Say It Ain't So...

Major League Baseball's Mount Rushmore.

Pictured top row, left to right: Honus Wagner, Gover Cleveland Alexander, Tris Speaker, Napolion Lajoie, George Sissler, Walter Johnson.

Bottom row: Eddie Collins, Babe Ruth, Connie Mack, Cy Young.

By purely photographic standards, this is not the greatest baseball photograph ever made. That honor in my humble opinion would have to go to Charles Conlon's remarkable picture of Ty Cobb giving all 110 percent of himself sliding into third, sending New York Highlander (Yankee) third baseman Jimmy Austin airborne in his futile attempt to tag out the redoubtable "Georgia Peach", as umpire Silk O'Laughlin gets himself into position in the background to make the call. 

Click here to see the familiar, highly cropped version of the photo. 

But no less remarkable at least as a historical document is this portrait of nine old men at the Major League Hall of Fame induction ceremony at the first such event in Cooperstown, New York on Jun 12, 1939. At the very least, three of those pictured above represent what would have to be considered part of baseball's equivalent of Mount Rushmore. All the rest would be close runners up.

The question of who belongs and who doesn't belong in the Hall of Fame is probably the most frequent topic of debate among baseball people, and even this esteemed group has its detractors, at the very least in the sense of omission.

So who is not in this photo that should be?

First and foremost is a group of perhaps an equal number of players who weren't allowed to play in the major leagues because of the color of their skin. One might consider the following:

• Shortstop John Henry "Pop" Lloyd
• Catcher Louis Santop
• Outfielder Pete Hill
• Pitcher José Méndez
• First Baseman and manager Ben Taylor
• Outfielder Cristóbal Torriente
• Second Baseman Frank Grant
• Infielder/Executive/Historian Sol White
• Pitcher/Manager/Executive Rube Foster

It wouldn't be until 1971 that a player was inducted into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame solely based upon his career in what became known collectively as the "Negro Leagues." Fortunately the irony of the original plan to honor these men and one woman of the game in a "separate but equal" room in Cooperstown was not lost on what today would be called the "woke" crowd, who in a much different day and age, were not excoriated for believing that everybody deserves to be treated equally and fairly. 

To date there are 35 Negro League players and two non-player executives enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame. There should be more.

Nevertheless, the nine players listed above, all eventually inducted into the Hall of Fame for their contributions to the game of baseball, ended their playing careers at least five years before the event pictured at Cooperstown, which would have made them eligible for the "Class of '39". 

One might argue that it is impossible to compare these players to "Major Leaguers" because they didn't get the chance to complete against them. 

But they did, not in officially sanctioned MLB games, but in countless exhibition games which became discouraged by MLB executives because the teams made up of black players usually won. For their part, most big-league stars understood the undeniable fact that Major League Baseball of their time, did not represent the best ballplayers, but only a fraction of them.

Babe Ruth was one of those players who understood.

Ted Williams was another. In his induction speech at the Hall of Fame in 1966, the "Splendid Splinter" said this:

...I've always been a very lucky guy to have worn a baseball uniform, to have struck out or hit a tape major home run. And I hope that someday the names of Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson in some way can be added as a symbol, the great Negro players that are not here, only because they were not given a chance.

It is said that speech was one of the driving forces behind admitting Negro League players into the Hall. Still, it took five years. On the other hand, we should be thankful for that because given today's animus toward diversity, equity and inclusion, had they waited until our time, it might never have happened.

OK that had to be said, I'm off my soapbox now.

Who else isn't in that photo? Well, the aforementioned Ty Cobb of course, who was part of the group, perhaps the fourth face on baseball's Mount Rushmore along with Cy Young, Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth. Personally, I'd put Walter Johnson up there too but that would make five. I'm OK with that.

Ty Cobb isn't in the photo because he showed up late that day.

Anyone else?

Ok now to the intended topic of this post.

Portrait of Joe Jackson by Charles Conlon, 1913

A lot of folks believe that one of the greatest injustices of the game is the fact that "Shoeless" Joe Jackson wasn't there. He still isn't.  

That may not be for long as Major League Baseball has just reinstated Jackson along with seven of his teammates from the infamous 1919 Chicago White Sox team who conspired with gamblers to throw the World Series that year. That means Jackson will be eligible to be voted into the Hall in 2028 by a special group of electors called the "Historical Overview Committee" made up of baseball historians and veteran members of the Baseball Writers' Association of America.

Jackson certainly has to be ranked among the greatest hitters in the game, ending up with a career batting average of .356, placing him in fourth place in that category among MLB and Negro League players. *

No less than Ty Cobb AND Babe Ruth both credited Jackson for inspiring their own approach to hitting. Here's what Cobb allegedly once told Jackson:

Whenever I got the idea I was a good hitter, I'd stop and take a look at you. Then I knew I could stand some improvement.

And here's Babe Ruth on Shoeless Joe:

Babe Ruth and Joe Jackson, 1920

I copied Jackson's style because I thought he was the greatest hitter I had ever seen, the greatest natural hitter I ever saw. He's the guy who made me a hitter.

Were it not for Jackson's decision to accept money from gamblers and not do everything he could to help win the World Series for his team, its fans and its city, Joe Jackson would have certainly been standing with the likes of the Rushmore crowd in that photograph. 

This is an account of his prowess as the most naturally gifted, if not necessarily the smartest player of his time, written in 1916 by F.C. Lane and introduced by the official historian of Major League Baseball, John Thorn.

Here's a little taste of the piece: 

Joe Jackson had simply native gifts, which, in themselves, have never been equaled. It was as natural for him to hit a baseball as it was for his early forebears to hit a squirrel in the eye at a hundred yards.

Gambling had always been a part of the game, there's no argument that gambling is what made baseball, like horse racing and boxing, a popular spectator sport in the first place. And paying off players to not do their best to win had also been around for a good long time. It was fairly well established that members of the 1918 Chicago Cubs were paid to throw that series against Boston, allegedly inspiring the members of their crosstown rivals to do the same the following year. And that Cubs team was not the first accused to having thrown a World Series by a long shot. 

To paraphrase the Chicago author Studs Terkel, while the 1919 White Sox may not have been the most corrupt team in baseball, they were hands down the most theatrically corrupt. 

And like all good theater, the drama of the 1919 World Series that has been handed down to us over the ages, is a mixture of some facts for plausibility's sake, mixed in with whole lot of fiction to keep it interesting.

Studs Terkel had a small role in the John Sayles film Eight Men Out which was based on the 1963 novel of the same name, written by Elliot Asinov. While the novel and subsequent film were one of many popular accounts of the Black Sox Scandal over the years, for some reason the film and especially the book are unfortunately considered by many (including so called "America's historian" Ken Burns) to be the definitive word on the subject. This despite the fact that the book's author made no claim his was a work of serious historical inquiry, and openly admitted having invented key elements of the story. **

Here is a piece published by the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) highlighting the myths about the scandal which were promoted in the book and movie.

The most enduring myth promoted in the book is laying the weight of the blame on the whole sordid affair not on the players, but at the feet of their boss, owner and founder of the White Sox, Charles Comiskey. 

I won't go into it here as I wrote an entire post on the subject, except to say that this line from the book referring to the 1919 Sox...

No players of comparable talent on other teams were paid as little.

...which was repeated almost verbatim in Ken Burns's epic PBS docudrama titled Baseball, has absolutely no basis in fact. 

Research involving the unearthing of player-salary cards from the era, has discovered that the 1919 White Sox team had one of the highest team payrolls in baseball and most of their players had higher salaries than comparable players on other teams. 

The argument that the players were justified in their actions in order to recoup what was due them because they were vastly underpaid, is simply not true. 

So why did they do it?

This might give you an idea. Joe Jackson admitted that he was offered $20,000 (more than three times his salary***) for his part in the fix. He then complained bitterly AND publicly under oath that he only got $5,000 from the gangsters. 

Of course it was for the money, the players just wanted more of it, a lot more. 

Those in the know had an inkling something was suspicious before the series even started as the odds for the highly favored White Sox against the Cincinnati Reds went down precipitously shortly before the first game. Some uncharacteristically sloppy play in the field and sub-par pitching, convinced the cognoscenti, including the great Christy Matthewson **** who was covering the game from the press box, that the fix was in. 

Nearly a year would pass before the whole thing blew up. As the Sox were heading toward another possible American League pennant, the case of the eight Sox players was brought before a grand jury in Chicago. In the meantime, one of the gamblers involved, Billy Mahrag spilled the beans to reporters in Philadelphia that games 1, 2 and 8 of the best of nine series had been compromised. 

