The BASEBALL RELIQUARY Inc.
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SHRINE OF
THE ETERNALS
On Sunday, July 20, 2003, a capacity crowd of nearly 200 people filled
the Donald R. Wright Auditorium of the Pasadena Central Library, Pasadena,
California, for the 2003 Induction Day ceremony of the Baseball Reliquary’s
Shrine of the Eternals. The festivities began at 2:00 PM with the traditional
bell ringing for the late Hilda Chester. The afternoon’s Master of Ceremonies,
Terry Cannon, also Executive Director of the Baseball Reliquary, announced
that Hilda was perhaps the most famous fan in baseball history, a denizen
of the Ebbets Field bleachers in Brooklyn for more than 30 years: “One
day, while passing a junk shop near her home, Hilda spotted a cowbell
for sale in the window. Price: 10 cents. From that moment on, a mighty
percussionist was unleashed in the Ebbets Field bleachers: Cowbell Hilda.” |
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THE HILDA AWARD The Hilda Award, named in honor of Hilda Chester, was established in 2001 to recognize distinguished service to the game by a baseball fan. The recipient of the third annual Hilda was lifelong New York baseball fan Ruth Roberts. Roberts has expressed her love of the game through writing music and lyrics for some of the liveliest baseball anthems of the last half century. Along with her frequent collaborator, Bill Katz, Roberts wrote the 1956 song, “I Love Mickey,” a celebration of Mickey Mantle which was recorded by Teresa Brewer. In 1960, she penned “It’s a Beautiful Day for a Ball Game,” the longtime radio theme of the Los Angeles Dodgers. And finally in 1963 came “Meet the Mets,” which was introduced to the public in March of that year and has been played before every Mets home game for the last 40 years. “The song is such a staple among generations of New York baseball enthusiasts,” remarked Cannon, “that some diehard Mets fans have requested that, upon their death, ‘Meet the Mets’ be sung at their funeral before their casket is closed.” |
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Currently a resident of Port Chester, New York, Ruth Roberts was unable to attend the ceremony due to recent eye surgery. Accepting the Hilda (a cowbell encased in Plexiglas with an engraved inscription) on Roberts’ behalf was her son, Michael Piller, who lives in Los Angeles. Piller offered several anecdotes about his mother’s love of baseball and music. Of “Meet the Mets,” Piller noted: “I am a television writer and producer, and I was at a major network recently pitching my latest project. I was wearing my Mets cap from the World Series with the Yankees. The head of the network asked me if I went to that World Series. And I said, well, yes, my mother got tickets because she wrote the Mets theme song. And his eyes lit up and in front of his entire staff, he sang the entire song word-for-word. I realized then, and wrote to my mother right after that meeting, that what she had really written was a city anthem. She had encapsulated in two minutes the entire experience and memories of the history of a baseball team. The shared experiences of our youth, of our memories and thrills, are bound together by that song. They still play it today before every game in New York, and everywhere I go I now make sure to let them know my mom wrote that song.” |
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THE TONY SALIN MEMORIAL AWARD
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Nemec shared
a final remembrance of Salin with the audience: “Tony really was, as
he billed himself as a teenager, ‘Mr. Baseball’ when it came to trivia.
He never pushed it on a national level, never would enter formal trivia
contests and such, but he would forever come up with great nuggets.
The thing you had to accept, though, with Tony was he would never give
any additional clues once he had laid one of his gems on you. There
was always this elfish smile followed by, ‘Sorry, that’s all the information
I’m going to give you.’ |
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KEYNOTE ADDRESS: ROBERT ELIAS The 2003 Keynote Address was delivered by Mill Valley, California resident Robert Elias, who is Professor and Chair of the Politics Department at the University of San Francisco, where he also founded the Legal Studies and the Peace & Justice Studies programs. A former college baseball player who was once offered a contract by the San Francisco Giants, Elias edited the book Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class, Gender and the National Pastime (2001). He has been the editor of Peace Review for over ten years and has been active in the peace, civil rights, and anti-apartheid movements. He was a member of the “Baseball for Peace” tour of Nicaragua in 1987, in which war-torn baseball fields were repaired and the sport was used to build goodwill between the American and Nicaraguan peoples. Elias is currently completing research on Curt Flood and on baseball and the Cold War. |
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Elias began his talk by acknowledging the 2003 inductees to the Shrine
of the Eternals: Jim Abbott,
Ila Borders, and Marvin Miller.
“Their experiences also relate directly to my theme,” Elias remarked.
“In their cases, on issues of gender, class, and physical difference,
they illustrate both the potential and the limits of the American dream.”
Elias followed with a commentary on how throughout the evolution of
baseball, key American issues have been played out, including politics
and nationalism; labor-management conflicts; class and economic inequalities;
and race, ethnic, and gender relations. |
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The afternoon’s first inductee, Jim Abbott, was introduced by veteran
sportswriter Jim McConnell, a journalist for over 30 years. McConnell
began his career with the now-defunct Pomona Progress-Bulletin
and currently works for the San Gabriel Valley Newspaper Group,
which includes the Pasadena Star-News, Whittier Daily News, and
San Gabriel Valley Tribune. Along the way, McConnell has garnered
numerous awards from places as diverse as the Associated Press, the
California Newspaper Publishers Association, the Society for American
Baseball Research, and the Los Angeles Press Club.
In preparing his remarks, McConnell indicated that he had informally
polled a dozen sportswriters and it was unanimous that Jim Abbott was
their best interview on the Angels in the years he played for them;
several of the writers described him as their best interview ever.
