The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, April 20, 2026

Notably: Whenever I read Red Smith, the greatest sports columnist of the last century (he died in 1981), I am reminded of what hacks the rest of us are, managing maybe a sentence a month of the kind he pulled off in every paragraph: “It was opening day in Ebbets Field, but not just an ordinary opening day, assuming any ballgame in Brooklyn can be ordinary. This was a Dodgers-Giants opener, which is like crepe suzette for breakfast, or, a circus opening with the tigers uncaged.” Or this description of Babe Ruth in a 1938 piece: “It has something to do with a mature man so much a kid in spirit that he could deliberately exile himself from the world he loved because his boss wouldn’t let him go to a party. For Ruth, you remember, quit the Braves and baseball in a huff when his employer refused to give him a day off to go down and see the Normandie dock. It has something to do with his squat homeliness, his overwhelming good nature, his buoyant friendliness, his vocabulary that would make a mule-skinner pale with awe, his immeasurable, boundless vanity. Strangely, there’s nothing offensive about his conceit. No more than about the conceit of a small boy who, turning somersaults with playmates, repeatedly shrieks, ‘Look at me! Watch how I do it!'” The other day I was reading a 1943 column that included this line: “Generally speaking, baseball is a gruesome career for a fellow who can’t hope to reach the top. It’s a dead – end street. Night games followed by long bus jumps. Cheap hotels and boarding houses and one-armed hash houses.” I had no idea what one-armed hash houses are. Looked it up: “A one-armed hash house (or “one-arm joint”) was an early 20th-century American fast-food establishment characterized by its specialized seating: chairs with a single, oversized wooden armrest designed to hold a meal.
These eateries were the predecessors to modern fast food, built for efficiency, high turnover, and solitary dining in busy urban centers.” A place to pick up a 1943 broadsheet and read Red Smith. At least we have the Library of America to fill in the void.

Half an hour before the people giving on a No-September 24,1059 McDermott threw out the first polysyllable, amplifiers outside Yankee Stadium were warning the crowds that all reserved seats were exhausted. This was erroneous. During the first game of the itsybitsy World Series between the Yankees and the Red Sox, the seat reserved for Casey Stengel remained unoccupied. It was Casey that got exhausted. Before the game, the doughty field marshal of the Yankees did deign to sit down, if you can call his posture sitting. While the players warmed up he assumed a characteristic pose, in which the only part of him in contact with the bench was a spot on the back of his neck about the size of a silver dollar. Disposed thus in defiance of all natural laws, he plaited his legs into a long braid and, folding his arms, hugged himself tightly, as though wrapping himself up in himself against the afternoon’s gray chill.
It was Yogi Berra who called attention to the weather. His comely features were unshaven and somebody remarked about the thick shrubbery on his jaw.
” I’m wearin ‘ it to keep warm, ” Yogi explained sensibly. ” I got a little cold. ”

–From Red Smith’s “The Vacant Chair,” a September 24, 1950 column.

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