With the cat out of the bag and feeling the heat, four of the eight players including Jackson, confessed their role in the scheme to the grand jury. The following year, Chick Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Fred McMullin, Swede Risberg, Happy Felsch, Lefty Williams, Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson found themselves in a courtroom in Chicago as defendants in a criminal case, charged with conspiracy to commit fraud. 

If you're interested and all you know about the trial is based on Eight Men Out, please do yourself a favor and read this.

Despite the confessions of half the defendants (which contrary to the book, were indeed presented to the jury), and other damning evidence against the players, the jury came in with a not-guilty verdict. The evening after the verdict was read, the jurors, twelve men all from Chicago, joined the players in a celebratory dinner at a local restaurant. Feel free to draw your own conclusions.

But the celebration was short lived. The next day, the newly appointed Commissioner of Baseball, (a position created as a response to the Black Sox affair,) Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis, banned all eight players for life from the game. In his ruling, Landis said:

Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player who throws a ball game, no player who undertakes or promises to throw a ball game, no player who sits in confidence with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers, where the ways and means of throwing a game are discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.

Something I just learned is that the Landis ruling didn't extend to Hall of Fame inductions until 1991 when "The Pete Rose Rule" prohibiting players banned from the game from consideration for admission into the hallowed hall was adopted. It turns out that Jackson's name was on the ballot twice, in 1936 and 1940. Obviously, he was not voted in. 

The Landis ruling was intended to be a lifetime ban, but I don't know how much consideration was made about it being a ban for eternity. As all members of the 1919 White Sox are long gone, they continued to be on the ineligible list until this month when the current commissioner Rob Manfred lifted the ban on all deceased players. Claiming that dead players no longer pose a threat to the game (yes he really did say that), this leaves the door open to Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, who seem rightly or wrongly forever joined at the hip in their ignominy, to have the chance to be considered entrance into the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame.

Whew, that was a long way to get to what I intended to be the crux of this post which is, drum roll please...

...should they be let in?

I have to admit that, as my friend Rich with whom I discussed this issue before starting writing this piece will testify, I was on the fence.

I no longer am.

This is the simple answer: it all depends what you want the Hall of Fame to be.

Here are the reasons I keep hearing why Joe Jackson should be inducted into the Hall of Fame:

There are lots of players currently in the Hall of Fame who have done worse things than Joe Jackson.

Look I get it, induction into the Hall of Fame is not the equivalent of the canonization process in the Roman Catholic Church. In the words of Bill Veeck:

Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.... Deplore it if you will, but Grover Cleveland Alexander drunk was a better pitcher than Grover Cleveland Alexander sober. 

The players in the picture at the top of this post, with the possible exceptions of Honus Wagner and Walter Johnson, were flawed men. In addition to "Old Pete" Alexander's problems with the sauce,  Tris Speaker allegedly had Klan ties, Babe Ruth was a rake, and Eddie Collins (also a member of the 1919 White Sox) as general manager of the Red Sox, was instrumental in preventing black players from joining the team. And Ty Cobb, part of the group not in the picture had anger issues*****.

So who cares? One could say all that matters is how a player performed on the field. The thing is, we have stats and record books and infinite other reams of information and their extrapolations to tell us the story of how good a player was on the field. One would expect that an institution like the Hall of Fame would have loftier goals than a mere record book or computer printout. In my mind, an institution such as that should exist to honor and celebrate a player's contributions to the game in addition to the numbers he put up.

Conversely, there should be repercussions to a player's compromising the game. Joe Jackson's numbers were staggering, that much is true. On the other hand, intentionally setting out to lose a game, much worse, the World Series for personal profit, goes against the very spirit of the enterprise an athlete dedicates his or her life to. In my mind, there is no more serious betrayal of the game then that. In other words, cheating to win is very bad, but cheating to lose is worse.

I work in the curatorial department of an art museum, and the enterprise I have devoted much of my life to is the care and protection of the objects in our collection. I could very easily take one of those objects, one that would probably not be missed for a long time, and sell it to make up for the amount I consider to be lacking in my compensation. 

You might say that an athlete intentionally trying to lose is not stealing, but it really is. Because the most important thing a team has to offer, is the trust it provides to its fans. Trust that their players and everyone involved with the team will do everything within their power to play well and honorably, even if it results in a loss. Once that trust is broken, it is very hard to restore. 

Which is exactly what the eight players of the 1919 White Sox did. And the cost to the team was staggering, they would not win another pennant or even come close until 1959. 

But Joe Jackson's stats during the 1919 Series show that he didn't slack up a bit, that he was really playing to win. On top of that, he didn't participate in any of the meetings with the gamblers. 

First of all, the second point doesn't matter. By accepting money from the gamblers, which he certainly did, Jackson made it crystal clear to his fellow players that he was a part of the fix, even more so as the team's undisputed star, which further emboldened his teammates to do what they had to do to throw games. 

Second, Joe Jackson's overall stats from the 1919 World Series don't tell the whole story. If you read the F.C.Lane article I posted above, you know that in addition to being an exceptional hitter, Jackson was also an outstanding outfielder with great speed and a cannon for an arm. In games one and two, he allowed two well hit balls to get by him resulting in triples and eventually runs which proved to be the difference in the games. Now triples hit to left field are fairly uncommon in the big leagues as the left fielder has a much easier throw to third base than either a right or center fielder.  Misplays like these don't make it into the box score, as errors are only recorded when a fielder touches the ball. If a fielder doesn't make it to the ball, no error, and no record of an inept play. These aren't exactly smoking guns, but they were enough to make folks in the know like Christy Mathewson suspicious.

Jackson hit well in the series, but much better in the games that were on the up and up. In the games the Sox were supposed to lose, his hits came usually when there was no one on base, or when the game was already out of hand. When there were runners on base and he had the chance to make a difference in the game, crickets. 

Baseball can't just erase Joe Jackson from the game.

Refusing to bestow a player with the highest honor possible in the game hardly constitutes erasing the player from the game, in fact in this case, just the opposite. Joe Jackson's travails have raised him to folk hero status. Heck there's even a library and museum dedicated to him. I'd venture to say that of the nine men in the picture above, with the exception of Babe Ruth and Cy Young (because of the award named after him), the name Shoeless Joe Jackson is more familiar to the general public than all the rest combined PLUS the Negro League stars thrown in for good measure. I think it's unlikely that were it not for his involvement in Black Sox Scandal and his banishment from the game, he'd be remembered today by anyone other than students of the game.

Besides, no one has expunged his stats from the record book, they're there in all their glory for everyone who cares to see.

Jackson and his teammates were acquitted in a court of law but in a dictatorial move, Judge Landis banned them from the game anyway.

That is irrelevant. Even if you were to ignore the vagaries of the verdict, the burden of proof of guilt in a court of law is significantly higher than it is in the workplace. Back to the example of me hypothetically taking a piece of art from our collection, I could stand trial for theft but if the police fail to come up with the object, there's a good chance I'd be acquitted. However, if there's just enough evidence to convince my bosses that I stole the object, they could fire me in a heartbeat with no repercussions.

In the case of the Chicago 8, there was no question of their guilt. 

It's been over one hundred years, can't we just forgive and forget? Hasn't Joe Jackson been punished enough?

Forgive? Certainly, as they say, to err is human, to forgive, divine.

Forget? Certainly not. That would be saying cheating the game and its fans for personal profit is AOK as long as it was long enough ago and the player put up good enough numbers. 

---

MY VERDICT (for what it's worth)

I think it is right and just that the ban on Joe Jackson and his fellow deceased players has been lifted as no one deserves to be condemned for eternity. Well, I can think of a few people who need no mention, but they weren't ballplayers. 

And I think it's a good thing that Jackson will now be eligible to be on the ballot for possible induction in the Hall of Fame.

But do I think Joe Jackson belongs there?

I know many people with strong opinions on the subject will no doubt think: "say it ain't so Jim" but...

No, he doesn't.

Neither does Pete Rose.

Sorry.

Notes:

*In 2024, Major League Baseball included Negro League stats in its official tally of baseball records. That long awaited move is reflected in this list of the top five lifetime batting averages:

1) Ty Cobb 367

2) Oscar Charleston 365

3) Rogers Hornsby 359

4) Joe Jackson .356

5) Jud Wilson .350


**Elliot Azinov admitted that he invented the story of White Sox pitcher Lefty Williams being threatened by a hitman working for gangster Arthur Rothstein to either lose game eight (that year it was a best of nine series) in the first inning, or suffer dire consequences both for himself and his family. Asinov revealed that he made up the character of hitman Harry F. and his threat to Williams on the advice of his publisher to guard against copywrite infringement.