Although Jim Abbott was unable to personally attend the ceremony due
to a previous commitment in his home state of Michigan, his acceptance
speech was videotaped prior to Induction Day and was played following
McConnell’s introduction. Abbott thanked the members of the Baseball
Reliquary who voted for him and acknowledged several people who were
instrumental in the success of his athletic career. “I had remarkable
support,” Abbott stated. “My mom and dad were wonderful people who taught
me how to play baseball in a little different way and took the time
to kind of creatively think of a way for me to play catch. You know,
the way I learned to switch the glove on and off is the way I learned
to do it with my dad.” |
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The second inductee for 2003, Ila Borders, was introduced by Jean Hastings
Ardell, an award-winning freelance writer whose work has appeared in
book form in the 1994 anthology Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend:
Women Writers on Baseball, and in publications such as Elysian
Fields Quarterly, the Los Angeles Times, and The Sporting
News. Her nonfiction book about women and baseball is forthcoming
from Southern Illinois University Press.
Ardell then proceeded to chronicle Borders’ competitive hardball
career, from Little League through middle school, high school, and college,
and into the ranks of professional baseball with the independent Northern
League. Highlights along the way included being the first woman to receive
a college baseball scholarship (1993, Southern California College),
the first female pitcher to win a men’s college game (1993), and the
first female to win a men’s regular-season professional game (1998).
“She proved that girls are not too weak or too fragile to play the game,
and that some definitely don’t throw like a girl,” Ardell added. “Her
presence on the diamond educated both the fans in the stands, the coaches,
and the boys and men she played with and competed against — at least
those open to change, who learned to respect women in a deeper way.
As her last manager [Borders retired from professional baseball in 2000],
the Zion Pioneerz’ Mike Littlewood said, ‘Ila was one of the most courageous
people I’ve ever met or seen play the game.’”
Ila Borders walked to the podium to a standing ovation from the audience.
She described her life as being “a fairy tale” and offered thanks to
her parents, both of whom were in attendance. Her father, Phil, who
had played professionally himself, worked closely with her on the “mechanics”
of the game since she was a child. Her mother, Marianne, drove her to
games and practices, and it was from her that she inherited her “heart”
and drive to succeed. Borders also acknowledged the presence of Mr.
and Mrs. Jim Wadley, former owners of the Duluth-Superior Dukes of the
Northern League, for whom she enjoyed her longest stint in professional
baseball. She thanked the Wadleys for allowing her to become a starting
pitcher for the first time at the pro level, and then proudly flashed
her 1997 Northern League championship ring, which she earned as a member
of the Dukes. |
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The final inductee for 2003, Marvin Miller, was introduced by baseball
lawyer Richard Moss, whose background in professional baseball dates
to 1967, when Marvin Miller invited him to join the Major League Baseball
Players Association as legal counsel. Along with Miller, Moss was intimately
involved in many of the pioneering legal decisions as they pertained
to the game’s development in the late 1960s and 1970s. In fact, he argued
all of the union’s legal and arbitration cases during his 11-year tenure
with the Players Association. Moss became interested in labor law while
attending the Harvard Law School. Following a two-year stint in the
Army, he practiced for a brief time in a small Pittsburgh law firm before
joining the Steelworkers Union, first as assistant general counsel and
later as associate general counsel in charge of the legal department
at the union’s international headquarters. Since leaving the Players
Association in 1977, he has represented numerous professional baseball
players and has also taught Sports and the Law at the University of
Southern California.
“Marvin helped the players understand that individually they had very
little power, but collectively they could change the system; they could
create a more equitable world in terms of their conditions of employment.
Marvin helped them understand something very basic, too, about labor
organizations and success, and that concerns solidarity. If you stick
together, you can accomplish things, and if you don’t, you won’t. And
that’s what distinguished the Baseball Players Association from comparable
unions in other sports.”
“To be specific, in the first 15 years of collective bargaining in Major
League Baseball, from 1966 to 1981, five basic collective bargaining
agreements were negotiated, involving the greatest improvements of the
working conditions of the employees than those achieved in any other
American industry in a comparable period of time. They included, of
course, the end of the reserve clause; the introduction of salary arbitration;
the introduction of impartial arbitration of disputes involving interpretations
of the contracts; the introduction of the players’ right to veto trades;
and much, much more. In those same 15 years, five pension and insurance
agreements were negotiated, vastly improving all the benefits and adding
many new ones. And all of this was done with lost time of exactly nine
days in 1972. In those first 15 years, nine days of stoppage represented
three-tenths of one percent of the days’ work.” In underlining the inaccuracy
of Commissioner Selig’s statement, Miller further observed, “Baseball
might turn out to be the most peaceful of any United States industry
in converting from non-union to union status.” |
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BENEDICTION
As he usually does, the Master of Ceremonies, Terry Cannon, concluded
the Induction Day festivities with a benediction or parting thought:
“Two hours ago, we began with a tribute to the greatest of all fans,
Hilda Chester, and now I would like to end by reading a brief section
from a book written by a fan, not a professional writer, named Art Hill.
The book is entitled I Don’t Care if I Never Come Back: A Baseball
Fan and His Game, and was published in 1980. In the following passage,
the author examines his unique relationship with the game, and I think
his experience in the thrall of baseball will be recognizable to many
of us similarly afflicted:” |
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Induction Day Photographs Courtesy of Larry Goren Answer to trivia question: Joe McGinnity and Amos Rusie |
