Notes from the Shadows of Cooperstown
Observations From Outside the Lines |
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NOTES FROM THE SHADOWS OF COOPERSTOWN
Observations from Outside the Lines
By Two Finger Carney (carneya6@borg.com)
#306 SEPTEMBER 12, 2003
REPERCUSSIONS
The title of this issue happens to be the title of the second item featured here, too, a little bit of "Horsehide Sci-Fi" that first appeared back in 1994. That was the year that a terrific season was in progress -- until August 12. I still call the event "Selig's Strike," because he could have shown some spine and stood up for the best interests of baseball -- resigning in protest, if necessary, if his fellow owners insisted on their foolhardy crusade to bust the player's union. Well, that's all behind us now. I reacted in a dozen different ways, all documented in some very dark issues of Notes, but one of the ways was to write Repercussion, and if you read The Right Dimensions last issue, this is both a sequel, and a whole new thing.
My leadoff piece here is also a kind of sequel -- to my interview with Eliot Asinof, also in last issue. And it, too, is all about repercussions. To me, one of the truly fascinating aspects of my research into the 1919 Series Fix, and the events surrounding it, is how close the Cover-Up came to succeeding. (If I had the evidence, I'd add "as previous Cover-Ups had succeeded.) Examining how the cover-up comes undone is, I think, the heart of my book. Keep that in mind as you read "Say It Ain't So, John! [Sayles, director of Eight Men Out]". It seems certain that the unraveling beings with an obscure "thrown" game between the Cubs and Phils on August 31, 1920 -- but on further review, whether that game was fixed is not at all certain. The Cub pitcher who was yanked before the game started, Claude Hendrix, was never implicated, the grand jury dismissed the accusations, and Bill Veeck, the Cubs' owner, exonerated him. Unfortunately Claude was let go after the 1920 season, and many sources report it was for his role in that August 31 game. But it ain't so.
I've been to Cooperstown again, and continue to be drawn to the Ban Johnson papers. And I was wondering -- if the White Sox were not in the 1919 Series, would an attempt to fix the games have been made? I think so. It seems likely to me that the gamblers had contacts on every team.
Now here's the real hot stove question. If the AL team in the Series was owned by one of Ban Johnson's loyal friends -- Phil Ball (St Louis), Frank Navin (Detroit), Connie Mack (Philadelphia), Cal Griffith (Washington), or Charles Somers (I think; Cleveland)? If a similar scenario played itself out, and Johnson got wind that the fix was in -- would he have pursued the matter with as much vigor? With the White Sox on the ropes, Ban was driven -- he hated Comiskey, and the two were dueling over the future of the sport. Comiskey was lined up with the owners of Boston and New York, and were prepared to join the eight NL teams to form (with one other team, the first of the "Loyal Five" to break ranks with Johnson) to form a brand new, 12-team circuit.
The politics of the sport -- closely linked to its economics -- may well have determined just how and when the 1919 Fix was dealt with -- as well as the future shape of baseball, with its Commissioner system. (Another great question: if baseball was not in such desperate straits, thanks to the B-Sox scandal, would Landis still have been the owners' choice? Surely he was chosen partly for the image he projected, of righteousness and integrity, as the sport teetered on the brink of disaster.
Johnson was motivated to bring the Fix to light, and later, to bring the case to trial (Landis would not have minded if there was no trial, his mind was made up about the players), partly by his hope to wreck the White Sox and drive Comiskey out of baseball. Some sources, like "Harry's Diary" in The Hustler's Handbook, suggest that Johnson was ready to then buy the Sox himself, at a marked-down price, and have Chicago to himself.
I can't quite believe Johnson would have handled a fix involving one of the Loyal Five's team the same way. I think he'd have acted -- the man did have a sense of fairness -- but he just might have kept things quiet, and leaned on his owner friend to dismiss the crooked guys without any fanfare. Just my opinion.
The chapter from Dear Patrick in this issue is also about some personal repercussions. Enough said there.
NEXT TIME perhaps a review of David Pietrusza's book Rothstein, which has a couple chapters devoted to Arnold's role in the Fix. If you read my interview with Asinof last week, you will be interested to know that Pietrusza has hit man "Harry F." threaten Lefty Williams, and does not acknowledge Eight Men Out for that little (fictional) detail. Harry F. Lives!
