I’d like to report that meetings of the faculty in schools such as those in which I worked are universally compelling, but if they are, and they are only rarely, it arrives as a debate about dress code devolves into character assasination, accusations of perfidy, and the sudden extinction of life-long friendships. There have been, however, a few moments in which the level of discourse has risen to memorable heights. I was a young teacher, unaware that it would be decades before another inspired comment would rock me to the core, when a colleague, a somewhat crusty Ivy educated country gentleman, pitched (and I use the word with some satisfaction) the following preface to remarks on grading, or bus etiquette, or trays missing from the dining hall,or a topic of equally grave concern:

“This is just a tentative fungo into a field of surmise …” he began.

Let the word “surmise” linger in your imagination for a bit as I wander into reflection on the purpose of hitting fungos.

I sit on a crisp winter’s day, glistening mounds of snow heaped along the side of the driveway, trees standing naked before me, thinking about baseball, as one does in early February in the week before pitchers and catchers are expected to report to training camp. The configuration of the next season is in question, but spring training will begin, and a coach somewhere will lift a fungo bat and loft a high fly ball to an outfielder straining to follow the arc of the ball in the harsh Arizona (or Florida) sun. Designed solely for the purpose of lofting baseballs, the fungo bat is of little use in any other aspect of the game. It’s longer and lighter than other bats, often made of ash. Here’s where some muddle may intrude; as a verb, fungo is the act of hitting a ball high in the air. Then too, the balls in flight are themselves called fungoes. 

In the early years of our marriage, my wife was puzzled one mid-evening as we drove by illuminated baseball fields in the Illinois heartland watching men and boys practice and play baseball as the long day cooled.

 “I’d like to pull over and shag some fungoes,” I said with conviction.

“Huh,” she advised.

John Toffey, the English teacher whose phrase resounds through the years, found the perfect metaphor in identifying a lightly held opinion tossed into a speculative conversation – a tentative fungo in a field of surmise.

I share the phrase now, in my personal mid-evening as my days cool, in order to remind myself of the elegant language of baseball. It is in the heat of a match that tennis players may shout, Love All, a heartening sentiment but not in this context. Golf has given us, Play it as it lays, a useful shorthand for playing by the rules and a sporty riff on Lao Tsu’s observation “Life is a series of natural and spontaneous changes. Don’t resist them; that only creates sorrow. Let reality be reality. Let things flow naturally forward in whatever way they like.” Football’s gritty aphorism, Winning Isn’t everything; It’s the only thing, attributed to UCLA coach Henry Russell “Red” Sanders and occasionally to Packer’s legendary coach Vince Lombardi, is a puzzling construction in that “everything” and “only thing” are not separated by much in terms of intensity, and yet there is a clear escalation by the end of the phrase. Other configurations might raise similar questions, as in “Survival isn’t everything; it’s the only thing. Well yes, in that as a state of being it is absolute, and no, because we might hope there is more to life than merely staying alive. 

I remember John Toffey’s locution with gratitude; it is one of the phrases I most enjoy trotting out on the rare occasions in which surmise is at hand. Today’s challenge is in coming up with other baseball related terminology that can be put to use in more general conversation. There are a plethora of genuinely startling terms in the lexicon of baseball, many more than are found in other enterprises. I can’t explain why invention is more pronounced in baseball, but I present but a few of the terms any fan would recognize from the crack of the bat:

Chin music – a pitch that is high and inside also known as High Cheese and High Cheddar

Can of Corn – an easy pop fly

Pop Fly – a high batted ball that does not leave the infield

Rhubarb – a scrap, quarrel, or fight between players teams, coaches and umpires

Texas Leaguer – a ball that drops between the infield and the outfield

Worm Burner – a sharply hit ground ball

The Hot Corner – third base

Pickle – a runner caught between two fielders in a rundown

Banjo Hitter – a hitter that put together a string of blooped hits 

In the Hole – the batter after the batter on deck

Eephus – a lobbed pitch that wobbles

Cricket, the sport that may have spawned baseball, has its arcane observations. Without any knowledge of the game, we’ve seen enough movies and read enough books to know that a bit of a sticky wicket is not a good thing. Don’t go looking for help with the phrase as the word “wicket” has several uses in the terminology of the sport. Let’s agree that in this instance, the wicket is an area of the field (pitch) that with overuse or heavy rain can get gummy just as situations in life can occasionally gum up.

