139 Days to Opening Day 2008

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Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 139 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.

Today’s excerpt is from Terrible Innocence: General Sherman at War by Mark Coburn. The book is mainly about Civil War General William Tecumseh Sherman during the time span from 1864-1865.

The passage covers Sherman’s well known feelings about reporters.

For Sherman, the choice between one soldier’s safety and the freedom of the press was no choice at all. As Marszalek says, he “made himself the sole definer of responsible journalism and the First Amendment.” He never attempted to censor his men’s letters home, contending that those letters and War Department releases were all the public required.

Cump grew rabid when anything reached the press that might conceivably be of use to the enemy. And to him that sometimes meant whatever pertained to the military. This subtle hint went to a general in Cairo:

I observe and article in an Evansville paper that looks as though you had communicated my instructions to private parties for publication. If this be so, it is a high military offense for which you must account. You are an officer of the United States and in no manner of ways accountable to an irresponsible press…If my dispatches to you reach the public and the enemy again you will regret it all the days of your life.

Put today’s excerpt in a baseball context.

*-Not the book cover. Just a portrait of the General