Least “average” yet most “American” — not the contradiction it seems

Several years ago, I read on Wikipedia about how Illinois has long been considered a microcosm of the United States. I accepted that ideal easily, given that the state — excluding the Memphis, Tennessee-aligned southernmost three counties of Alexander, Pulaski and Massac — is a mixture of the Midwest and the nonplantation South, which I have come to view as the most generically “American” regions of the country.

Upon actually reading the article, originally published in The Southern Illinoisian in 2007, I found something somewhat surprising:

“West Virginia was the least typical state — poorer, whiter, more rural — followed by Mississippi, New Hampshire, Vermont and Kentucky.”

That New Hampshire and Vermont are among the least typical states is impossible to question. Although certain features of their cultures — among the most distinctive in the US — may be retained from or linked to Puritan history, their dependence on highly global industries like tourism and finance exposes them to highly modern influences.

Mississippi is a slightly complicated case. Although ever since the Civil rights era it has been thought exceptional, in reality its highly trouble civil rights history is not “Mississippi exceptionalism” but “Mississippi genericism” at least vis-à-vis the other wholly “Deep South” states of South Carolina and Louisiana. Both South Carolina and Louisiana are among the most distinctive states of the US culturally and in political structures. Mississippi, contrariwise, had and has political structures analogous to the nonplantation South (and most of the US).

It nonetheless surprised me that Kentucky and West Virginia would be called the least typical states. In many ways, especially regarding culture — not a criterion used by The Southern Illinoisan — Appalachia and other nonplantation areas of the South comprise the most distinctly “American” region of the United States. In that sense, West Virginia and Kentucky are (two of) the most “American” states in the country.

The interesting thing is that, when I think about it, there is no contradiction between being the least “typical” state and the most “American” one. The reason Appalachia and other nonplantation regions of the South are such is that they are almost completely unexposed to outside cultural influences. Instead, they have become what James Löwen called “white ghettoes”, but which he and I agreed are more accurately named “white cloisters”. For historical reasons, many rural areas in the nonplantation South, the Midwest and the interior west have chosen to isolate themselves from outside culture for either religious or racial reasons — which of course may be linked.

1980s West Indies versus 1980s VFL?

Eleven years ago, I reacted in what I now recognise as a ridiculous manner to the discovery of an article in the Sydney Morning Herald that discussed the losses suffered by the 1984 Australian cricket tour of the West Indies. Having during the 1990s discovered an apparent pervasive anticorrelation between fast bowling strength and the profitability of first-class cricket, I long assumed the West Indies were an exception. Thus, my discovery that tours there were losing money made me emphasise beliefs established as a teenager, though others around me denied their truth.

Absence of evidence re the profitability of Caribbean tours before Lloyd worked out that spin was an unnecessary luxury precluded refutation of the argument that their extreme fast bowling strength caused the financial losses. Even people outside my family were unable to offer an answer with which I was satisfied — and they themselves never discussed the profitability of previous Caribbean tours.

Today when discussing the issue of how 1980s Wisdens overemphasised how bad England was and did not discuss what the West Indies were doing well, I received an interesting idea. This was that the financial losses of West Indian cricket during the 1980s were due to the increasing financial demands of their star players.

I had never thought of this argument before, but it is eerily similar to the situation faced by [Australian Rules] football during exactly the same era. With the VFL’s zoning and clearance rules declared illegal, and clubs in an era of inflation seeking to gain top players at any price, player costs continued to rise even when governments put the brakes on inflation, with the result that real wages of players increased at an increasing rate. Consequently, declining attendances as more and more people relocated to suburbs remote from the public transport essential to move large numbers of people to grounds produced much heavier losses than occasional attendance declines in previous eras. Clubs could not cut expenses as they previously could because of the demands players were making. These demands were further increased by a greater demand to win at any price (at least by most top football clubs). At the same time ruling classes who formerly patronised football turned to basketball, which was very easy to televise to people remote from public transport. The VFA, the WAFL, and lower leagues suffered even more than did the VFL. Ultimately, football had to reform on basketball’s terms — rationalised grounds and standardised conditions that made the game much easier to televise.

1980s West Indian cricket managers, no doubt, would have liked to reduce payments to star players to lower costs, but the Sydney Morning Herald implied that they knew this to be impossible. Also, exactly like [Australian Rules] football, cricket in the West Indies was struggling to compete with the rapidly growing National Basketball Association — based much closer than the MCC or Kerry Packer. Another similarity was that the West Indies were taking cricket to all grounds although only Queen’s Park in Trinidad was economically profitable, while football was played on unprofitable suburban ovals on which league-fixed ticket prices meant more popular clubs could not generate sufficient revenue from home games to improve facilities. The ruling classes of the West Indies, increasingly linked to the United States, had little interest in patronising better and cheaper accommodation at cricket venues.