All of that said, metaphors have to eclipse the particular in order to express the otherwise inexpressible, thus the tentative fungo. An obvious description already in use is fielder’s choice, in baseball pithy shorthand for a play in which a fielder makes a play to a base other than first, allowing the batter to arrive at first safely. For one locked in romance, however, such as Archie, the exuberant comic book lothario who plays the field, smitten by both Betty and Veronica, a fielder’s choice means being forced to pick one over the other with clear expectation of loss no matter which play is made.

Coming in with spikes high describes the aggressive and possibly injurious slide of a runner intent on stealing a base. Ty Cobb, perhaps the meanest son-of-a-gun (an oddity of biology?) to play the game, likely sharpened his spikes before each game, perhaps to improve traction, perhaps to intimidate the second baseman waiting to be speared, perhaps to spear a second baseman. Similarly, an aggressive and perhaps preemptive verbal start to a difference of opinion might intend traction, intimidation, or injury. “I may be coming in with my spikes too high,” might be a way to indicate an awareness of the distress a sharpened comment can cause. Suggesting that a solution is obvious, a can of corn, however, can be provocative as we are often in a pickle, caught in a rundown, caught off base, rather than seeing the inescapable solution to an issue.

I’m free of faculty meetings these days, so I won’t have a chance to accuse a colleague of throwing high cheddar, high cheese, playing chin music, no, I’m just offering a tentative fungo in a field of surmise.

Thanks, John.

In 2016 the universe coughed up a national smorgasbord of shame and pain, a cataclysmic upending of truth, justice, and the American way. In a desperate attempt to support the correcting of our course, I subscribed to The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and The Atlantic, recognizing that  if I valued the truth, I had better be prepared to pay the truth tellers who shovel through the banks of slime on a daily basis. 

They did and do their best, and I still subscribe, faintly appreciative of their dedication to their craft as they report the muddle of the first year of the Biden presidency and very much aware of the tumult that may arrive again before institutions have been fully restored. These are not jolly times; pandemics generally disappoint. I seek comfort where I can find it, skimming the accounts of Putin’s attempts to allow us to feel the pain of losing hegemony in Europe as Russia did with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in order to slowly absorb the Washington Post’s account of seismic change in Mars Candy’s branding of M&M’s.

 “Democracy Dies in Darkness” the Post’s banner promises, and so reporter Emily Heil shines the light on the forthcoming alteration of identity among the cast that the company describes as their “mascots”, the anthropomorphised sugar coated blobs of chocolate whose animated “adventures’ preceded the start of any film released in theaters until theater doors were shuttered.

It was not until I started to write about the “characters” that I realized that some had names – Ms. Green, Ms. Brown – while others were “male” and simply identified as Yellow or Red; I struggled then with the orthographic challenge in presenting the brand’s name. Mars, Incorporated, the forty billion dollar a year enterprise and the sixth largest privately held company in the US, describes it as M& M’s, the apostrophe a legacy of the unlikely sharing of resources owned by Forrest Mars,who held the patent on the process by which sugar coating could be hardened around a chocolate filling, and the monopoly on chocolate held by Hershey’s Chocolate Company during WWII. Hershey’s president, William Murrrie, was the other possessive “M”.

