Visiting Column #36 -- Raspberries and Baseball

Deep as we are into the 2020 presidential campaign, it feels like a good time for a laugh-at-myself story.  Actually, it always feels like a good time for one of those, so let's go ahead and do a short one today.

Back in 1979, I was the product manager for a medical electronic instrumentation company.  My product, not that it is relevant to the story, was a computerized coronary-care unit monitoring system.  The company had a demonstration model that I could have shipped to a hospital, set up in a CCU and stay with it for a week or so to show how it worked.

Accordingly, I traveled a lot, and that was before the days of airline points, unfortunately.

So this one time, I was in Montreal for a week.  The hospital was the ancient Sacre-Coeur, and I was there to set up and speak to the nursing staff, despite my lack of facility in French of any kind.  By the time I left, I was able to make a credit-card or collect phone call in French, but otherwise all I could do was steal a few relevant phrases from Singing Nun songs where possible.  I'm serious.

Generally, these trips were in support of the local sales rep for the company.  In this case, the rep was a fellow named "Jed" Jedrychowski.  Jed was from Poland, but had lived in Quebec for a long time, and spoke excellent English along with the French that was spoken routinely in his home by his wife and kids.  I really liked Jed, and appreciated that he invited me to his home a time or two -- not all the sales reps realized that life on the road was pretty lonely for the product manager.

Back then, as today, I loved to read baseball books.  I wasn't as picky then, because with all the plane flights and meals alone, I had a lot more time and needed a lot more books, even the pap biographies.  But some books were excellent, and I especially loved "The Summer Game", which I mentioned in a piece a few years ago (https://uberthoughtsusa.blogspot.com/2015/08/the-greatest-writer-of-two-centuries.html).

The book was the work of the great writer Roger Angell, who will turn 100 in September.  It was a compilation of the first ten years (1962-1971) of his baseball articles for the New Yorker magazine, and a showcase of his brilliance as an observer, and his mastery of written English.  I happened to be re-reading The Summer Game during that trip, so it was fresh in my mind.

One of the articles I'd just read was about the first season of the Montreal Expos, which had started in 1969 as the first Canadian major-league team.  Angell had a mildly jocular take on the whole thing, visiting a doubleheader at Montreal's Jarry Park, and writing about a few events, with inserted French to try to take the reader through the "new" French-Canadian fan's view.  This, for example, about the start of the second game:

"The second partie started just as dishearteningly, with the visitors scoring three points on three coups surs in the first, but matters improved electrifyingly in the second, when the Expos pulled off a triple play (line drive to Bob Bailey, au premier but, who stepped on the bag to double up an occupant Cardinal and then flipped to l’arret-court, Bobby Wine, who beat the other base-runner to second)."

I didn't speak French, then or now, but I didn't need to; the context was more than sufficient to convey the meaning of the words.  But then came this passage from later in the game narrative, which stumped me:

"When the gerant, Gene Mauch, came out to relieve his willing but exhausted young starter, Mike Wegener, he got the framboise from the fans."

"Framboise"?  What does that mean?

This was 1979, mind you, long before the common use of the Internet.  So while I had wondered, on reading it (at 30,000 feet), what that word could possibly mean in that context, it was not the instant information-gratification era, and so I didn't think to look it up.  It wasn't after all, that important.  I could have called my Dad, who spoke French and 4-5 other languages, if I had thought about it.

But here I was in Montreal, with the book fresh in my mind, when Jed and I were walking down a hall at Sacre-Coeur Hospital.  He was probably chatting with me about something or other, when it struck me that he, a Polish-Canadian who spoke fluent French, could clarify Angell's phrasing for me.

Of course, I had to explain the context to him.  I could have just asked him what "framboise" meant, but as my wife always says, I go by way of Kansas City in explaining things, so I told Jed the whole story, that Angell was sticking French words into a baseball story, and then gave them the line and asked him, in that phrasing, what the word referred to.
 
We were still walking down the hall in the hospital when I asked.  Long hall. Jed looks at me strangely.  He was not a big pro sports guy then, but even with that this was clearly an odd usage for him.

"Framboise?", he said.  "That doesn't make sense.  It is like, ah, 'strawberry' ..."

"Raspberry!!", I shouted.  Immediately I realized I was in a quiet zone of a foreign hospital and had just shouted a word that had no medical purpose.  At that moment I was in the doubly embarrassing situation of having shouted in a quiet zone in a hospital, and had a guy looking at me oddly, with no clue as to why the word "raspberry" (A) had any meaning in baseball, and (B) was in any way funny enough for me to shout in the aforementioned quiet zone.

"It's really 'razzberry', Jed", I explained, "It just means booing or making an offensive sound like they do at a ball game.  They were booing the manager for pulling the pitcher out.  Comes from Brooklyn, where they make all kinds of sounds, if that helps."

It probably didn't help, and it certainly didn't adequately explain to Jed why I thought it was so funny.  But either way, it didn't affect our friendship any, and though it is over 40 years since that time, I still have a visceral reaction when I see a raspberry.

I'll get over it, I promise.  Some day.

Copyright 2020 by Robert Sutton
Like what you read here?  There are over 1,000 posts from Bob at www.uberthoughtsUSA.com, and after four years of writing a new one daily, he still posts thoughts once in a while as "visiting columns", no longer the "prolific essayist" he was through 2018, but still around.  Appearance, advertising, sponsorship and interview inquiries cheerfully welcomed at bsutton@alum.mit.edu or on Twitter at @rmosutton