A major difference is that the VFL by 1984 recognised for exactly this reason that suburban grounds needed to be phased out, whereas the West Indies Cricket Board was expanding first-class cricket to these very loss-making venues. Nonetheless, the similarities are both interesting and surprising — increasing demands from players and a shift of ruling class patrons to basketball are almost certainly behind the heavy losses of all [Australian Rules] football competitions in the 1980s and may well be behind the financial losses suffered by the West Indies while it dominated world cricket on the field.

Stupid computers or not the point?

When I studied in Melbourne University, I was outraged at the rude graffiti I discovered on virtually every toilet wall. Almost all if it was sexual in nature, and I always felt it encouraged violence towards women or towards men perceived as not strong enough. This latter tendency was aided by the fact that as a university student at the end of the 1990s I had strong memories of bullying both at school and on the street.

Coarse (or violent) language on films or in music seemed to me like a natural culprit for bullying behaviour. When I first heard of film ratings, I presumed their purpose must be safety — preventing children learning that violence is acceptable behaviour or naïvely thinking thus.

At the same time, I was learning to use Microsoft Word, and one function I quickly discovered was AutoCorrect. I quite quickly began to check spelling on Word, and soon discovered that I could add to and delete from AutoCorrect. Given my dislike of rude language, it felt entirely natural to add to AutoCorrect any rude word whose meaning in less coarse language was known. I did this a lot for a while, often repeatedly because my additions in the Melbourne University computer laboratories were probably not retained when the computers shut down at the end of each day.

All seemingly went well for a while, until I made, merely testing, a discovery that was truly shocking — that AutoCorrect was not case sensitive! This meant that “Dick” was corrected even when intended as someone’s name (I intended and assumed it would only correct when uncapitalised, but was shocked when “Dick Tyldesley”, a former Lancashire bowler, became “Penis Tyldesley”!). Following this, I assumed that the inability of AutoCorrect to be case sensitive meant computers really were not nearly so intelligent as everybody presumed. I consistently laughed at how something so specialised as a computer could be unable to distinguish capitalised from uncapitalised words and (in this case) correct only the uncapitalised. At the same time my brother said, critically but not aggressively, that by adding swear words I was turning AutoCorrect into “AutoCensor”. “AutoCensor” remains a really funny joke, much less gratuitous than the renaming of people called “Dick” by an addition intended only to AutoCorrect with a small initial letter.

After a while, the contrived nature of my additions to AutoCorrect made me think my original idea was silly because it was so difficult a job to accurately rewrite rude words as something less nasty and more often than not grauitously violent.

Then, I was told rather quietly one day by a university official than I had been banned from the computer labs for “tampering with AutoCorrect”. I was told that my tampering with AutoCorrect had ruined some other student’s essays — completely changing texts in such a way that they could not be mended. Unlike later cases at RMIT where I reacted extremely violently and angrily, I accepted this punishment because I knew very clearly that I had been altering AutoCorrect. Even if I felt my intentions were good, I had already realised that tampering with AutoCorrect simply could not do what I wanted it to.

Until recently I largely forgot about this, although I still thought of computers as really stupid because AutoCorrect was not and could not be made case-sensitive as I always assumed it should be. However, a discussion with my brother confirmed what he had said to be a quarter of a century ago — that AutoCorrect exists purely to correct typos, and is not designed to correct swearing (my brother’s “AutoCensor”). Although it ought to be simply enough to have separate AutoCorrect entries with different capitalisations, that has never been done because it would be more complex and the purpose was and is always corrections whose necessity is independent of capitalisation. If that be recognised, then computers that correct “Dick” when capitalised are simply doing what they are ask, whether it was my intention or not, and are not totally stupid as I have always thought!

Assessing the theory of a “Revolution of 1959” part II

In two previous posts (click here and here), I have argued that English county cricket shows evidence of revolutionary change in bowling statistics and records during the late 1950s. Before this shift, spin bowlers almost always headed the averages, whereas afterwards fast bowlers almost came out at the top. Before the shift, also, spin bowlers took far more wickets than they did in subsequent seasons.

Another change with the putative but quite possibly real “Revolution of 1959”, which I did not discuss in the two previous posts, is a dramatic decline in the frequency of large innings and match wicket hauls. I have long known that there have been twenty cases of a bowler taking seventeen or more wickets in a match in England, but until recently not a solitary post-World War II instance. I also knew that there were relatively many (I did not count at the time) cases of sixteen wickets in a match, but not one by a non-touring bowler in England between 1957 and 1999. A few years ago I calculated that only three seasons between 1888 and 1960 (1920, 1946 and 1950) had no case of a bowler taking fifteen or more wickets in a match, whereas between 1961 and 1988 there were a mere five such cases by non-touring bowlers in twenty-nine seasons. There was indeed no fifteen-wicket match return by an England-qualified bowler between 1969 and 1993 inclusive. Also, no season between 1888 and 1969 saw no case of a bowler taking nine or ten wickets in an innings, whereas in the 1970s and 1980s there were only a handful of cases.