***In 1919, Joe Jackson's salary was $6000. That sounds like a paltry amount and it was considering he was the star of the team. But as I pointed out in my Charles Comiskey post, Jackson had a multi-year contract at that figure which Comiskey purchased from Cleveland, and he was under no obligation to increase the amount. There were other extenuating circumstances that made Comiskey especially loathe the idea of increasing Jackson's salary which you can read about here.

Nevertheless, in today's dollars, that $6000 would be equal to about $110,000, peanuts of course to what modern day ballplayers make, but not a bad wage, especially considering it's for only for a little over one half a year's work.

**** New York Giants pitcher Christy Matthewson, another candidate for baseball's Mount Rushmore status, was one of the original class of inductees into the hall of Fame in 1936. Sadly, "The Big Six" passed away much too early, in 1925.


*****One of the most agonizingly persistent myths of the game of baseball is the notion that in addition to his well-documented anger management issues, Ty Cobb was a racist-sociopath. That erroneous portrayal of him did not exist until well after his death, when an unscrupulous writer named Al Stump, unsatisfied by the response to his biography of the great ballplayer, decided to write a "tell-all" expose of his exploits with Cobb as he was gathering material for his book. The problem is, the writer made most of it up. You can read about it here. 

Jackie Robinson

There is a revealing moment that comes toward the end of the new PBS documentary on the life and times of Jackie Robinson. I'm not thinking of the clips of the magnificent ballplayer stealing home against Whitey Ford and the Yankees in game one of the 1955 World Series, or the noble civil rights leader marching with Martin Luther King. Nor am I thinking of the indignant man battling injustice directed at him and his people, or the successful businessperson, or the loving father in the arms of his family.

In 1966, Robinson worked as a special assistant for community affairs in New York during the administration of Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Given Robinson's achievements up to that point, not to mention his support of Rockefeller during the 1964 Republican presidential campaign, he probably could have had his pick of positions in that administration. The film clip I'm thinking of was shot at a community meeting where frustrated African American citizens were bringing concerns about issues plaguing their community to the table. In his capacity as the representative of the government, Robinson appeared shell-shocked at the barrage of criticisms brought before him. Clearly frustrated at not having the answers to these people's problems, he left the meeting by saying: "we'll get back to you."

Robinson the bureaucrat is hardly the image of St. Jack most of us are accustomed to seeing. However when you think about it, a lesser man in that situation might have just thrown up his hands and said: "Hey I'm Jackie Fucking Robinson, I broke baseball's color barrier. I don't need this shit."

Another clip shows Robinson humbly telling a woman that while his athletic accomplishments came easy to him, his new found career in service to others was hard, and it took lots of learning.

After his baseball career ended, Robinson could have retired to a comfortable life resting on his laurels, and settling down in his Stamford, Connecticut home with his wife Rachel and their three children. No none would have thought the lesser of him.

But as we all know by now, that was not Jackie Robinson. This quote of his closed part one of the documentary:

If I had a room jammed with trophies, awards and citations, and a child of mine came into that room and asked what I had done in defense of black people and decent whites fighting for freedom, and I had to tell that child that I had kept quiet, that I had been timid, I would have to mark myself a total failure at the whole business of living.

Having said that, Robinson could have taken an easier road toward being an advocate for his people. He could have followed the orthodox ideological path many of his contemporaries took. But his convictions prevented him from doing that too. He understood that life is complicated, and you can't simply find plug-in answers to difficult questions. Through all the heartaches and struggles the civil rights movement suffered in the sixties, Jackie Robinson still believed it was important to work within the system rather than against it. Rightly or wrongly, he didn't buy into the notion of changing the world by any means necessary.

For that he was excoriated by members of the black community, many of whom felt he was an old man out of touch with the times. Despite all he did for the cause of civil rights, he was labeled an Uncle Tom by some of his own people. I can only guess those words were infinitely more painful than all the invectives hurled at him by white players and fans during his baseball playing days put together.

Jackie Robinson's widow, Rachel Isum Robinson approached Ken Burns about a decade ago, asking him to follow up his nine part documentary called Baseball, which prominently featured her husband, with a new film that would exclusively feature him. Previous commitments prevented Burns from immediately acting upon her request, but he enlisted the help of his daughter Sarah Burns and her husband David McMahon to assist with the production of the Robinson film.

The film they made is a cohesive portrayal of the man and the struggles he faced during his lifetime. The filmmakers avoided the pitfalls of turning their work into hagiography, as so many portrayals of the Robinson have turned out, including the one in Ken Burns's Baseball. There was even a token effort to get into the heads of some of Robinson's fellow ballplayers who balked at the idea of playing with or against a black man. Unfortunately Dixie Walker, Enos Slaughter and the rest of the players who objected to Robinson's presence in the big leagues are no longer around to speak for themselves. That task was given to Robinson's teammate, pitcher Carl Erskine, who without condoning their behavior, explained their position as being Southerners brought up in a society that sincerely believed it was morally wrong for black and white people to mix. Even the late Red Barber, beloved to generations of NPR listeners for his weekly, homespun interviews with radio host Bob Edwards, admitted in archival footage from the original baseball documentary that he once believed having blacks playing ball with whites was wrong, and seriously considered quitting his job as the voice of the Dodgers over the signing of Jackie Robinson. It took Branch Rickey's tremendous power of persuasion to convince him to stick around.

Along with seeing Barber again, one of the joys of this Robinson film was seeing Buck O'Neil one more time. O'Neil, unquestionably the star of the original baseball series, was Robinson's teammate on the Kansas City Monarchs during the very brief time that Jackie played in the Negro Leagues. O'Neil gave interviews (not included here) where he described the position of white ballplayers at the time in practical terms. The black players he said, who would be coming into the league would be competing for the white players' jobs. Small wonder few major leaguers were thrilled at the prospect of several dozen new ballplayers competing for what few roster spots there already were.

Despite efforts to be as balanced as possible, Team Burns did seem to have an agenda in the making of this film, bending over backwards to make sure that white people didn't get too much of the credit for the integration of baseball.

In an interview published in an ESPN article titled: Jackie Robinson documentary kills myths of civil rights legend, Ken Burns said, referring to his original baseball documentary:

We sort of postulated that Branch Rickey reached down and touched Jackie, like Michelangelo,. He was supposed to be God, and Jackie was Jesus...(1) It wasn't just Branch Rickey alone in the wilderness. It was a black press that had been active for decades pushing it. It was a left-wing press.

Well it's not very likely that the black or left wing press held much sway with white America, let alone major league baseball back in the forties, so that last statement of Burns is over-reaching at best. For his part, Branch Rickey readily admitted that in addition to sincerely believing it was the right thing to do, much of his inspiration for bringing black players into the big leagues was money. This was never much of a secret so I find it a little surprising that folks like the author of the ESPN piece seemed surprised that "Branch Rickey wasn't Abraham Lincoln as a Major League Baseball executive." Of course anyone with a sense of history knows that Abraham Lincoln himself wasn't exactly Abraham Lincoln either.

The article and film suggest that Branch Rickey acted when he did in order to avoid repercussions from Mayor Fiorello Laguardia's threats of sanctions against the three New York teams if they did not integrate. What the article and film fail to point out are the incredible lengths Rickey went to keeping his plans of breaking  the color barrier secret until the time was right, including creating a smokescreen by planting a story that he was scouting black players in order to create a new Negro League. I think it is very clear that without Branch Rickey, his devotion to the cause, and his masterful manipulation of both the press and major league baseball, the integration of the game would not have happened for at least another five years if not more. It is disingenuous for Burns or anyone who knows anything about the subject to suggest otherwise.

The film touches upon the Dodgers' insistence that Robinson testify in 1949 before the House Un-American Activities Commission in regards to singer Paul Robeson's comment that black people would not fight in a war against the Soviet Union and Communism. Robinson was reluctant to testify but feared his job and the future of blacks in the big leagues were at stake, so he gave in. Many people in the black community were bitterly disappointed by Robinson's supposed betrayal of Robeson, himself a great hero to the movement.

But Robinson's statement, which he allegedly had Rickey's help composing, turned the tables on the commission, stating unequivocally that it was not the appeal of Communism that was turning blacks against this nation, but the continued treatment of an entire race as second class citizens. He added that the fact that Communists were exploiting race problems in the United States for their own benefit, did not mean the causes for those problems did not exist. Unfortunately the Burns film merely glosses over the substance of Robinson's comments before the committee, focusing on only a few trite words about being more concerned about his upcoming contract with the Dodgers than politics. You can find his complete statement to the committee here.