Not sure I mentioned last time, but Eliot Asinof offered to give my book a read. I'm sending it to him in chunks, because I'm still working on it all the time. But he loved the first chapter (on the 1924 Milwaukee trial, and Gropman vs Holtzman) and was really complimentary. I wish he was an editor!
A final note about my book (still Never on Friday, until a publisher changes it). It will be both more and less than the material in Notes starting with issue 268. I have collected much more information and written much more, than has appeared here so far. True, Notes will include some tidbits and tangents, which I've cut out of the book. But the book has an overall framework, a whole different pace and sequence than the bits and pieces that are scattered in Notes. I really like the way it's turning out.
SAY IT AIN'T SO, JOHN!
The evening after the day I spent with Eliot Asinof, I was back in the Shadows of Cooperstown. And I noticed that my wife Barb was watching Eight Men Out on Bravo. She had never seen it before. Somewhat familiar with the subject since she's had to put up with me talking about it over the past year, she seemed to be enjoying it, and I let her alone. For a while.
Eventually I was drawn back to the TV, where I tried hard not to comment on every scene. I was doing pretty well, until the end. I was familiar with the way the film winds up, but this time around it really got to me. I like 8MO, I like the casting and acting. But the way John Sayles telescoped the events after the Series drove me nuts. So here is my guide to watching the end of Eight Men Out ... keep it near your TV set.
1. THE SERIES ENDS. Next we see Hugh Fullerton talking with Ray Schalk, then banging out a story on his typewriter. Although Fullerton denied talking with any players (at the 1924 Milwaukee trial), I will interpret this scene as suggesting that Fullerton wrote, and Schalk said, independently, right after the Series, that seven players would not return the next spring. Schalk quickly retracted his statement. Fullerton left town.
2. ATTELL IN A BAR. Next we see Abe Attell being tipsy in a bar, with Ring Lardner and Fullerton overhearing him. This is likely the event that took place in mid-July 1920, at Dinty Moore's, Kid Gleason calling Lardner and Jimmy Crusinberry to come on over and listen to an inebriated Abe Attell spilling the beans.
3. FULLERTON AND MAHARG? After more typing, Fullerton now talks to Billy Maharg and types up an article "Philly Fighter Fingers Fix!" which appears in the Evening World. It was James Isaminger who interviewed Maharg, in late September 1920, and this scoop appeared in the Philadelphia North American. (Fullerton's own blockbuster appeared in the New York Evening World in December 1919.) Next we see Buck Weaver reading the story in the Chicago Herald and Examiner, Fullerton's employer until after the Series. Eddie Cicotte reads a Herald & Examiner headline, "Cheap Shots Plague Players" (and Kate Jackson reads it to Joe). The kernel of truth here is that the Isaminger-Maharg piece prompted Cicotte to go to the grand jury the day after it appeared, with Jackson on his heels.
4. THE PRESS CRASHES DOWN ON FULLERTON. Ring Lardner to Hughie next reads a famous Sporting News condemnation of Fullerton's irresponsible muckraking, and then Comiskey offers a reward for evidence of a fix. Both these events happened right after the Series, they are 'way out of sequence.
5. EDDIE COLLINS GOES TO COMISKEY. Now this event happened, too, but not until September 1920. Most sources have Collins going to Commy to tell him that there are players laying down, and the Sox can still win the 1920 pennant if everyone gives their best. In one version, Collins merely complains that Eddie Cicotte needs a pep talk; in another, he accuses teammates of being crooked. I've seen somewhere the suggestion that Collins was dismissed by Commy, pretty much the way 8MO has it, and that he then went to Ban Johnson. Anyone else seen that reference?
6. ENTER ALFRED AUSTRIAN. At this point, Sayles has Comiskey summon his lawyer, Alfred Austrian, for help. This is another even that happened long before, probably during the 1919 Series, or maybe even before -- the rumors of the Fix had been around since August. Austrian says "We must control the investigation." In fact, Commy had hired detectives soon after the Series ended, and had kept them out there till the following May. Ban Johnson had his own investigation going, too. Baseball never did launch an investigation. Commy makes a remark that indicates that he knows they are guilty -- again, he probably knew something was up after Game One.
