The BASEBALL RELIQUARY Inc.
Shrine of the Eternals Keynote Address
In this spangled month of the Fourth of July, the All-Star Game, and the Baseball Reliquary’s exhibit here at the Pasadena Central Library, “Patriotic Pitch: The Empire of Baseball,” two things become clear: 1. Baseball and patriotism are a provocative though not always palatable mix. 2. We ourselves are a strange and wondrous country of zealots – and I’m not just talking about Boston Red Sox fans. Truly, we can demonstrate our passions in curious ways. A man named Barry Bremen – an ostensibly ordinary businessman from Michigan was also an “incorrigible impostor” who impersonated, among others, a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader, and one of our honorees here today, the San Diego Chicken.[i]
Our politicians, no surprise, reflect
this odd zealotry: Speaking to the Iowa Faith
and Freedom Coalition, Newt Gingrich explained
his extra-marital affairs this way: “There’s no
question at times of my life, partially driven
by how passionately I felt about this country,
that I worked far too hard and things happened
in my life that were not appropriate.”[ii]
Please don’t try this one at home.
In any event, the practice of patriotism
and baseball has always been linked. As
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton — who knows
a thing or two about lame spousal excuses —
once remarked, “Being a Cubs fan prepares you
for life – and Washington.”[iii] This afternoon, I’ve added a third element to the mix: That would be poetry – and by extension, the good use of language. I am not first up with such an idea. As fellow Reliquarian Don Malcolm recently wrote, poet Walt Whitman was “the first American artist to embrace the game [of baseball] and assimilate it into his poetic vocabulary.” [iv] Whitman also looked to poetry to celebrate what this country not only was but also what it might become. With all the exuberance of the mid-19th century, Whitman writes in 1855, “The United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”[v]
Ever after, writers have found in baseball an irresistible mirror of evolving
Americana. As does the Reliquary. Consider the
Walter O’Malley tortilla. A simple flour
tortilla imprinted with O’Malley’s face, which
evokes the whole sorry tale of political
chicanery done to the residents of Chavez
Ravine. And seven years ago, where others saw
empty exhibit cases in the Cal State L.A.
Library, which serves many Latinos, Terry Cannon
saw an opportunity to showcase the neglected
history of local Mexican-American baseball. The
idea took off like an M80 on the Fourth of July,
engaging students, historians, and the
community. The Latino Baseball History Project
is now housed at Cal State San Bernardino.
Professors Francisco E. Balderrama and Richard
Santillan have just published
Mexican
American Baseball in Los Angeles (Arcadia
Press, 2011), and plan to continue to reclaim
this history county by county, and, ultimately,
throughout the U.S.
Contrast that approach to MLB’s refusal
to move the 82nd All-Star game from
Phoenix in the wake of Arizona’s passage of AB
1070, the controversial racial profiling bill.
Despite considerable protests, baseball
commissioner Bud Selig refused to address the
issue. He remained mute. He later designated
former Diamondback Luis Gonzalez to be the
All-Star Game ambassador. And I remember
thinking,
Why does an all-star game need an ambassador?
Why does the national pastime require an
ambassador within its own borders? Possibly
because MLB felt it needed a Latino World Series
hero for damage control in Arizona.
“Patriotic Pitch” is The Reliquary’s
latest challenge to establishment thinking. The
exhibit shows how appallingly wrong-headed – not
to mention wrong-hearted – American patriotism
has sometimes gone. And how Organized Baseball
has cheerfully gone along. As Albert Spalding
recalled of the bloody Civil War, “It had been a
great war for baseball.”[vi] Spalding
would go on to benefit immensely from U.S.
military initiatives, serving as sort of the
Johnny Appleseed of baseball during his 1888
World Baseball Tour, and planting outposts of
his sporting goods enterprise in towns near and
far.
This exhibit is based upon Rob Elias’s
thought-provoking book,
The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and
Promoted the American Way Abroad.
Elias suggests that a country that
has been at war somewhere, somehow for virtually
all its existence — you could look it up[vii] — might
take a hard look at its practice of foreign
policy. (Summed up, when in doubt, invade
Canada.) He argues that Organized Baseball is
culpable in its uncritical complicity in “making
the world safe for baseball.”[viii] In a
recent e-mail, Rob explained. “As I’ve tried to
indicate in the book, readers can draw their own
conclusions about the legitimacy and
appropriateness of the history of U.S. foreign
and military policies, but they shouldn’t
pretend that organized baseball hasn’t been a
huge and major booster for those policies, for
better or worse.”[ix]
If Elias’s book has a mantra, it comes on
page 1: “The true patriot is one who gives his
highest loyalty not to his country as it is, but
to what it can and ought to be.”[x] (Albert
Camus) What Elias proposes is not the sort of
unquestioning patriotism that Dale Petroskey
exhibited when he was president of the Hall of
Fame and Museum. (In 2003, with an anniversary
celebration of the film
Bull
Durham scheduled, Petroskey rescinded an
invitation to the film’s stars Susan Sarandon
and Tim Robbins because of their outspoken
opposition to the Iraq War.) As Elias puts it:
“Routinely patriotism has been defined not as
support for the nation’s ideals, but rather as
loyalty to official policies.”[xi] From
personal experience, I can tell you that this is
not always a popular opinion, living as I do in
Orange County.