It wasn't his words in the end but the fact that he appeared at all before a committee bent on condemning Paul Robeson that soured his reputation with many in the black community. What should have been one of his finest moments, turned into a very bitter experience which he regretted in his later life.

Well made as it is, like all Ken Burns films, with the exception of personal anecdotes, this film doesn't contribute much original research or insight into its subject. The fact that so many people were surprised by what they learned from the film, simply means they never cracked open a book on the subject. Jackie Robinson is one of the most celebrated Americans of the twentieth century, and the vast amount of published material on him, testifies to that fact.

Many were surprised for example that Robinson supported Richard Nixon over John F. Kennedy in the 1960 presidential election. Robinson correctly surmised from talking to him that JFK was not informed, nor particularly cared about civil rights issues. He correctly believed that the choice of Lyndon Johnson as Kennedy's running mate was made to appease southern white voters. He also believed that the choice of Johnson would hurt black people. He turned out to be dead wrong on that one. He also turned out to be wrong about Nixon, and ended up once again being on the losing side when he endorsed Hubert Humphrey over Richard Nixon in 1968.

One issue that the film takes a different point of view from just about everyone else, concerns Dodger captain and shortstop Pee Wee Reese and his supposed public comforting of Robinson during his first visit with the Dodgers to an overtly hostile Cincinnati. Despite featuring the event in the original baseball series, Burns now claims the incident never happened. He is sure of this because "There is no image or write-up (of the incident) anywhere".

Well he's probably right. We'll never know for sure but Pee Wee Reese more than likely did not put his arm around Jackie Robinson's shoulder on May 13, 1947 in Cincinnati. Robinson remembers him doing it later, perhaps the following season. In the seminal book concerning the Robinson era Brooklyn Dodgers, The Boys of Summer, author Roger Kahn interviewed Robinson, Pee Wee Reese and several of their teammates. Reese talks about making similar gestures toward Robinson many times during their playing days with the Dodgers, but does not specifically mention Cincinnati or that particular game.

So at some point, in a show of solidarity, Reese put his arm around Robinson on the field. Given all the momentous events surrounding Jackie Robinson and the integration of baseball, why such a fuss over a trivial matter? (2)

According to Burns, we white folks like to hold on to "myths" like Reese putting his arm around Robinson in Cincinnati, or Branch Rickey being Abraham Lincoln, "because it gives white people skin in the game." Frankly I'm not quite sure what he means by that. I think most white people today understand that the exclusion of African American players in "organized baseball" (for lack of a better term), was a grave injustice that had to be addressed, not something given to blacks out of the kindness of the hearts of white folks. But in order for the major leagues to integrate, there had to be white people on board willing and able to make it happen. And yes, there were many white folks who did everything they could to not make it happen. But it was going to happen one way or other, regardless of those people.

In a parallel universe, there was a brilliant history of black baseball which produced some of the greatest players the game has ever seen. Without those players, we would not be talking about Jackie Robinson today; he stood upon their shoulders. Unfortunately, the minute Jackie Robinson broke into the big leagues, the Negro Leagues became irrelevant, and the livelihoods of thousands of folks whose lives were wrapped up in them, not just ballplayers, were lost. Despite that, I've never heard a report any of those players who were simply born at the wrong time, publicly gripe about Jackie Robinson's good fortune.

And then there was Jackie Robinson who devoted most of his life after his retirement from the game to the cause of civil rights, justice, and equality in this country. Ken Burns in his seemingly endless promotion of this film, presents Jackie Robinson as the "most important man in the history of baseball," That of course is an opinion to which he is entitled. As far as baseball is concerned, I consider Jackie Robinson the Neil Armstrong of the game. Both men were chosen to be the first at what they did, and both responded to the task in extraordinary fashion. But had it not been for those two individuals, someone else equally qualified would have been chosen, and more than likely would have done a magnificent job.

What sets Jackie Robinson apart, is his extraordinary life away from baseball. It takes a great man to humble himself  for a cause he believes is greater than himself. Robinson sacrificed everything, even the love and respect of his own people, because he believed in doing not what was popular, but what was right.

As the Neil Armstrong of the game, Jackie Robinson may not have been the most important person in the history of baseball, but I think it's safe to say that for his exemplary work both on and off the field, he is the most important baseball person in history.

Happy Jackie Robinson Day.


Notes:

(1) Not to nit pick, but the person in what I believe the painting Burns is referring to in his comment is Adam, not Jesus.

(2) If Burns were truly concerned about clearing up the falsehoods found in his earlier work, he should start by correcting the hatchet job he did on the characters of Ty Cobb and Charles Comiskey.

The Cuban Comet

When on April 30, 1951, Saturnino Orestes Armas Miñoso Arrieta became the first black man to play for a Chicago major league baseball team, he hit a home run in his first at-bat. Before that in 1949, Bill Veeck bought Miñoso's contract from the Negro League New York Cubans and signed him with his Cleveland Indians, making Minnie Miñoso the first black player of Latin American origin to play in the big leagues. Hall of Famer Orlando Cepeda wrote that Miñoso is "to Latin ballplayers what Jackie Robinson is to black ballplayers... the one who made it possible, ... the first Latin to become a superstar."

It's a strange coincidence that the seven time all star, three time gold-glover died just weeks after another Chicago baseball icon, Ernie Banks. Not only were both the first players of color to play on their respective Chicago teams, not only did both men have long and distinguished careers, but each would become unquestionably the heart and soul of their teams, even long after their playing days were over.

In Miñoso's case, it's difficult to say exactly when the end of his career came; he is perhaps best known as the only player to have appeared in a major league baseball game in five different decades, (seven decades in pro ball if you count plate appearances for minor league teams in 1993 and 2003). Miñoso's role was limited to pinch hitter for his old friend Veeck's White Sox, appearing at the plate eight times in 1976 and twice in 1980. In those ten at bats, Miñoso collected just one hit. Folks my age who never saw him in his prime, (and I'm no spring chicken), are more likely to think of Minnie Miñoso as a spry old man, rather than the "The Cuban Comet" as he was known in his glory days.

Call it respect, nostalgia, or a gag, just another bit of Veeckian mischief, but it's likely that those ten extra at bats for the White Sox while he was in his fifties, cost Miñoso some respect, at least among the folks who determine every ball player's ultimate dream, induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

In his 2001 epic tome, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, the author rates Miñoso as the tenth best left fielder of all time, between Willie Stargell and Billy Williams, both Hall of Famers. In his argument for Miñoso's induction, James lists by his reckoning, something not to be dismissed, the twenty greatest players in MLB history between the ages of 30 and 39. Minnie Miñoso is number 16 on the list, and the only one who is not in the Hall of Fame, with the exception of Pete Rose, who was excluded for his off-the-field shenanigans. Given that Miñoso didn't break into the big leagues until he was in his mid to late twenties (depending upon which birth date you accept), his already impressive career stats could have been better, had he more years in his prime to play in the majors, were it not for the color-barrier.

The latest snub of Miñoso came less than three months before his death, when the "Golden Era Committee" made up of eight Hall of Fame players and the same number of executives, rejected all ten of the stellar players of the fifties and sixties who came before them, Miñoso included.

In an ESPN article published just two days before he died, Christina Karhl interviewed Miñoso at length about his career, his disappointment at the snub, and the open hostility he faced as a player. Miñoso says:

My father and my mother taught me there was a way to pay somebody back, if they tried to break your arm or break your face: Pay them back on the field with a smile on your face. I used to keep my teeth clean all the time, just to make sure that's how I gave it back to them that way all the time.

He added this story about a confrontation with an opposing pitcher:

One day, this pitcher said he was going to get me. And I go up to the plate thinking, if I bunt it past this pitcher I'll get a base hit. So I put my hand out and push the ball up the line; we're both heading to first base -- and I didn't go after him. And he asked, "Why did you do that, why did you save me?" And I told him, "Because you have a wife, you have a kid, you have a mother. If you'd broken your leg or if I'd cut you, that would be on my conscience." Later on, he sent me a thank-you note, saying that I had earned his respect from then on.

Fitting last words I think for a great ballplayer and an even greater man.

Rules are rules

A couple years ago I wrote about the greatest act of sportsmanship I've ever encountered. It happened during a college softball playoff game when a batter hit the ball over the fence for a home run, the first (and what turned out to be the last) of her career. As she rounded first base, she tore an ACL and crumbled to the ground. Unable to stand up, let alone run the bases, her coaches conferred with the umpires who told them that in order for the home run to count, the batter without any assistance from her teammates or a pinch runner, would have to complete the circuit around the basepath. At that point, Mallory Holtman, the first baseman on the other team asked if there was any rule against the opposing players assisting the stricken batter. The umps said no, and Holtman joined by the shortstop Liz Wallace gingerly picked up their opponent and carried her around the bases, lowering her leg to touch each base and finally home plate. The run that the team in the field willingly gave up, ended up costing them the game and a chance for the championship.

