The BASEBALL RELIQUARY Inc.
SHRINE OF THE ETERNALS
On Sunday, July 29, 2001, a capacity crowd of nearly 175 people filled the Donald R.
Wright Auditorium in the Pasadena Central Library, Pasadena, California, for the 2001
Induction Day ceremony of the Baseball Reliquary’s Shrine of the
Eternals. The festivities began at 2:00 PM (Pacific Standard Time) with the
traditional ceremonial bell ringing for the late Brooklyn Dodgers fan Hilda Chester. In
his welcoming remarks, Master of Ceremonies Terry Cannon lauded Chester by saying,
“As a young woman growing up in Brooklyn, Hilda’s dream was to play in the big
leagues. Thwarted as an athlete, she turned to rooting, and in the community of rooters
she became royalty.” |
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By way of introducing the
afternoon’s keynote speaker, Terry Cannon shared some contemplations on the subject
of baseball and music. First, he listed several former ballplayers who played musical
instruments, including Eddie Basinski (violin), Stan Musial (harmonica), Satchel Paige
(guitar), Maury Wills (banjo), Horace Clarke (vibraphone), and Carmen Fanzone (trumpet and
fluegelhorn). Then Cannon described the musical zaniness of the Dodger Sym-Phony, that
wacky band of merrymakers who would mock, deride, and razz umpires and opposing players at
Ebbets Field. Also recalled were Phil Linz, the New York Yankees utility infielder who
stepped into baseball immortality in 1964 with his harmonica version of “Mary Had a
Little Lamb,” and “Disco Demolition Night,” which Cannon cited as
“probably the most infamous confluence of baseball and music in the game’s
history.” |
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Frishberg began by playing his lovely ballad, “Van
Lingle Mungo,” the lyrics of which are composed solely of vintage ballplayers’
names. He acknowledged Jim Bouton, who, while working as a television sportscaster in the
early 1970s, created interest in the song by playing it during the baseball season.
Frishberg then proceeded to recall his only encounter with Van Lingle Mungo, the pitching
star for the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants in the 1930s and ‘40s whom the song
is named after. Both the composer and ex-pitcher were scheduled to appear on Dick
Cavett’s television show, when they met briefly prior to going on stage. “Oh,
you’re the guy with the song,” Frishberg remembers Mungo saying. “I said
right. He was very nice and he said I really like the song. Of course, he was a big
celebrity now down in Pageland, South Carolina. So he takes me aside and says, tell me,
when do I get the first check on this. I saw the look in his eyes and he was not kidding.
He really expected there was going to be a check. And he was a big guy and looked like he
might be a little unreasonable, you know. I thought fast, though, and I said, well look,
nobody’s gonna make any money off this song — that’s number one. Number two, if
anyone does make any money off of it, I’m gonna be the last one. And I said,
you’re never gonna see a cent off this. He said, but it’s my name. I said I
know. The only way we can get even on this is you gotta go home and write a song called
‘Dave Frishberg.’ So he laughed and hit me on the back and he said, that’s
okay, I like the song anyway. I lost contact with him after that, but I did send him a
birthday card every once in a while.” |
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The afternoon’s first inductee was introduced by Amy Essington, a Negro League historian and a Doctoral student in American History at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont, California. Essington has written essays on Effa Manley, Rube Foster, and other figures associated with Negro League baseball, and has served internships at both the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library and the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian Institution. She is actively involved in numerous professional organizations, including the Western Association of Women Historians.
“He couldn’t have been real, could he?”
Essington began. “He had to be the figment of some fiction writer’s overactive
imagination: A tall, lanky, brash, cocky, fast-talkin,’ fun-lovin’ philosopher
from Alabama who could throw a baseball right past you before you even saw the thing. Is
it even possible? Could someone really have thrown a baseball that hard, or played that
long, or talked that fast? Of course. Because with Leroy
Robert Paige, anything was possible. He was Walter Johnson, P.T. Barnum, Stepin
Fetchit, Al Capone, and Paul Robeson, all rolled into one. He played with Jackie Robinson
and Cool Papa Bell. He schmoozed with Joe Louis and Louie Armstrong. He pitched against
Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle. He went everywhere and did everything.” |
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Essington recalled that when the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown decided to allow Negro
Leaguers into its hallowed shrine in 1971, Satchel Paige was the first player chosen. When
Satch heard his plaque would go in a separate section (described by Essington as “a
sort of immortal, eternal segregation”), he said, “I ain’t goin’ in no
back door.” In a very poignant closing to her introduction, Essington remarked,
“So Cooperstown changed its mind, and decided to put Satchel’s plaque in the
same room with Babe Ruth’s and Dizzy Dean’s and Tris Speaker’s. And thanks
to Satchel, Negro Leaguers have been going in the front door ever since. And so, it is
with great pleasure that we now welcome Satchel Paige into the Baseball Reliquary’s
Shrine of the Eternals — through the front door. Satchel, here you is, and here
you is going to stay.” |
