Ladies and gentlemen,
distinguished inductees and representatives of
those inductees, thank you for being here today
and thank you for the honor of welcoming you to
the annual induction ceremony of the Baseball
Reliquary’s Shrine of the Eternals, 2007.
I was sitting with a group of
friends a few nights back, excitedly talking to
them about how I was so honored to be delivering
the keynote address today, talking about the
Baseball Reliquary and of the achievements of
Jim Brosnan, Bill James, and Yogi Berra.
They all knew Yogi Berra by name, in
fact they even misquoted him to me a couple of
times; a couple of them think they had heard of
Bill James, somewhere; and – who was the other
guy? A writer; a baseball player? And, of
course, the usual question we all get, what the
hell is a baseball reliquary?
Maybe I was a little too
enthusiastic, maybe I just went on too long as I
am disposed to do, but I saw the familiar signs:
the glazed over eyes, the condescending nods,
and then the quick cut-off to another round of
martinis. When the conversation resumed, we
talked about reality TV, political sex scandals,
no baseball. I cite this incident to underscore
my pleasure at being here with you. I love my
friends dearly, but there are times when we do
not walk the same path. All of us here today,
however, are from the same congregation, an open
society yet a small but learned group of ardent
fans of the game of imperfect beauty, the game
of baseball.
If you are lucky, you play the game
as a child, out on the street, improvising a
Chevy for a base and the sewer as an automatic
out. Not unlike the ivy in Wrigley, the Green
Monster at Fenway, the game adapts to its
environs easily enough. In my generation, the
sandlot was really an empty lot before the
Barrington Towers were built, that is, on the
weekends with Dad, or back in East LA, empty
lots were gardens gone abandoned, land not yet
claimed by urban renewal. We played
tripleheaders where the 10 meets the 5 and the
60, the East Los Angeles Freeway Interchange.
Sure, it was great to finally get a
uniform from the park league or the YMCA and it
was fun to finally play on a field that had
grass where it was supposed to be, real bases
and balls that did not have more tape than seam,
but still, it is the improvised elements of the
game which gave it its character, its
improbability, and its imperfect beauty.
The ardent fan played from sunup to
sundown, boys and girls of any ability and
various ages, so many games and configurations
of teams, changing the field in accordance with
who drove home and who drove off, that we lost
track of the games won or lost, but never the
vital statistics, that is, how many hits we made
in a day, starting with homers and ending with
hits we call hits that may have been ruled
errors, but who’s counting?
It was possible on occasion to
overstep the boundary of acceptable devotion for
the game. My mother’s lamp with the ceramic
panther base and tropical floral shade will
forever be the last thing I broke with a
well-hit whiffle ball inside the living room one
night. I got a double, however I got whiffle
ball banned forever from inside my home.
But the ardent fan plows on, and
when he is not playing baseball, he is reading
baseball, at least that is the way it was for
our crew. We shared dog-eared editions of the
Duane Decker series, fighting over who got the
copy of Southpaw from the library next,
or the ten-cent copy of World Series by
John Tunis, rescued from the used book rack near
the dirty magazines in the back of the Rexall on
Wabash. Sure there were other writers well
before my youth; no other team sport has
inspired so much literature and art. My uncle
gave me his copy of Jackson Scholz’ Batter Up,
so hallowed, I didn’t put it into circulation
with my pals and as a result I still have it.
There were the biographies of our baseball
heroes, always it seems written with or as told
to Arnold Hano. And then, Along Came Brosnan.
Jim Brosnan looked like one of us,
that is, he did not look like a baseball player,
rather he seemed suited to be a librarian, with
his thick glasses and his reserved mien. He was
surely quick-witted and well-spoken, his
teammates called him Professor, and a few other
names after he was published. But he did not
appear to be a man who made a living tossing
around a baseball. Yet he certainly did and that
was the crux of his gift.
I contend his appearance enhanced
his role in the annals of the literature of the
game, made him accessible, and thus edified the
impact of his two famous books, The Long
Season and Pennant Race. He made the
game more tangible than it had ever been. He
took us into the locker room, onto the bench and
bullpen, and more so, he gave us an ear to hear
the genuine vernacular, language certainly
modified for the standards of those times, but
real words spoken in real settings nonetheless.
He was the precursor to Jim Bouton’s
breakthrough expose, and unfortunately he took
the first steps in a dastardly trail that led
from The Bronx Zoo to the magnum opus of
that great baseball scholar, Jose Canseco. But
he is not to blame, for given his time, he
managed to make the game more real while still
holding fast to his own sense of dignity. He
didn’t write two great American novels, he just
wrote two great books about what he knew. There
are better writers, such as Roger Angell, Thomas
Boswell, and the dear friend we lost too soon,
David Halberstam, but Brosnan played the game.