Stories like this one should make everyone stand up and cheer because they define in the purest sense, what athletic competition is supposed to be all about. Baseball fans like to think of the game we call "our national pastime", as an institution that exemplifies all that this country is ideally supposed to represent: fairness, decency, and above all, in its rules that ensure every player gets his or her turn at bat, democracy itself.

In reality, when adults codified the rules of the game, thereby wrestling baseball from the domain of children in the mid 19th century, the overriding question on the minds of the majority of folks who have played the game since was this:  "How can I get around those rules?"

An early star of the game who later became an owner and big time promoter of baseball, Albert Spalding, described his game in typical nineteenth century bravado this way:

Baseball is the exponent of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness, American Dash, Discipline, Determination, American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm, American Pluck, Persistency, Performance, American Spirit, Sagacity, Success, American Vim, Vigor, Virility.

You may notice that nowhere does Spalding mention honesty and fair play.

Granted there were some magnificent players like Christy Mathewson of the New York Giants and "Gentleman" Dave Malarcher of the Chicago American Giants of the Negro National League, who were known for their scrupulous attention to good sportsmanship. Both players were documented overruling umpires' decisions in their favor when they thought they were the wrong calls. Needless to say, these two extraordinary individuals are in the minority in the annals of baseball history.

Commenting on the character of some of the most honored and cherished members of the baseball community, Bill Veeck once said:

Wake up the echoes at the Hall of Fame and you will find that baseball's immortals were a rowdy and raucous group of men who would climb down off their plaques and go rampaging through Cooperstown, taking spoils.

Veeck should know, he was probably as rowdy and raucous as the best of them. He made a career as an executive and owner of several clubs, by thumbing his nose at the baseball establishment, including their rules. One of the eminently quotable Veeck's most famous quotes is this:

I try not to break the rules but merely to test their elasticity.

In his autobiography, Veeck As In Wreck, Bill Veeck took pains to point out the lengths of his mischief. Probably the most famous and notorious of his stunts came when he was the owner of the woebegone St. Louis Browns. On August 19, 1951, as a gag, Veeck sent three foot seven inch Eddie Gaedel up to bat against the Detroit Tigers. Veeck's stunts indeed tested the limits of baseball rules, ethics and sometimes even decency.

There was one rule that Veeck actively sought to break, baseball's infamous color line. As owner of the Cleveland Indians in 1947, Veeck signed the first African American player in the American League, Larry Doby. The following year he signed the great Satchel Paige who at 43, became the oldest "rookie" in major league history. Aghast, baseball insiders claimed that had Paige not been black, he never would have been signed at that advanced age. Taking aim at injustice, Veeck replied, "Had Satchel Paige been white, he'd have been in the major leagues for twenty years."

For his efforts, Bill Veeck, "the game's enfant terrible",  became one of the most beloved, and at the same time, most vilified individuals to be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Another colorful Hall of Famer who didn't have too many qualms about stretching the rules, especially when they pertained to him, was John "Mugsy" McGraw, the longtime manager of the New York Giants. In his playing days, McGraw, a third baseman, had a penchant for grabbing the belts of base runners when the ump's eyes were fixed elsewhere. One runner got wise to McGraw, and while standing on second base between pitches, he unbuckled his belt. When his teammate at the plate singled, the runner zipped past third base and scored, while the embarrassed McGraw stood at third base holding a belt.

One of McGraw's most legendary escapades took place in 1901 when he signed a second baseman named Charlie Grant to his team at the time, the Baltimore Orioles, (today's Yankees). Grant was a seasoned professional ballplayer playing for the black team, the Chicago Columbia Giants. As the player was light skinned and had straight hair, McGraw planned to pass him off as a Native American named Tokohama, a name McGraw made up. Blacks of course were not allowed to play "organized baseball" in those days, while there was no such restriction on Native Americans. Before the season began and Grant was able to become the first black player to play in the major leagues in the 20th century, albeit not in the open, his cover was blown in Chicago, as he was well known here.

It was "The Old Roman", Charles Comiskey, the owner and founder of the White Sox who famously declared: "If McGraw keeps this 'Indian', I'll put a Chinaman on third base." Comiskey was not being blatantly racist; he played with and against many black players in exhibition games during his playing career and would have loved to have been able to sign blacks to his team. But rules are rules and Comiskey was only stating the obvious; if McGraw was going to play fast and easy with baseball's color line, so would he. In the end, the sanctity of the rule barring blacks prevailed, and Charlie "Tokohama" Grant was back with the Columbia Giants in a matter of days.

In a sense, Chris Janes might be the Charlie Comiskey of today. He's the guy who blew the whistle on the Jackie Robinson West little league team whose national championship was stripped away last week.  In his role as vice president of the suburban Evergreen Park Athletic Association, Janes saw it as his duty to report his suspicions that JRW was fielding some players who did not live within the bounds of that league's territory, in violation of Little League rules. Incidentally, Janes's team was handed a 43-2 defeat by JRW in the tournament, which I'm sure had nothing to do (wink wink) with his decision to turn them in.

Well it turns out that Chris "Without the boundaries, it's not Little League anymore" Janes himself is not above accepting players in his league who do not live within its boundaries. The night that the ruling on JRW was announced, a Chicago woman came forward and claimed that Evergreen Park officials forged documents so that her son could play in that league.

Janes denied any wrongdoing. There are actually no rules prohibiting kids from playing in leagues outside their home districts for the majority of little league activities, only tournaments officially sanctioned by Little League Inc.who runs the annual Little League World Series. Janes insists that while his league does accept outside players whose parents come to them, they do not actively recruit players, nor do they play those boundary-busting kids in tournaments that prohibit them from doing so.

Would he if he could, play kids who weren't from Evergreen Park in Little League Inc. sanctioned tournaments? Your guess is as good as mine but honestly I think it's clear he would.

I haven't a clue how JRW comes upon its players, but I strongly suspect that, just as most little league programs like Evergreen Park's, parents and kids come to them, not the other way around. The organization has been around for a long time, and is very well known. It seems very reasonable that folks from all over the Chicago area would be thrilled to get their kids into the program.

That does not excuse the JRW administrators of willfully violating the rules of the tournament. In fact, there are so many loopholes and waivers enabling kids who live outside the boundaries to play on any given team, even in the Little League tournaments, that it's truly surprising to me that the adults who run JRW didn't go the extra mile to make sure that all the players already on the team could legitimately play in the big tournament. Unfortunately they didn't, and that's why they find themselves in the mess they're in. Perhaps they felt they were just too busy trying to run a little league program made up of hundreds of kids, not just the thirteen kids we keep hearing about. Perhaps in their over-zealousness to gain attention for their program and the contributions that would help out an institution that does a great deal of good in a troubled part of the city, they overstepped their bounds and broke a few rules. Maybe they just felt the good they did for the community overrode the tournament rules.

BUT THEY CHEATED!!!

I hear those cries coming over and over again from dozens of indignant coaches and parents of the teams that were vanquished by JRW in last year's tournament. One of those voices is that of Kristi Black who's the president of the Mountain Ridge Little League, who fielded the Las Vegas team that was the runner up to JRW in the tournament. According to Ms. Black, the tournament "has an asterisk on it like the one on Barry Bonds home run record." The coach of the Vegas team, Ashton Cave, compared JRW's misdeeds to those of cyclist Lance Armstrong, who like Bonds, was found to have used performance enhancing drugs.

I'll give you three guesses, who do you think Ms. Black and Mr. Cave believe should be crowned the US champion? Bet you won't need all three guesses to come up with the correct answer.

The voices of "reason" in defending the move to strip the championship from the kids who themselves did not cause this problem, claim that it's important to teach young people the value of respecting rules, and that a championship won fraudulently is no championship at all. In time they say, the thirteen members of the team JRW sent to Williamsport, PA, will learn a valuable lesson and be all the better for it.

I'm not so sure. My guess is that the lesson those thirteen boys will learn is that the world is an unfair place. What they will take away from this experience is that it doesn't matter how hard you work for something, there's always a chance someone out there will be willing and able to take what you earned away from you, especially if you're black.

WHOA, FOUL!!!, cry those same indignant voices, THIS IS NOT ABOUT RACE, IT'S ABOUT FOLLOWING RULES. WE SHOULD NOT HAVE A DOUBLE STANDARD, THE RULES ARE THERE FOR EVERYONE TO FOLLOW!!!

