Statues depicting ardent Cincinnati Reds fan Harry Thobe, Boston Red Sox fan “Megaphone Lolly” Hopkins", and Atlanta fan Pearl Shadow greet visitors at the entrance of an exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame called humorously Sacred Ground. Photo courtesy of me. Taken August 27, 2011.
[Editor’s note: This is a continuation of Wednesday’s post, Reflections on the 2013 All-Star Game One: Mariano Rivera is boring and that’s why he’s great.]
Much as I love Susan Sarandon in Bull Durham, baseball is not a religion.
It's not a religion, ballparks aren't cathedrals, and the Hall of Fame isn't a shrine. It's a museum. A good one. Much more interesting and lively and fun than it was when I was a kid. If you haven't visited it recently, you should make a point of going soon. Too bad that, thanks to a handful of sanctimonious sportswriters, you won't get to see the plaques of the best pitcher and the best hitter and all around player of the last quarter of the 20th Century this summer, you should still go. And Cooperstown itself is a pleasant and pretty little town. But the point is the museum and what it's there to do, which is what any good museum is there to do, illustrate a history.
Another way to say that is that museums tell stories through visual aids.
Sometimes when I’m daydreaming between innings while sitting in the stands or watching on television or listening while out on the porch late at night, I like to take a Tralfamadorian view and imagine baseball’s history as one continuous, never-ending game of thousands upon thousands of innings being played by uncountable numbers of players in one eternal moment, and that all that’s happened, all that is happening, all that will happen is happening now, all at once, and if we knew how we could look into the moment and pick out any single game, any inning, any at bat, at any ballpark on any given day and see Old Hoss Radbourn finding enough life left in his nearly dead arm to pitch one more game on his way to winning 59, Shoeless Joe and his teammates, their sox still metaphorically white, meeting in that hotel room to discuss throwing the Series, DiMaggio extending his hitting streak another day, Jackie Robinson digging in at the plate in his first at bat at Ebbets Field, Willie just turning his back on home plate to chase after Wertz’s fly ball, Reggie swatting his first of three, the ball on its lazy way down the first base line and Buckner beginning to bend for it, Sid Bream, fucking Sid Bream, rounding third, and Barry Bonds hitting the first home run to splash down in McCovey Cove, and the second, and the third, and the fourth, and the fifth, and the sixth, seventh, eighth, and ninth!
Of course we do have a way of looking at it like this, by telling stories.
More than every other sport, baseball is best understood and appreciated through the telling of stories (Only golf and boxing come close) and baseball’s fans are naturally lovers and collectors and tellers of stories.
We don't love the game for the numbers. The numbers help us appreciate the game. But we love the game for how it is played, and so how individuals played the game is as important---in some cases more important---than the numbers they put up while they were playing. How did they help make games and the game interesting and exciting and fun? The numbers might argue that Jim Rice doesn't really belong in the Hall. But if you were in the stands in Fenway Park that day he tied the game against the Blue Jays with a two run homer that kicked up a tower of dust in the deepest reaches of the Red Sox bullpen and then won it with another blast to the exact same spot and you were thrilled but you weren't surprised because that's the kind of thing Jim Ed did, you might be inclined to say, What do the numbers know?
Actually, the numbers know that he did that kind of thing often, but suggest he didn't do it often enough to offset other things he did often, like ground into double plays.
“You could look it up!” is the game’s unofficial motto. And you could. You can. We all do. The numbers are there. But every discussion of numbers turns into an exchange of stories pretty quickly.
In this character matters. Not character as in having good character. In being a character.
That's why we talk about Ty Cobb, despicable as he was, as if he's still alive and spiking opponents and charging up into the stands to beat up hecklers and why Honus Wagner is a revered but increasingly distant figure growing harder and harder to see in the mists of the past.
Because he's a closer, and because he's a man of good character but not a character, and because he played for the New York Yankees during one of their least tumultuous eras, Mariano Rivera doesn't add a whole lot to the story on his own. He’s a secondary character in the story of the Yankees, which is a dominant chapter in the story, but within that story he is overshadowed by Ruth, by Gehrig, by DiMaggio, by Mantle, by Berra, by Munson, by Jackson, and by Jeter. By Casey Stengel, Billy Martin, and Joe Torre, as well. He's a fascinating aside, but he's not a complete story on his own.
Bonds is.
