Category Archives: baseball

by | 1 June 2009 · 8:20 pm

All-Indian Baseball in 1930s America

The Spring 2009 issue of NINE: A Journal of Baseball and Culture has an article by Royse Parr on Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club (Project MUSE subscriber link). Here are a few excerpts (footnotes omitted) from a fascinating glimpse at another era.

The story of Ben Harjo’s All-Indian Baseball Club has never been told. A full-blood Creek, Harjo was born on October 8, 1898, in Indian Territory near the city of Holdenville, now within the state of Oklahoma. In his teenage years, Harjo attended Haskell Institute, an Indian boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas, where he was the captain and a pitcher on the school’s Creek baseball team. Known as the “New Carlisle of the West,” Haskell Institute was proud of its baseball stars that included major leaguers Ike Kahdot (Potawatomi), Lee Daney (Choctaw), and Ben Tincup (Cherokee). Jim Thorpe (Sac and Fox, Potawatomi), a major league baseball player from Oklahoma, first attended Haskell. He then became athletically famous as an All-American football player and a track and field gold medal Olympian at Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania. Prior to leaving for Carlisle, Thorpe’s father said to him, “Son, you are an Indian. I want you to show other races what an Indian can do.” In their warrior tradition, Indian athletes were inspired to beat the whites at their own games. From these beginnings emerged Ben Harjo’s dream of forming a barnstorming All-Indian baseball team.

According to the 1930 United States census, Harjo had ten laborers of Negro or Indian extraction who lived on the farm with his wife Susey and their five children. He was scrambling to make a living as a farmer during the lean years of the Great Depression and the Oklahoma Dust Bowl. The local agent for the U.S. Indian Service regarded him as an exceptional young man whose farming methods were an example for other Indians.

Fortunately for Harjo and his baseball dreams, his full-blood Seminole Indian wife, Susey, was oil-rich from her land allotment in the Seminole oil fields. She had a trust fund controlled by the U.S. Indian Service that was in excess of three hundred thousand dollars. Susey was very generous with those less fortunate, especially for funeral bills, medical attention, and education, but she was only modestly educated. Susie paid for the building of a Presbyterian church, and she had a propensity for purchasing and discarding vehicles, which included a Ford sports coupe, two Dodge trucks, a Dodge sports coupe, a Pierce Arrow luxury sedan, and a Chevrolet team bus….

What is the historical significance of the Harjo club and its story? Earlier barnstorming Indian baseball teams were often subjected to racial taunts and harassment because of their skin color. No such incidents were reported in the press for the Harjos. Even when their teams were soundly defeated, local journalists were complimentary of the athletic talents of the barnstormers. The Harjo club’s play on the field, especially when they won the prestigious Denver Post Little World Series in 1932, proved that they were skilled professional athletes. In the New England states in 1933, it was heartwarming to read that the good-natured Thorpe was surrounded by hundreds of admiring youngsters.

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by | 4 March 2009 · 5:53 pm

How Doth Lotte Love Baseball?

In the Los Angeles Times, John M. Glionna profiles the unlikely manager of a once hapless Korean baseball team, the Lotte Giants of Busan: former LA Dodgers infielder Jerry Royster.

Reporting from Busan, South Korea — Jerry Royster isn’t sure whether to laugh or cry: The umps just don’t speak his language. Every time he races out of the dugout to argue a play, he has to bring along an interpreter.

Last year, the former Dodgers infielder took the helm of this city’s wildly popular Lotte Giants, becoming Korea’s first foreign manager….

In his first year, he took the cellar-dwelling Giants to the playoffs for the first time in nine years. Even with a shorter 126-game schedule, the Giants attracted more fans than many major league teams and doubled attendance from the year before.

Long-suffering loyalists dubbed their new manager “Hurricane Royster” and composed a rally song in his honor.

But Royster, now in his second season, said it’s not just fans who excite him: Koreans play good baseball.

Korean players’ ability is well-known — except in the U.S., where only a few, such as former Dodgers pitcher Chan Ho Park, are household names.

But that is changing. Korea won the gold medal in the 2008 Olympics without losing a game, and in the 2006 WBC lost only once — to archrival Japan in the final. Only Cuba was ranked ahead of Korea in the International Baseball Federation’s world rankings.

