Home Run

An eviscerating op-ed piece in the NY Times last Saturday, precise and disdainful. It has to do with baseball, but even if you know nothing and care less about the game (I’m looking at you, you Challenge types), it’s worth a look for its elegantly remorseless demolition work.

Until I was in my mid teens all I wanted to do was play baseball. I hated school for all the usual reasons, but especially because it wasted good ballplaying time and was run by people who at least affected to believe the game—The National Pastime!—wasn’t important. Buffoons.


It finally dawned on me that I wasn’t going to make the big leagues at about the same time I discovered previously unsuspected, if ultimately limited, abilities as a distance runner, but while I’ve believed for decades now that running far fast is the best sport, it’s still obvious to me that baseball is the best game. I was eventually able to make part of my living writing about baseball, and editing, packaging, and publishing what other people wrote about it. The result is that I have, not a lot of inside information, but a strong sense of the game’s history and development dating back into the 19th century. I’ve always been especially interested in the relations between players and owners, which have been difficult since the game first went professional a few years after the Civil War. The “reserve clause” the writer mentions is shorthand for an agreement among owners that for almost a hundred years kept players from selling their services to the highest bidder, thereby keeping salaries artificially low.

The Baseball Hall of Fame referred to in the column’s title enjoys shrine-like status as a repository of mementos of the game’s history and as the location of almost 300 plaques honoring baseball’s greatest players, executives, umpires, and others. It is an almost transcendent honor for any baseball figure to be elected to the Hall. But inclusion depends on election, and I agree with many writers, historians, and plain fans that there are many people in the Hall who don’t belong there, and some not there who do. This belief is the basis of many American barstool arguments.

At its simplest, this column is one of those arguments. But that’s certainly not all it is, and the sheer brutal honest outraged accuracy here is refreshing. I’ve always liked Fay Vincent. Pusillanimous he ain’t.