If he never gets a plaque, there needs to be an exhibit devoted to him, explaining why he doesn't have one. If he does get one someday, that exhibit still needs to be there to explain why he got it even though many people felt he didn't deserve it.
You can’t not tell Bonds’ story and still claim you’re telling the story of baseball. It’s argued that giving him and Clemens and the others plaques in that part of the museum clearly labeled on the maps as the “gallery” not the chapel violates…I’m not sure what. It’s holiness, is what it comes down to. But in leaving him out the museum would be failing to fulfill its mission as a museum. It might be a holier place, but it’s definitely a lesser museum.
Barry Bonds was the best player of his time, one of the very best of the last 40 years, and then he made a decision that made it impossible to judge just how good he really was.
Except that was never going to be possible. It’s not possible to judge, objectively, precisely, and absolutely, just how good any player was because, as Scott Lemieux puts it, the idea that baseball records “are comparable throughout the eras...has never actually been true.”
Babe Ruth was a remarkable talent, but he was able to dominate his league the way he did in part because baseball in the 1920s was far, far less efficient at getting the best talent into the majors — not just the color line but the lack of systematic scouting and farm systems. The Hall of Fame is teeming with merely good players whose stats were compiled during the high-offense twenties and thirties. And while Roger Maris’s record was not established in a high-offense era, it was still the product of many contingencies — an expansion year, a ballpark that made the record possible (which it would not have been for a right-handed hitter in Yankee Stadium or any hitter in Griffith Stadium), having a better hitter behind him to increase the number of ABs in which he could homer. The idea that baseball stats before 1995 were easily comparable across eras is very wrong.
Baseball isn’t a religion, ballparks aren’t cathedrals, the Hall of Fame isn’t a shrine, and the numbers aren’t sacred artifacts.
They’re signatures.
60
61*
56
.366
755
2130
The records are points of pride for the players who hold them. They are interesting as measures of the difficulty of the game. But what do individual records tell us about the players or the way the game is played or was played? Did Bonds become a better player than Harmon Killebrew only when he hit his 574th home run? Did he become as great a player as Ted Williams when he hit his 521st?
(Immediately, Williams fans have begun telling themselves the story of Williams the flying ace’s service in World War II and Korea.)
Want some numbers to obsess over? Forget 762 and 73. Try 514 and 8.
Bonds stole 514 bases over the course of his career. He won 8 Gold Gloves.
How did he “cheat” to put up those numbers?
The records---all the numbers---are important only in the ways they color the story and advance the plot.
Cal Ripken’s record of 2,632 consecutive games played is quite an achievement. Some fans think it’s a dubious one, that he wore himself down and hurt his team for a vanity. But that’s beside the point. The point is that as a story it pales next to Gehrig’s 2130 because of the way Gehrig’s streak ended.
Every game closer to DiMaggio’s record of Pete Rose came called more attention to the difference between himself and DiMaggio. If Rose had hit safely in 13 more games, those differences would have been the story.
And it wouldn’t be just a matter of character or character. DiMaggio never played on Astroturf. Rose played many more games at night.
McGwire’s 70 and Sosa’s 66 are curiosities because the story had already been told---Would anyone ever break Ruth’s record? All McGwire and Sosa did was break Roger Maris' record. And Maris’ story isn't just that he broke Ruth's record. His story is compelling for what he went through while on route to breaking it. McGwire and Sosa and then Bonds didn’t change that or take away the sting of that stupid asterisk. And they share the same fate as Maris, overshadowed by the player whose record they’d surpassed.
Breaking Ruth’s record left Maris as it found him, a good but not great hitter in an era about to be dominated by pitchers. It left Ruth…Ruth.
Breaking a record doesn’t erase the player who previously held it from the story. It doesn’t demean or diminish him. It just adds something else to tell when telling his story.
Putting Bonds and Clemens in the Hall won’t “cheapen” anything. It adds to the story and the stories of other players the Hall exists to collect and re-tell.
Not putting them in this year cheapened something. It cheapened today for the fans who made the trip to Cooperstown for the induction ceremonies and for the families of three men the Veterans Committee voted in this year, Hank O’Day, Jacob Ruppert, and Deacon White. Imagine how many more people would be hearing their stories if their plaques were going up alongside Bonds’ and Clemens’.
Effing Sid Bream? I thought that was reserved for Bucky Dent.