“We’re not a secret to most countries,” Royster said. “It’s only the Americans who are now starting to realize there’s good baseball being played here.” Royster didn’t know what to expect in late 2007 when old friend Bobby Valentine, manager of Japan’s Chiba Lotte Marines, called him.

Shin Dong-bin, owner of the Lotte teams in Japan and Korea, wanted to shake things up by putting a foreign manager in the southern city of Busan. Valentine recommended Royster, who’d just been fired as manager of the Las Vegas 51s, then the Dodgers’ triple-A team.

“I told him he was going to take over the Cubs of Asia,” said Valentine, a former Dodger who once managed the New York Mets. “They were a blue-collar team that never won but everybody loved anyway. The fans were dying for a competitive team and a leader.”

I doff my authentic Chiba Lotte Marines baseball cap to Mr. Shin—and also to Bobby Valentine, who showed the way. Now, if only Marty Brown can lead my old NPB Central League favorites, the Hiroshima Toyo (= Mazda) Carp, to win the Japan Series this year. And in Korea, Go Busan!

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by | 31 October 2008 · 6:23 pm

Why Oh’s Home Run Record Stands

In the third of a three-part series in the Japan Times on the remarkable baseball career of Sadaharu Oh, Robert Whiting reveals another reason why nobody in Japan has been able to break Oh’s record of 55 home runs in one season.

The one big black mark on Sadaharu Oh’s reputation was, of course, the unsportsmanlike behavior of the pitchers on his team whenever foreign batsmen threatened his single season home run record of 55.

The phenomenon had first surfaced in 1985, when American Randy Bass playing for the Hanshin Tigers, who went into the last game of the season — against the Oh-managed Giants at Korakuen Stadium — with 54 home runs.

Bass was walked intentionally four times on four straight pitches and would have been walked a fifth, had he not reached out and poked a pitch far outside the plate into the outfield.

Oh denied ordering his pitchers to walk Bass, but Keith Comstock, an American pitcher for Yomiuri reported afterward that a certain Giants coach imposed a fine of $1,000 for every strike Giants pitchers threw to Bass….

A replay of the Bass episode came during the 2001 season. American Tuffy Rhodes, playing for the Kintetsu Buffaloes, threatened Oh’s record.

With several games left in the season, Rhodes hit the 55 mark. But during a late season weekend series in Fukuoka, pitchers on the Hawks refused to throw strikes to Rhodes and catcher Kenji Johjima could be seen grinning during the walks.

Again Oh denied any involvement in their actions and Hawks battery coach Yoshiharu Wakana admitted the pitchers had acted on his orders.

“It would be distasteful to see a foreign player break Oh’s record,” he told reporters….

A second replay occurred in 2002, when Venezuelan Alex Cabrera also hit 55 home runs, tying Oh (and Rhodes) with five games left to play in the season. Oh commanded his pitchers not to repeat their behavior of the previous year, but, not surprisingly, most of them ignored him. There was more condemnation from the public, but, curiously, not from Oh, who simply shrugged and said, “If you’re going to break the record, you should do it by more than one. Do it by a lot.”

Such behavior led an ESPN critic to call Oh’s record “one of the phoniest in baseball.”

In Oh’s defense, there was probably nothing he could have done to prevent his pitchers from acting as they did. Feelings about “gaijin” aside, it was (and still is) common practice for teams to take such action to protect a teammate’s record or title….

Still, amid all the fuss about protectionism in baseball, it is noteworthy that no one in the Japanese game ever sees fit to mention the fact that Oh hit most of his home runs using rock hard, custom-made compressed bats.

A batter using a compressed bat, it was said, could propel a ball farther than he can with an ordinary bat. Compressed bats were illegal in the MLB when Oh was playing in Japan, and were outlawed by the NPB in 1982 after Oh retired, but well before Bass, Rhodes and Cabrera had Japan visas stamped into their passports.

One of the enduring ironies, of course, is that Oh was born a Japanese citizen in Taiwan in 1940, but became a citizen of the Republic of China after Japan lost the war in 1945. His name is variously rendered as 王貞治, Wang Chenchih, Wáng Zhēnzhì, or Ō Sadaharu.

