Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference Baseball in Literature and Culture, March 24, 2023 (Postponed from July 7-9, 2022); On the campus of Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas

1. Twenty-Sixth Annual Conference
Baseball in Literature and Culture
March 24, 2023
July 7-9, 2022
On the campus of Ottawa University, Ottawa, Kansas

2. There's no crying some Character
in Baseball
OR
Character(s) of the game: virtue, integrity, and
eccentricity in our pastime
Phil Oliver
Middle Tennessee State University
phil.oliver@mtsu.edu
@osopher@c.im (Mastodon)
Up@dawn (JPOsopher.blogspot.com)

3. This has been an unusual conference to
re-prepare for, with the long
postponement leaving me (frankly) a
bit cold for my original topic. I was
already a bit ambivalent about it, as the
strikethrough and the parenthetical (s)
in the title might hint. Is it character in
the moral sense, characters in the
eccentric sense? Is it about something
else?
Yes.Yes it is, all of those.
It’s a grab-bag. We’re just back from
Arizona spring training, so it’s about
that too. Cheers!

4. Besides the usual Spring
games featuring Dodgers,
White Sox, Angels,
Guardians, Cubs, Reds et al…
we got to see Teams Canada
and Great Britain.
Both impressed, even though GB’s
sparse uniforms indicate a tepid level of
national support. They deserved better.

5. Hard not to feel for that
kid from Canada who’d
never pitched higher
than Class A, and whose
character was surely
tested against the US
All-stars. Good luck to
Mitch Bratt. It took
character to take the ball
at all that night.

6. Some of my fellow Cardinals
fans don’t like to speak well of
the Cubs, but I think it shows
great character on their fans’
part to sing that goofy victory
song and fly the “W” when they
can… as they did at Wrigley
West in Mesa.
And, to stick with their team
even after the owners decimated
the championship 2016 club.

7. Give them credit, too, for inviting the Clydesdales to Mesa.

8. And as for that other sense of “character,” here’s one who may have been striving for his own
version of αρετη [aretê], the Greek word for unique excellence or skill of any sort;
hence, especially, moral virtue, at the end… ^
We lost one of baseball’s all-time great characters on Monday —
Joe Pepitone was a three-time Gold Glove-winning first baseman
who hit 219 home runs, most of them for the fading New York
Yankees [of the ‘60s]... He hit some long home runs, dined with
Sinatra, periodically skipped games or left them early, got divorced
a couple of times and was, perhaps, the first ballplayer to bring a
hair dryer into the clubhouse. He lived a troubled life in many ways,
but toward the end of his life he said that he was making an effort to
put things right with his family. For many baseball fans, the name
Joe Pepitone marks a certain time in baseball. Joe Posnanski

9. And thanks to our postponement, this
is now also about our morning
keynote speaker’s book. ^Brad
“discovered an astonishing range of
experiences and untold stories in [his
subjects’] post-baseball lives, and he
realized that we all have more in
common with ballplayers than we
think.”
RIght. We’re all capable of vice and
virtue, we’re all characters. We’ve all
endured vulnerability and failure. We
all have stories to tell, characters to
build, αρετη to chase. We’re all, for
better or worse, more or less
experienced.

10. I’m teaching a course
this semester in the
Master of Liberal Arts
program at my school
called Experience.
We’re reading
James’s Varieties,
and Sagan’s.
Perhaps it’s time for
someone to write The
Varieties of Baseball
Experience… if in fact
that’s not exactly
what Brad has done
already.

11. “Balukjian, whose writing has appeared in National Geographic and The Los
Angeles Times, has an agent but not a publisher; he is waiting to gather
interviews before shopping the project.” Tyler Kepner, NYT 6. 20.15
It does take character of one form or another, doesn’t it, to hop in a battered
Honda and undertake a grueling project like Wax Pack without the security of a
publishing contract? Not to mention persevering through 38 rejections

12. Brad does not sugar-coat his own
vulnerabilities and failings (OCD and
insobriety, for example). He’s a baseball
fan, after all, and we understand that even
the most successful hitters are
unsuccessful most of the time. But
ballplayers try constantly to learn from their
whiffs and errors, and Brad is trying to
learn something about growing old
gracefully in the post-playing career
“afterlife” of Boomer, Tempy et al. I’m
reminded of ^Richard Ford’s Frank
Bascombe, whose sportswriting career
acquaints him with former athletes who’ve
not aged well.

