C6| Saturday/Sunday, February 29 - March 1, 2020 **** THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.
Banging
on trash
cans to
signal
pitches
is quaint,
but how
about
singing
show
tunes?FOR THE PAST FEW YEARS,
major-league baseball has exas-
perated fans and players alike
with its “analytics” fetish, bar-
raging the public with mysteri-
ous terms like “launch angle”
and “exit velocity.” That’s what
makes the Houston Astros’
goofy, juvenile, super-low-tech
sign-stealing scandal so re-
freshing. By noisily banging on
a metal trash can to let batters
know what pitch was coming,
the Astros returned baseball to
its sandlot roots. For this we
should all be grateful.
Just like smearing pine tar
or spittle all over a baseball, or
nicking the old horsehide with
a razorblade, the can-banging
scam was raw and primitivecoaches who want a leg up?
In tennis, coaches could send
secret messages to players by
replacing their sun visors with
a sassy beret or sticking pencils
in their ears. In football, the
use of unusually civil trash-talk-
ing is an obvious solution.
Rather than crudely question-
ing the quarterback’s lineage,
as players have done since time
immemorial, the middle line-
backer might say, “Gosh, your
mom Emmy Lou sure is a car-
ing, nurturing lady, Skipper,”
signaling to the cornerbacks
that a flea-flicker was coming.
Of course, he would know
that the flea-flicker was on the
way because somebody on the
sidelines armed with spyThere Must
Be Better
Ways to
Cheat at
Baseball
and in some
ways sweet. It
was cheating
the old-fash-
ioned way: not
by planting
sensors on the
player’s bodies
and relaying
signs via elec-
tronic stimuli,
but simply by
making a lot
of noise. There
was something innocent and
wholesome about cheating that
was carried out in such a hokey
fashion. It was the sort of thing
Tom Sawyer might do. Or Lori
Loughlin.
Cheating, of course, is not
limited to baseball. The New
England Patriots secretly taped
other teams’ practices and let
the air out of the visiting
team’s ball. Tennis coaches rou-
tinely use hand signals to ille-
gally coach players. Soccer is
nothing but choreographed
cheating to trick the refs into
awarding penalty kicks.
But now that there is such
an intense focus on finding and
punishing cheaters, what op-
tions are left for athletes andglasses had
noticed that
the quarter-
back always
stuck out his
tongue on
trick plays.
Despite
baseball’s cur-
rent war on
club-mandated
duplicity,
there is no
reason that
players have to resort to Morse
code or semaphores or teleki-
nesis or anything involving the
paranormal in order to cheat.
There are still ways to rig the
game without getting caught,
ploys that are very hard to de-
tect precisely because they
seem so innocuous. Or inane.
One possibility is for the en-
tire team to hum or whistle
show tunes to apprise the batter
of the speed of the next pitch.
For a fastball, the team could
whistle “Climb Every Mountain”
from “The Sound of Music”
while a slider would be identi-
fied via a stirring rendition of
“Master of the House” from
“Les Miz.” Show tunes aren’t
the team’s thing? The inspiringlyrics, “Allons, enfants de la pat-
rie” from “La Marseillaise”
could let the batter know that a
curveball was on the way.
Or skip the soundtrack in fa-
vor of normal conversation
containing a secret code. A
half-dozen Astros bellowing,
“Don’t you think Greta Gerwig
should have been nominated
for Best Director for ‘Little
Women?’” would be a warning
that a nasty two-seam fastball
was sailing right down Broad-
way. “Is that inverted yield
curve keeping you awake at
night?” would indicate that a
forkball was the next offering.
“Those who cannot remember
the past are condemned to re-
peat it” would transmit an un-
mistakable message: change-up,
68 mph, lower outside corner.
Something as basic as “Look
out! A tarantula!” could warn
that the high heater was com-
ing right for a batter’s noggin.
Admittedly, in the fullness of
time, the opposition might
eventually catch on to this chi-
canery. Then again, it took
three years before anyone any-
where noticed the Astros’
trash-can ploy. Rocket scientists
these guys ain’t. GREG CLARKEMOVING
TARGETSJOE
QUEENANW
hen writing be-
comes tough,
Louise Erdrich
likes to turn back
to family letters.
“We’ve always been a letter-writing
family,” the novelist explains, “and I
find in those letters joy and difficulty
and solace.” Two years ago, in the
throes of writer’s block, she began
reading her grandfather’s letters and
stumbled onto the idea for her next
novel.
Patrick Gourneau—or Aun-
ishinaubay, as her grandfather was
known in the Chippewa language—
was the tribal chairman of the Turtle
Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians
in North Dakota. In 1954, the year of
Ms. Erdrich’s birth, he was engaged in
a protracted fight with the U.S. Con-
gress, which was trying to break trea-
ties with Native Americans, revoke
federal recognition of Native Ameri-
can tribes and sell their land—a policy
known as “termination.” Researching
his time as tribal chairman felt “like a
holiday from writing,” says Ms.
Erdrich. “It turns out I was doing in-
ternal work all along.”
“The Night Watchman,” to be pub-
lished March 3 by Harper (which, like
The Wall Street Journal, is owned by
News Corp), offers a fictionalized ver-
sion of the struggles of the Turtle
Mountain Indian Reservation. A char-
acter named Thomas Wazhashk is
based on Ms. Erdrich’s grandfather,who was the night watchman at a lo-
cal factory. He spends the long over-
night hours sorting through a new bill
before Congress that says it will grant
Native Americans “emancipation.” In
practice, she writes, it means an end
to reservations and tribal sovereignty.