With this I agree, up to a point. The Little League does indeed have a precedent for stripping away championships for rule violations. It would be unfair of them to treat JRW differently than other teams simply because they're black. What does seem strange to me is their one-size-fits-all system of punishment for transgressions. There is no redress, and there are no considerations of the severity of the transgression.

Most systems of jurisprudence I know of enact punishments that fit the crime. After all, we don't get our driver's licences revoked for a single parking ticket. Not so apparently with the Little League where it's one strike and you're out.

So where do JRW's transgressions fall in the greater scheme of things? I can sort of understand Little League Inc's philosophy of limiting players on a team to a confined community. But as I pointed out in my previous post, we've become a highly mobile society, and the definition of a community is much broader and more complicated than it once was. And as I mentioned above, there are petitions to be filled out and waivers that can be signed, that allow the de facto expansion of a league's boundaries. In my opinion, this legal end-run around the rule contradicts the spirit of the boundary regulation, if not the letter of it. Many teams take advantage of these loopholes.

Because of that, the question of whether JRW's transgressions created an unfair advantage for their tournament team is debatable. Remember these are twelve year old children we're talking about, not "ringers brought in to create a super team", as they've been depicted. To hear the folks who support the stripping of the championship talk, you'd think JRW enlisted Derek Jeter and Albert Pujols to play for them.

To me, far more serious infractions, perhaps worthy of stripping a title, would include fielding players above the stipulated age limit, paying families for the services of their children, players using illegally modified equipment such as corked bats, the use of performance enhancing drugs, or any other transgression for which no waiver or loophole would ever be considered.

Obviously you can't justify infractions by saying that everybody does it, but I find much of the rhetoric leveled at JRW to be vindictive, self-serving, and dare I say, hypocritical. If it were up to me (which of course it isn't), a much more reasonable punishment for boundary infractions would be limiting sanctions to the administrators, in the form of fines or suspensions. I regard revoking the championship from the children of Jackie Robinson West to be draconian, if not unjust.

All the talk going on in the week since the championship was stripped, seems to miss the point of children's athletic programs. Any reasonable person would say that the purpose of such programs is to not only teach kids how to play the game, but also to teach values such as teamwork and sportsmanship. Winning and losing are of course integral parts of any game but in no way should they be front and center in children's sports. Critics claim that by their actions, the folks at JRW placed winning above everything else, but it seems to me that the other teams' fixation on cheating and unfair advantages on the part of JRW, places a far greater emphasis on winning, than do the infractions themselves.

If the coaches of the teams who lost to JRW were truly concerned with the spirit of the game and not only about winning and losing, they would accept the outcome of the tournament, not try to make excuses for losing. It's their responsibility as teachers and role models to understand that it's just as important to teach kids how to be gracious losers (as the JRW kids were when they lost the world championship to a team from Taiwan), as it is to be respectful winners.

Of course there would be no game of baseball without rules. But not all rules are created equal; some are integral to the game, others are not. If everyone slavishly followed every rule enacted since the game's inception, runners would still be put out by being hit (or plugged, which is the correct term) with the ball, pitchers would still be throwing underhand, and blacks would still be banned from the game.

It's far easier to tear down that to build. The folks at Jackie Robinson West have done a magnificent job over the years, building an important institution in the city of Chicago. Tens of thousands of kids have walked through their doors since 1971 when the league was founded. It's true that their administrators may have run roughshod over some tournament rules, but put into the their proper perspective, these transgressions don't amount to much, little more than bureaucratic neglect.

Players like Christy Mathewson, Mallory Holtman, Dave Malarcher, and Liz Wallace, all understood that the game was bigger than they were. Despite having the rules in their favor, they all chose to do what they considered to be the right thing, rather than accept a ruling against their opponents that they felt was unjust.

By insisting that JRW's championship be revoked, then reaping the spoils by claiming the championship for themselves, the adults of the Las Vegas team are doing far more to undermine youth baseball than the adults at Jackie Robinson West. As of last Wednesday, the Las Vegas team is now the US Little League 12U Baseball Champion. Talk about an asterisk.

Most of us within the game or without, fall far short of the moral and ethical credibility of Mathewson, Holtman, Malarcher and Wallace. Like the proverbial warning about throwing stones if you live in glass houses, those of us without the integrity of those four, had better be careful before we start pointing fingers at anybody else.

JRW

On September 1st of last year I wrote this post expressing my appreciation for the Jackie Robinson West little league team from the South Side of Chicago for winning the United States 12 and under Little League Championship. Today the team was stripped of that championship on account of recruitment issues as some of the players on that team did not live within the boundaries of the league.

Well I'll go on the record and say here and now that I stand by my post and my appreciation.

It was Chris Janes, a little league coach and Vice President of the south suburban Evergreen Park Athletic Association who set the investigation in motion late last year. In a radio interview on a local sports-talk station, Janes said he e-mailed the offices of the Little League governing body, raising questions about the validity of some of the JRW players, after he saw TV reports showing the mayors of suburbs, definitely NOT within the JRW's boundaries, publicly congratulating specific players and claiming them as their own. Whether it makes a difference or not, Janes's Evergreen Park little league team was defeated by JRW by a score of 43-2 in the sectional tournament leading up to the Little League World Series in Williamsport, PA.

Well as Marcellus once said to Horatio:

Something is rotten in the state of Denmark.

I don't for one minute condone cheating by breaking rules in any sport. It's especially disgusting when it comes to cheating in athletics involving children. There is no question in my mind that if the adults who run JRW and the district they represent, willfully violated Little League rules, they should be punished with appropriate fines and/or suspensions.

But guess what? It gets complicated. We live in a society where the nuclear family does not always consist of a mother, a father and their children all living under one roof. A lot of kids spend part of their time with one parent in neighborhood X, part of their time with another parent in neighborhood Y, and the rest of their time with an aunt, uncle or grandparent in neighborhood Z. Public school issues in this city encourage parents to list their kids' residences in whatever neighborhood affords their children with the best opportunity. Is that cheating? Well, perhaps, but frankly, given the circumstances, most parents who care about their children, are not beyond bending the rules (many of them arcane), in order to give their kids a bit of an advantage.

Getting back to Chris Janes's shocking discovery that some of the JRW players may not have come from within the boundaries of their league, if it was such public knowledge that the mayors of the towns some of these kids came from were able to make public pronouncements, how is it that the administers of the National Little League were unable to figure it out on their own? After all, JRW was not an unknown quantity when it entered the tournament this year, they've been around for a very long time. It was no secret to anyone that this was not a rag-tag group of kids from a small corner of Chicago, but an all star team comprised of kids who were selected from far and wide.

Personally I think this kind of recruitment is a bad idea. Why after all is it so important to build an all star team of 12 year olds? There's plenty of time for that in their young careers. 12 and 13 year old kids are still learning the game and in my opinion, winning should not the be all/end all of playing a sport at that age. As the parent of a little leaguer, I've had a lot of experience with 12 and 13 year old ballplayers and can personally say they're all great. The parents are another story.

"Without the boundaries, it's not Little League anymore. Little League stands behind its boundaries 100 percent", said Chris Janes, the coach who blew the whistle on JRW. Now I can't say what goes on in Evergreen Park, but if Mr. Janes really believes that, he's either blind or delusional.

My son's travel team has played in several tournaments in the region, including the 12 U divisional tournament that led up to the Williamsport Little League World Series. In that tournament, (governed by exactly the same rules that govern the LLWS), the team we played, and ultimately beat to win our division, was from another park in Chicago. It was a well established fact that this team recruited players from all over the Chicago area. I knew one of the players very well as he was once on our team in our park's house league. The boy lived within neither park's boundaries. We later encountered another player from that team, their best pitcher, in a Wisconsin tournament. He was representing a team from a suburb that was closer to Kenosha, Wisconsin than Chicago.

And truth be told, half of our park's traveling team is comprised of players from another park. My wife and I don't do it, but parents routinely choose and sign their kids up in little league programs that are miles from their homes. There are many reasons for doing this. Frankly I don't see it as a big deal.

But rules are rules.

That said, from what I understand of the situation, the officials at JRW broke Little League rules by not respecting the boundaries of other leagues within their division. The official Little League rules state that it's OK to do that so long as they get the approval from the officials from the other leagues affected. This apparently did not happen. For their part, the folks in the division seemed to look the other way.

It appears to me that the National Little League looked the other way as well. Let's face it, the story of Jackie Robinson West was a gold mine for them. It was only when their hand was forced that they took action.

Too bad for the kids some say, but they won the tournament unfairly. What about the other kids who didn't get to play because their rightful spots on the team were taken up from kids who didn't legitimately belong there? What about the other teams in the tournaments who got beat unfairly by JRW?