13. Frank draws a harsh
conclusion in The
Sportswriter: “If there's
another thing that
sportswriting teaches you,
it is that there are no
transcendent themes in life.
In all cases things are here
and they're over, and that
has to be enough.”
^Play the game. Win or
lose. Play again tomorrow,
until the ultimate game is

14. That’s one way to think about transcendence. Personally, and like the late
Commissioner Giamatti, I prefer to naturalize the concept by thinking of
“a green field in the sun” as forever.
Now there was a commissioner of character. And then, like the Sox on the
2d of October, he was gone. Pete’s still here. But who’s the greater
character?

15. Bart the Renaissance scholar, as
distinct from Bart the baseball fan,
knew of course that he was fooling
himself. Nothing on this earth is truly
forever. But transcendence of the
natural variety is still quite real. Peter
Ackroyd put it succinctly in The Plato
Papers… ^
“trans-end-dance: the ability
to move beyond the end,
otherwise called the dance of

16. In his later sagas, despite his
earlier skepticism, Frank
Bascombe comes to appreciate
that enough can be enough.
He’s entered into his own late
stage of life, which he calls the
Permanent Period. He’s
looking for something once
and for all, at last, to be. “This
is how in the shit I am! My life
is this way.” In the meantime,
though, one day at the old
ballpark in Philly…

17. “The kind of happy I was that day at the Vet when
"Hawk" Dawson actually doffed his red "C" cap
to me, and everyone cheered and practically
convulsed into tears - you can't patent that. It
was one shining moment of glory that was
instantly gone…”
But it was a transcendent moment. Priceless!
Mortician-transcendence, Hawk?
WAPO

18. “Whereas life, real life, is
different and can't even be
appraised as simply "happy",
but only in terms of "Yes, I'll
take it all, thanks" or "No, I
believe I won't." Happy, as my
poor father used to say, is a lot
of hooey. Happy is a circus
clown, a sitcom, a greeting
card. Life, though, life's about
something sterner. But also
something better. A lot better.
Believe me.”
― Richard Ford, The Lay of the
Land
Better than Happy? That
sounds Nietzschean-affirm or
negate it all, embrace
adversity, strive painfully,
love your fate, suffer nobly,
climb, breathe thin air, feel
the power…

19. That’s a hard sell for me, I teach a
course on the Philosophy of
Happiness and agree more with
William James…
If we were to ask the question:
“What is human life's chief
concern?” one of the answers we
should receive would be: “It is
happiness.” How to gain, how to
keep, how to recover happiness, is
in fact for most men at all times the
secret motive of all they do, and of
all they are willing to endure.
William James, “The Religion of
Healthy-Mindedness”

20. And Aristotle:
“Happiness is the meaning and the
purpose of life, the whole aim and
end of human existence... One
swallow does not make a summer,
neither does one fine day; similarly
one day or brief time of happiness
does not make a person entirely
happy.” But a propos that last remark ,
you have to wonder if Aristotle
ever had a moment like Frank’s
at the Vet. Or mine at Al Lang,
for that matter, in 1992, when I
snagged Dale Sveum’s foul ball.

21. And while we’re here looking at treasured foul balls…
Joe Torre signed this in 1972, before my sister’s dog got
hold of it.
Red Schoendienst,
Whitey Herzog,
Butch McCord:

22. And that is not at all to
deny the value of the
quest for meaning,
purpose, strength, will,
power, love, knowledge,
wisdom, compassion,
kindness, or whatever else
is not “a lot of hooey.” All
the virtues, the ingredients
of a good and flourishing
life worth living, are
mutually supportive.
And who better exemplifies
those virtues of character
than this great gentleman, a
character unlike any other…

23. The All-Arete Team: Manager Buck O’Neill… Who should be on hios All-Character Team?

24. Given time constraints, this is probably where the slideshow will end in
Ottawa. But I asked NLBM prez Bob Kendrick about that, he suggested
some names. Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Leon Day, Hilton Smith, Buck
Leonard, Judy Johnson just to name a few." Perhaps we can think of a
few more, during Q-&-A?
Following are some slides, mostly unfinished, that I was working on
before last summer’s postponement. Maybe I’ll finish them before our
next conference. Wait ‘til next year!
Time permitting, though, I’ll end with this…