But we are here for baseball. Let’s
return to Camus’ comment and rephrase it: “The
true fan of baseball is one who gives his or her
highest loyalty not to the game as it is, but to
what it can and ought to be.” Which is what the
Baseball Reliquary does so well. In honoring
people from the Left, like Lester Rodney, an
early white advocate for integration, and labor
organizer Marvin Miller, who fought for fair pay
and pensions, pioneering women like Ila Borders
and Pam Postema, and black ball players like
Dock Ellis and Curt Flood who got the short end
of the bat, the Reliquary reminds us fans of the
injustices, complexities, and nuances inherent
in this game – as well as the resilience of the
human spirit. Two of our inductees into the
Shrine this year remind us of just that – Pete
Gray and Maury Wills.
To encourage an institution, whether MLB
or the U.S. government, to be what it can and
ought to be, calls for the good use of language.
George Orwell’s essay of 1946 “Politics and the
English Language” still resonates with its
indictment of the ways politicians find to
manipulate words. Orwell argues that the correct
use of language can ultimately be a moral choice
– one that I would add can extend to baseball.
Consider the evasive language used to avoid
integration for so long, for ducking the
steroids crisis, when everyone in baseball knew
what was going on – and these are just two
examples. Remember the Reliquary’s event “Love
to Hate: The Dodgers-Giants Rivalry?” One
conflicted soul showed up in a Dodgers cap and
Giants T-shirt. The joint was packed, and we
could have talked ‘til midnight. The key word
here being “talked.” And I was reminded of my
childhood in New York City, arguing passionately
over the qualities of the Yankees, Dodgers, and
Giants. When I learned of the near-fatal beating
of Giants fan Bryan Stow on Opening Night at
Dodger Stadium this year, I thought,
A man
wants to take part in a century-plus tradition
of baseball rivalry and now this? What words
might have been found to encourage, no, demand,
safety at that troubled ballpark? Words fail me
here.
I wonder, too, whether any other sport
commands a 974-page dictionary. The third
edition of
Dickson’s Baseball Dictionary sits on a
shelf near my computer, a reminder that getting
the words right matters. But striving for this
doesn’t mean you can’t have a good time along
the way. When author John Schulian gave the
keynote here in 2005, he commented that baseball
had grown too serious. “Can you be funny playing
for Steinbrenner?” he asked. Part of his lament
had to do with language. Listing the players’
“canned quotes and clichés, sportswriters’ lack
of wit — but not you, Chris Erskine — and the
shrillness of sports talk radio,” Schulian urged
that “baseball perform Tommy John surgery on its
funny bone.”[xii] Now Vin
Scully is nearing retirement. And where, oh
where, is the man or woman who might step into
his conversational story-telling tradition? We
need more Ring Lardners, more Robert Coovers,
and more Chris Erskines. These guys can write
funny. We need that.
The Reliquary, long may it reign, never
forgets that baseball is a game, and that it is
meant to entertain. Ergo, our third inductee,
the San Diego Chicken aka Ted Giannoulas. When
Skip Caray first interviewed him, the announcer
asked, “Why did you cross the road?” to which
the Chicken replied, “To get away from a stupid
question, Skip.” Caray cracked up, and the
exchange became their signature closing line.
In closing let us return to Walt Whitman,
who called this country “essentially the
greatest poem.” He wrote that line in the
Preface to the first edition of his opus
Leaves of
Grass, which he would revise throughout his
life. How innocent was Whitman, the country, the
game of baseball 150-plus years ago. We are no
longer innocent as to how this country is run.
Wars take their toll. We know that mistakes —
big ones — have been made. Likewise in
baseball. And as with Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass, this country, Organized Baseball, and the Baseball
Reliquary are all works in progress. With its
latest exhibit, the Reliquary proposes that it
is good and patriotic to examine what baseball
and this country stand for. Why not a patriotism
that not only expresses gratitude for the
privilege of living here but also leaves room
for constructive criticism? Poetry and the good
use of language are essential to this. Today,
once again, the voters of the Shrine of the
Eternals – the people – have spoken.
This year, they have, I think, gotten the
inductees just right. Besides, the Chicken is
here! All will be well.
# [i] “Gate-crasher made headlines,” Los Angeles Times, July 7, 2011. AA6. [ii] Maggie Haberman, “Newt Gingrich: ‘I was doing things that were wrong,’” March 8, 2011, http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0311/50913.html#ixzz1G4F7yVxZ [iii] Newsweek, April 18, 1994. Paul Dickson, Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, page 107. [iv] Don Malcolm, “Post-Cooperstown Post Modernism,” Endless Seasons: Baseball in Southern California, July 2011, Society for American Baseball Research, page 14. [v] Walt Whitman, Preface, Leaves of Grass, 1855. [vi] Robert Elias, The Empire Strikes Out, (New York: The New Press, 2010), Page 8. [vii] Elias, pages 35-36. [viii] Elias, page 79. [ix] E-mail to the author, June 8, 2011.
[x] Elias, Page 1. [xi] Elias, Page 2. [xii] John Schulian, keynote address, The Baseball Reliquary Shrine of the Eternals Induction Ceremony, July 24, 2005. |