 19
to 21…
Yes, those are the centuries of baseball.
Volume 7, #6, March 27, 2009
The Mount Rushmores of Baseball – the Preface
As previously promised, here is the first installment of a work
in progress. Based on an essay from the 2007 version of “19
to 21,” The Mount Rushmores of Baseball is a book in the writing.
For those of you who weren’t around in 2007, or who may have
forgotten the original concept, here is the Preface to “The
Mount Rushmores of Baseball” (If anyone has a connection to
a good publisher who you think might be interested in such an interpretive
history of baseball, let me know…) which should hopefully
explain what this is all about.
Some years ago the Boswell of Baseball, Tom of the Washington
Post, that is, wrote a book entitled, “Why Time Begins
on Opening Day.” It’s a fine book, but, ultimately,
Boswell got it wrong. Time does not begin on Opening Day. At least,
baseball time doesn’t. On the contrary, baseball time is broadly
recognized to run from the 19th Century to the present. And, since
that time, baseball has never stopped. Neither has time. Nonetheless,
there is no denying the attraction of each year’s Opening
Day.
And that’s true of every season. Even though the Hot Stove
League, with its many subplots, keeps baseball’s share of
mind (and old PR term, in case you’re interested) during the
“off-season,” the fact is the actual start of every
new season also reminds us that baseball time never stops, just
as, to quote Neil Young, rust never sleeps. And the subplots of
the Hot Stove League are many. The Awards Season, with its always
manifest controversies (AKA, “how could HE have been voted
the MVP?). The Winter Meetings, packed with hype and type (both
electronic and hard copy), followed closely, not by Larry Doby,
but by the various atrocities of the Free Agency Follies, also known
as, “why would anyone give Cesar Izturis THAT much money,
or how does David Eckstein keep getting a job?” The annual
Hall of Fame voting, which often, though not always, is a case of
finding a new way to deny Ron Santo entry. And finally, Spring Training,
when every year has its own Ron “Palm Trees” Stone or
Roger Freed, who hits .500 in the Grapefruit or maybe Cactus) League,
and then falls off to .163 when the regular season starts.
Still, despite the intrigue and insanity of the Hot Stove League,
there is always a huge attraction to Opening Day, mainly because
each one presents its own series of plot lines, usually involving;
the hottest and most-hyped Japanese import since the Toyota, the
return of a “retired” star, a quest for some major statistical
milestone, at least one divisional race wherein any of four teams
has the potential to win, speculation on which, if not both, of
the New York teams will make a spectacular pratfall, breathless
reports of injuries, various tests of the Commissioner’s cojones,
and, prognostications galore, and last but not least, the question
of whether or not last year’s World Series champion can repeat.
Of course, as of each year’s Opening Day, that’s all
in the future. And this is about the past. And about recognition
of those who have gone before Opening Day. It’s about an idea
from Rod Nelson, who initially posed the concept in an e-mail.1
The Mount Rushmore of Baseball. A simple, yet brilliant concept.
Let’s look back over baseball history… which, in reality,
can actually be said to extend back past the start of the 19th Century…
and decide who merits having their countenances carved on some prominent
point, ala Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt in the hills
of South Dakota.
Nelson originally proposed his own personal Mount Rushmore of Baseball
as including Babe Ruth, Branch Rickey, Jackie Robinson and Marvin
Miller2. All good choices, but, upon further reflection, an awfully
limiting set for the rich history of the National Pastime. Still,
it is a brilliant idea, and not just because Nelson is a very sharp
guy and one of baseball’s deep thinkers. There have been innumerable
histories of baseball written over the years; everything from the
landmark multi-volume historian series of Harold Seymour and David
Quentin Voigt, to the interpretive tales of Charles Alexander and
Joe Durso, to the analytical brilliance and wit of Bill James. Every
one of these works, though greatly diverse in their approaches,
inevitably bring the discerning reader to a seminal, though maybe
or maybe not obvious, conclusion about the game…there are
great figures, even heroic figures, in every era of baseball. Often,
they are individuals who have affected major paradigm shifts in
the game. Sometimes, they are individuals who can be said to have
“saved” the game from various threats, either internal
or external. Sometimes they are crusaders, sometimes bringers of
information who have enlightened us all about the game, sometimes
rules makers and even breakers, and sometimes, they are just heroes
who stand astride the game like the Colossus of Rhodes (the one
outside of Turkey, not Dusty). And they all, in some fashion, epitomize
the transformations of the game.
Thus, even though there have been innumerable histories of baseball
written over the past 100 years or so, perhaps there is room for
one more. It seems like a reasonable task to look at baseball history,
and the changes in the game, through the perspective of the great
figures of the game, and how they either effected or represented
to those changes and the game’s development. As noted somewhat
indirectly above, these great figures need not be players. In fact,
in many instances they are not players. Baseball executives, baseball
authors/writers, baseball historians, baseball deep thinkers…
they all have a place on this Mount Rushmore, because they all played
key roles in the development of this marvelous game. So here is
a history of baseball, as framed by its outstanding individuals.
Given the vast sweep of history, and the innumerable individuals
who have made it (to say nothing of those who have written it),
it seems restrictive to just pick four busts to be enshrined on
the Mount Rushmore of Baseball. (Besides, that would make for a
really short book.) Surely we all know that baseball, or what we
now call baseball, has undergone innumerable changes in 200+ years?