7. LANDIS IS COURTED AND HIRED. The film makes it look like Landis is brought in to deal with the crisis. This is a popular misunderstanding. The scandal broke in September 1920. The National Commission was leaderless since Herrmann resigned in February 1920. It was not until November 1920 that the turbulent scramble among club owners (which came close to a schism) named Landis the first Commish. He started his term in January 1921.
8. GRAND JURY SUMMONED. Again, the Cook County grand jury was called in early September 1920, and began hearing witnesses around September 22. 8MO makes it seem like the grand jury was called to deal with the scandal of the 1919 Series, but that is not quite true; an alleged fix of a Cubs-Phils game, August 31, 1920, had put the pressure on. But the judge was close to Ban Johnson -- one paper was sued for libel when they said Johnson wanted to offer the judge the new Commissioner post. I have no doubt that the 1919 Series was the real target of the GJ.
9. THE FIXERS FLEE. Now we see Rothstein on an ocean liner, Sport Sullivan on a train (to Montreal?), and Attell practicing his Spanish while waiting in line to buy a ticket to Mexico. There is no mention of the fact that Rothstein came to Chicago and testified to the grand jury. He was never indicted.
10. ENTER EDDIE CICOTTE. Now we see Eddie Cicotte entering Austrian's office and waiting. Most sources have him being called in, meeting for some time with Austrian (rehearsing), and then signing a waiver of immunity, before being led to the grand jury. But in 8MO, Eddie is whisked to the GJ and signs the waiver there.
11. JACKSON FOLLOWS. Then Joe appears ... no mention that he came on his own to tell what he knew. Austrian, in the movie, tells Joe that he needs to sign a waiver, "like Eddie and Lefty." In fact, Lefty did not show up until the day after Joe testified. There is no mention of Joe's several hours (rehearsing) with Austrian, his call to the judge to claim his innocence (the judge doesn't believe him, without hearing his story), or his getting drunk with the bailiffs before he testifies.
12. HAPPY TALKS. In 8MO, Happy Felsch "confesses" to anyone within earshot as he sits on a bar. Yes, in a bar, too. No credit given to Harry Reutlinger, who actually interviewed Happy.
13. SAY IT AIN'T SO. Now Jackson leaves the courthouse, suggesting that Happy spilled his beans the same day. He didn't, he talked the day after, like Lefty. Accosted by reporters, Joe is asked "Why'd you wait so long to spill it?" to which Joe blurts out "Swede is a hard guy." While the words are probably Jackson's, I believe they were spoken as an explanation of why he had requested bailiffs' protection -- because, he said, Risberg had threatened him. The "mandatory" scene with the disillusioned small boy follows immediately; Sayles knew it was fiction, but felt the film needed it, because the audience would be looking for it. Gee, wouldn't want to help a guy's reputation, now, would you Mr Sayles? Hey, it's seven decades later, who cares?
14. CUT TO THE TRIAL. There is no sense of time in any of this. No reference to the baseball season that has almost played itself out before the 1920 grand jury hands up its indictments. And we are whisked now from the grand jury to the 1921 trial. In fact, the trial was set for early 1921, but postponed a number of times. In 8MO, Rothstein has a rep bargaining with Austrian about making the confessions disappear as the trial begins. In fact, they were stolen long before, probably January 1921, and reported missing in February. New evidence was needed (Ban Johnson had to find Bill Burns to corroborate Maharg's story), before new indictments could be handed up. They were. Johnson pursued this with amazing energy. Landis was fairly aloof -- I believe he really was hoping there would be no trial. It didn't matter to him, he ruled the country of baseball and had made up his mind about the future of the players. To him, the trial was totally unnecessary. In 8MO, the confessions disappear during the trial.
15. POOR BUCK. 8MO makes Buck Weaver very sympathetic -- who could find fault with good old John Cusack? It also portrays him during the trial repeatedly calling out to the judge for a chance to give his side, for a separate trial. Judge Landis takes note. Ironically, in real life, Landis later faulted Weaver for not speaking up in his own behalf at the trial. Buck appealed, of course, for reinstatement. Over and over. Landis replied with the very dense legal argument, "Birds of a feather flock together." Never mind that the rules Buck broke were made years later. In 8MO, Buck tries the Joe Jackson defense: look at my record. But John Cusack insists that he hit .327 -- while Buck actually hit .324. Just a little thing, but maybe Landis picked up on it. If he lied about his batting average, how can I believe him?
