Evil Umpires?

By John Leo

Although some Americans seem a bit skeptical about the news that Russians invented baseball, or lapta, as it has been known for the past 60 or 70 Soviet pennant races, the matter is old hat to knowledgeable fans. As Izvestia recently explained to its readers, Russian emigres brought their ancient national pastime to what is now California 200 years ago, with batters striking at a ball with a stick and fielders throwing the ball at opposition players to register outs.

The Russian origin of American baseball is a simple fact and a closed issue, but Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev, jocularly dubbed "Goose Glasnost" by the Professional Lapta Writers Association, has graciously allowed speculation on how the game actually got to America. Pravda believes it was stolen by a Marine guard at the U.S. embassy in Moscow who scurrilously wheedled details of lapta out of an unwary Russian cook during an evening of illicit and probably drug-induced lovemaking sometime during the mid-19th century.

Another school of thought holds that the game arose in the 10th century and was brought to America by one of the earliest people's explorers, Eric the Red, who is said to have founded a team named for himself in what is now Cincinnati. Other equally respected laptologists maintain that the spirited game evolved from the famous sporting rides of the cossacks. In this view, games occurred spontaneously on the Russian steppes, with peasants hurling stones up at the fabled horsemen in attempts to achieve outs, while the free- swinging cossacks were responsible for most of the offense. The amazing success of the cossacks, who often went undefeated for decades at a time, is sometimes cited by Izvestia as proof that polo as well as baseball originated in sports-minded Russia.

This pro-cossack school generally aligns itself with Izvestia's West Coast theory of American baseball. In this opinion, the first American team was not the Cincinnati Reds but the Los Angeles Engels, named for the wealthy crony who liked to toss the lapta around with Karl Marx, the first great theoretician of the game and the main reason why so many modern lapta stars have been nicknamed Lefty. Marx and Engels introduced the dialectical theory of lapta: the pitchers are always ahead of the hitters, and vice versa. Marx's classic one-liner about lapta, "Nice right-wing deviationists finish last," ranks with Lenin's famous admonition about the Russian psyche: "Anyone who wishes to understand the Russian soul had better learn lapta."

It is Stalin and his successors, though, who deserve credit for expanding the ancient national pastime from a merely local amusement to a truly global game. The historic postwar expansion brought coveted big league franchises to such deserving cities as Warsaw, Budapest, Havana, Prague and now even Kabul, where an all-rookie team of Afghan players altered traditional notions of defense by employing the first heat-seeking laptas during regular-season play. Much like the introduction of the corked bat and the designated hitter in the U.S., the Afghan innovation has clearly irritated a few hidebound older fans back in Moscow, who constantly demand that the commissioner "lower the mound" in mountainous Afghanistan to bring offense and defense back into classic balance.

Unlike capitalist versions of the game, lapta prohibits base stealing, since the bases belong to all the people and are not to be appropriated for individual use. Sacrifices, on the other hand, are encouraged and often occur even with no runners on base. Instead of left-, center- and rightfielders, the lapta outfield features two leftfielders followed around by a fleet fellow traveler, or occasionally a British free agent eager to play ball with the Russians.

Over the centuries, lapta has developed many colorful customs and expressions. For instance, a peasant with only one lapta in hand but with two cossacks bearing down on him was said to be facing a "fielder's choice." Third base has been known as the "hot corner" since the Minsk-Pinsk World Series of 1937, when a Pinsk third-base coach, who happened to double as a political-education instructor, peppered the Minsk third baseman with probing theoretical questions. Tragically, this led to the only fatality in big-time lapta. During the seventh game of the series, after uttering the ill-advised suggestion "Stick it in your ear, Comrade Coach," the luckless Minsk third baseman was dragged from the Cosmodome by large men in bulky suits, executed and later brought to trial.

Diehard lapta fans deeply resented President Reagan's recent remark about lapta's "evil umpires." In truth, umpires are so revered in the Soviet Union that players often call out, "Honor to the umpires!" and managers run out of the dugout to congratulate the men in black on successfully making difficult calls. This is because the umpires are scrupulously fair and usually have close relatives on the party's Central Committee.

They are also famous for appreciating a good joke. One was told by the famous star Lefty ("Babe") Jabov, who once hit 62 homers in a year, more than Ruth or Maris or other inferior Americans weakened by decades of debilitating capitalist exploitation of the toiling masses. After a called third strike, the fun-loving slugger turned to the beloved umpire and quipped, "But, comrade, Marx said that when workers controlled the means of production, there would be no more strikes!" The joke was considered so funny that Jabov was not jailed at all but merely sent down to the Siberian League for attitudinal readjustment.

As it happens, the slugger's younger brother Karim Jabov is a famous Soviet sports figure in his own right. Shortly after the Russian invention of soccer, the gangly Karim picked up a soccer ball and playfully thrust it back over his head into a potato basket hanging from the rafter of a people's barn. He thus simultaneously invented both the in-your-face reverse slam dunk and the entire game of basketball. Watch for the complete story in Izvestia.