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by | 18 October 2008 · 7:28 am

Ethnic Baseball in Hawai‘i, 1920s–40s

From: Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball, by Robert K. Fitts (U. Nebraska Press, 2008), pp. 48-49:

The Athletics, previously known as the Asahi, were the elite Japanese American team in the Hawaiian Islands. Founded in 1905 as a team for Japanese thirteen- and fourteen-year-olds, the Asahi soon dominated the AJA (Americans of Japanese Ancestry) Oahu Junior League. Finally, in 1920, league organizers decided that the team was too strong and moved the youths into the adult AJA Honolulu Baseball League. Three years later, the Asahi won the championship.

In 1924 the multiethnic Hawaii Baseball League was formed with six teams. Original members included the Portuguese Braves, the All-Chinese, the All-Hawaiians, the All-Filipinos, the Elks (made up of haoles) and the Asahi. With no age restrictions, Asahi recruited the best players from the AJA leagues throughout the islands. The Japanese team fared well, winning championships in 1925, ’26, ’29, ’30, and ’38. Japanese Hawaiians followed the Asahi’s triumphs closely, and Hawaii’s two Japanese-language newspapers, the Hawaii Times and Hawaii Hochi, covered the games and players in detail. The ballpark also became a meeting place for the community as thousands of ethnic Japanese came to Honolulu Stadium for each game.

With the outbreak of World War II, Japanese Hawaiians strove to show their loyalty to the United States. Many, including Asahi owner Dr. Katsumi Kometani, volunteered for the armed forces. With Kometani’s permission, the team downplayed its Japanese affiliation. John A. Burns, the future governor of Hawaii, ran the team in Kometani’s absence, while future Honolulu mayor Neal Blaisdell managed. The two haoles changed the team’s name to the Athletics and added several non-Japanese to the roster. The club did well and captured the 1942 championship. Kometani returned in 1945, reestablished the team’s all-Japanese American roster, and appointed Allen Nagata as manager. The team, however, remained the Athletics until it retook the Asahi name after the 1949 season.

Okinawans, like half-Okinawan Yonamine, were welcome to play on the AJA teams, but Wally and his wife-to-be got a lot of grief from both sides before they wed (in 1952) for not marrying within their respective Okinawan and Japanese communities.

According to this timeline, Wally went by his given name Kaname (要 ‘pivot, linchpin’) until 1943.

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by | 17 October 2008 · 6:30 am

Yomiuri Giant Nagashima as Manager, 1970s

From: Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball, by Robert K. Fitts (U. Nebraska Press, 2008), pp. 302-303:

As a manager, Nagashima could inspire his players. John Sipin, a former San Diego Padre who played with the Giants from 1978 to 1980 after five years with the Taiyo Whales, recalls, “Nagashima was a great leader. He was a legend and had extremely high energy. Unlike most managers, he would not go into the dugout and sit down. He was always on the field, hitting fly balls or ground balls.” Nagashima especially liked aggressive players who showed “fighting spirit” and rewarded them with compliments and playing time. His enthusiasm was infectious and most of his players trained and played hard for him.

Nagashima’s ability as a strategist, however, did not match his enthusiasm. He rarely played percentage baseball. Instead, he relied on a bizarre combination of traditional conservative Japanese baseball tactics and irrational hunches. After a lead-off hitter reached base, Nagashima routinely used the second batter to bunt the runner over, even when the Giants trailed by large margins. He rarely employed pinch runners, even when a slow catcher representing the tying run stood on second in the late innings. He bunched his like-handed hitters together in the lineup, instead of interspersing lefties with righties. Most importantly, he did not stick to a steady pitching rotation. He often started pitchers who were throwing well on short rest and continually used starters in relief. Nagashima was also intolerant of pitching mistakes and routinely pulled pitchers at the first sign of trouble.

He seems to have done better the second time around, during the 1990s.

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by | 15 October 2008 · 3:11 pm

American Influence on Japanese Baseball, 1953

From: Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball, by Robert K. Fitts (U. Nebraska Press, 2008), pp. 126, 140-141:

[Before 1953], a typical Japanese catcher would receive the ball from the pitcher, take two steps forward, crank his arm back, and throw it back to the mound. In the midst of that routine, [American Nisei Wally] Yonamine would sometimes steal second base, sliding in safely just as the pitcher caught the ball. [Nisei catcher Jyun] Hirota brought American receiving to Japan. He had a strong arm and used to return the ball to the pitcher while still in his crouch. The fans loved it as much as opposing base runners feared it. Soon, Japanese catchers began mimicking Hirota and their mechanics changed. The average number of stolen base attempts in the Central League dropped from nearly 3.0 per game in 1952 and 1953 to 2.6 per game after Hirota’s second season in Japan….

