CITIZEN OF BASEBALL
Larry Freundlich
Not surprisingly for a fan in his sixties, Maglie's Giants and Furillo's Dodgers form the bedrock of my baseball memory. I was born and raised in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn in the 1940s and '50s. During the summers of my boyhood, my father and I would walk four miles down Bedford Avenue to Ebbets Field, into a swelling river of fans converging on Sullivan Place from other tributaries of the borough. It was one of the few times we held hands. On our twenty or so trips to the park each year, and as we sat together at the Formica-covered kitchen table of our family's two-bedroom apartment house on Kings Highway listening to Red Barber and Connie Desmond on the radio, I acquired my father's powerful emotional entanglement with the Brooklyn Dodgers, so that for me as well as for him, Bobby Thomson's home run off Ralph Branca in 1951 would remain an unhealed wound and the Dodgers' victory over the New York Yankees in the 1955 World Series a gift given for my faithfulness.
Neither he nor I felt any irony about our devotion to the Brooklyn Dodgers. My father, a dentist, whose office was in East New York, would not change his socks during a Dodgers winning streak. And for my part, when Leo Durocher left the Dodgers to manage the hated New York Giants, with hot tears in my eyes I tore his baseball card to pieces and burned it in the vacant lot across from our apartment house on Kings Highway.
Roger Kahn's Boys of Summer were, indeed, my boys also-part of my family. I had an intense emotional attachment to and a scholarly vocation for the persons and careers of Pee Wee Reese, Jackie Robinson, Carl Erskine, Duke Snider, Johnny Podres, Clem Labine, Joe Black, Roy Campanella, Billy Cox, Andy Pafko, Gene Hermanski, Don Newcombe, and Gil Hodges. I knew their statistics cold. To this day, my personal banking card PIN number is a variant of the uniform numbers of the 1955 double play combination, Hodges, Robinson, and Reese. And because they were my family, I cared about its minor branches, even if their acquaintance with my team was brief and unremarkable. More than fifty years after they played for the Dodgers, Willie Ramsdell, Ed Head, Bobo Milliken, Stan Rojeck, Dixie Howell, Ed Roebuck, Bud Podbielan, Wayne Terwilliger, Don Wade, Cookie Lavagetto, Kirby Higbe, Marv Rackley, Al Gionfriddo, and George Shuba soften my heart and revivify my youthful innocence.
My love of the Dodgers, like atomic valences in organic chemistry, bonded me into an intricate compound with the most attractive players of the other franchise cities. Just say the name of a major league team to me, and my mind spontaneously downloaded its iconic star: Boston (Ted Williams), Detroit (Al Kaline), the Giants (Sal Maglie or Willie Mays), St. Louis (Stan Musial), Cincinnati (Ted Kluszewski or Ewell Blackwell), Chicago Cubs (Ernie Banks), Philadelphia Phillies (Robin Roberts), Chicago White Sox (Minnie Minoso or Nellie Fox), Cleveland (Bob Feller or Lou Boudreau), Boston-Milwaukee Braves (Warren Spahn), Milwaukee-Atlanta Braves (Hank Aaron), Pittsburgh (Ralph Kiner), and the New York Yankees (Joe DiMaggio).
Sometimes a team had no icon, and those teams proved to be moribund. For example, too much of a stretch was required for me to iconize Ned Garver of the St. Louis Browns, and Harmon Killebrew, who became a legitimate icon, was lost to the Washington Senators when they traded him to Minnesota. The Philadelphia Athletics hadn't had an icon since Jimmie Foxx in the 1930s. If the Senators and the Athletics had any iconic identity, it was through their executives: Calvin Griffith (nasty and cheap) and Connie Mack (ancient and moral).
Each one of these players (and others I might have mentioned: e.g., Luke Appling, Bob Gibson, Hal Newhouser) represented the interests of a baseball city-state, one in competition with my own baseball city-state: Brooklyn. Furillo was as redolent with patriotism for me as Medici was for a Renaissance Florentine; and Durocher triggered aggressive antagonism, as if he were the diabolical Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan. DiMaggio and Musial, to this Florentine mind, might have summoned up the doges of Venice-entrusted with the affairs of a city so great (Serenissima, like Venice, the Lion City)-that it would be impossible to hate them, despite their competition with my city. When Brooklyn's dark tormentor Sal Maglie was set adrift from the Giants and shockingly found safe haven among his former victims, it was as if Rommel, at Patton's side, had led our khaki, white-starred Sherman tanks across the Rhine to defeat the Germans, clearing his name of infamy and earning him an honored place among our heroes.
This kind of passionate identification of one's city with individuals, whose names seemed as one with it, was, I believe, the strongest hold that baseball had on the fans before the era of free agency and television. In Bob Leuci's essay in this volume, "Hooks," Leuci recalls that as a kid growing up in Brooklyn, he assumed that all the Dodgers had been born in Brooklyn-no matter that Reese was from Louisville or Robinson from Cairo, Georgia, or Duke Snider from Los Angeles. That kind of instant call on the chauvinism of the fan was possible only because many of these iconic players were team lifers: Hodges, Furillo, Erskine, Reese, Robinson, Campanella, Ted Williams, Kaline, Bench, Banks, Robin Roberts, Brett, Clemente, DiMaggio, Whitey Ford, Berra, Rizzuto, Crosetti. If they did wander, it was only in their twilight years, and only because they could not yet give up the game (Mays and Spahn to the Mets, Hank Greenberg to Pittsburgh, Blackwell to the Yankees, Mize to the Yankees, Cavarretta to the White Sox).
