29 May 06
The Story of Baseball is the Story of America. Discuss.
A story on the BBC this week looked at the induction of 17 black players in the Hall of Fame from back when baseball was segregated. Buck O’Neil, who is now 94, was offended by the suggestion that baseball was merely a “game.” The story of baseball is the story of America, he insisted. He lived through segregation and the negro leagues and narrowly missed a spot in the Hall of Fame. Buck O’Neil is the consummate player and gentleman.
Okay.
If the teens gave us the frontier spirit, Ty Cobb, and the best pitcher possibly of all time getting poisoned by gas on the Western Front, the twenties gave us the excesses of Babe Ruth and the flappers, if the thirties gave us soup kitchens and Lou Gehrig, if the forties gave us Ted Williams and war, and the fifties ditto and the dominance of the Yankees and the rise of the West Coast, if the sixties gave us an expanded strike zone and a scramble and Haight Ashbury and the seventies Pete Rose and expansions and Watergate, if the eighties gave us Reagan and free agency, the nineties gave us the fall of the alternate superpower and the rise of the big sluggers—McGwire, Bonds, Sosa—what does our current decade augur for the fate of the United States?
Overpaid players juiced on steroids. Megalomaniacal baseball commissioners. Parents screaming when Little League kids miss ground balls. Sound familiar, anyone? And who gets to call a time out?
- As I read your ‘discussion’ the image in my head was of a line graph, going from left to right with the line bouncing up and down, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. I also kept ‘seeing’ the common thread through all of it that I know I will have when I go take in a ballgame—ritual (the national anthem, some strikes, some hits, some fly balls, some walks, the seventh inning stretch, etc.) a relaxed afternoon in a park full of green, the ability to be connected by keeping score and the simple pleasure of being there. It doesn’t really matter which level of ball I’m watching either. For this decade, of which you describe so well, I’m going to settle in for the parts that I enjoy. Thanks for the nice summation of the decades!— Sean 3. June 2006, 07:32 Link
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