Twenty-five years ago this summer—September 6, 1995 to be exact—the
“Iron Man” Cal Ripken, Jr. played in his 2,131st consecutive game, breaking the
“Iron Horse” Lou Gehrig’s previously held record. The game, against the
California Angels, was nationally televised on ESPN. It was difficult to
watch out-of-town teams in those days, but for this special occasion, even
non-baseball fans tuned in. (Also, in those days, they were not the “Los
Angeles Angels of Anaheim,” and there were only two ESPNs.) When the game
became official, after the top of the fifth inning, a twenty-minute standing
ovation for Ripken ensued. For good measure, Cal had hit a home run in
the fourth inning. The fans, the commentators, the players agreed: Cal
“saved baseball.”
The 1994 strike and cancelled World Series had embittered many
fans—why are millionaires who get to play a game for a living on strike?—and
many Americans had forsworn Major League Baseball. It’s not like it
used to be. I’m done. But, this moment with the “streak” had,
according to the pundits, redeemed all that bitterness and selfishness, and
“baseball [was] back.” As for me, yes I was confused about the strike and
upset that it abbreviated the ‘94 season and delayed the ’95 season. However,
I was too young and too obsessed with playing and watching baseball for me to
do any forswearing myself. If I was an
Expos fan—their only chance at winning it all was in ‘94 (and I don’t count the
Washington Nationals as the same team)—I might have held a longer
grudge.
Even though I lived in the Philadelphia exurbs and was a loyal
Phillie fan, a chance encounter with Cal in a 1988 sticker book had turned me
into his number-one fan. Over time, my bedroom became the “shrine” to
Ripken, as my dad called it. And so, Ripken-obsessed in
non-Oriole-country in 1995, I felt I was able to own, to some degree, that
break-the-streak moment, and it felt very nice. That is, aside from
having to share him with my best friend Fran, Cal was uniquely mine in central
Bucks County. (Fran was obsessed too, and we would regularly debate who
liked Ripken more or who liked him first.) Mrs. Fogel, our eighth-grade teacher
and no huge baseball fan as far as I knew, knew about the impending Ripken
moment and knew to ask me about it. (I don’t know whether she asked
Fran. Probably not, as she liked him
less.) She congratulated me for that moment I had been
working so hard for. So did Uncle Rich, Mr. Cassidy, and other family
members and friends. Watching that game in the basement with my parents,
hiding tears, I concurred with the baseball intelligentsia: Cal had saved the
game and, by extension, naturally, had saved America.
Twenty-five years later, here in 2020, the Major League Baseball
season is delayed again. Perhaps, it will never get off the ground. Meanwhile, the
revelation at the end of last season of the Houston Astros cheating scandal embittered
many fans, not unlike the strike did. (The
Astros, American League champs in 2019 who lost to the Nationals, admitted to
using technology to steal signs in the 2017 and 2018 seasons, but they deny
cheating in the 2019 season and postseason.)
Who will save baseball, and by extension, naturally, America this time?
*
I recall the 1990s fondly. It was a beautiful time,
especially for a middle-class, white, suburban kid like me, who was lucky enough to be
sheltered from both trauma and heartbreak. On the surface political scene, Saddam Hussein had kicked off
the decade. Then, there was Rodney King and Waco, OJ and Oklahoma City,
Lewinsky, and Saddam some more. But, we didn’t think about any of that.
We didn’t have to think about any of that. More important, especially in
the summer, was Letterman, Seinfeld, AOL Instant Messenger, Sportscenter,
the Jersey shore, the Outer Banks when we got too good for the Jersey shore, Baseball
Tonight, and baseball in general.
At the time of Cal Ripken’s saving the world, I was still at the
age when many boys think they’re good enough to make it to the big
leagues. Because I was good enough to make all-star teams as an eighth-grader, I would be good enough to play in high school and in college and,
maybe, even beyond that. That’s why Fran, Billy Ganter, Mike Agnew, and I
would go to baseball camp each summer at Allentown College (now DeSales
University): to work on the fundamentals that would elevate our play and to
“network” with college coaches (the first time I was encouraged to network although
I don’t think I used the word). That was the beauty, or the trick, of
playing in Chalfont. It was a small enough world—there were nine boys in
my graduating 8th grade class—and we felt, rightfully, that nothing could stop
us. At school recess each day, we played a blacktop version of the game,
with stuffed whiffle bats and tennis balls. In between school and TV
games and actual games, I worked on the batting tee (later to be replaced by
the “Solohitter”) in our sizeable
backyard and made my younger brother field grounders with me until we couldn’t
see the ball anymore and one of us got hurt. “Baseball is Life. The
rest is just details.” Mr. Agnew had bought that shirt that a lot of dads
wore, and then we all bought that shirt.