Differing eras, differing rules – everything from prohibiting
the wrist snap on underhand pitching to the DH, differing styles
of play, to say nothing of the changes in the players in the game...
which means both those on the field and off the field. Without too
much difficulty, it is possible to identify for purposes of this
book, at least a dozen distinct eras of baseball, each of which
merits an individual Mount Rushmore. Now you could, let’s
say, pick Daniel “Doc” Adams, Henry Chadwick, Harry
Wright and John Montgomery Ward for the 19th Century Mount Rushmore
of Baseball. And Ban Johnson, Babe Ruth, Branch Rickey and Jackie
Robinson for the 20th Century Mount Rushmore of Baseball. And maybe
Billy Beane, Bill James, George Mitchell and Albert Pujols for the
still-infant 21st Century Mount Rushmore of Baseball. (Or you could
make an entire different set of choices.) Or, like Nelson, you could
pick Ruth, Rickey, Robinson and Miller as the one, true Mount Rushmore
of Baseball (or Chadwick, Wright, Ruth and Rickey – a grouping
that would be this author’s choice for the Big Four), it’s
truer to the game, and more fun, to choose four each from…
Pre-1840
The 1840s
The 1850s
The 1860s
The 1870s
The 1880s
The 1890s
The game and its rules changed and developed so rapidly from the
mid-1840s to the mid-1890s that each decade during this period merits
its own Mount Rushmore. As the game developed into the 20th Century,
the various paradigm shifts become less common, and the eras relatively
longer.
1900-1920
1921-1945
1946-1959
1960-1969
1970-1992
1993-???
Now comes the hard part. Even broken into a dozen or so eras, the
grand sweep of baseball history defies easy efforts to isolate just
four giants in each era. For that matter, it is oftimes difficult
to identify who should go into what era. Probably the most notable
example of this is Branch Rickey. Should he be a candidate in 1921-1945
(for his groundbreaking work in the establishment of the farm system),
or maybe 1946-1959 (for the 20th Century felling of the Color Line),
or possibly 1960-1969 (for his role in bringing about expansion)?
Not an easy choice, grasshopper.
This isn’t electing or pondering who should be in a Hall
of Fame, it’s choosing four individuals from specific, distinct
periods of the game’s history. Yes, there is a great deal
of room for discussion on exactly who should go on each Mount Rushmore,
and each reader may well have differing opinions from those put
forth in this book. However, it’s my book, so I get to make
the choices that will appear herein. And that’s without even
addressing the problem of where to put the Mount Rushmores of Baseball.
One possibility for the latter would be on the hills above the shores
of a scenic finger lake in New York State, sometimes known colloquially
as “Glimmerglass.” After all, the National Baseball
Hall of Fame is already thereabouts. It might even make a good additional
tourist attraction to that charming region and village. Alas, that
won’t work, and not just because of the possibly unwanted
new development it would entail, or because Cooperstown, N.Y. is
one of the hardest places to get to in the entire United States,
nor even due all the fancy summer homes that have already built
on the edge of Lake Otsego (there goes the neighborhood). No, the
problem with Cooperstown as the home for the Mount Rushmores of
Baseball is that, while the Hall of Fame was invented there, baseball
wasn’t, except in the minds of Abner Graves and Albert Spalding.
No, a better spot for the Mount Rushmores of Baseball might be
to start carving up the Palisades of New Jersey, just across the
Hudson from Upper Manhattan. For it was there, according to the
best information we have at the moment, that the first game of what
we now commonly recognize as baseball was played in 1846. Besides
being more accessible than Cooperstown (though the Jersey Turnpike
is hardly as pleasant a ride as the roads leading to Cooperstown),
this location would have a subsidiary effect of giving New Jersey
another notable attraction outside of; the Shore, various toxic
waste dumps, and the town of Freehold, birthplace of the Garden
State’s most outstanding native son, Bruce Springsteen. So,
let Major League Baseball start buying up the Palisades, and put
out in RFP to sculptors, builders, contractors and the like. It’s
time to get started on what would be a real Hall of Fame, the Mount
Rushmores of Baseball.
In other book news, this came in this week from PublishAmerica,
seemingly indicating that the 2008 version of “19 to 21,”
now entitled, “The Breaks Even Out and Midnight Comes Quickly
for Cinderella,” is available, at least through the PublishAmerica
website, http://www.publishamerica.com.
For Immediate Release Contact: Shawn Street – Public Relations
PublishAmerica Presents The Breaks Even Out and Midnight Comes
Quickly for Cinderella by John Shiffert
Frederick, MD, March 23, 2009 -- PublishAmerica is proud to present
The Breaks Even Out and Midnight Comes Quickly for Cinderella by
John Shiffert of Newnan, Georgia.
The 2008 baseball season was, in many ways, like every other baseball
season. It had a little bit of everything, and pretty much everything
that happened in baseball in 2008 had some sort of historical precedent,
whether it was a similar situation that had occurred sometime during
the past 150 years or so, or perhaps something that illustrated
baseball’s seeming failure to learn from history…because,
he who fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it.
This is 2008, as compared and contrasted against similar stories
and people from baseball’s past.
The steroids mess, great pitchers and great pitching feats, unassisted
triple plays, no-hitters, 500/600 home run hitters, big trades,
the Hall of Fame, record breakers, The House That Ruth Built. Plus
some lighter moments…Billy Crystal making the majors, funny
team nicknames, “baseball” in Finland. All leading up
to the World Series and the weirdest game to ever conclude a season.
John Shiffert is a native Philadelphian (for fifty-six years),
a Phillies fan (for fifty years), and a sportswriter (for forty
years - this is his fourth book). A member of the Society for American
Baseball Research, he is currently director of university relations
at Clayton State University in Morrow, Georgia
-- John Shiffert
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