25. Roger Angell has died. 101.
What a terrific age, if you can
keep your wits, health, and
gratitude. And character. He
evidently did, and wrote earlier in
his last decade of the challenges
and (mostly) delights of growing
quite old in a youth-besotted
society. He's always been my
dependable ally, whenever I felt
the need to justify my baseball
obsession. He makes it cool to
care about "the haphazardous
flight of a distant ball." Just to
care…

26. “It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so
insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional
sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the
sports nut (I know this look - I know it by heart) is understandable and almost
unanswerable. Almost.
What is left out of this
calculation, it seems to me, is
the business of caring - caring
deeply and passionately, really
caring - which is a capacity or
an emotion that has almost
gone out of our lives. And so it
seems possible that we have
come to a time when it no
longer matters so much what
the caring is about, how frail or
foolish is the object of that
concern, as long as the feeling
itself can be saved.
Naïveté - the infantile and
ignoble joy that sends a
grown man or woman to
dancing in the middle of
the night over the
haphazardous flight of a
distant ball - seems a
small price to pay for such
a gift.” Five Seasons

27. What, after all, is this great world we must care about but a haphazardous ball adrift in the night?

28. To be edited,
to be
continued (I
hope!):

29. My working title is "There's no crying some character in baseball"...
UPDATE: Character(s) of the game: virtue, integrity, and eccentricity in our
pastime
we can drop the strikethrough, the allusion to Tom Hanks is probably gratuitous.
I'm still going to open with the theme of how Opening Day was a bigger deal to
me when the lockout (etc.) somehow turned it into a lesser public deal than
usual.
But my main topic is character, integrity, virtue (in the old Greek sense of
arete), as displayed by some players, execs, and fans. I'll see if I can propose
and defend all-character teams, all-time and contemporary (if the evidence can
be gathered). Buck O'Neill will probably manage, Jackie Robinson will be
there. Pete Rose won't be.
I asked Bob Kendrick for his suggestions. "There were a number of players
including Monte Irvin, Larry Doby, Leon Day, Hilton Smith, Buck Leonard,
Judy Johnson just to name a few." I'm rooting for Albert Pujols and Mookie
Betts to make the cut. And Brett Phillips…*
I'm going to do some more research, ask around a bit more. I hope to conclude
that nice guys do finish first, enough at least to vindicate character in baseball.
And if some of those with character turn out also to have been characters,
eccentrics, oddballs, well so much the better. But I'll draw some distinctions.
Arete is not strictly the same as niceness or likeability or fan-friendliness, though
some fairly constant conjunctions of those categories will be noted.

30. Brett Phillips…*
Watching eight-year-old Chloe Grimes hit liners and throw heat, you'd never guess the young ball
player is also fighting cancer, and has been, off and on, since she was two. Her grit proved an
inspiration to her favorite player on the Tampa Bay Rays, Brett Phillips. But inspiration is proving
to be a two-way street…

31. The English word “character” is derived from the Greek
charaktêr, which was originally used of a mark impressed upon a
coin. Later and more generally, “character” came to mean a
distinctive mark by which one thing was distinguished from
others, and then primarily to mean the assemblage of qualities
that distinguish one individual from another. In modern usage,
this emphasis on distinctiveness or individuality tends to merge
“character” with “personality.” We might say, for example, when
thinking of a person’s idiosyncratic mannerisms, social gestures,
or habits of dress, that “he has personality” or that “he’s quite a
character.”
...
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/moral-character/

32. "Integrity is one of the most important and oft-cited of virtue
terms. It is also perhaps the most puzzling. For example, while
it is sometimes used virtually synonymously with ‘moral,’ we
also at times distinguish acting morally from acting with
integrity. Persons of integrity may in fact act immorally—
though they would usually not know they are acting immorally.
Thus one may acknowledge a person to have integrity even
though that person may hold what one thinks are importantly
mistaken moral views."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/integrity/#:~:text=Integrity
%20is%20one,mistaken%20moral%20views.