One of the most enduring questions of international baseball is how the quality of the Japanese leagues compares to the U.S. Major and Minor Leagues. Many baseball experts consider the Japanese leagues at the present time to be “4A”—that is, better than Triple A but not equal to the Majors. In 1953 the gap was even broader. The Giants were undoubtedly Japan’s best team, but they were unable to match Pacific Coast League teams, even during spring training. The game results suggest that the club was probably equivalent to class A competition. Some of the Giants, however, could have played at a higher level. Takehiko Bessho particularly impressed PCL managers; San Diego reportedly tried to buy his contract from Yomiuri. Lefty O’Doul also noted that Yonamine could move into the PCL if he was interested in returning to the United States.

Despite their poor record, the trip to Santa Maria was a resounding success. “We certainly learned a lot during our spring training,” proclaimed Harada, “and I can truthfully say that this is an entirely different ball club now. The Major League managers especially, briefed us thoroughly on how to play the national pastime properly. The many so-called inside hints that they offered us went a long way toward improving all of our players.” The managers helped the Giants with all aspects of their game. Kawakami learned to hit with more power by cocking his wrists. Chiba worked on fielding fundamentals and getting his body in front of the ball. “He doesn’t make those one-handed catches he used to make,” Harada commented approvingly. Mizuhara adopted Leo Durocher’s style of leaving the dugout and managing from the third base box. He also learned how to direct base runners and use signs like the American managers.

Perhaps most importantly, the Giants experienced the aggressiveness of American baseball firsthand. Early in the trip, Shigeru Chiba, attempting to turn a double play Japanese-style by standing on second base, was taken out with a hard slide and was spiked. He quickly learned how to move off the bag and avoid a slide while making a double play. The Japanese realized that Yonamine was not particularly rough or dirty, but just played hard-nosed American baseball. Some of the Giants began to adopt a more aggressive style and learned to slide hard with their spikes up.

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by | 13 October 2008 · 8:00 pm

Japanese vs. American Baseball Practice

From: Wally Yonamine: The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball, by Robert K. Fitts (U. Nebraska Press, 2008), p. 272:

Many Americans state that the Japanese practice too much. “I believe that the Japanese put more emphasis on practice than actually playing the game,” said Gene Martin, who later played for Yonamine. Leron Lee, who played for the Orions during the 1980s, adds, “To show their fighting spirit, the Japanese would focus on how hard they could practice and how long they could practice…. So when they would get into the ball game, they couldn’t really perform up to their abilities.”

Yonamine agrees that many Japanese managers at that time conducted drills that accomplished little. He especially disliked the thousand ground ball drill, pointing out that as players tired they abandoned their fundamentals. At best, it led the players off track. At worst, it led to bad habits that affected their play.

Wally, however, argues that Japanese players then, and now, need to practice more than Major Leaguers. In the United States, most players learn baseball basics in high school, college, or at the latest in the instructional league—the first rung of the Minor League ladder. They then fine-tune their skills as they ascend through the extensive Minor League system. During this time, the young players practice hard so that when they become Major Leaguers, proper technique is automatic. Most Japanese, on the other hand, have not been taught proper fundamentals in high school and college. They enter the professional league as raw players with much to learn. There is no equivalent of the American instructional league in Japan, and each club has only one minor league squad. Young Japanese players therefore rarely get enough drill before they are promoted to the main team. As a result, Japanese managers need to constantly instruct their players and improve their skills even after they become starters on the parent club.

I bought an extra copy of this book for my father, who’s the same age as Wally Yonamine, arrived in Japan about the same time, and became a big fan of Wally. During a decade in Hiroshima, he also became a fan of the hapless Hiroshima Carp, whose former pitcher Hiroki Kuroda just pitched a crucial win for the Dodgers in the current NLCS. Kuroda seems to have brought Japanese-style baseball with him to the U.S., according to a nice LA Times profile of him this past summer.