These are legitimate points to be sure.

But the kids who DID make the JRW team, didn't have anything given to them. They worked hard to get where they are, played the games and won enough of them to win the US Championship. They were all (as far as I know) 12 year olds, it's not as if they had a bunch of high school kids playing on the team. From my personal experience with the game, I find it highly unlikely that most of their opponents in the LLWS, including the highly regarded Taney Dragons from Philadelphia, held hard and fast to the boundary rules. Had JRW lost the US tournament, no one would have bothered with investigating them. If as I suspect other teams played fast and easy with the rules, then JRW had no unfair advantage.

The point everyone seems to miss in all the heated conversations about this issue, is that JRW and little league programs everywhere are not simply about the all star teams that represent them in tournaments. They're about the hundreds of kids in each league who with or without any baseball acumen, participate in the house leagues, learning the game, not to get the chance to play
high school, college, or professional baseball, but to learn about teamwork, sportsmanship, fair play, and mostly just to have fun. For some disadvantaged kids, their little league experience may be their one and only outlet to escape an otherwise troubled life.

I can't see much good coming out of stripping the championship from a group of kids who were just doing their best to play baseball, but I do see a great deal of potential harm to little league programs across the country. Yes the blatant violation of the rules is wrong and needs to be addressed. But from my own experience, for one reason or other, mostly out of convenience, the majority of adults involved in little league baseball at one time or other violate the spirit if not the letter of the boundary rules. As we have seen, ninety nine times out of a hundred, the officials are more than happy to look the other way, as indeed they should.

In this case if it were up to me, I would sanction the administrators of JRW and the district for their transgressions, and maybe even some of the administrators in the Little League for dropping the ball on this.

But I would leave the kids out of it.

That last part is not going to happen, it's a done deal as the players of JRW have been stripped of their hard earned championship and all the other championships that led up to it.

How typical, it's the adults who fuck up and the kids who get screwed.

Ernie Banks

This is not my tribute to Ernie Banks who died yesterday. I wrote that almost three years ago after having written too many tributes to dead people that should have been written while they were still alive.

Beyond the sadness of losing the man who was my greatest childhood hero, several thoughts came to mind since receiving the news of his passing last night.

Buck O'Neil and Ernie Banks

Ernie Banks, who in 1953 became the first African American to play for the Cubs, was one of the last major league ballplayers to have come out of the old Negro Leagues. Banks played for the Kansas City Monarchs, one of the preeminent teams in the glory days of Black Baseball. Banks was scouted and signed to his first contract with the Monarchs in 1951 by none other than Cool Papa Bell, one of the greatest players black or white, to ever play the game. His manager in KC was Buck O'Neil, a very good player in his own right, who would eventually become the first African American coach of a major league team, the Cubs. In that capacity, O'Neil signed Lou Brock to his first major league contract. Cubs fans the world over know exactly how that deal turned out.

O'Neil would later come to nationwide attention largely thanks to being featured prominently in Ken Burns' PBS documentary, Baseball. He spent the final years of his life helping create and drumming up support for the Negro Leagues Baseball Museum in Kansas City, and tirelessly spreading the news about the glory days of the Negro Leagues, dispelling the old notions that Black Baseball was a second class operation.

O'Neil was also instrumental in gaining induction of several Negro League players and executives into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. Although he himself was inexplicably overlooked in the balloting, he graciously took to the podium on July 29, 2006 in Cooperstown, NY during the induction ceremonies of several of his fellow players:



We lost Buck O'Neil shortly after he gave that speech but his spirit lives on not only in the museum he helped build, but in the revival of interest in an often overlooked, yet very significant part of American history.

With Ernie Banks's passing, we have lost one of our last direct connections to that history.

Of course by the time Ernie Banks came to the Monarchs, the team and the rest of the Negro Leagues were in their death throes, having become virtually irrelevant on April 15, 1947, the day Jackie Robinson played his first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers. The door to the majors was opened up that day, if only by a crack for African American players, who were banned from playing in "organized baseball" since the 1880s. It took twelve years before every major league team would have at least one black player on their roster. and most teams like the Cubs, were hesitant to have more than two or three at any time. Consequently, while there were opportunities for black ballplayers in the big leagues, those opportunities were few and far between. Unless you were a player of the caliber of say, Larry Doby, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Roy Campanella, Monte Irvin or Ernie Banks, your chances of making it into the big leagues were infinitesimally small. And with the drying up of the Negro Leagues, the twenty years or so following the "integration" of the game were particularly difficult ones for most black players.

Ernie Banks was not particularly outspoken about race and the injustices faced by people of color in America. For better or worse, he did not feel it was the athlete's responsibility to comment on such things. That probably worked to his benefit. Unlike players like Jackie Robinson who became a very prominent spokesperson for civil rights in America, Banks with his child-like enthusiasm, his easy-going demeanor, and his media-savvy, made him less threatening to white folks, especially during the fifties and sixties in the (at the time) lily-white north side of Chicago, playing on a team whose fans represented that demographic. I don't think it's a stretch to say that Mr. Banks's popularity eased the path for black players who followed him into the majors.

In time Ernie Banks became unquestionably the most beloved player in the team's long history. The question, and at this point it's purely an academic one, is this: was Ernie Banks the greatest player in the team's history?

One could argue that he wasn't even the best player among his teammates. Here's what baseball historian and statistician extraordinaire Bill James has to say about one of them:

Billy Williams was Ernie Banks without the PR.

In the comments section to my tribute to Banks, my friend, writer, historian, Cub (and Ernie Banks) fan, and expert on every aspect of the game of baseball, Francis Morrone, wrote this:

Leo (Durocher) got to where he couldn't stand the sight of Ernie. He just hated him, and hated how (as Leo perceived it) Ernie manipulated the press and the public. Leo wanted to bench Ernie (not without reason, as by the late sixties Banks was a complete liability in the lineup) and felt he couldn't.

Fightin' words to be sure to any dyed-in-the-wool Ernie Banks fan but unfortunately the facts and stats support them, especially in the twilight of his career. 

There have been several great players (though not many in our lifetime) who could challenge Ernie Banks to the title of greatest Cub ever. I'm about to stir the pot to boiling over with one of them.

His name was Adrian Constantine Anson. Anson played a remarkable  27 years of big league ball, 22 of them with Chicago. He came here in 1876, the same year the team's owner William Hulbert and his associates formed the National League. Anson, a first baseman, quickly became established as one of the stars of the game. In 1879 he became player/manager (where he got his nickname "Cap") and led the team, at the time known as the White Stockings, to five championships in eight years. 

As manager, Anson was an innovator in those early years of the game, credited with coming up with or perfecting strategies such as the hit and run, sending players signals from the bench, placing a coach at third base, the hook slide, hitting to the opposite field, all aspects that we take for granted today.

Such was Cap Anson's influence on the team that the nickname White Stockings was replaced with "Anson's Colts". When Anson finally departed from the team in 1898, his loss was so profound that the nickname was changed again, this time to" the Orphans". The team would keep that unfortunate name for four years, until a newspaperman reporting from spring training (another invention of Anson's), referred to the promising crop of new players on the team as "cubs." The name as you can imagine, stuck.

Cap Anson by many accounts is considered the greatest major league player and manager of the nineteenth century.

There was another side to Anson however. During an arduous road trip in 1883, his team was scheduled to make a stop in Toledo to play an exhibition game against the minor league Toledo Blue Stockings. Out of fatigue, he balked about playing a meaningless game but his boss, team president Albert Spalding insisted as the Chicago team's success assured a huge draw in the northwest Ohio city. Further complicating the issue, when he got to the ballpark, Anson refused to take the field unless an agreement was made that the Toledo catcher, Moses Fleetwood Walker, an African American, would not play. Charlie Morton, Toledo's manager refused to take his catcher out of the lineup and assured Anson that if his team refused to take the field, the Chicago nine would forfeit their share of the hefty gate receipts. Anson relented that time, but in later meetings with Toledo, and other teams that had black players, he got assurances that no black player would ever take the field against the Chicago team. 

In some circles, Cap Anson is given much of the credit (or blame), for the "gentlemen's agreement" among baseball club owners and officials, which banned African Americans from organized baseball for sixty years. 

Even for his day, Anson was a virulent racist who would make Ty Cobb look like a card carrying member of the NAACP. 

Despite that, Anson's contributions to the game are indisputable.

In his list of the 100 most important people in baseball, John Thorn, Major League Baseball's official historian, places Cap Anson at number 64, just below Jacob Ruppert, (the Yankee owner who signed Babe Ruth), and just above Bill Veeck. 