To test this evidence for a “Revolution of 1959”, I have tabulated all the cases of nine or more wickets in an innings, and of fifteen or more wickets in a match, by “home” (non-touring, not necessarily England-eligible) bowlers. To be more precise, I have also compiled the instances of bowlers taking ten wickets in an innings, and sixteen and seventeen wickets in a match. The data are compiled via the Association of Cricket Statistics and Historians. High totals are shaded in gold, and record totals for a season are bolded.

Season	9+w/i	10w/i	15+w/m	16+w/m	17+w/m
1836	2		1
1837	2	1	1	1	1
1838
1839	1
1840	1		1
1841	1
1842	2		1
1843	1		1
1844	1		1	1	1
1845	1		1	1
1846	1
1847
1848	1	1	2	1
1849
1850	4	1	1
1851	2	1	1
1852	1		1	1	1
1853	1		1	1	1
1854
1855	1		1	1
1856
1857	1		1
1858	2
1859	1	1	2
1860	4		1
1861	2		1	1	1
1862	2	1	3
1863	2		2	1
1864	3
1865	3	2
1866
1867	1
1868	3
1869	1		1	1
1870	1	1
1871	5	1	1
1872	2	1	1
1873	2	2	1
1874	2	1
1875	3		1
1876	2		1	1	1
1877	2		3	1	1
1878	2	1	1
1879			1
1880	1
1881
1882
1883
1884
1885	2		1	1
1886	4	1
1887
1888	3	1	1	1
1889	2		1
1890	4	1	2
1891	2		2
1892	3		1
1893	2		3
1894	6	1	4
1895	10	2	8	3	1
1896	2		1
1897	2		3
1898	3		6	1
1899	6	1	3
1900	6	2	1
1901	2		2
1902	6		2
1903	2		2
1904	6		5
1905	7		2	1	1
1906	10	2	6	2
1907	8	1	5	1	1
1908	1		1	1
1909	5		1	1
1910	5		1	1
1911	6		1
1912	2		4	1
1913	3		3	1	1
1914	6	1	3	1
1919	1		1	1
1920	5
1921	8	4	2
1922	7	1	3	2	1
1923	4	1	2	1	1
1924	5		1
1925	4		2	1	1
1926	3		1	1	1
1927	6	1	3	2
1928	3		3
1929	7	3	1	1
1930	6	1	3	2
1931	6	2	4
1932	5	2	3	2	1
1933	4		2	1
1934	5		2
1935	3	1	2	1
1936	6	1	3
1937	5	1	3	2	1
1938	3		2
1939	9	2	3	3	1
1946	3	1
1947	5		6	1
1948	5	1	3
1949	5	2	3
1950	1
1951	2		1
1952	4		2	1
1953	4	1	2	1
1954	5		3	2
1955	7		3
1956	6	4	3	2	1
1957	3		1
1958	4		3
1959	4	1	1
1960	3		1
1961	1	1
1962	1
1963	1
1964	5	1	2
1965	3
1966	3
1967	2		1
1968	1		1
1969	1
1970
1971
1972	1
1973
1974
1975	2		1
1976
1977
1978	1
1979	1
1980
1981	1
1982	1
1983
1984
1985	1
1986	2
1987
1988	1
1989			1
1990	1
1991	1
1992
1993	2
1994	3	1	1
1995	4		1
1996	1
1997	1
1998
1999
2000	2		1	1
2001
2002	1
2003	2		1
2004
2005
2006	2
2007	1	1
2008
2009
2010	1
2011	1
2012	2
2013			1
2014	1		1
2015	1		1
2016	2
2017	2		1
2018
2019	1		1	1	1
2021	2
2022	1		1
2023			1

The table shown above gives, on the whole, more confirmation of a radical change around the late 1950s than the table of spin bowling predominance and wicket hauls in my preceding post noted at the beginning. Evidence of a dramatic reduction in the number of large wicket hauls in England at that time can be clearly seem from the following graph, which tabulates the table above into eleven-season running totals.

11-year moving totals of instance of 9 or ten, ten, fifteen or more, sixteen or more and seventeen or more wickets in a match by a non-touring bowler in England.
The figures cover seasons from 1836 to 2023, or eleven-year periods centred between 1840 and 2018.