Ours was that magical Sandlot boyhood life, but even less walkable than the LA suburbs and even whiter and without Benny (i.e. no Latinx
kids and no one—spoiler alert—good enough to actually “make it”).
In the 1990s, there were clear heroes. Cal Ripken, of
course. That improbable ‘93 Phillies team of washed-up, joker, has-beens:
Darren Daulton, Lenny Dykstra, John Kruk, Mitch Williams, Pete Incaviglia, and crew.
Especially compared to the superstar-curated rosters across the league, we
loved that Phillies team and their unlikely ride that year. Before the
wild card and the “LDS” (League Division Series) were things and before
interleague play was a thing, those Phillies surprised the baseball world by
winning the NL East and then defeating the Braves for the National League
pennant. (In those days, Atlanta was in the “West.”) I tuned in to
each postseason game early because I had envied those Tim McCarver and Bob
Costas dramatic-voice-over-classical-music-slow-motion preludes, and finally, I
was able to watch them for a team I liked. Sure, the Phillies lost to the
Blue Jays on Joe Carter’s World Series-ending home run (only the second time in
history), but like "Roy Hobbs" (Robert Redford) and the Knights in The Natural,
they had won the pennant and that was what mattered. (There is not even a
World Series in The Natural). And, that is what we choose to
remember.
There were other heroes, too, who weren’t on my favorite teams but
who were benign enough to warrant admiration: Kirby Puckett, Ken Griffey, Jr.,
Tony Gwynn, Craig Biggio, Nolan Ryan, Ryne Sandberg. Away from the TV,
out on the actual fields of our lives, there was that improbable ‘96 Saint
Jude’s team that made it to the Region 20 playoffs—farther than a Jude team had
in years. They were heroes, too, even though they lost to Our Lady of
Mount Carmel in the semi-finals. That is what we choose to remember.
In the 1990s, there were also clear villains. Joe Carter,
yes, but he was more a blip on the radar. The Braves were always around,
and so I hated them more: Greg Maddux, John Smoltz, Tom Glavine, David Justice,
Chipper Jones. Tom Glavine, especially, was a villain because not only
would he get a ridiculously generous strike zone from most umpires but also he
was a player-union rep, and therefore, I had associated his millionaire pretty
face with all that baseball not being played during the strike. My friend
and class/teammate Brian Smith was villainous, too. That is, he liked the
Braves. Why does he like the Braves? He isn’t even from
Atlanta. And Tim Whelan, a year ahead of us—he liked them, too.
So did Alex Moore, who lived down the street. Not only did Alex like the
Braves, but he also rooted for the Cowboys, the Bulls, Duke basketball, and
Nebraska football. He apparently lacked a soul and jumped on every
bandwagon he could find. Despite the
cultural appropriation and it being a Braves’ thing, I admittedly was jealous
of the Atlanta fans’ “Tomahawk Chop” and thought the Phils’ “Whoomp There It Is” was a
valiant effort but just couldn’t match in its rallying power, even though
“Whoomp” beat the chop in six games. Then mid-decade, the Yankees
re-entered the scene and played their role as perennial villains, with their
burgeoning payroll, their history of winning, Steinbrenner, and the whole
Yankees apparatus, right down to the twelve-year-olds in the stands who cheat and then are treated as heroes. My buddy Jon Hassinger liked the
Yankees. He insisted on being them every time we played whiffle ball, and
he definitely was not from New York. Sure, I wasn’t from Baltimore, but I
rationalized, I love the Phillies, but I also "need" an AL team, and Baltimore
is the closest. Plus, I started liking Ripken first (before Fran Lang did)
in 1988, when the O’s were terrible, and they’re still not that good. I
have since looked it up: Baltimore’s Camden Yards was farther from my
home than Yankee Stadium was. But still, Jon, the Yankees? He and I would patch up any hard
feelings each evening by watching Sportscenter at least three times and Baseball
Tonight at least twice.