33. "Virtue is a general term that translates the Greek word aretê. Sometimes aretê is also
translated as excellence. Many objects, natural or artificial, have their particular aretê or kind
of excellence. There is the excellence of a horse and the excellence of a knife. Then, of
course, there is human excellence. Conceptions of human excellence include such disparate
figures as the Homeric warrior chieftain and the Athenian statesman of the period of its
imperial expansion. Plato’s character Meno sums up one important strain of thought when he
says that excellence for a man is managing the business of the city so that he benefits his
friends, harms his enemies, and comes to no harm himself (Meno 71e). From this
description we can see that some versions of human excellence have a problematic relation
to the moral virtues.
In the ancient world, courage, moderation, justice and piety were leading instances of moral
virtue. A virtue is a settled disposition to act in a certain way; justice, for instance, is the
settled disposition to act, let’s say, so that each one receives their due. This settled
disposition consists in a practical knowledge about how to bring it about, in each situation,
that each receives their due..."
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-
ancient/#:~:text=Virtue%20is%20a%20general,each%20receives%20their%20due

34. Jackie Robinson

35. “No. 99 Mike Mussina. Some years ago, a
baseball executive of some renown was
explaining the excellence of Mike Mussina,
and he said something that I will never forget.
He said: “You know what? The best way I
can describe Moose is—the guy’s just a
mensch.” That’s a complicated scouting
report. “Mensch” is a fascinating word. It’s a
Yiddish word, and its meaning is hard to fully
capture. Mensch literally translates to “human
being,” or “person.” In the classic musical
Fiddler on the Roof, Tevye the Milkman talks
about how his son-in-law Motel has matured,
and he says, “This Motel is a person.” He
means “mensch.” I don’t think the translation
works there. The more common definition of
mensch is “a person of integrity and honor.”
But this doesn’t do much better at getting to
the true meaning. “A person of integrity and
honor” sounds like a war hero, an honest
politician, a philanthropist, a person who
spends life in the service of others. These
people are mensches, certainly, but
mensches don’t have to be any of those
people.

36. Mussina 2. Leo Rosten, in The Joy of
Yiddish, defines a mensch as “someone to
admire and emulate, with the key being
nothing less than character, rectitude, dignity,
a sense of what is right, responsible,
decorous.” That’s better. But perhaps it’s
better to define mensch by using examples.
A mensch is someone who, when they
borrow your car or lawn mower, returns it
filled up with gas. A mensch sends you a
thoughtful handwritten note after interviewing
you—even if you didn’t get the job. A mensch
stands up to defend you when you’re not
around. A mensch leaves a note on the
windshield if they tap or dent your car. A
mensch goes back to the table to leave a few
extra bucks because they feel like the tip left
by the group was too small. A mensch tells
your manager or boss when you did a good
job. A mensch is the person who always
brings a gift, surprises you by remembering
your birthday, knows your kids’ names
(bonus mensch points for knowing the dog’s
name too), shovels the driveway of their older
neighbor, offers to take a photo when seeing
people struggling with their group selfie, and
always remembers to pass along the
promised book or recipe or recommendation.

37. Mussina 3. In other words, a mensch is someone who tries to do the
right thing, the kind of person many would call a “sucker.” But that
doesn’t bother the mensch. He or she isn’t perfect; far from it. A
mensch makes as many mistakes as the next person. A mensch is
the person who apologizes for those mistakes, makes up for them,
keeps striving to do better in situations big and small.I Was Mike
Mussina a mensch? Like I say, it’s complicated. As a pitcher, a
mensch is an excellent description of Mussina. He more or less did
everything right. The fact that it took him too long to get elected to the
Baseball Hall of Fame is a celebration of his menschiness. He never
did anything for show. He just pitched. Look at him this way: Mussina
is a stats geek who didn’t play for stats, a New York Yankee who
loathed attention, a pitcher who finished Top 6 in the Cy Young voting
nine times but never won the thing, a starter who took five no-hitters
into the eighth inning but never threw a no-hitter, a guy who won 20
games for the first time as a 39-year-old and promptly retired rather
than go for 300 victories (he finished with 270). He made it to the Hall
of Fame despite a bold unwillingness to do anything extra to improve
his chances of making it to the Hall of Fame. In that way, he was the
ultimate baseball mensch.”
— The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski
https://a.co/iylFDUO