Since The Right Dimensions was written, in 1993 -- it was in the last issue of NOTES -- a Marlin dynasty has come and gone, and Tampa Bay got their franchise. I had not planned on a sequel. Then the country of baseball was shaken by a terrible, man-made disaster. The Strike of 1994-95 had a ...
REPERCUSSION
The saucers appeared everywhere, pole to pole and around the globe, all at once. They hovered menacingly over the largest urban sprawls and the smallest villages, of every continent. The first time they appeared, over ten years ago, they were politely quiet and visited just a few countries. But this time the flying machines hummed with anger, and they hung over the earth like a swarm of hornets, poised to sting.
The short, blue Smurfy aliens were back. Before, they had been agonizingly brief: they landed near the Astrodome in Houston, then gently asked to be taken to the Commissioner of baseball. Buster White was rushed to a historic meeting that was shown around the world on TV.
Their mission was simply to boldly seek new games, scanning galaxy after galaxy for the best entertainment that civilizations could muster. They had learned about baseball from radio signals, Red Barber bouncing his patter off the red planet, Garagiola echoing around the moons of Jupiter. And they liked it.
And their visit, that time, was to offer a suggestion: try 89 feet between the bases, 57 between home plate and the pitching rubber. Then they were gone.
Now they were back. The flagship was in Houston again, and the tone of their first words was irate: "Get your bleeping Commissioner here NOW!"
Dan Rather was in the front row of reporters on hand. "Uh, we don't have one just now. Would the President do, or the Secretary General of the United Nations? How about Larry King?"
"We need the Commish."
"Is there a problem?" Mike Wallace meekly asked.
"You bet your collective keisters there's a problem. We haven't picked up any baseball games in months. What the bleep happened? Did Griffey get 62 or not? Was it Cleveland-Montreal in the Series?"
David Brinkley cleared his throat and rubbed his chin. "Uh, well, you see, the season was never completed. There was a Strike."
"Look, we are serious. What fools would stop a summer like the one your planet had going? You had fans fighting for tickets, you had a century or more of experience as a foundation ... are you saying that you learned nothing in all that time that could have prevented the interruption of a season?"
"Well," Brinkley offered, his eyes focused on his shoes, "we used to have a Commissioner, and when things got crazy, he'd always invoke the 'best interests' thing and the game would start up again. But the owners didn't like that much, so they forced the last Commissioner to resign, and never replaced him."
"So who looks after the best interests of baseball now?"
The gaggle of media superstars looked at each other, but none of them offered an answer. "Look, I've got seventeen hundred thousand blue brothers out there, with very itchy trigger fingers. I don't know if they will buy this explanation. This is all very sad. Very shoddy. We have discovered that civilizations that fail to protect their best games, almost always self-destruct within a year or so. Would you like us to put you out of your misery, rather than go through the usual cycles of violence, destruction, starvation, plague and so on? We could make it quick and painless."
"Wait, no!" Dan Rather was starting to sob. "Look, we knew you liked baseball, but we didn't know it meant that much to you, or we'd have never let the Strike happen. Trust me!"
"A pity. It's not just us, you know. We wager with other species. There was quite a lot riding on Tony Gwynn's shot at .400. The Zerds just about mortgaged their moon on him. And they are not good losers, you know."
Jane Pauley fought her way to the front line. "Hey, we can have baseball up and running by the time you are all back in your saucers. Really. We didn't mean to harm anyone."
The smurf scratched his left antenna. "Geez, I don't know. The Krvtzes are not a very forgiving life form. They might come down here after we're gone and zap your oxygen away, just to get even. They are very big Atlanta fans, you know. Although they can't figure out why Ted Turner sleeps at the big games.
"OK, here's the deal. I will tell the brothers that it was a huge mistake, and it won't happen again. Agreed on that?"
"YES!" the media horde shouted in unison.
