I don’t have a ready explanation. Well, not a good one anyway. Let’s just say I tend not to do “country” and have tried scrupulously to avoid walking down any of the same paths as the Deerslayer. Then there’s the fact that the ladies in my family are no more enamored of legendary baseballs than they are of storied pucks. Cracker Jacks and souvenirs aren’t what they have in mind when they inquire, “Where’s the shopping?”
But I am obviously not alone in this, hardly the only one who adores the game but is not enamored of the jaunt into the New York boonies. In its 63 years of existence, the Hall of Fame has attracted an average of about 200,000 visitors annually, so we’re not exactly talking Disney World or Niagara Falls numbers. It even pales by comparison with other sites that venerate the historic game; Boston’s famed antique, Fenway Park, will attract more than 3 million visitors in 2002, and it’s open for just 81 days.
Now the Hall of Fame has made a very savvy decision: it will come to us. For the first time in history, the hall is embarking on a road trip. And it’s bringing some prime memorabilia on a four-year-odyssey, crisscrossing the nation with stops in 10 major U.S. cities. The exhibition is expected to attract more than 1 million people a year, a mother lode of middle-aged men dragging young children past an Andy Pafko baseball card and other touchstones of their youth. It is a masterstroke for a sport that, at least historically, has demonstrated all the outreach acumen of dinner-hour telemarketers.
The exhibition, entitled “Baseball as America,” opened at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City this month and will be there through mid-August. It is a stunning show, a true “best of” collection–even if you don’t get to see it as we coddled press did alongside 26 living members of the Hall of Fame. Can there be a better moment for an old fan than watching Stan “the Man” Musial assume the stance one more time? Or having Juan Marichal confide that while Clemente, Aaron and Rose were all tough, Phillies journeyman Tony Gonzalez was the one guy he could never get out.
But even absent the glamour guys, the exhibition is a grand slam. Far more than a random collection of neat bats, balls, jerseys and shoes (including even “Shoeless” Joe Jackson’s shoes), it reveals baseball as an essential part of this nation’s fabric, interwoven with every major societal trend. There is a section about mythmaking, which includes the trophy given Lou Gehrig at his unforgettable Yankee Stadium farewell. A section about root, root, rooting for the home team, with the costumes of mascots like the San Diego Chicken and the Phillie Phanatic. And a section about the national spirit includes FDR’s “Green Light Letter,” declaring that the game should go on during World War II as a morale booster, as well as the post-9-11, first-pitch ball thrown by President Bush at the World Series in Yankee Stadium.
And there is, naturally, a section on ideals and injustices. It includes a letter written by JFK praising the heroic contributions of Jackie Robinson. And also a piece of ugly hate mail sent to Hank Aaron as he was on the verge of surpassing Babe Ruth–usurping the rightful perch of a white man, the writer suggested in semiliterate fashion–as the game’s all-time, home-run hitter. There is also a short, neatly-typed epistle, dated Christmas Eve, 1969, to commissioner Bowie Kuhn. In it outfielder Curt Flood, who had just been traded from the Cardinals to the Phillies, posited this rather astounding notion: “After 12 years in the Major Leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.”
Today, after decades now of free agency and arbitration and a whole lot of labor consternation in Major League Baseball, it is a bit difficult to comprehend how radical Flood’s assertion was. He would not profit, other than in the eyes of history, for his prescience. But every modern baseball player should remember him nightly in their prayers or toasts. Flood was 100 percent right, as right as Abe Lincoln in his Emancipation Proclamation a century before, but that doesn’t mean that all the residue of his challenge has been good for the game. Baseball’s labor wars have been sports’ most venomous and they offer up a truly unappetizing portrait of “baseball as America.”
Indeed it’s easier, or perhaps simply more palatable, to regard this realm not as American, but rather as “baseball as the Middle East”: two unrelentingly, bitter adversaries who can’t move past historical grievances and visceral hatreds to furnish a lasting peace that assures everyone’s survival. There are no heroes, no visionaries. There is no leader among the owners, no leader among the players and certainly not the commissioner himself who appears capable of transcending the chasm between the two sides. Both trade in a single currency, and that is bile.
I can ignore all this for the majesty of Opening Day on Monday. So I will enter Fenway Park with a sprightly step for what, in the Red Sox eternal quest, passes for a season of renewed hope. There is a new, impressive and aggressive ownership group hell-bent on defying history’s curse on their and my ballclub. And I will sit in the stands, ignoring another huge hike in ticket prices, and play the fan to the hilt. Is Pedro’s shoulder OK? How about Nomar’s wrist? And have the Red Sox ever boasted such a speed parlay as Rickey Henderson and Johnny Damon? The Yankees must be quaking!
But when the day’s celebration is over and I step back into my journalist’s skin, I will recognize that the 2002 season is in jeopardy as baseball heads toward another cataclysm. It seems preposterous, given the toll the last divide took on the game, but it is sadly true. The players’ contract expired last November, and there is no progress in the dialogue for a new one. The two sides don’t even speak the same language. When commissioner Bud Selig pledges that the owners won’t stage a lockout this season, the players detect only a ruse. Get them to finish out the season and then the owners will unilaterally unleash a host of new and unpalatable contract provisions. The players believe their only leverage may be to strike before the owners do–and, of course, when it counts and hurts the most. The fans be damned!
Does this sounds slightly familiar, a bit like deja vu all over again? Of course it does. It’s an eerie reprise of the 1994 impasse that produced the strike that lasted 232 days and wiped out a World Series. Even after the resumption of play, it took another two years to hammer out a contract. And it took several more years–and a classic World Series in a time of American emotional upheaval–before baseball could reclaim some semblance of its former hold on the American public.
Baseball doesn’t have the luxury of another such conflagration. Its emotional claim on this nation, particularly its youth, is already tenuous. The “national pastime” crap is nothing but an exercise in nostalgia. So the fools on both sides ought to hightail it over to New York’s Upper West Side and the American Museum of Natural History. Take a good, close look. Not at “Baseball as America.” You don’t have to bother with that. Rather check out that dinosaur in the lobby. I hear they used to be very big in this country, too.
WHO WILL WIN …
Here’s hoping that baseball makes it though the season and here’s hoping it doesn’t turn out this way. Unfortunately, reason dictates otherwise. The rich have only gotten richer.
AMERICAN LEAGUE
East: New York Yankees
Central: Minnesota Twins
West: Seattle Mariners
Wild Card: Oakland Athletics
NATIONAL LEAGUE
East: Atlanta Braves
Central: St. Louis Cardinals
West: Arizona Diamondbacks
Wild Card: Chicago Cubs
And the World Series will be that tired, old chestnut: Yankees over the Braves. (For a Red Sox fan, that’s barely one step up from a season-ending strike.)