On the actual field, Mount Carmel in Doylestown were our Catholic
league villains, with their bigger homes and larger school enrollment, and
Souderton were the secular league villains, who made us forfeit a playoff game
only after we won it soundly because “our ump” didn’t show up (an example of when adults get
in the way, especially "their adults").
More than any Yankee or Brave or Mount Carmelite, though, JD Drew
was the ultimate villain of the 1990s. JD Drew? Someone whose
contributions or career did not change history that much, compared to some of
the true hegemons of that decade? Yes. In 1997, with the second overall pick, the
Phillies drafted Drew out of Florida State, where he was the top player in all
of college baseball. But with the advice of his agent and baseball’s Iago, Scott
Boras, he refused to sign for anything less than $10 million, even though he
hadn’t played a game of professional ball in his life. The Phillies
offered him $2.6 million, which he refused, and he went to play
independent-league ball for a year. Then, he re-entered the draft in ‘98,
and the St. Louis Cardinals selected and signed him for $7 million. Here
was this unproven, hotshot, Sun Belter college kid, who thumbed his nose at the
organization, at the city of brotherly love (and at the suburbs), and the Phils
had nothing to show it—for that top draft spot, which they had earned from all that
losing the previous year(s). That did not sit well with the phaithful,
and so when Drew, with the Cardinals, finally made his way to Philly in ‘99, he
sat out the first game citing “injury,” but we knew it was fear and
guilt. He even switched jerseys with the bullpen catcher, but the fans
found him anyway and booed him mercilessly. The Phillie Phanatic dumped
bags of fake cash in front of him. The next evening, when Drew actually
played, the fans booed and jeered and cursed him, and some freedom fighters even
threw batteries at him (yes, batteries, don’t ask why or what significance
there is). The following year, I had the opportunity to attend a
Cards-Phils game and boo Drew as well. I left the batteries at home—plus,
we never sat close enough for our batteries to have reached him—but I donned a
home-made t-shirt, with “JD Drew” in the “no”/strike-through symbol on the
front and “© The JD Drew Sucks Company” on the back, which at the time I
thought was both clever and just. I received compliments from fellow fans—I
don’t remember the score of the game, it doesn’t matter—including from one
gentleman who said I had made the best shirt ever and that he “would have Adolf
Hitler over to [his] house for dinner before [he] would have JD Drew
over.”
In the 1990s, it was a black and white world, and JD Drew was on
the wrong side.
*
In the summer of 2002, home from college, I sat down to write a
different unsolicited essay on baseball. I don’t recall the specific
impetus for writing it. There was an on-the-field incident, or an
off-the-field incident, or another huge contract signing, or some player on TV
wearing his uniform pants loosely around his ankles as if they were wind pants,
which was not how I was taught by my baseball camps and coaches to wear
them. (I used to wear mine tightly, pulled up to my knee, showing off my stirrups, like I was Ozzie
Smith in the '80s, or something.) In that essay, titled “Where
Have You Gone, Jim Eisenreich?” I wrote down everything I thought was wrong
about baseball and the few things I found right about it. Jim Eisenreich
was a journeyman outfielder who played for the Phillies between ‘93 and
‘96. He had (has) Tourette’s Syndrome, and fans admired him for overcoming
that and for otherwise being a “class act” and showing “hustle” and “grit.”
Like Simon and Garfunkel’s Joe DiMaggio, who was also “gone,” I saw Eisenreich
as a hero of the past—four years into the past, that is, as he only had
retired in ’98—and the kind of player and, presumably, person we should
all hope to be. In that self-righteous manifesto, I decried the influence
of money, the lack of team loyalty, fights, hot shots, players not running out fly or foul balls, JD Drew, the designated hitter (the DH wasn’t new, but I believed it was
a longtime harbinger of baseball’s downfall), bad attitudes, more money, and
steroid use, presuming that Mark McGwire, Barry Bonds, and Sammy Sosa all used
them. I was, however, less interested in whether my favorite players
juiced. I am grateful that I cannot find that essay today.