38. “Schilling was the opposite kind of story. On
game days, there simply wasn’t anyone you
would rather have on your team. Schilling
was a ferocious competitor. He loved the big
moments—the bigger the better. Even in his
younger days, when he was wildly
inconsistent and a self-described “idiot,” he
thrived in the playoffs, in the World Series,
when the games counted most. And when he
developed into an incredible pitcher, like he
was from 2001 to 2004, he maintained that
love of the spotlight. Something about him
would rise up when the team needed him to
win. He was at his best when his team
needed it. And the other four days? Schilling
was as he is now: opinionated, inflexible,
thin-skinned, a loudmouth, a knucklehead, a
jokester, a troll, a clubhouse politician, a
nonstop yapper… (see May 10 email)

39. ..."Pete Rose has had the same kind of
compulsive pull throughout his life—for baseball,
for the ponies, for sports betting, for sex, for cars,
for action. Change? He can’t change. And he
wouldn’t even if he could. It’s all part of the same
story. There are so many misconceptions about
Pete Rose’s permanent suspension and Hall of
Fame eligibility. Here is the basic time line:
February 1989: Rose went to have a private
meeting with baseball commissioner Peter
Ueberroth. The New York Times reported that
the meeting was about Rose’s gambling. March
1989: Ueberroth, having been advised that
Sports Illustrated was about to publish an exposé
of Rose’s longtime gambling on baseball,
announced that MLB had started an investigation
into “serious allegations.” April 1, 1989: A.
Bartlett Giamatti became commissioner of
baseball. Giamatti revered baseball… (see May
10 email)

40. Buck Leonard. "The Gibson-Ruth connection
always seemed a little bit forced to me. On the
surface, yes, you have two of the all-time great
power hitters, maybe the two greatest power
hitters, but they were very different men. They
were almost direct opposites in personality,
demeanor, style of play, position, even which
side of the plate they hit from. But Gehrig and
Leonard? Now, that was a match. They shared
similar styles (Leonard readily admitted that he
tried to copy Gehrig’s batting motion when he
became a pro). Gehrig was a little bigger and
might have hit with more power. Leonard was a
little more athletic and was a better defender.II
But their similarities ran even deeper. They were
each steady and humble men. They played
without flash, without ego, with a quiet resolve
that everyone around them admired. Lou Gehrig
was the most beloved player in the major
leagues. Buck Leonard was the most beloved
player in the Negro Leagues."
The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski:
https://a.co/bnUGAIe

41. "Leonard would always say that in his younger days, he never really thought about the major leagues. “It does no good,” he said, “to mourn for what you
can’t have.” But after Robinson crossed the line, Leonard—like so many of the greatest Negro Leagues players—began to think about what might have been.
“I don’t think anybody really felt sorry for himself until after Jackie Robinson integrated the Brooklyn Dodgers,” he said with some sadness in his voice. “Then
everybody started thinking: ‘Maybe we should have been there all along.’ It was a shocking thought. Some of us weren’t prepared for it.” When Leonard was
44, Bill Veeck approached him about playing for the St. Louis Browns. Leonard knew that he was too old to do it. That scout, Elwood Parsons, spoke with
Leonard around that time about the success that Robinson, Roy Campanella, and Don Newcombe were having with the Dodgers. “I’ll never forget Buck’s
eyes filling with tears,” Parsons said. “And he said, ‘But it’s too late for me.’ ” Buck Leonard went back to Rocky Mount and worked for the school district. He
helped out with the minor-league team there. He was 65 years old in 1972 when he went into the Hall of Fame with his old teammate and friend Josh
Gibson. Also elected that year: Sandy Koufax and Yogi Berra. Leonard said: “I will do everything in my power to honor and uphold the dignity of baseball.” He
didn’t need to say that. He lived his whole life that way. And when reporters asked him how he felt about not playing in the majors, he shrugged and said it
wasn’t meant to be. “I only wish,” Leonard said, “I could have played in the big leagues when I was young enough to show what I could do.”"
"The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski: https://a.co/fK7sz8i

