| Baseball's Chasm Between Heroes
The Christian Science Monitor
July 11, 2000
Tonight, in the classic midsummer pause to honor the
heroes of the national pastime, young men will line
up along perpendicular chalk lines, flanking a diamond
that has long captured the nation's dreams.
"American" and "National," their
uniforms will say, recalling the admonition of the historian
Jacques Barzun: "Whoever wants to know the heart
and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules
and realities of the game ...."
Today the most penetrating reality of the game—more
than bloated salaries, sharp inequities dividing rich
and poor teams, the relentless sales hustle at the ballpark,
and even Mr. Barzun's "mystic nine" in grass—lies
in the chasm in value between black achievement and
white.
Fifty-three years after Jackie Robinson carried the
aspirations of a people into the center of the nation's
culture, white heroes remain, by far, the most fondly
revered.
Enter the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown,
N.Y. beneath an arch bearing Barzun's famous words,
and witness the throngs of baseball tourists, 99 in
100 white, gazing at trophies encased in glass. On a
weekend, you will find it hard to move—unless
you are visiting the exhibit called "Pride and
Passion: The African American Experience." There,
you may find yourself alone.
Move two doors down, to the walk-in mausoleum honoring
Babe Ruth. Read about how the mythical Babe lived life
large; how he saved the game from scandal and boredom
with his walloping home runs.
Walk next door, and see how Hank Aaron, a black man
who broke the Babe's all-time home-run record despite
hate mail and death threats, has been crammed onto a
wall.
Read nothing of the terrible crucible Mr. Aaron passed
through in shattering a myth of white superiority, risking
his life for something larger than baseball; learn nothing
of the way his dignified struggle transcended sport,
to the deeper annals of American heroism.
Stand before the two glass cases honoring latter day
home-run heroes, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.
Mr. McGwire, who hit four home runs more than Mr. Sosa
in the famous chase of 1998, enjoys a tribute twice
as large; his 70th home-run ball fetched 30 times more
at auction than Sosa's 66th, and nearly four times that
of Aaron's final-career homer, which represents the
most stunning record in baseball history.
This reality reflects the attitudes of many fans, who
are more comfortable when blacks, like Hollywood sidekicks,
blow kisses to the cameras as contented number twos.
When a white icon is threatened, it's often another
matter.
When Aaron broke Ruth's record, and spoke out about what
he endured, amnesia
settled upon white
fans and the baseball
establishment; Aaron's
accomplishment, and
the toll it took,
went virtually forgotten.
When Barzun wrote his famous words in 1954, baseball
was at the heart of America; its playing field a metaphor
for the nation.
It was the year the Supreme Court abolished the doctrine
of "separate but equal," and a generation
of young black players, in a thrust paralleling the
civil rights battles in the streets, took on a struggle
for equal recognition on the field.
As with the movement they mirrored, theirs was a partial
victory. For decades, white players have garnered greater
recognition and larger endorsements based on the privilege
of their skin color.
Today, amid rising multiculturalism and roiling debate
over affirmative action, many whites prefer to retreat
to the comfort of their own kind—from the Bunyanlike
heroes Ruth and McGwire, to the volatile John Rocker
and his self-styled free speech laced with racial code
language.
As if in response, blacks have drifted away from the
game—fans and players alike.
Major League Baseball had a lot to do with this. For
a generation, the game was poorly marketed in urban
America. Many black children found it increasingly hard
to find an adequate ball field; the result was a sharp
decline in young players.
Today, half as many blacks, by percentage, play in
the major leagues as they did in 1975.
In the front office, white owners continue to resist
hiring blacks for management positions. Despite recent
efforts by Major League Baseball to counter these trends,
the game no longer holds the promise for blacks it once
did. It is no more a metaphor for aspiration.
At the All-Star Game tonight, Hank Aaron will throw
out the first ball. Flanked by the heroes of a later
generation, the smiling old slugger will be remembered
as the man who shattered the Babe's record.
But few will wish to recall what he went through to
get there, or the threat he posed to white Americans
so protective of one of their own.
Such is the reality of historical amnesia, and the
way heroes come to be in the American pastime. |
Oil
in Equador's Amazon