He wrote about it, and he did it first.
The base of knowledge of the ardent
fan was found on the back of a baseball card,
where all the inner secrets of the game were
laid out for you to be decoded, as eventually, a
genius among us, would indeed do that very
thing. But we took that which was given to us at
the time and we made it our currency, our
measure of expertise, and our quest for Wisdom.
I am told that mathematics has its
own built-in musicality, to which I confess to
being tone deaf. And as for statistics, at its
core it is merely the act of building a
compendium of numbers that can be molded to the
vessel, which needs be served. But analysis,
that requires the application of scientific and
subjective thinking to otherwise plain facts.
Thus, to do so gives impetus to the
thing so often we fear, good or bad, change. To
derive new methods of measure, amplify and endow
a set of probabilities, and in doing so
challenge the glacier of conventional wisdom,
well you gotta know you’re just asking for
trouble.
When Bill James came upon the scene
he was greeted with the kind of warmth from the
baseball establishment that is usually reserved
for favorites such as Marvin Miller or a gaggle
of super agents who show up unannounced and
uninvited at spring training. And I imagine for
Mr. James looking at a game is a little like
what it must have been for Galileo looking up at
the sky and thinking to himself, boy I am in for
it now. But nonetheless he persevered, made
inroads, and, for the ardent fan, opened the
game to a new vision that only served to make
the game more vital. Thus, the more the
information, the more we know what we do not
know, and the divine mystery of baseball is
intact.
James did not divest the game of its
charm or serendipity, rather he made it more so,
he fed the ardent fans more fodder for debate,
and gave baseball statistics a sense of
musicality. For in the end, it is a game based
upon a round object being hit by another round
object, and what we know is that after all
analysis of statistics and predictions, anything
is possible.
Speaking of imperfect beauty, let us
speak of our final honoree, Yogi Berra. Could we
have loved him any less if we knew him as
Lawrence? I would hope so but I think not. Here
is a man who took the gifts of his stumpy body
and broad face and remarkable skill and turned
them into the prototype expectation of what we
want a catcher to look like.
Oh your first baseman is a lanky
left-handed fellow, and the shortstop is gonna
be the team fireplug, but a catcher, he is the
bulldog on the field. His nickname is Pudge or
Smoky. His hands are ugly, and he can’t run
worth a damn, but without him, you don’t have a
game. The pitcher might be the captain of the
ship, but you don’t go anywhere unless you have
a chief down in the boiler room to keep the
screws turning. Those guys are catchers. Here I
have to disclose my own special prejudice
because I was a catcher. I read The Catcher
in the Rye the first time when I was 13
because I thought it was a book about a catcher.
Well, it was, but it wasn’t about baseball. It
was still a very good book.
Imagine being the best at something,
anything, better than anyone else? Yogi Berra is
listed as number one in Bill James’ book, and
Casey Stengel called him My Man long before that
phrase became commonplace. He knew how much Yogi
knew the game.
He was the guy who caught the only
perfect game ever thrown in a World Series. He
was a three-time MVP during his tenure on all
those remarkably talent-laden Yankee teams. He
was a 15-time All Star over three decades, and
yet, what is it that really brings us here
today? What is it about this wonderful baseball
player that makes this day necessary?
I doubt you will find any other
athlete in any other arena that has so
influenced popular vernacular. He has been
likened to Sheridan’s Mrs. Malaprop, but what
she did was use the wrong word at the wrong time
– what Sheridan did was plot to get the laugh he
wanted. With Yogi, he has made us laugh yet he
has left us with a profound wisdom, a double
take that I get. Nobody goes to that restaurant
anymore, it’s too crowded – I get that. If you
can’t imitate him, don’t copy him, and my
favorite, the one that took Yogi into the world
of Zen: What time is it? You mean now? I get
that. I get all of it, don’t you?
I contend that we are here today to
honor three inductees whose ability to influence
the game of baseball is the least of their
achievements. In their relative careers, they
have not only enhanced the imperfect beauty of
the game, but they have also certainly elevated
our popular culture and American patrimony. Thus
to this group of ardent fans, it is we who are
honored to be honoring them. Thank you Jim
Brosnan, thank you Bill James, and thank you
Yogi Berra. Thank you Terry, Mary, and all the
Baseball Reliquary, and let’s play ball. Muchos
gracias. |