In the 2000s, college classes and then later the navy kept me
pretty busy, and therefore, I began drifting away from the game,
unintentionally. I recall 9/11 and my roommate from Staten Island, Tom,
who thought that the Yankees should have, poetically, been the World Series
champs that year, instead of those Sun Belt-newcomer Diamondbacks, with
their swimming pool beyond the right field fence. Tom did not appreciate
it when I said in return that the Yankees were the reason the terrorists hated
us. Then, there was Steve Bartman, that hapless Cubs fan who in 2003
interfered with a potential foul out and ruined—or so unofficial pundits said—the
Cubs’ chance at their first World Series win since 1908. (They would have
to wait another 13 years.) There was Curt Schilling’s “bloody sock” and
the rest of the Red Sox, who finally broke their own curse in 2004, sweeping the Cardinals
in the Series, after coming back from three games down against the Yankees in
the ALCS. But over time, the Red Sox became the new Yankees, with their
young hotshot general manager, Theo Epstein, and their big names and multiple
titles.
Around the same time—March 20, 2003 to be exact—the US illegally and immorally invaded Iraq. In April 2003, the National Baseball Hall
of Fame disinvited Tim Robbins, who was supposed to participate in an event at
the Hall for the 15-year anniversary of Bull Durham. Robbins had spoken out against the war, and the president of Hall, Dale Petroskey, did not like that.
From Cairo, where I was studying abroad, I wrote an email to Petroskey, siding
with Robbins and against the war. I still await his reply. When I
came back from Cairo, it seemed as if the flags were getting bigger, and the
national anthems were getting longer, and there were more “God Bless Americas”
slipped into more seventh-inning stretches, and the broadcasters were all
wearing more and bigger flag lapel pins each day, and there were more fighter-jet flyovers
and more yellow ribbon magnets and more troops being honored on the field, and
that every time you watched a game, or especially if you went to one, you had
to consent to war in Iraq or war somewhere—it did not matter where. And
honestly, it seemed like we Americans were very insecure people, internally,
and that therefore we were projecting all this stuff, externally.
Or, maybe it had been this way all along and I was only noticing then.
Or, maybe I was the one projecting. Due to these associations—baseball
and America had long before become one and the same—I started enjoying
baseball less.
I did stay around long enough to watch the Phillies win the World
Series in 2008. It was the first time a favorite team of mine or a team I
was on had won any title, and it felt very nice. I also stayed around
long enough to watch the Phillies go down Red Sox lane the following years—’09
, ‘10, and ’11—buying up big-name players and getting very big for their
britches and yet, not winning another title. I saw the 2009 World
Series from Uganda, where I was a volunteer teacher, waking up at odd hours to
watch it on the priests’ satellite TV across the street. The commercials
and the bunting—not the sacrifice-move-the-runner-over kind but that
red-white-and-blue-hanging-up kind—and the Tim McCarver melodramatic
voice-overs and thinking about the million-dollar contracts and the God Bless
Americas provided a little reverse culture shock each night that I watched the series
from East Africa: Ah right, that’s where I am from. It was about
then when Major League Baseball and I went our separate ways. Plus, I had already got what I needed in ‘08. The league, in my mind, had
become—or was always?—a microcosm of the larger US conspicuous-consumption,
capitalist culture, i.e. of a world gone wrong, i.e. worse than baggy uniform
pants this time. Meanwhile, in my first year of teaching in the States, I
happened to teach a couple baseball players who happened to be assholes.
Then, I looked back to my own high school days and thought about my classmates
who were good enough to go on to play in college at least and remembered that
they were assholes, too. And, I presumed that when they didn't make it all the way, they found jobs with hedge funds, alongside my old bandwagon neighbor Alex Moore. By extension, I thought that most professional
baseball players must be assholes, too. I had heard from a
friend of a friend of a friend, who rode with a cab driver one time
who happened to be overweight and who, another time, had given champion Phillie second-baseman Chase Utley a ride,
that Utley was an asshole, having made a joke about the driver’s obesity.