The graph above shows:

1. low numbers of high wicket hauls up to 1880 when relatively very little first-class cricket was played
2. high numbers of high wicket hauls between about 1880 and 1960
3. low numbers of high wicket hauls after 1960 when pitches became more completely covered

The fall in frequencies of high innings and match wicket hauls during the late 1950s shown in the graph above is distinctly steep. There were forty hauls of nine or ten wickets in an innings between 1954 and 1964, but only eighteen in the overlapping period from 1961 to 1971 just seven years later. This fall is convincing evidence for a “Revolution of 1959”.

It should be noted that similar changes appear to have occurred in certain other countries. This is especially true of Australia, where very large wicket hauls have always been much rarer than in England, especially amongst spin bowlers, due to the radically different soils and consequently pitches. Ever since the close of the pluvial era from 1886 to 1894/1895 Australian pitches have proved impossible for English spinners. Before the “Revolution of 1959” these bowlers dominated county cricket — yet not one was a significant force in Australia, where the tighter grass binding reduced their gentle rolling spin to slow straight balls with zero deviation.

No spin bowler has taken ten wickets in an innings in Australia since George Giffen in 1883/1884, and no non-touring bowler has taken fifteen wickets in a match in Australia since Leslie Fleetwood-Smith in 1935/1936. In fact, no non-touring bowler took nine wickets in an innings in Australia between 1979/1980 and 2015/2016. Yet, there were quite a few cases of large match hauls in Australia during the interwar years. This suggests that the “Revolution of 1959” — whilst definitely real — was largely due to England’s efforts to counter Bradman’s great 1948 team, who demolished every prolific wicket-taking county spin bowler, and who emphasised strong, deep pace and seam attacks to minimise the ability of batsmen to hit. With bowlers bowling shorter spells, there was less and less opportunity for them to bowl enough to take large numbers of wickets — but at the same time Australian bowlers became much harder to hit than the spin-dominated interwar attacks were. England responded by phasing out most spin and turning to tight, short-of-a-length seam bowling. This helped England win more but made county cricket vastly less entertaining, turning every county into a losing proposition by the 1960s.

A favorite long-time joke

For many years I have often joked that the next new Melbourne suburbs should be called “Wass”. I have even joked that there is no suburb called “Wass” when there is a suburb called “Hallam”.

This joke is funny to me because “Hallam” and “Wass” are obviously linked to me in a way that is not comprehensible to those who do not know old county cricket well. A relative of mine said that if Hallam was in the east, “Wass” should be in the west of Melbourne, though I have not myself imagined it this way.

In the 1907 County Championship , Nottinghamshire achieved, on paper, the best record of any team since 1889. They won fifteen games, lost none, drew four, and had one abandoned without a ball bowled. This extraordinary record was almost entirely due to the bowling of Albert Hallam and Thomas Wass, who in the twenty games took 298 wickets out of 348 taken by Nottinghamshire (whose two matches with Yorkshire saw all but ninety minutes cricket washed out by rain). No one else except John Gunn did any serious work, and Gunn took just 25 wickets at more than twice the price of Hallam’s or Wass’ wickets.

Despite on paper an unparalleled record, even at the time Nottinghamshire were seen as flattered by not playing equal-second-placed Worcestershire — who had the most powerful batting team in the country due to three Foster brothers playing frequently — and effectively not playing equal-second-placed Yorkshire. Wisden in fact said that Surrey, who won only twelve of twenty-eight games and lost four, were a better team on hard wickets than Nottinghamshire. The problem, of course, is that in an extremely cool and damp summer (the coolest since 1889 in England) only one Nottinghamshire game — against Essex at Trent Bridge — was played throughout on a pitch unaffected by rain. On these wet pitches Hallam and Wass were unstoppable. Nevertheless, they were never even considered for the following winter’s controversial tour of Australia, for which many key players were either unavailable or refused the terms offered them. This suggests that the “extraordinarily good” bowling attributed to Hallam and Wass by Wisden really meant “extraordiarily successful” regardless of quality. I have emphasised that almost every English spinner of the twentieth century was a total failure in Australia, almost certainly because they learned bowling on soft, parkland pitches where extremely gentle finger action produces vicious spin. This same action on the ancient Australian soils yields a harmless straight slow bowler. It is almost certain that before they even entered county cricket, those old English spin bowlers had lost any potential ability to learn the much more vigorous finger and wrist action needed to get the smallest turn in Australia. Many, of whom Hallam was almost certainly one, lacked the natural finger strength to do this anyway.

The Melbourne suburb of Hallam, of course, cannot have anything to do with a cricketer who never visited Australia! It was actually named after the businessman William Hallam, who could conceivably be related to the cricketer given that his full name was Albert William Hallam, but I doubt it very much.