Jim Berryman's 1936 baseball preview, lost among the experts

Lost! - in a forest of confusing dope! is a Jim Berryman cartoon for the Washington Evening Star, dated 8 April 1936. Two puzzled men wander among tree trunks labelled with American League strengths and doubts, and a caption says the game is played on a field, not on paper (NAID 5743105).

The drawing

This is a baseball cartoon, not a political one. The archive describes two bewildered men standing among tree trunks, each trunk lettered with a team's supposed edge or weakness, and small inset sketches of a team owner, a horse, and a player riding a tiger. The labels are the joke. Every forecast points a different way.

LOST!

- IN A FOREST OF CONFUSING DOPE !.........

YANKS' PITCHING STAFF / SENATORS' SPEED / DI MAGGIO THREAT / HOW ABOUT GROVE ? / YAWKEY'S "ALL-STARS" / INDIANS UNKNOWN [...]

AMERICAN LEAGUE "EXPERTS"

THEY'VE GOT IT ON PAPER--BUT THE GAME IS PLAYED ON A FIELD!

[...] BUT THE DARK HORSE MIGHT BE AN INDIAN PONY!

JIM BERRYMAN

Why it is in the file

The archive tags the cartoon with card stacking and calls the fit weak: each tree carries one selective claim, and the claims are set against each other. Its catalog lines put the issuer type as media, the audience as the domestic public, and the purpose as warning or informing. There is no government message here and no enemy.

The useful thing about the cartoon is its attitude. The line about paper and the field is a cartoonist laughing at the "experts" and their confident predictions.

The Berryman set

The drawing sits in the National Archives among the Jim Berryman political cartoons held with the records of the U.S. Senate. On this site, the July 1938 cartoon of WPA money sown across the South and the same month's New Deal knight charging three Democrats show the political side. The Roosevelt administration essay notes that the country's newspapers in these years were privately owned.

How the cartoon came into the Senate files is not in the FRAME record.