That seemed like evidence and proof enough. And then, I thought back to
Lenny Dykstra and the current “libel-proof” train wreck that he is and the
‘93 Phillies and all that “grit” of those guys we would have liked to “have
[had] a beer with” and wondered if they would be wearing
MAGA hats today, or at least flying the "Don't Tread on Me" flags somewhere. Maybe not—and in another breath, Who cares? That
is quite the jump, by the way, and also, unfair—but,
I was revising my own histories and redrawing my own categories.
Extending this train of thought, I also revisited my own
particular hero-worship and, aside from JD Drew, I questioned my selection of
earlier sworn enemies. I blasphemed and even reconsidered Ripken.
Ripken, in 1995, was seen as the everyman hero, like your dad going out to the
factory every day, so said Costas and the pundits. But,
C’mon in 1992,
Ripken had signed the largest baseball contract ever and was
making $6 million a year that September when he saved baseball. Your
father was not making $6 million a year going to the factory,
or even to his consulting firm (as the factories were all gone by ‘95 anyway. And while we’re on factories
and blue collar personas, sure, Springsteen’s dad worked in one, but Bruce, at
an overall net worth of $500 million, certainly does not work in one alongside
Ripken and your dad. And while we’re talking about Bruce and baseball,
why would he write, “He could throw that ‘speedball’ by you”? What the
hell is a “speedball”? Has Bruce ever even watched a baseball game?).
True, Cal's never missing a game was a feat, but that blue collar
working man persona that McCarver-Costas beautifully sung I came to
see as late-stage capitalism’s mystification over, one, the actual gross
inequality between the haves and have-nots and, two, your own actual social
immobility while you continue to believe in the mythical American-dream social
mobility, or something like that. Additionally on the foreign front,
Had
Ripken become, as ambassador of baseball in his retired days, part-tool of US empire? I was leaving no stones unturned. To be fair though,
“baseball ambassador” was much softer and less harmful than some of
the other things W and Condi cooked up in their time, and if I were offered the job, even by
this current State Department, it would be hard to turn down. Meanwhile,
I was also taking aim at the changing corporate names of stadiums and other easy,
conspicuous targets. At Yankee Stadium, for one, you could buy a “Legends
Suite” ticket for up to $2,500 and have five-star dining in the Legends Suite Club and not have to interact with (slightly) lower-class fans. Even
in stadiums less plutocratic than Yankee, you have to drop at least $35 on
fried food to get full. And, while I sat
with a friend in his corporate law firm’s box seats, at no cost to me—I surely
couldn’t turn him down!—I contemplated the people working those concessions and
how they almost definitely do not make enough between that and their second or
third jobs to enjoy a night at the park themselves or even to survive in cities
like New York, San Francisco, Boston, and DC with their unaffordable housing—or
now more and more, even Philadelphia. And, how those workers are
disproportionately people of color, while the fans in the stands and even the players these days are
getting whiter and whiter. Finally, on the steroids question, I assumed
it wasn’t just McGwire and the Roger Maris-chasing-gang who were juicing.
I presumed most sluggers were, and many pitchers, too. I blamed them, but
I also blamed the DH rule and TV ratings and viewers drawn by the home run
only, i.e. fans not worth winning over anyway.
Few aspects of the game were safe from my new analysis.
Not only did I go back to reexamine my ‘90s heroes and villains, I
went back and reexamined my own ‘90s innocence and also that early 2000s ("Eisenreich") lens
that led me to see the world in black and white. Yet at the same time, I had the luxury of not
seeing things from a different “black and white” perspective when maybe I should have.
How and why did I employ “grit” and “class act” for certain players and not others? Why did I like Gwynn or Griffey, or, away
from baseball, even Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods, but I did not like when
Bobby Bonds talked about his son Barry and race or,
away from baseball, when Venus and Serena Williams’ dad talked about his daughters and race. Why did he bring it up? We were having so much fun. I didn't see it. How did
I not see it? But meanwhile, Griffey was thinking about race himself, as
other black players must have been. How could he not? He was kind enough
to us white fans just to not bring it up. I knew why I liked Ripken, but when the great Eddie Murray returned to the Orioles in his twilight days, why did he come off as angry to me and why did I want him to "smile more"?
