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A national pastime in crisis:
Can it still muddle through?
By MAURY ALLEN
of TheColumnists.com
This goes back to the early 1960s when I first sat
in a baseball press box for pay--not enough--and fun: much more
than expected.
A writing hero of mine, Jimmy Cannon, a columnist at the New
York Post who had covered wars and Joe DiMaggio with the same
verve and enthusiasm, typed away on his Royal portable.
He created words on the blank sheets of yellow Western Union
paper that sang as melodically as Crosby in his day or Sinatra
in mine. He was an artist with the language, a craftsman who
could tie paragraphs together the way sailors tie a slip knot.
Cannon was in his 60s by then with drinking bouts and four decades
of rugged sports journalism causing him anguish and anger. He
had, in the vernacular of the game, lost his fastball. Still,
he was CANNON. He had been the king and deserved respect.
He got none. The younger sportswriters, myself among the crowd,
laughed at his longevity when we should have been reading his
prose. That’s just the way life always is. In Japan they
honor seniority. In America we are amused by it.
A few of us gathered this one day as the baseball game played
on in front of us and talked loudly of the issues of the day,
the bloody war in Vietnam, the bloody civil rights demonstrations
in the American South, the latest rock numbers, the newest jazz
hangouts.
Cannon, who would later be immortalized by us because he labeled
the young writers “chipmunks” because one of us had
bucked teeth and all of us chattered endlessly in his environment,
stood up.
“Baseball, gentleman,” he bellowed, “baseball.”
He was suggesting that it was bad enough we had no respect for
his skills and standing. We also showed no respect for what was
then known as The Great American Pastime.
Four decades have passed since then and I am now older than Cannon
had ever reached. It took me a while but I finally get his point.
The Great American Pastime is in crisis. I weep over that.
The talk is more of salaries and steroids than long hits and
hard pitches. There are no heroes in the game any more because
all the good players are covered by scandal, doubts or distortion.
The Commissioner is a wimp because he won’t stand up to
the union and the union head is a fraud because he sees no connection
between the drug abuse and the morality of the game.
Some 80 plus years ago baseball owners reacted to the Black Sox
scandal by bringing in the dictatorial Judge Kenesaw Mountain
Landis. He was a racist and a bigot but he was also lean, mean
and a dignity machine about the game’s integrity.
If Pete Rose applied for reinstatement in the time of Landis
he would have been run out of the office faster than a speeding
bullet. Bud Selig still mulls it over.
As the baseball season begins in Japan and fans line up for tickets
in cities across the nation, the game is at a crisis point. The
competition is so enormous from other sports, from movies and
theater, from television and computers and from the weight of
daily life.
I have this love of the game that carries me forward each spring.
There is something so magical, so mystical about a man standing
at home plate with a 34 ounce bat and a pitcher 60 feet 6 inches
away with a hard baseball he can hurl plateward at 100 miles
and hour.
Another writing hero, Leonard Koppett, explained it all in one
descriptive word: Fear. He suggested all baseball resounded on
that word, the fear of the baseball hitting the batter, the fear
of failure, the fear of incredible embarrassment before 50,000
people and dozens of blistering critics.
It was that way for Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth. It is that way for
Alex Rodriguez and Bobby Bonds. No drug can eliminate that mental
torment when a hitter is supposed to deliver or a pitcher is
supposed to succeed.
With heart and head, and maybe in some cases with the addition
of chemicals, a percentage of players conquer that fear and perform
those miraculous feats of hitting a round baseball with a round
bat huge distances.
Ted Williams, in his unfrozen state, called that skill the most
difficult in sports. Guys can hurl footballs long distances or
drop in the three point goal in basketball’s final seconds
or account for victory with drama in a series of games in many
sports.
There is nothing like that amazing deed of driving a baseball
over a faraway wall or even throwing it from the deepest shortstop
hole for the breath-taking out.
Baseball is an exquisite invention. They have doctored up the
game with silly things like the designated hitter or huge gloves
or cork-filled bats.
But still it stands as it has for 150 years, 90 feet between
bases, 60 feet 6 inches from the batter to the pitcher, green
grass or artificial surfaces in the outfield and handsome dirt
in the infields.
Ruth and Cobb and Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson would
recognize their game if they were plunked down on a ball field
again. Not that much has happened in the playing of it though
everything has happened around the fringes of it.
Baseball is at a crisis stage in its image and its conduct. Somehow,
I think, it will muddle through.
It goes back to a Cannon line he offered in the press box on
a quiet afternoon when I sidled up to him in awe. This time we
talked baseball.
“The game will survive not because of the people running
it,” he said, “but despite the people running it.”
©2004 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001
by Jim Hummel. The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection,
1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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