1984 Baseball Abstract: Oakland A's  Technical Information  One
of the people I interviewed last summer for the job as my
assistant was a very nice young man named Paul Izzo. Paul hails
from Providence, Rhode Island; he grew up, as it happens, just a
few blocks from the boyhood home of Davey Lopes, soon to be
designated a shrine. Paul showed me an article in an old
Baseball Digest which talked about Davey Lopes growing up in an
East Providence ghetto. The area he grew up in is, in fact, not
a ghetto at all. It's a very nice, turn-of-the-century
neighborhood.  I thought about that a lot during the summer, a
short essay on the minor irritations and insults of racism in
America; a similar essay was what we might call the incident of
Eddie Murray's family. David Earl Lopes is sort of black, and
everybody knows that black people grow up in ghettos. So Dave
Lopes has to deal with that.  I am in the same article with the
Oakland A's and their blessed computer in more newspaper
articles than you can count. I am not c