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JIMMY PIERSALL In his introductory comments about Jimmy Piersall, Terry Cannon noted that the first nine inductees to the Shrine of the Eternals (including Dock Ellis, Curt Flood, and Bill Veeck Jr. in 1999 and Moe Berg, Bill Lee, and Pam Postema in 2000) share a common literary interest. Eight of the nine, in fact, have written books, and the only one who didn’t was Moe Berg, probably the most erudite and intellectual player in the history of the game. (Berg was, however, the subject of at least seven books published in several languages.) Prior to reading a moving excerpt from Jimmy Piersall’s autobiography, Fear Strikes Out, published in 1955, Cannon maintained the book was “far more than one of the great comeback stories in baseball literature. Piersall exhibited extraordinary courage in detailing his mental breakdown and his subsequent recovery and return to the playing field. In the Eisenhower era, mental illness was not a topic of polite discussion at the American dinner table, not to speak of in the macho and conformist world of the professional athlete. Piersall’s book was courageous in its attempt to make readers aware of the causes of his mental breakdown and, most importantly, of the fact that mental illness can be a curable disease.” |
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Due to previous commitments, Jimmy Piersall was unable to
personally attend the ceremony and asked his stepson, Robert Jones, to accept his
induction into the Shrine of the Eternals. A screenwriter based in Hollywood for the past
15 years, Jones is the head of his own company, Deadwood Productions. Although Jones’
relationship with his stepfather underwent some difficult moments in its early stages, he
described Piersall now as his “best friend and mentor. He’s helped me through a
lot of tough times with his own life stories. He does the same thing with the kids, as he
calls them, that he coaches. He coached for the Cubs for 14 years until a year ago. He
might be coaching the game, but then he’d tell them about life, what to look forward
to and what to be careful of, in his own unique monosyllabic way. That’s just how
Jimmy is. He’s not an erudite speaker, but he gets the point across, which you end up
loving him for.” |
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JIM BOUTON No stranger to the Shrine of the
Eternals ceremonies, Albert Kilchesty, the Baseball Reliquary’s Archivist and
Historian, introduced the afternoon’s final inductee, Jim Bouton.
He spoke about the impression Bouton made on him as a youngster: “Today I am very
happy to call Jim an eternal. And although I’ve never met him before, I have
always called Jim Bouton a friend. Sort of like your favorite baseball uncle or family
relation that turns you on to something really important and crucial when you’re at
an age to really begin looking at the world in a wider way. And he changed my life
forever. I’m speaking, of course, about the publication of his book, Ball Four.” Continued readings of the book as an adult resulted in further discoveries: “While baseball is the central backdrop to the book, Ball Four is about a hell of a lot more than baseball. It’s a book about life. It’s a chronicle about a fighter, a survivor, a bulldog, if you will. Someone struggling to make sense of an environment in which the inmates are running the asylum. Somebody struggling to hang onto his career literally by his fingertips. And the great trope in the book is Bouton’s attempt to master the knuckleball, which, of course, as we all know, is thrown with the fingertips.” Kilchesty lauded Ball Four as one of the period’s most important sociological documents: “Ball Four reveals with surgical precision the complexity, the uncertainty, and the insecurity of ballplayers; the penurious conduct of the owners; and the difficulty in establishing and maintaining relationships in life with children, wives, and your family. I also found in subsequent rereadings of the book that Jim in Ball Four is a direct descendant of the great anti-heroes of American fiction in the 1950s and ‘60s, too. I’ve often thought of Jim Bouton’s relationship to baseball in Ball Four as similar to Yossarian’s relationship to the Second World War in Catch-22. Both of them seemed to be trapped in systems beyond comprehension and seemed to be the only sane people there to see what was going on.” |
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“But
most important for me and for the rest of the reading public,” Kilchesty concluded,
“the appearance of Ball Four in 1970, coinciding with Curt Flood’s suit
against major league baseball to revoke the reserve clause, altered the game forever.
Without Curt Flood, without Jim Bouton, we would not have free agency today.” |
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Bouton proceeded to acknowledge family members and former players and coaches who
influenced his career, including Yankees pitching coach Johnny Sain and all of his
teammates: “Mickey, Whitey, Yogi, Elston Howard, and Hector Lopez, who gave me my
only vote when I ran for player representative of the Yankees.” He also thanked Ralph
Houk for trading him to the Seattle Pilots and Joe Schultz “for becoming the greatest
character an author ever had to work with. . . The best way to describe Joe is he was the
opposite of Vince Lombardi. Joe felt sorry for us. He told us not to feel bad, we just
didn’t have the talent.” |
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Induction Day photographs courtesy of Larry Goren |
This Shrine of the Eternals 2001 Induction Day was made possible in part by a grant from the California Council for the Humanities, a state affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities. |
Dave Frishberg’s appearance was sponsored in part by a grant from the Los Angeles County Arts Commission and the Recording Industries’ Music Performance Trust Funds through the Professional Musicians Union Local 47; and by LIVE! @ your library, an initiative of the American Library Association, with major support from the National Endowment for the Arts, Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Fund, and John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. | ![]() |