Baseball DIY

Okay, my computer is back and fixed finally....thanks to the folks at HP for getting it all done relatively painlessly! In the meantime I've been reading The Jackie Robinson Reader, edited by Jules Tygiel (who wrote Baseball's Great Experiment: Jackie Robinson and His Legacy). Anyway, it is a very well done collection of aticles, book excerpts and letters on Robinson. I particularly liked the sections written in Jackie's voice as it was his motivations and thoughts that have always intrigued me the most.

I have been thinking about Jackie Robinson a lot lately because of all the steriod chaos and questions about who deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. I was watching the news a week or so ago and there was a one-liner about Rafael Palmeiro that really hit me hard. The commentator was referring to his drug test and said "Palmeiro has Hall of Fame numbers but will the test ruin his chances...." And I thought so that's it. All it takes for the Hall is numbers and the rest is irrelevant. No one cares about contribution to the game, it's legacy. Apparently if you hit a lot of balls then you have contributed in the greatest possible way; there is nothing more you can do then rack up the numbers.

That's all it takes to change the game.

And so I was thinking maybe I was wrong about the Pete Rose deal. Maybe Giamatti was wrong too. If it is all about the numbers and only about the numbers then Rose certainly should be in, hell any player regardless of his dependency on steriods for success or his coke habit or his gambling addiction should be in. Maybe I'm making baseball more than it is by resisting all of this. Palmeiro has the numbers, so by all means, let the man's legacy remain untainted by a silly little drug test.

But then there is this.

Roger Kahn wrote in The Boys of Summer, "In two seasons, 1962 and 1965, Maury Wills stole more bases than Robinson did in all of a ten-year career. Ted Williams' life-time batting average, .344, is two points higher than Robinson's best for any season. Robinson never hit twenty home runs in a year, never batted in 125 runs. Stan Musial consistently scored more often. Having said those things, one has not said much because troops of people who were there believe that in his prime Jackie Robinson was a better ball player than any of the others. 'Ya want a guy that comes to play,' suggests Leo Durocher, whose personal relationship with Robinson was spikey. 'This guy didn't just come to play. He came to beat ya. He came to stuff the goddam bat right up your ass."

Now that's playing!

And Jackie did it with the whole world watching, with death threats and vile name calls. With games cancelled because he wanted to play, with hotels refusing to let him stay there and restaurants refusing to let him eat. He did it with the weight of his race, with the need of his race, resting on his shoulders. He did it all because he knew that he had to in order to change the world; he could not give up because we all needed to be lifted by his achievement.

We all needed Jackie Robinson to play well.

Pete Rose just wanted money and as for all the steroid junkies, well their reasons for injecting poison into their systems are their own, but I'm sure they have more to do with cash and fame then making the world better and certainly nothing to do with making the game better. It makes me a little sick to think that they could be side by side with Jackie Robinson in the Hall of Fame; all of them equal in their accomplishments. It makes me sick and it makes me sad.

I just keep thinking we should be a bit better than simply the numbers, but then again, we should all be better than war and famine and rampant disease as well.

Excuse me while I read some more of Mr. Kahn; I need to remember why all of this matters again.