Posted by: Linkmeister | Sunday, July 28, 2013 at 05:05 PM
He won 8 Gold Gloves as a *left fielder*, and he was a left fielder because despite his speed, he couldn't cut it at center. and yes, effing Sid Bream.
Posted by: Janelle | Monday, July 29, 2013 at 09:08 AM
As a Pirates fan who saw his team's last winning season for twenty years end that night...yes. Fucking Sid Bream. (And that damned closer-less bullpen-by-committee that forced Leyland to try to ride a fading Doug Drabek just one...more...inning....)
Posted by: Jaquandor | Monday, July 29, 2013 at 09:27 PM
Janelle, surely you're not dissing left fielders? Yaz was a left fielder!
Posted by: Lance Mannion | Thursday, August 01, 2013 at 07:00 PM
I believe it’s’ called the Baseball hall of fame and Museum and they are two separate entities. I don’t have a problem with Bond’s being in the museum – if memory serves the Black sox are in there as well, I have a large problem with the idea that Bonds should have a plaque in the hall of fame.
Baseball, when you get down to it, is not important – about the only time it had real historical impact was when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier other than that – not really. As much as I love the game.
And because it’s not important you do and should be held to a higher standard (frankly I’d lie cheat and steal to save a friend’s life – I wouldn’t to win a softball game) than folks have in real life. It’s a game, and as it is a game how you play it matters. Bonds used the game for his own self aggrandizement and his lasting legacy is to cast doubt on the achievements of everybody else who played baseball in what has come to be known as the steroid era. He’s gotten his reward he, absent some major revelations and a massive change in how baseball is run, has his records; he won’t be erased like Lance Armstrong’s seven wins were. To suggest base ball honor that legacy with a plaque is a bit much. Seaver, Cobb, Mathewson, Ruth, Yaz, et al played the game, even Bob Uker and Marvelous Marv Thornberry played the game and in doing so honored it in its patent artificiality . Bonds used the game to become famous and make a lot of money. As I said he’s gotten his reward. Baseball owes him nothing.
No it’s not a religion or a temple – but it’s not a whorehouse either.
Posted by: Bob Muir | Tuesday, August 06, 2013 at 02:02 PM
Bob, very well said, and in principle I agree with you, especially about Bonds' having been a selfish player. That's why I think the comparison with Ken Griffey Jr is so compelling. Griffey really did sacrifice himself to Cincinnati. But you're also making the character argument, and so what are you going to do about all the bad characters already in the Hall, starting with Cap Anson and A.G. Spalding? Then what about Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Enos Slaughter, and Dixie Walker? Not to mention Ty Cobb? (Joe DiMaggio hung out with gangsters. Ted Williams was kind of selfish. And Mickey Mantle wasn't exactly a paragon of virtue.) Also, you can't say the same things about Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, or Raphael Palmiero, so what's the case for keeping them out?
As I think I've said over the course of these several posts, I think what these guys did cast doubt only over their own records. I think players should go into the Hall based on their own records so what they did makes it hard to judge just how good they were. But it doesn't make it impossible to judge, unless you arbitrarily decide the steroids made them not better than they might have been if they hadn't used them but any good at all. Clemens and Bonds put in Hall of Fame careers before they started using.
This isn't really important, but Hall of Fame "gallery"---as it's officially identified on the museum maps---isn't any more separate from the museum than the gift shop. It's a great place, however you slice it, though. Have you been recently? If not, you should get up there! I wish I could go back this summer.
Posted by: Lance Mannion | Tuesday, August 06, 2013 at 04:30 PM
haven't been in a While - the weekend Tom Seaver was inducted - induction weekend is crazy but worth it if (I was I was also there for Yaz and Johnny Bench's induction - long story about that trip - don't have time to go into it invovles Sahron Springs and Carlton Fisk's bat) -
I don't qutie thing I'm making a character jdugment here but I need to think it through - my feeling - and hell could be wrong here is that a lot of great players were rotten people - indeed I think you could create an impressive all star team out the worst people to play the game. However, and this could be utterly willfull so I need to think this through - there is a difference bewteen what happens outside the lines and what happens inside the white lines - that I feel is the important difference - Babe Ruth showing up hung over at a game wasn't as bad as what Hal Chase did to the sport stone cold sober. I could be just blowing smoke here but..well to be continued.
Posted by: Bob Muir | Wednesday, August 07, 2013 at 04:11 PM