To try to atone for these old but newly manifested sins, I went
back and appropriated new, different heroes—not replacing Ripken but standing
alongside him: Jackie Robinson, Roberto Clemente, Ichiro Suzuki, or Paterson NJ native Larry Doby. I tried
to support independent league baseball where it existed—the Camden Riversharks
and the New Jersey Jackals—against the Sherman-Antitrust-Act-exempt, monopolist
MLB. (I highly recommend Netflix’s The Battered Bastards of Baseball, which is about a Portland indie team in the '70s taking on that monopoly). I pretended to be interested in girls’
softball, to make up for my gender gap.
Here in 2020, aside from Bryce Harper, I cannot name a single Philadelphia
Phillie, and I only know his name because of the astronomical 13-year $330
million contract he signed last year. I cannot name a single Baltimore
Oriole. I say that with neither pride nor shame. It is just where I
have landed.
*
In 1905, the baseball executive A.G. Spalding began a commission
to investigate the game’s origins. There were some die-hard
American-baseball purists, especially in the late Gilded Age shortly after the
Spanish-American War, when the US had joined the big boys’ club in overseas
empire-building and was feeling very good about itself. They wanted to prove that baseball was a uniquely
American invention. Most people who considered the question seriously,
however, thought that the game had just evolved from the older, British
“rounders.” Spalding’s sophomoric commission purposefully excluded any supporters of
the rounders theory. Since initial evidence was very lacking, he
solicited letters from the public that would serve as his evidence. One
such letter claimed, dubiously, that the future Union general of the Civil War,
Abner Doubleday, had invented the game in Cooperstown, New York in 1839.
Spalding thus had all the evidence he needed and declared baseball as America’s
self-made sport, and that became the official history. Most baseball
historians doubt this account and believe that it just evolved from rounders.
*
In 1995, as a know-it-all eighth grader, I looked way back into
the past, to 1993, when baseball still had its ostensible pre-strike innocence. But
in 1993, adults around me were already looking back to previous decades when
the game was less about the money. And, I presume the parents of those
adults had looked back to an even different time when it was a “purer” game.
Did that purity include the 1919 Black Sox scandal or racial segregation or
Babe Ruth’s very high salary (for his time)?
In 2002, as a know-it-all college sophomore writing that terrible
essay, I looked back on ‘95 when baseball was great, before it was then ruined
by steroids, money, hotheads, and baggy pants. I wanted the game to be
great, again. In the 2010s, I looked back at my 2002 self with disdain,
precisely for looking back on the ‘90s with such schmaltz, and at the same time, I looked back at my ‘90s self only with the critic’s lens, seeing only a
sheltered kid with his fake heroes. I threw out many babies
with the proverbial bathwater.
But a couple weeks ago, here in 2020, walking in the park with my
daughter and my mask, I heard the ping of an aluminum bat from some other, presumably sheltered kid in his (or her) backyard working off the tee (or Solohitter).
I felt bad for this kid I did not see because his own baseball season has been cancelled and because he
does not get to watch his heroes, obscenely overpaid or not, on TV or at
the ballpark. And I must admit, here in the United States of COVID: I miss
Major League Baseball. I haven’t sat down to really watch a game in
eleven years, but I feel its absence, acutely. The game is supposed to be
on TV in the background like it was growing up, with Harry Kalas giving the
play-by-play. 162 games is a long season—there was never any pressure to
watch whole games and certainly not every single one—but you’re supposed to at
least stop in the living room, here and there, to watch a couple innings at a
time. Better yet, it’s supposed to be on the radio, like when, due to
some archaic broadcast rules, the TV couldn’t carry it. Or because Aunt
Helen didn’t have cable. Or because
that’s how Bernie Sanders’ family and many
Jewish families in Brooklyn, in my historical imagination, followed their
Dodgers (before the team got too big for its britches and left for the Sun Belt).
Tim McCarver is supposed to be bloviating on a Fourth of July day game broadcast—who can
help him and better yet who can help being drawn into his melodrama? I
can’t.
