August 2018 - 32

Baseball and Bridge
BY AUGIE BOEHM

esides the catchy alliteration
of "B's" (old Yankee fans may
remember the jingle "Baseball
and Ballantine Beer"), there are
some interesting connections between
baseball and bridge. Today's ball game
and a session of bridge each last roughly three hours and are divided into
numerous segments, normally nine
innings for baseball and usually eight
to 12 rounds for a matchpoint session.
Each shares several meaningful terms,
e.g., grand slam, sacrifice, diamond,
club, signals, double, rubber and ace.
In the 1950s, Charles Goren visited
the Brooklyn Dodgers' clubhouse in
Ebbets Field. Bridge was the Dodgers'
favorite pastime during rain delays and
on the road, and Goren played some
deals with the ballplayers. He was
particularly impressed with the bridge
skills of pitcher Carl Erskine and
wrote about it in his regular column for
Sports Illustrated magazine, but we are
getting ahead of our story.
The early days of organized baseball
are divided into the "dead ball" and
"live ball" eras; the dead ball period
lasted until around 1920. The early
baseball, not so tightly wound, was dif-

32 Bridge Bulletin August 2018

ficult to hit for long distances, and the
game's strategies were directed toward
accumulating small advantages, e.g.,
bunting, stealing bases, advancing base
runners, basically playing for one run
at a time. Wee Willie Keeler claimed
his success as a batter was to "Hit 'em
where they ain't." Ty Cobb embodied
all the key elements of the dead ball era
- he hit for average (still the highest
lifetime), he stole bases with abandon,
and he used every aspect of gamesmanship at his disposal. Sliding spikes high,
intimidation was part of his arsenal.
For fun, let's separate bridge into
dead ball and live ball eras, the early
days and how the game evolved. The
bridge equivalent of dead ball is the
simple bidding and carding methods
of Culbertson and Goren. Perhaps
because of deficient methods that
caused lots of guesswork, many of
the top players of that era compensated by pursuing every psychological
advantage through gamesmanship and
intimidation. Favorite weapons were
sarcasm directed at the opponents
and sharp practices that Edgar Kaplan
dubbed "Old Black Magic." Kaplan
meant that in the days of rudimentary
bidding, many players compensated
for systemic gaps by using variations
in tempo and inflection. A cheery raise
from 1♠ to 2♠ might be as high as 10
or 11 points since limit raises weren't
in vogue; a sulky 2♠ bid matched
the bottom of the range. Fortunately,
for the safety of infielders, spiking is
no longer tolerated, and the conduct
and ethics of bridge have improved
enormously, recent cheating scandals
notwithstanding.
The beginning of the live ball era in
baseball coincided with Babe Ruth's

transition from pitcher, one of the best,
into a daily hitter, an immortal. A more
tightly wound ball made it easier to hit
home runs, and the advent of sluggers
swinging for the fences re-energized
the sport. In bridge, the transition to
"live ball" started in the late 1950s
with systemic bridge as advocated by
Kaplan-Sheinwold and Roth-Stone.
As baseball has developed more
sluggers, smaller ballparks, and better
conditioned athletes, the tape measure homer and the 100 mph fastball,
hallmarks of the modern game, have
captured the public's interest. In modern bridge, the equivalents are featherweight opening bids and hyper-aggressive preempts. They don't always
produce good results, but there's no
question that today's game contains
more thrills and chills, more precarious contracts, fewer partials.
Great bridge players of earlier times,
such as Norman Kay and B.J. Becker,
epitomized the ideal of winning by
avoiding errors. Becker was reported
to have said, "On one of my good days,
an opponent cannot beat me; he can
only tie." Nowadays, avoidance of error
has largely been replaced by going all
out to win boards. Modern bridge more
resembles Babe Ruth swinging for the
fences with a concomitant increase in
strikeouts rather than Ty Cobb choking up his grip, aiming for singles, able
to spray the ball to all fields. In today's
baseball, with the increased number of
home runs and strikeouts, fewer balls
are put in play. Due to overshift and
stacked defenses, many batted balls
become routine outs. The game is less
nuanced. Tennis with big dominant
servers tends to shorten rallies. Is
this more exciting or less? Probably,

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of August 2018