"We want to hear Harry Caray live, before we are past the sun. You got two days to get things going. We'll do our best to smooth things over in the rest of the universe. No one will buy that Strike story, you know. Very bush league explanation."
"Thank you, thank you," Connie Chung blurted, kissing the blue suction cups on the alien's feet. "Would you do one thing to help facilitate the return of the game?"
"And what would that be," the alien replied, raising all three eyebrows.
"If you have room for 28 passengers, I have some addresses for you. We can help. Mrs Schott is in Cincinnati, Mr Steinbrenner is in New York...."
"Save it, sister. We can't carry all that baggage. We could take two, maybe three if we returned Elvis."
The press corps screamed, as if they had practiced all October, as if someone had given them a cue: "FEHR AND RAVITCH!"
"Keep Elvis, but take those two, please," Rather implored the alien. "We just can't take them anymore."
"Done. Oh yes, one other thing. When you start it up again, lose the wild cards. And start the Series earlier. And Game of the Week -- put it back on every Saturday."
Around the globe, lasers ignited the sky, as the saucers withdrew, firing warning shots at harmless targets, the Tribune in Chicago, Busch breweries in St Louis, billboards hawking The Baseball Network.
With the threat of a global holocaust averted, world pressure to start up baseball was titanic. In two days, baseballs were flying all over the planet, in places they had never flown before. The team owners who insisted that the players first agree to a salary cap, were publicly hung. The TV ratings for the hanging, were low, because it was up against Game of the Week.
Although it was the dead of winter, the 1994 season was resumed from the point where it had been interrupted, August 12, with the games played under domes and in the sunny south. Getting many generous calls, Tony Gwynn finished at .411.
The story has a postscript....
"OH, YES, ONE MORE THING..."
The transmission from the departing saucers, headed back to their Galaxy-to-be-Named-Later, was brief. "Plant a tree in every outfield, just one, but a large one. Anywhere in fair territory. We were right about the dimensions, weren't we? Trust us." Then they were gone.
Of course, the advice was taken world-wide. It would be foolish to question the azure aliens about what was a demand, and what a polite suggestion. The special rules added to every earthly handbook on baseball came to be known as The Blue Laws.
And over time, it was acknowledged that the interstellar gamesters knew what was needed to improve the sport. At first, the outfielders of the planet complained -- among themselves -- that they could no longer roam the wide-open spaces without fear of banging into anything but baggy walls and each other. No matter how deep the trees were planted (and they typically were placed on the warning track), they still seemed intrusive.
But the trees were not just obstacles, like the batting cages and monuments and flagpoles that once invaded old ballparks. They were alive, like grass, and they demanded sunlight, so the arrival of the trees meant the end of domes. And that meant the end of artificial turf. A new generation of fans learned the patience taught by April showers, the beautiful terror of an August thunderstorm, the art of storytelling while the tarps rolled on and off the diamonds, like an eternal tide.
What's more, the fans grew to love their trees. Each city and town and Little League tended their trees and boasted of them, decorating them on Opening Days and holidays. When outfielders crashed into them, or played the wild caroms, fans went wild with excitement. Almost every night, the trees were the centerpieces for the day's highlights, as fielders tried to climb them for impossible catches, or found apples in their mitts when they thought they had an out, falling from the leaves. The highest compliment for Gold Glovers became, "He can play the trees."
Moreover, each fan seemed to be reminded by hits into the trees, of some childhood ball game where something similar happened. The trees and the grass tied the fans to the game stronger than ever before, because now all the games they watched, as college kids or parents or grandparents, were better linked to the games in their memories, the games of their wonder years.
The trees became so popular that some teams tore down their outfield walls and planted orchards, and let fans roam the fruited pastures, for free. A few rickety tree houses were even built, and these became more fun than any luxury box ever was. The homeless of the large cities found their way into ballgames, and were noticed, and the daily TV exposure forced cities to solve that problem by providing decent and affordable housing for all of their citizens. The trees blazed every fall with a rainbow of pride, and greeted each spring with green buds of hope.
[In issue #294, I began running DEAR PATRICK: HOT STOVE DELIVERIES FROM A FATHER TO A SON, a book I started writing in 1989 and continued for a few years, till I set it aside. Some of DEAR PATRICK has found its way into NOTES before, but never the whole thing, beginning to end -- until now. Here is Chapter 13.]