Sadly, the name of Ernie Banks is not anywhere to be found on the list.

Let me point out, it's Thorn's list not mine. 

If it were my list, highly biased of course, Ernie Banks would be near the top. When he became a big leaguer in the fifties, the game of baseball was in its doldrums. Attendance was down drastically, either because of TV or out of fear of the changing neighborhoods where the ballparks were located. In the sixties, teams built brand spanking new polyester-laden stadiums indistinguishable from one another, each with all the personality of a  block of styrofoam. The Cubs were holdouts in the National League and during the sixties, there was Ernie Banks, the lone voice in the crowd, extolling the virtues of day baseball, played they way it should be played, ("baseball in the daytime, loving in the nighttime" being one of the least quoted of the rakish Mr. Banks's favorite comments), played on grass in the "Friendly Confines" of Wrigley Field. Eventually, the burghers of baseball saw the light and dynamited all those concrete-clad mausoleums and replaced them with new ballparks all modeled after Wrigley Field. 

Baseball is back to at least some semblance of being the way it should be, played on real grass (if not in the daylight), in real ballparks, which in my estimation, is thanks in no small part to Ernie Banks. 

Now there's a contribution worthy of John Thorn's list if you asked me. 

Last night an amazing thing happened. As I was working on a website devoted to baseball, I was testing out a feature that retrieves ballplayers' stats. The random name I plugged in to test the program was what else, Ernie Banks. Not more than two minutes later, as his lifetime stats were staring me in the face on my computer, my son came in the room to deliver the news that Mr. Banks had died. 

I took that to be some kind of sign. 

Personally, what would put Ernie Banks at or near the top of my list of most important people in the game of baseball is this: He is the person who without a doubt, is most responsible for making me fall in love with the game. 

I have no doubt that I am not alone in that sentiment. And for that all I can say is this:

Thank you Mr. Cub, you wear that title well.

May you rest in peace.

 fIf it were or it than almost any other segment of American so in 1883ciety.

The game still matters

In a time when folks are declaring gloom and doom for the sport of baseball, this year's Little League World Series produced no fewer than two powerful, feel good stories that prove the game we still refer to as "The National Pastime" matters.

"Throw like a girl" has been the mantra of baseball fans across this country as one of the highlights of this year's Series was a flame throwing 5'4" 13 year old from Pennsylvania named Mo'ne Davis. Young Ms. Davis, only the 18th girl to participate in the Little League World Series became the first member of the female persuasion to pitch a shutout in the competition held annually in Williamsport, PA. That performance against South Nashville on Friday August 15 turned Mo'ne into a national celebrity.

It was hard not to root for Ms. Davis and her team the Taney Dragons from Center City, Philadelphia. The Dragons team, much like my son's travel baseball team, and decidedly unlike most of their competition in the LLWS is integrated; its players and coaches reflect the multi-cutural population of the city they represent. Also like my son's team, one of its best players happens to be a girl.

But I couldn't root for the Taney Dragons on August 21st because that day the team from Philadelphia faced the team from my home town, Chicago: Jackie Robinson West.

The team that is known affectionately around these parts simply by its initials JRW, is an all-star team, its members chosen from a league of the same name located on the south side of Chicago. Much has been made about this all African American team representing a part of town that lately has gotten more publicity for bad things rather than good. People have expressed amazement at their success given that in our time fewer and fewer African American players play in the Major Leagues and interest in the game in the black community is at an all time low.

But there's nothing at all amazing about the success of JRW. The league was established back in 1971 by Joseph H. Haley, an educator by profession. His league has become one of this city's most cherished institutions, thousands of Chicagoans from all walks of life including a few major leaguers have had the honor of calling themselves members of Jackie Robinson West. In the words of the Illinois General Assembly's official proclamation marking Mr. Haley's passing in 2005:

From a league with just five teams, Jackie Robinson West Little League has grown to more than 1,000 players on 36 teams; the league has instilled the values of good citizenship, perseverance, team effort, sportsmanship,and self-discipline in generations of young people; Mr. Haley wanted the children in his league to get a good education and taught them that school was more important than baseball.

On the evening of August 21st, the alderman of the ward where my son plays baseball, arranged for a viewing party to watch the game between JRW and the Taney Dragons, which would determine who would go on to the US finals. It was one of dozens of such parties around Chicago to support the team that represents not just the south side, but our entire city.

In that game Chicago would never look back after scoring four runs in the bottom of the first. Despite a late rush from Philly who down by one run, loaded the bases in the top of the last inning, the game ended 6-5, JRW.

The mostly white crowd at our event went wild when Philly harmlessly lined out to the Chicago second baseman to end the game.

It took a spectacular double play to win the next game against a strong, highly favored Nevada team who smoked both JRW and the Dragons in their first meetings. But in the end, JRW won that game too and became the US Little League Champions.

Unfortunately, JRW lost the World Championship to South Korea the following day but it hardly mattered. The city of Chicago threw them a huge party that culminated Downtown at the Pritzker Pavillion in Millennium Park. It was the kind of celebration normally held all too infrequently when one of this city's professional sports teams wins a championship. Sadly I missed the event as I was out of town.

Public figures and executives from both of Chicago's major league baseball teams were there to speak words of encouragement to the young players and to all young people of the city, black, brown and white, at least those who cared to listen. The message was simple: their most important job was to get a good education first, and good things most likely will follow.

In both victory and defeat, JRW has represented Chicago honorably. As a result, the team and the league have rightfully been embraced by the entire city.


Coming as it did on the heels of a well publicized national tragedy, some writers could not resist the temptation to frame the story of a Little League baseball team winning the national championship within the subtext of race in America. In a blog for The Nation, directly under a picture of the young members of the JRW team aboard a float being cheered on by throngs of white people during a parade in Williamsport, Dave Zirin wrote this:

... the events of this summer show with bracing clarity that there are huge swaths of this country that love black culture and hate black people.

The whole point of Zirin's piece was to compare the public's reaction to this year's Little League World Series, to that of the shooting of an unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, by a Ferguson, Missouri police officer. Zirin expresses his astonishment over JRW "beating the odds" as an all black team from the inner city where: "the gutting of the social safety net, the explosion of economic inequality and the hollowing out of our cities" has decimated "Little League programs, Boys & Girls Clubs and community centers: the very infrastructure baseball demands." These are the very conditions Zirin argues, that paved the way for incidents like the one in Ferguson.

In other words, blacks don't play baseball anymore, so the story goes, because society has taken away the apparatus for them to do so.

If anything, the events of this summer have proved (to anyone who didn't know it already) that theory to be nothing but hooey.

The point Zirin seems to miss is that successful Little League programs, like so many other successful institutions involving children, are not the result of any social safety net, but are the result of the one most important factor in determining the course of a young person's life: parents.

From an article written by Bob Cook in Forbes Magazine, published just before the start of this year's tournament:

What makes Jackie Robinson West succeed as a league is the same as what makes any league succeed, no matter the players’ race, ethnicity or income status. 

“It’s a combination of factors,” said (Joseph Haley's son who took over the league upon his father's death, Bill) Haley, a dispatcher for the Chicago Transit Authority. “Our league has a strong tradition. The coaches were once players. It’s taken hold in the community. You pull kids from a limited area, so there’s a sense of community to start out with. Being state champions (the league has won two Illinois championships in a row) is incidental to what we’re trying to do.”

The key, Haley said, is not the children. “It’s the adults. Baseball is a family game. It starts with just a dad playing catch with his kids. You’ve got a dad who hits pop flies on a Sunday. That’s where the connection comes in. 

“That’s how it started for me.”

Those words ring true for anyone who has ever been involved with Little League baseball at any level.

In expressing his amazement over the success of the team from the Jackie Robinson West league, Dave Zirin (who happens to be white), seems to fall into the trap of mistakenly assuming that African American communities are places filled with nothing but hopelessness and despair, fueled by poverty and racism. Implicitly he's saying that it's hard for black folks to do anything on their own without help from above. As such, characterizing the success of JRW as "astonishing" and "against all odds" is parochial at best, patronizing at worst.

The success of the Dragons and JRW teams are tremendous accomplishments to be sure, but no different from those of any other Little League team who reaches those heights. What Zirin and other social commentators fail to take into account is that the stories of Mo'ne Davis, her Taney Dragons teammates, and the team from Jackie Robinson West are not simply triumphs of the human spirit, but like anything worthwhile in life, are the result of countless hours of dedication, hard work, and the pursuit of perfection from everybody involved: the players, the coaches, the community, and especially the parents.

That's a valuable lesson all of us need to learn.

Thank you Dragons and JRW for being such magnificent teachers.