement.

The idea behind the "All-Name" team is that over the
years, we have become regularly convinced (usually around the time of
the NFL college draft), that we can predict which kids are going to have
long and productive pro careers JUDGING BY THEIR NAMES ALONE! Some players,
we had noticed, just had football names, names we could see, in our mind’s
eye, emblazoned in headlines on the sports page, or scrolling, ticker-style,
across the bottoms of CRT and plasma screens across America.

Honestly, we asked ourself, could Bronko Nagurski, Dick Butkus, Larry Csonka, Tedy Bruschi, Bart Starr, Joe Montana, Lynn Swann
or Jack Youngblood (all Hall-of-Famers) have done anything OTHER than
play professional football.

So, in the preseason draft for our little, 10-team league,
our team, the H20town
Ids, would draft only players with solid, hard-hitting
football names, and easily win the division. That was the plan, anyway.

Unfortunately, by draft time, at 8:00 on a late summer
Saturday night, we were already deeply under the influence of a combination
of doctor-prescribed
and herbal remedies for the grab-bag of aches and afflictions from which
we occasionally suffer, and as a result our picks were more capricious
than coldly lexical. That is, instead of picking the players with the
best "football" names, we were picking the ones with the weirdest, funniest,
oddest or most difficult to pronounce names.

For example, our quarterback was Daunte Culpepper, and
right away we were in trouble. We breathed a sigh of relief when he was
finally knocked out of action in mid-season and we were free to choose
a replacement from among the dregs that none of the nine other owners
thought
worthy
to carry on their rosters. Our other selections included: T.J. Houshmandzadeh,
Antwaan Randle El, Muhsin Muhammad, Mewelde Moore, Keyshawn Johnson and
Jay Feely. (roster
here)

But the players we really lusted after, lexically speaking,
were the Gramatica brothers, Mart