In baseball today, such player-city identification becomes more rare each year. Cal Ripkin is a Baltimore man forever, but Mussina and Giambi move to the Yankees, Schilling and Johnson to Phoenix, Griffey to Cincinnati, Manny Ramirez to Boston, Alex Rodriguez to Texas. These players are of surpassing excellence; staying to be venerated in their home cities, they would honor the place of their major league debut and mix their achievement with the civic pride of their baseball city-state-the player enriching the city, the city enshrining the player, the player becoming part of the imaginative life of the citizen-fan.
Instead the master players have become condottiere, willing to fight for the next city-state as long as they get paid enough. The player gets richer, the game becomes subservient to commerce, and the fan grows coarse. "Entertain me!" the fan demands of the oligarchic owners. "I'm buying the products that justify your television contracts. We know you're not doing this for love, and we know what to call it when you do it for money." As the historian Simon Schama points out in Citizen, his book about the French Revolution, when the citizens of Paris learned that the royals were as low-minded and venal as they themselves, Versailles was stripped of the illusion of sanctified privilege that protected its courtiers and potentates from the scorn and murderous hostility of the populace.
When the game of baseball becomes a subset of the entertainment business or communications industry, its aesthetic and ethical purity are compromised, and the game becomes subject to the exigencies of mundane life with all its relativity and design flaws. Whatever baseball's condottiere may gain personally or contribute to their current employer, their interchangeable alliances despiritualize baseball in the same way that disloyalty tears apart a family. We feel abandoned by those we trusted and loved, and this betrayal of our expectation of loyalty makes us resentful and angry. "Whatever happened to love of the game?" we ask. "What are these players and owners doing to deserve this money?" These are the kinds of emotions we feel when baseball loses its magic, and we see that behind the curtain the Wizard of Oz is either a cold-eyed, self-aggrandizing capitalist or a selfish brat.
When A. Bartlett Giamatti died in 1989, I planned someday to initiate a book project that would celebrate the contribution that Italian Americans have made to major league baseball, because Giamatti better than anyone else understood the spiritual elements of baseball, which baseball was ignoring at its own peril.
In his philosophic and beautiful encomium Take Time for Paradise, Giamatti had expressed his belief that the geometric patterns and seasonal rhythms of baseball, solemnly recorded in each year's record book, resembled a divine plan, what in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance would have been seen as part of the great chain of being and in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment as the clockwork universe: a world with a purpose, built according to a perfect plan, adequate for all contingencies and capable of being learned and comprehended by the faithful. Each player's and fan's assent to the orthodoxies of baseball contributed to the perfect operation of the design. When we play by the rules, we are cared for and nourished, and, in turn, our devotion preserves the life force of the game. So when Pete Rose set himself above the rules by which he had achieved glory as a player, he broke the spiritual covenant between the game and the fan, between the church and the congregation. For Giamatti, Rose would be entitled to every honor except the one reserved for the great ones of the faith: the Hall of Fame, where only the faithful are entitled to holy ground. The commissioner of baseball banned Rose from the Hall not to demean Rose's genius as a player but to honor the game and preserve the level field of dreams on which it must be played. Rose thought it was all about him. Giamatti knew it was all about baseball. When given a chance to repent, Rose refused. Giamatti stood firm. Excommunication fit the crime.
For Giamatti the perfection of baseball was completed in the collaboration between player and fan. The fan was attracted to repetition and familiarity, and his continued faith depended on the maintenance of the rules and the slow evolution of its customs and paraphernalia. As the fan grew in knowledge and expertise, he felt himself empowered. He mastered the catechism in the daily sports pages and the encyclopedia of baseball and at his local bar. His opinion based on knowledge meant something. To love and understand baseball was self-esteeming. His city's team was his own team. He was a citizen of baseball and so were the players.
One thing the condottiere were not were partisans. The condottiere would fight for the highest bidder. One day they fought in the army of Florence, the next on the side of her enemy, Milan or Lucca. They had no primary allegiance except to their own careers. Because they considered themselves professional soldiers first, they identified with the interests of other professional soldiers whom they might oppose in today's battle and then partner in tomorrow's, depending on who was signing the checks. Battles between condottiere armies became, therefore, increasingly less lethal. With no altruistic commitment to the affairs of their employing city-state, why not cut their fellow condottiere some slack and get some mercy in return?-then no one in the soldiers's union will get hurt. War became an increasingly expensive and cynical fiasco, often involving a great deal of maneuvering but no deadly fighting. Anyone who has seen Rickey Henderson or Deion Sanders barely alert to his responsibilities in the field knows what a drain the play-for-pay mentality has on committed performance. And baseball's condottiere are everywhere you look.
The golden days of our fandom were the days when our heroes passionately served one master-one city's team. The 1950s rosters of the Yankees and Dodgers are the most glorious examples of long-lived commitment, and the Yankees, with DiMaggio on center stage, have the edge in mythological power. Weren't all the Yankees bombers from the Bronx and wouldn't they all want to buried in center field?
How well it would have served Bart Giamatti to have rooted for the Yankees, a team whose citizen players were in significant part Italian American. But Giamatti was fated to be a Red Sox fan whose deepest admiration was reserved for Red Sox lifer Bobby Doerr. Giamatti deserved a fuller plate.
If his heart had worn pinstripes, the citizens of his baseball city-state would have included Lazzeri, DiMaggio, Crosetti, Rizzuto, Berra, and Raschi-all of them in for the long term. He would have known that Billy Martin was half Italian, and in Joe Torre would have recognized a gentleman like himself.
Excerpted from Reaching for the Stars by Larry Freundlich Excerpted by permission.
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