“He only had an eighth-grade edu-
cation,” says Ms. Erdrich of her
grandfather. “But he immediately
grasped the Orwellian language of the
bill—of ‘emancipation’ and all this
blather. ‘Get rid of your land, and
you’ll have equal opportunity.’ It still
comes out of Washington sometimes.
It’s a form of dispossession always,”
she adds. “He knew this was a disas-
ter that could finally break them.”
After keeping watch all night, her
grandfather organized during the day,
drawing Native Americans and whites,
journalists and congressmen, Republi-
cans and Democrats into a coalition
that eventually traveled to Washing-
ton to battle for the tribe’s survival.
“He was exhausted,” says Ms. Erdrich.
“In his letters, he would say, ‘Mama
says I need to get more than 12 hoursof sleep a week.’”
Ms. Erdrich, 65, was born to a Ger-
man-American father and a mother
who is half-French, half-Chippewa. A
member of her mother’s tribe, she
lives in Minneapolis but returns fre-
quently to the reservation in North
Dakota. Though other tribes’ rights
were terminated, the Turtle Mountain
Band of Chippewa was not—thanks in
part to her grandfather’s efforts. Still,
the reservation is now “two town-
ships, about 72 square miles,” she
says. “That’s a reduction from millions
of acres to such a small space that it
cannot fit all of its members.”
Ms. Erdrich’s previous novels have
chronicled Native American life on fic-
tional reservations, leading some crit-
ics to draw comparisons with William
Faulkner, the creator of the invented
Yoknapatawpha County in Mississippi,
where he set most of his fiction. “My
giant was really Flannery O’Connor,”
says Ms. Erdrich, citing her Catholi-
cism and her dark sense of humor.
Ms. Erdrich attended Catholic school,
and Benedictine priests had a strongmissionary presence in the Turtle
Mountains.
Ms. Erdrich’s debut novel, “Love
Medicine” (1984), won the National
Book Critics Circle Award. She has
gone on to write 15 more novels, in-
cluding “The Plague of Doves” (2008),
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize that
centers on the lynching of four Native
Americans wrongly accused of mur-
dering a white family. (Philip Roth
called it a “dazzling masterpiece.”) Its
sequel, “The Round House” (2012),
tells the story of a boy’s search for his
mother’s rapist and the tangle of con-
flicting jurisdictions that make it hard
to prosecute the assailant; the book
won the National Book Award. Along
with “LaRose” (2016), these novels
form what Ms. Erdrich calls her “jus-
tice trilogy.” She has also written po-
etry, children’s books and a memoir.
“The Night Watchman” explores “a
forgotten chapter in history, a sort of
dark spot in the American conscious-
ness,” says Ms. Erdrich. The termina-
tion policy “was designed to erase
American Indians as peoples and asWEEKEND CONFIDENTIAL|ELIZABETH WINKLER
Louise Erdrich
AnovelofNativeAmericanstruggle,inspiredbyabelovedgrandfather
nations, to erase identities and family
ties. Most of all, it was designed to
take land. I worry that we don’t have
a real grasp of how extraordinarily de-
structive that time was.”
In the new novel, she tries to
imagine the thinking of Arthur Wat-
kins, the real-life Utah senator who
pushed to terminate federal recogni-
tion of the Native American tribes in
hopes that they would assimilate.
“Arthur V. Watkins believed it was
for the best,” she writes. “To uplift
them. Even open the gates of heaven.
How could Indians hold themselvesapart, when the vanquishers some-
times held their arms out, to crush
them to their hearts, with something
like love?”
Ms. Erdrich writes and revises her
drafts in longhand before typing
them up. The physicality of that pro-
cess makes her feel more connected
to her characters. Looking back over
her own books, she can identify the
passages written on a computer:
“There is some granular difference. I
don’t have the same complexity in
my sentence structure.”
Writing a character based on a
close family member posed a new
challenge for Ms. Erdrich. She strug-
gled to find any imperfections in her
beloved grandfather. “He tried very
hard to meet people on a human
level, no matter what they were do-
ing,” she says. “He never saw people
as foes exactly. He saw them as peo-
ple who needed to be educated and
who needed to talk to him. He would
make a friend. He was extraordinary
that way.” After being interrogated
during a Senate hearing by Watkins,
her grandfather made a point of
thanking the senator. “I thought,
‘Damn, have a flaw!’” says Ms.
Erdrich. “I don’t want to create one
for you.”
The novel weaves her grandfather’s
narrative together with those of fic-
tional characters, including a tribes-
woman named Patrice who “came in
unannounced and took over a lot of
the book.” That sort of experience—
feeling herself being lifted out of the
word-by-word slog and spun along by
a character—is Ms. Erdrich’s favorite
part of writing. “It’s sort of being in a
trance,” she says. “You get hooked on
looking for that as you write. It’s a
kind of reward for being in this per-
sonal little madhouse.”
She still worries about modern
forms of Native American disposses-
sion. “It’s giant corporations who have
their eye on tiny scraps of land or
want right-of-ways through tribal
lands,” she says, referring to recent
fights over pipeline routes. She rel-
ishes the refuge she finds on the res-
ervation and at her Minneapolis book-
store, Birchbark Books & Native Arts,
which has given her a literary commu-
nity that eases the solitude of writing.
“It’s much more than a business.
It’s really a way of life,” she says of
the store, which specializes in Native
American literature, history and
crafts. “The personal is being eroded
in so many ways, but independent
bookstores keep the personal alive.”‘He knew this
was a disaster
that could finally
break them.’NATE RYAN FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
REVIEW