The Chris Moeller Archives

The new leadoff hitter

 
It needs to be acknowledged in this space that the Cardinals have signed a five-year contract with a star African-American player. Except for a single-year with Jason Heyward in 2015, Dexter Fowler will be the team’s first “core” black player since 1999. The Cardinals have not had an African-American All-Star since 1997. (They had one every year from 1982 to 1997-- owing largely to Ozzie Smith, but eight others were All-Stars at least once during that stretch.)

The importance of this development has been written about now at ESPN and the Post-Dispatch, and it’s been discussed here. On the large-trafficked sites (how I refer to the others), the topic always touches off reader comments from Cardinals fans along the lines of Why does this matter? The Cardinals’ job is to get the best players, period. Thanks for bringing race into this for no reason, you liberal scum. What a blessing it must be to live in that color-blind world-- a privilege of whiteness, if you will. These comment threads have also, often, included accusations that a certain player of color-- Heyward, as an example, is “not a Cardinals-type player.” Those opinions are never elaborated on so I will only infer at their basis.

Let’s look at it only from a business standpoint then-- since the suggested tack is what’s best for the Cardinals. St. Louis is a majority-black city. Among MLB cities, this is true of only four others-- Detroit, Baltimore, Atlanta, and Cleveland. With the departure of the Rams to Los Angeles earlier this year, the city was left with only two professional athletes that were African-American-- Cardinals’ outfielder Tommy Pham, whose father is black and his mother Vietnamese, and Ryan Reaves, a bruising right-winger for the NHL’s Blues from Winnipeg, Manitoba, the son of a former Canadian League football player from Arizona. (For a time in 2016, the Cardinals also employed veteran pitcher Jerome Williams.) This reality accentuated the culture gap that exists, but shouldn’t, between the team and the city. It may not seem, outwardly, like a problem until you have Ferguson protestors gathered outside the stadium targeting the highest-profile event in the city, as we had in 2015, and you have videos going viral of white Cardinals fans arguing with them on the street and tossing racial epithets. These fans are claiming an ownership of the team which they should not wholly possess, but the Cardinals organization is in the defenseless position of appearing to be almost entirely white in the backdrop of this scene. The same thing happened outside Rams games that year, but inside the dome, you had the contrasting image of five Rams pass catchers, all African-American, coming out of the tunnel with their hands in the air, taking the field in solidarity with the protestors-- an action unsanctioned by the team, I would add, but the uniform represents.

St. Louis is a city that has volatile race relations, a city that has endured more than its share of incidents involving police profiling, corruption, and violence, suburbs and neighborhoods scarred by housing covenants and historic inequities. Interstate 64 serves as a de facto dividing line between an overwhelmingly-black majority population in North County, and a large-majority white population to the south. Area municipalities, like Ferguson, are currently being targeted by the Department of Justice because of accusations of targeting of black motorists with fines reportedly designed to fill city coffers.

White and black populations too often seem to look upon the other through a veil of suspicion. But the Cardinals should be-- and were, during the era of the brewery ownership, a bridge. The intense stare of Bob Gibson from the pitcher’s mound out across nine different World Series games during the mid-1960s is an iconic visual in the annals of sports history. Before colored sets arrived and displayed bright red of his uniform, America saw the blackness of his skin through his heroic exploits. His teammates, Curt Flood, Bill White, and Lou Brock, were heroes for the entire city (as their white and Hispanic teammates were also). African-American-style baseball reached its apex in St. Louis and in the U.S. in the 1980s with fleet and daring teams that included Ozzie Smith, Willie McGee, George Hendrick, Vince Coleman, Lonnie Smith, and Terry Pendleton. (Forgive the fact that I’ve listed these names before in similar posts, but it excites me to write them.)

I applaud the Cardinals’ ownership for recognizing a dissonance. A year ago, they failed in their efforts to re-sign Heyward, and to sign pitching ace David Price, but they made substantial offers to both players-- offers that, if accepted, would have been record-setting financial deals for the franchise. There’s a code that’s being spoken this winter, in a way. Chair Bill DeWitt III and GM John Mozeliak say they want “excitement” added to next year’s team, and African-American consumers, as well as whites, know how that translates-- it's the opposite of complacency. The entire sport, in recent years, has de-emphasized the attributes that African-Americans have traditionally brought to the game. Base stealing, basic catching and throwing, and enthusiasm took a back seat to power, plodding, and the unwritten rules of “tradition,” yet simultaneously, we have continued to deal with a double-standard in which blacks that succeed in the sport always have their success attributed to genetic gifts, while their white counterparts are considered harder workers. The patron saint of white “scrappiness” in St. Louis, and possibly the entire sport, is David Eckstein, but I have watched damn near every Cardinal game for 20 years, and I don’t know what separated his level of effort from many others that are of color. I’ve never seen anybody work as hard on the field-- Eckstein included-- as either Tony Womack or Kolten Wong, but neither of those players ever acquired that label. Dexter Fowler manifests all of it-- his personality, his enthusiasm, his hustle, his intelligence. I’m thrilled that he took this assignment that also requires an understanding and appreciation of social issues.