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by | 8 September 2008 · 10:24 pm

Baseball’s 1990s: Steroids and Strike Zones

The latest issue of NINE: A Journal of Baseball and Culture (Project MUSE subscription required) contains an article by Benjamin G. Rader and Kenneth J. Winkle, reexamining the reasons for Baseball’s Great Hitting Barrage of the 1990s (and Beyond).

In an article published in NINE in 2002, we examined what we called “Baseball’s Great Hitting Barrage of the 1990s.” In addition to offering statistical support for the claim that there was an unusual amount of offensive productivity in the 1994 through 1999 seasons, we also considered explanations for why the hitting revolution had occurred. With regard to the latter, we questioned some of the popular theories for the offensive outburst—namely the “juiced-ball” hypothesis, the belief that ballparks were cozier in the late 1990s than they had been earlier, and the role of league expansion in diluting the quality of pitching. But at the same time we lent support to the arguments that lighter bats, physically stronger hitters, and a new style of hitting (with the assistance of a smaller de facto strike zone) contributed significantly to the great hitting barrage of the late 1990s.

Now is an especially opportune time to reexamine and update our earlier findings. Not only do we presently enjoy the benefit of a longer historical perspective on the 1990s, but we are also able to extend our analysis from the 2000 through the 2007 seasons. Furthermore, recent disclosures of the widespread use of performance-enhancing drugs by the players and Major League Baseball’s implementation of a drug-testing program in 2003 make it possible to employ statistics to better speculate about the effects of drugs on the great offensive barrage. Equally important to a reconsideration of the recent offensive outburst was the decision of Major League Baseball (beginning in 2001) to enlarge the de facto strike zone, determined by the umpires, and impose a more uniform strike zone on the umpires.

We reach three major conclusions. First, the great hitting barrage peaked during the 1999 and 2000 seasons. While remaining far above the two-divisional era in offensive productivity, the 2001 through 2007 seasons fell below the peak achieved in 1999 and 2000. Based on batting averages, runs per game, home runs per game, and on-base percentage plus slugging percentage, we posit three eras of offense in recent baseball history: (1) the two-divisional era of low productivity (1969–1993), (2) the great offensive barrage (1994–2000 seasons), and (3) the new equilibrium (2001–2007 seasons). Second, while it is impossible to offer quantifiably direct evidence of the relationship between drug use and the offensive explosion, we conclude that player use of performance-enhancing drugs did contribute to the hitting barrage. As the threat of exposure and then drug testing increased, some measures of offensive productivity began to decline, though not approaching the depths of the two-divisional era. Third, it is possible to offer more quantifiably direct evidence of the relationship between the strike zone and the offensive explosion than it is the relationship between drugs and offense. We conclude that the size of the de facto strike zone was an equal, and perhaps even more important, variable in explaining the hitting revolution as well as its modest decline after the 2000 season. When Major League Baseball decided to try to impose a more uniform strike zone on the umpires in the 2001 season, seasonal batting averages and runs per game (but not home runs) fell, though not back to earlier levels.

The same issue also contains a poem by Mary Herbert that Language Hat is sure to appreciate, Only Peggy Lee Could Sing of My Mets Misery.

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by | 8 September 2008 · 9:42 pm

The Jackie Robinson of 1905?

Ten years ago in Harvard Magazine, Karl Lindholm briefly profiled Harvard graduate William Clarence Matthews, who some people at the time thought might be capable of breaking the color barrier in professional baseball by playing with the Boston Nationals.

Born in Selma, Alabama, and trained at Tuskegee Institute from 1893 to 1897, Matthews was a promising student and outstanding athlete who was sent north for further education, first to Phillips Andover and then to Harvard. From 1901 to 1905, he played shortstop on perhaps the best college team in the country (75 wins, 18 losses in his four years) at a time when baseball enjoyed singular appeal in the United States. It was not uncommon for players to walk off a college campus onto a major-league diamond: Christy Matthewson left Bucknell for John McGraw’s Giants, and two of Matthews’s teammates, Walter Clarkson and “Harvard Eddie” Grant, went on to play in the big leagues….