The ‘90s were indeed wonderful, at least for me, I must admit. Maybe there was some ugly stuff in those years I didn’t see, but it
wasn’t all crap—not at all, not even close. I must say that I am now grateful, in a way, for that
lovely blindness of 1995 and even for that different, “Eisenreich” blindness of 2002. I am grateful for that angstier
blindness of 2009 and, even, for that trite anger of 2019. I am grateful for the original heroes and the
original villains, including JD Drew, even though I understand the world to be a little grayer now (and even though Drew shall remain a villain, along with the DH and hedge funds). I am
grateful for the schmaltz that was called for and even for all the schmaltz
that was overdone.
Some myths and mythologies are harmless, I believe. The
Doubleday baseball creation myth, for instance, is probably one example as long as it doesn’t prevent
historians from sharing the actual record alongside it. Some mythologies
may even be helpful or have a positive effect, and some heroes and icons are
worth saving, at the same time that they’re worthy of criticism, loving or
otherwise. I will keep Ripken (or Eisenreich or, tangentially, Springsteen) as my “hero,” even if that word is grossly overused. Some imagined pasts, I guess, can
peacefully coexist next to actual history, as long as we know the difference.
However, some
characters in other myths should not be hailed as heroes because they were, in fact, murderous conquistadors or greedy sociopaths or, often, just run-of-the-mill grifters. Or in some cases, they were slaveholding generals in a rebellious army that fought to keep slavery. (Doubleday may not have invented baseball in 1839, but at least he chose the right, or less wrong, side to general for in 1861. Robert E. Lee turned down Lincoln's offer for a spot on the Union side and chose "Virginia" instead.) Some mythologies continue to be exploitative and homicidal, long after the "heroes"' departure. Therefore, I believe, some imagined pasts and mythologies must be crushed, as they necessarily carry with them presents and imagined futures
that are lethal.
I spent a lot of time as a kid arguing that baseball was not boring, that it was the best game ever, and that if you couldn’t appreciate it, that said
something about you. I argued that
Ripken was the best player ever and was being selfless—not selfish, dear pundit
or naysayer friend—for playing every day.
But, I realize now those were moot arguments to moot questions. All that mattered was that it was the game I
loved and that I admired Cal. And, as baseball and America were
natural extensions of each other, I spent a lot of those same years assuming--in many cases, arguing--that we were the greatest country, ever. Then, in recent years, I have spent a lot of time thinking how we most definitely are
not the greatest and might even be the worst country in many categories, especially in regards to exploiting black lives at home and exporting violence on brown lives abroad. These are important topics, but questions dealing with superlatives and absolutes--"best? worst? ever?"--now seem moot as well. It’s the only
country that most of us call home, we should know its actual history, and we have a duty to make it more just and equal. How? As Lenny Dykstra put it in that ’93 home companion video
we watched so many times and which I just re-watched and loved again--how could I not?--“Whatever it takes, dude.”
People
will come, Ray. They'll come to Iowa for reasons they can't even fathom.
They'll turn up your driveway not knowing for sure why they're doing it.
They'll arrive at your door as innocent as children, longing for the past.
"Of course, we won't mind if you look around", you'll say, "It's
only $20 per person". They'll pass over the money without even thinking
about it: for it is money they have and peace they lack. And they'll walk out
to the bleachers; sit in shirtsleeves on a perfect afternoon. They'll find they
have reserved seats somewhere along one of the baselines, where they sat when
they were children and cheered their heroes. And they'll watch the game and
it'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. The memories will be so
thick they'll have to brush them away from their faces. People will come Ray.
The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has
rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard,
rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this
game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and
that could be again. Oh...people will come Ray. People will most definitely
come. - "Terence Mann" (James Earl Jones), Field of Dreams
On that
Iowa land from where indigenous peoples were pushed out to make room for white homesteaders
and where the cash-strapped and bank-bullied "Ray Kinsella" mowed his crop to build a baseball field--buried in Mann’s sentimentality and wishful thinking--might be some
truth. If we don’t ignore the very rough edges, that wishful thinking might
even serve us, if it doesn't blind us or make us complacent. Or as Tim Robbins put it to Dale Petroskey , "Long live democracy, free speech and the '69 Mets [sic or, the '93 Phillies, rather]; all improbable glorious miracles that I have always believed in."
Notes:
1.
“Catch the fever” was the
1993 advertising slogan for Major League Baseball. Enjoy:
2.
Do not purposely catch
other fevers. Help stop COVID. Wear a mask.