Here’s an aside that will be of interest to a small sliver of the population: Hershey was celebrated in popular culture during my youth as the company whose products needed no advertisement or promotion; that was a myth, of course, but still, no Hershey barrage for the most part. With regard to mascots, the only ripple in the Hershey stream are the costumed characters’ ‘ such as “Twizzlers’ ‘ and “Milk Dud’ ‘who are available for dance parties and selfies at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. My son and I were grabbed by Mr. Goodbar some years ago, but he seems to have been relegated to the trash heap of discarded icons, perhaps due to the notoriety he experienced when Hershey’s discontinued the use of cocoa butter, demoting his nutty goodness from “milk chocolate” to “chocolate candy”.

The Mars family, on the other hand, has been pumping out (pUmping out) its candy for decades, offering the “…melts in your mouth – not in your hands” line since 1949. The family of anthropomorphic candies has grown gradually, from the first pair (plain and peanut) who dove naked into a bath of chocolate to the alluring Ms. Green whose strip tease was almost as disturbing as the cognitive dissonance between “likeable” characters and the certainty of their being eaten, ostensibly “alive”.

Heil’s article is whimsy packed and lightly snarked, essentially illustrating the gap between the Mars initiative to bring greater representation of color and heritage to their team and the sensibilities of reasonably evolved contemporary humans. Heil fails to mention, however, that this initiative is not the first attempt to broaden the appeal of their confections. Any connoisseur of M& M’s in 2001 would remember the ill-conceived attempt to appeal to an Hispanic market with the production of the dulce de leche tablets, distributed in a select few locales – Los Angeles, San Diego, Miami, San Antonio, and McAllen-Brownsville, Texas.

Pero, no, señor Mars. De ninguna manera.

The greater amusement is to be found in reading the Mars Brand press release: “Iconic M & M’s Brand Announces Global Commitment to Creating a World Where Everyone Belongs!” Should the reader think this pronouncement conveys an exaggerated importance of candy branding in a troubled world, Mars assures the reader that elements of global influence are already in place.

“The iconic candy brand’s announcement is built on more than 80 years of bringing people together with its bite-sized colorful candies and flavors and is part of the evolved M&M’S brand’ strategy built on purpose, which promises to use the power of fun to include everyone, with a goal of increasing the sense of belonging for 10 million people around the world by 2025.”

There are so many juicy morsels to parse here, starting with “… the evolved M&M’s brand strategy built on purpose” and sliding right into the “power of fun”, and let us remember that this is the Mars Candy empire describing itself, but grotesqueries of even greater consequence are yet to come.

After citing studies which indicate that humans like to be loved and to belong, the corporation delineates the evolution of branding dedicated to making sure that all people have access to the experiences where,”everyone feels they belong.” The initiatives in short are these:

1. More nuanced personalities for the beloved characters allowing the power of storytelling to emerge.
2. More variety of colors and shapes of M&M’s “lentils across all touchpoints to prove that all together, we’re more fun.:
3. Added emphasis on the ampersand (&) demonstrating the aim to bring people together
4. Inclusive, welcoming, and unifying tone of voice “rooted in our signature jester wit and humor.”

As any social scientist would be quick to explain, I am not making this up. In my most madcap excess of imagination, I could not have come up with “signature jester wit” as a description of a scantily clad Ms. Green’s attempts to cadge votes as a swimsuit model “working the polls” by straddling a stripper pole in go-go boots and handcuffs

Fox News’ non journalist Tucker Carlson, has claimed his place in the pantheon of nay sayers by lamenting the lack of sex appeal accomanying the newly nuanced Ms. Brown and Ms. Green. “You wouldn’t want to have a drink with any of them,” he complains after asserting that in being turned off by all colors of candy we have achieved equity. Yes, Ms. Brown, a nuanced female executive, no longer wears stiletto heels (she has feet?), and Yellow, formerly an idiot voiced in turn by John Goodman and J.K. Simmons, is no longer actively drooling, but the most creative shift may be in presenting Orange as the embodiment of Generation Z anxiety.

Eating characters we love is bound to make us feel that we belong to a global community of predatory consumers, and what could be more fun than that.

M&M’s – melts in your mind, not in your hands.