42. Campanella. "The sportswriters adored him. They told his fun stories day after day. They talked constantly about his leadership,
about his connection to pitchers, about his ability to hit in the clutch. And they continuously voted him the league’s MVP. In 1951, he
hit .325/.393/.590 with 33 homers and 108 RBIs. He was named MVP. In 1953, he hit .312/.395/.611 with a catcher-record 41 home
runs and 142 RBIs. He was named MVP. In 1955, he hit .318/.395/.583 with 32 homers and 107 RBIs. He was named MVP. Did he
deserve all three of those MVPs? Maybe not. There’s a good argument to be made that his own teammate Duke Snider had better
seasons in ’53 and ’55. But Campanella was so widely respected and admired and loved that the writers wanted to give him all the
awards. In this way, he was quite different from his teammate and fellow pioneer Jackie Robinson. Though they faced the same
racism, Campanella rarely mentioned it or fought back. While Robinson was a whirlwind of force and dignity and felt an impassioned
duty to change the world, Campanella just loved playing ball. “It’s practically impossible,” one reporter said, “to get Campy to admit
that any phase of his life was especially difficult or unpleasant.”"
The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski: https://a.co/2U9Wg5p

43. Frank Thomas. "You can’t really tell Thomas’s story without talking a little bit about steroids. Thomas played in that steroid era, and he was by
far the most outspoken anti-steroids hitter of his day. He called for drug testing as early as 1995. He was quoted many times hinting (or flat-
out saying) that he knew other players took shortcuts and he found it revolting and against the very essence of baseball. He was the only
active player willing to talk to George Mitchell for his report about PEDs in baseball. Even in his post-playing career, he has not been shy about
speaking out against those players who used (or might have used) PEDs in his time. “I’m not happy at all,” he told the New York Post after a
couple of suspected PED users were elected to the Hall of Fame. “Some of these guys were great players. But they wouldn’t have been great
players without drugs…. I don’t mind these guys doing what they want to do for their families and to make their money. But don’t come
calling to the Hall of Fame and say, ‘I’m supposed to be in the Hall of Fame’ when you know you cheated.” I’ve thought a lot about why
Thomas was so outspoken when so few other players were. I think it’s because he understood that he was destined to be in the middle of the
PED story whether he liked it or not. He was enormous, muscular, and a former football player. He hit with great power and, late in his career,
broke down with various injuries: He was always going to be a leading suspect in the PED hunt. This undoubtedly drove him crazy because it’s
so unfair—there was (and remains) a recklessness people relied on to guess who used steroids and who did not. Thomas wasn’t going to idly
watch people speculate about him. He was going to control the situation just the way he controlled at-bats. He lashed out. He challenged
other players. He did admit, with some embarrassment, briefly using amphetamines as a young player. But he would not let anyone group
him with those who were taking PEDs. And he would not defend or shield any PED users, not even with his silence."
The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski: https://a.co/1F6qo5Y

44. Brooks Robinson. "Look at those words again that he wrote as a child: “I’m slow to anger and not easily discouraged; am enthusiastic, happy,
calm, and very active.” I think that came through with the way he played—and I think that was why my dad was drawn to him. I look at Dad’s life
then; every day he endured the daily grind at the factory, the grouchiness of his bosses, the monotony of the grueling work, the realization there
were no promotions ahead. But every day, though he was dead tired, he came home and took us to the pool, coached our Little League teams,
played catch in the backyard. He did something that altered our lives just a little. Every day. And, in a way, that was Brooks Robinson, too. Every
day—it could have been a Sunday at Fenway Park, a Friday night at Yankee Stadium, a Thursday in April in frigid Minneapolis, a scorching
Tuesday in July in Kansas City, or just a boring old Wednesday night in Cleveland, with the infield as hard as a rock and the sky as gray as the
smoke coming from the factory chimneys. It didn’t matter. He was always there, every day, on the balls of his feet, ready to charge for a bunt or
dive to his left for a line drive or backhand a grounder down the line and make a throw as he fell backward. “That’s it!” my dad yelled to me as I
dived into the grass in our backyard, snared the ground ball, jumped to my feet, and made the return throw. “That’s it! That’s Brooks
Robinson!”"
The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski: https://a.co/85RKpHS