CHAPTER 13
FAREWELLS
March 14, 1990
Dear Patrick,
That playoff game I described in my last letter was not the worst thing to happen in 1972. On August 9, my father was on the second tee at his favorite golf course, playing with the league for which he was secretary. It was his second heart attack, and he died instantly, we were told. Today would have been his seventy-sixth birthday.
I had last seen my father a few days before, at the Pittsburgh airport. I was flying through, on my way from summer studies in St. Louis, to New York, where I'd spend a week or so, before returning to teaching duties in Cleveland. My parents drove out to meet me for lunch between planes.
I was excited about the possibility of spending the next summer in Europe, as part of my Masters program. My father dreaded travelling, which is why we never got beyond Lake Erie on family vacations. But he encouraged me to seize the opportunity, if it came along. (It did, and I did.)
I was in New York when I received my mother's phone call. Time froze. It was hard to grasp that he was really gone. That I had received his last letter.
I was keeping a kind of journal at the time, and when I learned of his death, I wrote. I reflected on how close we had become, since I left home in 1964, through our letters.
I listed his virtues and vices, recalled his devotion to the Pirates, Beethoven, and good beer. He had a classic liberal education at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, earning a Masters degree. He once told me that he graduated from college and found he was "an educated bum" -- meaning that he had a degree, but no real skills. A few years later, I would know exactly how he felt!
I wrote of his sharp sense of humor, which was chronicled in his letters under the title "Buc Bumblings," absurdly detailed descriptions of how he saw things going, on and off the field.
His letters to me were private. He confessed to me, bragged, gave advice, occasionally asked for some, and used me as a sounding-board, testing new ideas. Although he had no use for communism in any form, he also was depressed by the American worship of "the Almighty Dollar" -- greed was changing the face of the country. During the time we wrote, our country was in turmoil (deeply divided over Vietnam), the Catholic Church was in turmoil, things at Allis-Chalmers, where he worked, were in turmoil. Writing back and forth helped us both to cope, to move on through it.
Those were years, by the way, when the media reported regularly on and fed a growing "generation gap" in America. The gap between me and my father never was so wide that our paper conversation missed a beat.
I felt that if he'd write again, he'd close the letter in his usual way: "Smile -- Be Yourself -- Pray. Love, Dad." I never called him by his name, Mike. Only Dad.
Suddenly it was August 10, and I was in Pittsburgh, at his wake. In the quiet times, I scribbled more notes. A million feelings and thoughts and images flooded my heart that day and the days following. There was everything to say, and nothing to say.
At the funeral home, my mother was presented with a bible, by a group of men who represented the union, from the company where my father had worked for thirty-some years. She had been married to him during all those years -- sharing him with Allis-Chalmers and the Pirates and golf. Dad was not a member of the union -- he represented management, in contract negotiations, stressful events that were, no doubt, tenser for my father than any World Series. But the union reps said that he was an extraordinarily fair person, and so for the first time, the Union Bible "crossed the lines."
Life went on. The baseball season ended, with me carefully logging the last results in his "Predictions" tablet. Neither of us could have forecast this.
On New Year's Eve, another sudden death: Roberto Clemente was flying to Nicaragua from his native Puerto Rico, where he had organized a drive for relief supplies, for earthquake victims. The plane he had personally chartered, to be sure that the medicine, food and clothing got to those who needed it, went down in the ocean, and his body was never recovered.
Clemente's death, like his life, was stunning. For Pittsburghers, it was also a death in the family.
Again my first reaction was to write: this time, for the first time in my life, I sent a letter to a newspaper, to Al Abrams of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Apparently it was not published, as hundreds or thousands of others also wrote. Mine was not a brief letter, but a dense two-pager (single-spaced), about a person of whom I was very proud, who had dignified my city and my game. My letter praised Clemente as a saint, to those for whom baseball was like a religion. To my family.
I have a carbon copy (no Xerox available to me then) of my letter, and I am surprised when I read it today, to see that even then I saw a kind of gap growing between the players and fans. There had been none between Clemente and his fans in Pittsburgh: he stood tall, not for commercials, or for some fashionable position, but for clear human values, for what we called "virtues" -- which are the opposites of "vices." Roberto had not been faultless -- no one is. But his good deeds shown.