Only 8% of MLB players are African-American, as of our most recent opening day. That’s down from a peak of 27% in 1975, down to almost the level it was during the era that immediately followed integration, but the number has held steady since 2012. The signing of Fowler means that the Cardinals immediately look more like the city of St. Louis. The Cardinals have always been a regional team in a small city, but now with a world championship team only hours away in Chicago-- and can you believe this fact? The Cubs are the first World Championship team in the Cardinals division since the 1987 Mets-- a bandwagon packed with jumpers throughout the central part of the country may have just landed on Chicago’s North Side. It's time for the Cardinals to reinforce the appeal to their base-- the city residents. I go to the games. My wife is of African descent. She looks for black players. So do I. At Busch Stadium, you don’t even see black faces on the “cheer” squad. There have been precious few fans of color in the seats too. The only group of attendees that looks like the city is the concession workers-- and it’s been almost 65 years since the team integrated in the dugout. Fowler’s presence cannot hurt. He tweeted a photo of his daughter (whose mother, Fowler’s wife, is Middle Eastern), wearing that bright red Cardinals hat and expressing her excitement for the family’s new destination (after the Champion Cubs made their unappreciative feelings for her daddy obviously known). That’s the same red hat you see African-Americans wearing all over the city.

It has a national importance when you are representing this particular city, one that is often maligned as decayed and dangerous. On BET’s reality series Nellyville, set in St. Louis, a member of Cornell “Nelly” Haynes’ family is always dressed in St. Louis Cardinals fan gear. On OWN’s Welcome to Sweetie Pie's," a reality show about a growing chain of soul food restaurants based in St. Louis, the cap is ubiquitous among the employees. When Michael Brown’s father is seen speaking to the news media, he is inevitably wearing a Cardinals hat. Like these others, he’s not telling the world that he loves baseball. He’s telling us where he’s from, and who his people are. Some MLB teams display the team name on their cap. The Orioles of Baltimore display the bird of their moniker, the Angels of Los Angeles show the “A” with the halo, the Athletics of Oakland give us a yellow “A,” and the less said about the Cleveland Indians the better, but the Cardinals have never displayed a red bird on their cap. It’s always been the enmeshed letters STL, and now on the field, they’ve got a rainbow roster that holds deeper colors-- talent that is white (Adam Wainwright, Stephen Piscotty, Trevor Rosenthal, Matt Carpenter, Lance Lynn), African-American (Fowler), Dominican (Carlos Martinez, Jhonny Peralta, Alex Reyes), Cuban (Almedys Diaz), Puerto Rican (Yadier Molina), Venezuelan (Miguel Socolovich), Panamanian (Edmundo Sosa), South Korean (Seung Hwan Oh), African-American and Vietnamese (Pham), and Pacific Islander and Chinese (Wong).

Ozzie Smith called Dexter Fowler on the phone upon the announcement of the signing last week. “Not rocket science” is how Ozzie described to ESPN the supposition that more African-American players will lead to more African-American fans. Baseball has got to double-down on their push to get more. In recent years, the economic resources for player development have decisively moved to the Caribbean. The city of St. Louis produced the baseball talent of Ryan Howard, but he is now old enough to be moving into retirement. Football and basketball have ciphered off more young talent in the city than any other factor. Ezekiel Elliott, the man who will easily be named the NFL Rookie of the Year, and can make a case as league MVP as well, is a product of St. Louis’ John Burroughs High School. But football has not been kind to its players, as has been well publicized. Pursue a career in football, and the money you make has a good chance of going to waste on a life of crippling headaches and early dementia. The NFL doesn’t seem to think much of St. Louis, either. You say you aren't 6 feet, 7 inches tall? Then consider baseball and its guaranteed contracts, long tenures, a lifetime of robust physical and mental health-- as athletes should expect for their effort, and no archaic rules that force up-and-coming talent to develop their talent for free on the “plantation” of collegiate exploitation. There are going to be great-looking ladies surrounding every sport, but in baseball, some of them might even be on your team. Well, not currently, but that FOX series Pitch is so damn realistic that it wouldn’t surprise me.

Ozzie didn’t go so far as to say, but the manager also needs to let Fowler be himself. Spontaneous celebrations need to be permitted, even encouraged, and they have been neither in the Cardinals clubhouse for a long time. The Cardinals have a core group in place, but Fowler instantly becomes part of it, and needs to be. It’s justified by the dollars he’ll be getting, the role he will have manning center field and batting lead-off, but also because of where he comes from and what he represents-- not just his race, but his track record. Forget where he got it and the hype surrounding it, he’s got a ring, and now five years removed from their most-recent championship, that’s something only three other current Cardinals can boast. Make no mistake, Dexter Fowler is going to be filling a very big hole.

posted by CM @ 7:42 PM