Word: flaked
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...world champion New York Yankees. He wore his blonde hair short, and T.V. advertising executives begged for his services to plug their latest masculinity-producing hair tonics. Then two things happened to Jim Bouton: he lost his fastball, and the owners and other players discovered that he was a flake...
...flake in baseball is to be intelligent. A flake is someone who disturbs the status quo (i.c. an outside agitator). Suddenly the television producers were nowhere in sight, the owners treated Bouton not as a star but as a commodity, and he ended up in the minor leagues. Another forgotten man, another tax loss for the owners. But there were new stars, after all, to take his place in the firmament. Jim Bouton became a marginal ball-player, lingering in the lower minor leagues until baseball expanded in 1968 and his contract was picked up by the Seattle Pilots...
BALL FOUR is the story of Bouton's try for a comeback. But because Jim Bouton is a flake it is also much more. It is an account of chicanery on the part of the owners of stupidity on the part of the managerial staff, and of blindness among rank and file ball-players. Ball Four places the all-American game under the scrutinizing of an experienced eve and finds it a game played by men, not giants, Ball Four is also the best book ever written about baseball...
...thumbnail-sized automatic switches that are designed to shut off the oxygen tank's internal heater if its temperature rises above 80° F. Tests showed that the temperature, if unchecked, could soar as high as 1,000° and cause the electrical insulating material to flake off. The arcing that results can ignite the insulation. Heat from the fire expands the compressed semiliquid oxygen, and its pressure eventually increases enough to burst the tank. The safety switches were apparently damaged when the heater was used during a test before the launch...
Through their toy films, the Eameses have examined everyday objects by illustrating the objects' characteristics; tops are to be spun, not to sit on the shelf. So for seven minutes the audience delights in watching whirling tops of different colors and nationalities. A snow-flake top from India splits and becomes five tops spinning at once. There is no narration; a musical score anticipates the spinning function found even in a jack or thumbtack...