In his final 1972 at bat, Clemente had gotten his 3,000th hit. His credentials for the Hall of Fame were impeccable. Soon after his death, he was elevated to the Hall in a special election. He had the stats, but he could have made it on character.
Death is never easy to accept, for a family or a city. I have known many persons who are now dead, relatives, friends, acquaintances. Always, a sense of loss -- but there is no loss quite like that of a parent.
The death of an athlete still active is also especially sad. Any athlete, not just a superstar. Sports stand outside of real time -- death is not supposed to intrude. Of all of the fictional stories I've read and the films I've seen about baseball or sports, Mark Harris' Bang the Drum Slowly is my favorite.
It's about how a team treats one of its members, a third-string catcher, Bruce Pearson -- before and after they learn he has a rare, terminal illness. The central characters are Pearson and a star pitcher, Henry Wiggin, his best and only real friend, who makes a comment that goes something like this: "Everybody knows that everybody's dying -- that's why they treat each other so good." I think that's worth pondering some.
Several times in my life, I've had the duty of sorting through the effects that someone has left behind, after they died. (As director of my community in Cleveland, I twice served as a kind of "next of kin" when two of the older monks passed on.) It's a unique chore -- like excavating another civilization, trying to guess the meaning of objects, to relate them to what I knew of each person, to wonder why each item was kept until the end, and not discarded somewhere along the way.
Among my father's belongings, I discovered an odd stick pin: a catcher's mitt with a baseball centered inside, a few inches long. It commemorated the opening of Forbes Field in 1909. I guess that I had seen the pin before, but my father had preserved it safely since -- when? Perhaps since he went through his own dad's things, when he died.
Because there was no doubt that the pin would have been my grandfather's. It was hard evidence that there were baseball genes in my family before my father.
My paternal grandfather, a Mike like my Dad, was a red-haired Irish cop, who died long before I was born. I imagine him as being well over six feet, because policemen should be tall. I still have his nightstick. I also have some of his red-hair genes: they showed up only when I grew a beard at age 28. He married a gal who had "come over on the boat" to Pittsburgh from Czechoslovakia, when she was a teenager. My grandmother Mary Svoboda (she said the name meant "freedom" in Czech) learned to speak English (well, Pittsburghese), but never the language of baseball. Gram had only the environment, no genes.
I never knew my father's father. Neither did my mother -- he died before my father married. But my Aunt Mary did, and she confirmed that he was indeed a baseball fan, and took in as many games as he could at Forbes Field -- policemen were given free
passes, but I'm sure they earned their way, keeping rowdy fans in line by their uniformed presence -- complete with nightstick.
Aunt Mary had one baseball memory that I wish was on videotape, or at least on film. It was from sometime in the early twenties. Mike Sr. took the whole family to a big game at Forbes. Because that meant two streetcar rides, everyone dressed up in their Sunday best, even Ma Carney. They had front row seats, but in the bleachers. Gram never did like the heat, and sitting out in the hot sun to watch someone hit a ball was not to her liking. I can imagine her grumbling all the day long about it, but enjoying being with her husband and her kids.
Aunt Mary recalled seeing Honus Wagner, and she knew the Pirates won, but she didn't remember who they played or the score or who pitched. What stayed with her was the memory of the excitement her father displayed -- she hadn't seen him excited very often. But that Bucco win revealed a father who could yell and smile and hoot with anyone. And his fervor was contagious -- the whole family was excited.
Maybe that day my father got hooked on baseball. If it wasn't that day -- surely it was a day just like it. "It happened in the bleachers" -- good title for a short story.
That fall, I donated the original Mike's pin in my father's name to the Baseball Hall of Fame. I wanted his name to be there. It just seemed fitting. I didn't think about it at the time, but when I told my Aunt Mary, she said my grandfather would be thrilled if something that had been his, was in Cooperstown.
I received back, from Ken Smith, then the Hall's Director, a hand-typed letter, thanking me for the pin -- they hadn't had one, and would be glad to add it to their collection.
Next time we're in Cooperstown, we can look for it there. Together.