Unlike many other black players, he had options off the diamond. He had taken courses at Harvard Law School as a senior; now he earned an LL.B. at Boston University while working as an athletic instructor at Boston high schools. He passed the bar in 1908 and embarked on a legal and political career; in 1913, with the help of Booker T. Washington, he was appointed special assistant to the U.S. district attorney in Boston. From 1920 to 1923, he served as legal counsel to the black separatist Marcus Garvey.

Even while working with Garvey, he remained involved in Republican politics, and he played a major role in the 1924 presidential campaign. When Calvin Coolidge was elected with the help of a million black votes, Matthews was rewarded with a post in the Justice Department–but a list of “demands” for the “recognition of colored Republicans” that he presented to party leaders was ignored. Whatever else he might have accomplished was thwarted when he died of a perforated ulcer at 51. His death was reported in all the major East Coast newspapers: the Boston Globe called him “one of the most prominent Negro members of the bar in America.” The black press ran front-page headlines.

Matthews said in 1905, “A Negro is just as good as a white man and has just as much right to play ball.”

Now, ten years later, Karl Lindholm has published a fuller analysis of the public speculation at the time in the latest issue of NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture (Project MUSE subscription required). His article title, Rumors and Facts: William Clarence Matthews’s 1905 Challenge to Major League Baseball’s Color Barrier, indicates that the newspapers of that era, in particular the Boston Traveler, were often no more reliable than those of our day.

Rumors sometimes have a basis in fact, and sometimes rumors are pure fiction, made up, irresponsible, serving commercial, political, or personal ends. In 1905, one of baseball’s most compelling rumors involved the imminent entry into the major leagues of William Clarence Matthews, “Harvard’s famous colored shortstop.” This rumor, reported in the Boston Traveler in July 1905, was repeated in Sol White’s History of Colored Baseball (1907) and passed on to contemporary audiences by Robert Peterson in his seminal Only the Ball was White (1970).

There are inevitable questions about the rumor’s veracity. Is it possible that forty years before Jackie Robinson signed a contract with Brooklyn, someone in organized baseball was seriously considering adding a black man to a major league roster?

This essay addresses that question by examining the major players—the Boston Nationals’ player-manager Fred Tenney in particular—as well as the primary documents associated with the rumor of Matthews’s breakthrough, demonstrating the reasons Matthews might plausibly be considered for this role, while also raising the possibility that the Traveler conjured a patently false story in Boston’s overheated journalistic environment during the first decade of the twentieth century.

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by | 17 July 2008 · 6:09 pm

Ichiro’s “English for Special Purposes”

On top of his fine analytical and motor skills on the baseball field, Ichiro seems to possess the motivational skills necessary to manage an American baseball team, or so reports Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports, who credits Ichiro’s motivational speeches for the American League’s string of wins in recent All-Star Games. Look for him to manage, say, the Chicago White Sox after he retires from playing.

“It’s why we win,” David Ortiz said.

He pointed to Ichiro Suzuki, the Seattle Mariners’ wisp of an outfielder, a man who still uses a translator to do interviews with English-speaking reporters – and happens to be baseball’s amalgam of Anthony Robbins and George Carlin. Every year, after the AL manager addresses his team, Ichiro bursts from his locker, a bundle of kinetic energy, and proceeds, in English, to disparage the National League with an H-bomb of F-bombs, stunning first-timers who had no idea Ichiro speaks the queen’s language fluently and making returnees happy that they had played well enough to see the pep talk again.

The tradition began in 2001, Ichiro’s first All-Star appearance, and the AL hasn’t lost a game since. Coincidence?

Um. No.

“I know how important it is to the game,” Ichiro said. “I’m more concentrated at that moment than I am in the game.”

A wide grin spread across his face. Ichiro’s secret had been exposed, so, hey, why not have fun with it?

He crafts his public portrayal similar to the image he projects on the field: a technician, a warrior, a Ph.D. in stoicism. In reality, Ichiro’s All-Star teammates love him for his wicked sense of humor and sly deceit, shown with a vocabulary far more expansive than he leads on.

All the first baseman around the AL know Ichiro speaks English, singles accounting for 1,393 of his 1,711 hits since joining Seattle in 2001. Generally, the conversation doesn’t move much past pleasantries, which makes the speech all the more shocking.

via Daniel Drezner

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