Renewal
The first spring training games of the year were played in Florida and Arizona yesterday and today-- thankfully still without a pitch clock attached to them. But the end for the untimed Major League game may be closer than you think. You know you've got problems when the people that run the sport are the ones that think it's boring.
Baseball has fallen out of the national conversation. It feels irrelevant today. Baseball's heroes are no longer America's heroes. Expansion turned it into a regional sport. That's how the New York Times assayed it 18 months ago. One of the sport's star players said it best, "Somehow or other, they don’t play ball nowadays as they used to some eight or ten years ago. I don’t mean to say they don’t play it as well. But I mean that they don’t play with the same kind of feelings or for the same objects they used to. It appears that (ballgames) have come to be controlled by different parties and for different purposes."
Actually, that's a statement that goes back quite a bit longer than 18 months. I'm quoting Brooklyn Atlantics' captain Pete O'Brien in 1868. Baseball's obituary has been re-written, and re-published, about a million times since. In 1890, the Omaha World-Herald proclaimed that "the rage for base ball seems to be dying out." That only turned out to be true in 1890 if you were strictly talking about the base ball that's spelled as two words. The sport with the compound name, by contrast, has done pretty great. Dare I say, indeed, that baseball is in better overall health today, and is more relevant, than either the New York Times or the Omaha World-Herald.
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So every team in the Little League World Series plays games with eligible players and ineligible players, but the first all-black championship team is the one that gets called out on it? What bullshit. Yes, this is racism rearing its ugly but predictable head. Note to the uninformed: every Little League team is a "regional" team. What are these boundaries for each team exactly? Cities? Counties? Townships? Neighborhoods? On my LL team 30 years ago, about half the players had their choice of which team to play on based on their rural residence. Our best player lived a half hour away with his mother most of the year, but lived with his dad, in our area, in the summer. The teams that make it to Williamsport are each All-Star teams of a certain stripe. That's why the championship game each year, televised on ESPN, is never between a neighborhood and a neighborhood, it's always something like "New Jersey" versus "Taiwan." Jackie Robinson West Little League "cheats" and they lose their national championship trophy. The New England Patriots cheat and they're Super Bowl champions.
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Something that doesn't make sense to me: This spring, for the first time since 1997, the Cardinals issued uniform #25 to somebody other than Mark McGwire. That's a demonstration of a desperately short amount of gratitude, if you ask me. The year the Cardinals traded for McGwire, the average annual financial value of each Cardinals player-- 25+ players each a company asset-- was $1,552,695. When McGwire retired, only four years later, that number was $2,849,933. That's nearly a one hundred percent increase in less than half a decade's time. McGwire's exploits at the bat warranted banner headlines, in print and online, around the world. The man was-- and is-- simply the most financially- and culturally-important figure in the Cardinals' entire history.
On the field at Busch Stadium on September 8th, 1998, in front of 50,000 fans and millions watching at home, Cardinals chairman Bill DeWitt Jr. announced that McGwire's number 25 would one day be retired by the club, and be added to those displayed on the outfield wall, such other baseball glitterati as Dizzy Dean, Bob Gibson, Stan Musial, and Ozzie Smith. I heard DeWitt say it. I can play the quote back for you on an MLB-licensed DVD. In less than a year's time in 1998, DeWitt had already sold tens of thousands of t-shirt jerseys with McGwire's name and number stamped on the back. I guess the boss was acutely feeling the moment of history on that particular night because issuing the number to the team's assistant hitting coach 17 years subsequent seems like an act directly counter to this earlier declaration.
Since 1998, the Cardinals have retired the uniform numbers of both Tony LaRussa (McGwire's manager for his entire Cardinals tenure) and Whitey Herzog, two men who each covered up their uniform numbers with nylon windbreakers damn near every time they put their uniforms on, and have sold virtually no replica or t-shirt jerseys between them. And this summer, the New York Yankees will retire Andy Pettitte's uniform number 46. Pettitte, an admitted steroid cheat, will also get a plaque in Yankee Stadium's Monument Park.
posted by CM @ 8:35 PM
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