45. Alex Rodriguez. ..."the general feeling is that he will not be elected. But who knows? This comeback: It’s something quite remarkable. How
did it happen? Well, I think he’s a smart guy who has come across as sincerely contrite for the mistakes he made and managed to get across
his true love of baseball. This alone is incredible; so few athletes have managed to do it. Think Pete Rose. Think Barry Bonds. Think Roger
Clemens. Think about their failures. But I think there’s something else, too. It goes back to what Allard Baird saw all those years ago on a
high school baseball field: A-Rod was destined for greatness, perhaps more than anybody who ever played the game of baseball. And he
was great, truly great, but it never quite felt that way. It always felt corrupted. It always felt disappointing. He did that to himself. And now,
A-Rod stands before America and says that he wishes he’d done it all differently. He wishes that he could go back to that high school day
when he hit two home runs and stole two bases and inspired a young scout to send back a report with 80s on it. He can’t go back. He knows
that. We know that, too. And maybe we all understand that feeling too well."
"The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski: https://a.co/9l3CK7V

46. Musial. "There was something about Musial, I think, that somehow brought out the best in me and my writing. I don’t think this had much to do with me.
I assume it was his basic goodness, his consummate brilliance as a ballplayer, his devotion to making people happy. You know, sometimes Stan Musial
would walk up to a restaurant table where a family or group of friends would be celebrating something, a birthday, an anniversary, a job promotion,
whatever. He would be drawn to their joy. And then he would ask someone if he could borrow a dollar bill. He would then take the dollar bill and fold it
in various ways until he had transformed it into a ring. He would then slip the ring on a fan’s finger, giving them a lifetime memory. And I thought not
only about the sweetness of the gesture but of the fact that at some point Stan Musial had to teach himself how to fold a dollar bill into a ring. Why
would you teach yourself such a trick unless you planned to use it to bring joy to people? Yes, there was something about Musial that lifts the heart, and I
loved writing about that as much as I loved writing itself. But as this countdown reached No. 9, I found myself so nervous. Why? Because I wondered:
What did I have left to say about Stan the Man Musial? And then I remembered Stan Musial’s famous advice about hitting. “You wait for a strike,” he
said. “Then you knock the *&#%^ out of it.” In other words: Don’t complicate things."
The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski: https://a.co/bPYcAUo

47. Musial 2. "The kindness was always there with Musial. “Nicest man I ever met in baseball,” Bob Gibson said. The Dodgers’ pitcher Joe Black—one
of the first African-American pitchers in the National League—said that the first time he pitched against the Cardinals, he heard racist taunts. After
the game, he was sitting by his locker when he felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and it was Musial. “I’m sorry that happened,” Musial said.
“But don’t you worry about it. You’re a great pitcher. You will win a lot of games.” Chuck Connors, who later became an actor and the star of the
show The Rifleman, was briefly a big-league ballplayer. In 1951, he was playing for the Cubs and hitting so poorly that he couldn’t sleep at night. He
asked everyone he knew to help, but nobody knew how to help him. So he did the unthinkable: He asked Stan Musial of the rival Cardinals. And
you know what Musial did? He went with Connors to the batting cage and worked with him for a half hour. “You keep swinging,” Musial said at the
end as he slapped Connors on the back, and even though the batting lesson didn’t save his career, Connors never forgot it. “Stan was a better
player than me,” Mickey Mantle said, “because he was a better man than me.”"
The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski: https://a.co/1iUdSZR

48. Walter Johnson, “When Johnson died, more people talked about his decency and his kindness than his fastball. In a game where so many all-
time great players are also supremely nice people—Honus Wagner, Stan Musial, Roy Campanella, Brooks Robinson, Tony Gwynn, Mike
Trout, on and on—Walter Johnson might just have been the nicest of them all. He was so nice that many people in his day saw it as his one
fatal flaw. Ty Cobb used to crowd the plate against Johnson, knowing full well that he was too nice to throw at him. Babe Ruth used to talk
about how he liked facing Johnson for the same reason (Ruth hit .350/. 495/. 675 against Johnson by the best stats we have). “If he had been
born a mean cuss and tried to dust off the hitters,” Joe Sewell said, “nobody would have had a chance.” But he just couldn’t be mean. It wasn’t
in him. He loved people, especially kids. He signed all the autographs. He talked baseball with anyone who wanted to talk baseball. He
refused to question umpires. The umpire Billy Evans had another favorite Johnson story. Johnson had worked a 3-2 count against a hitter and
then threw a clear strike three, but Evans called it a ball. “Sometimes,” Evans would say, “we as human beings just make mistakes.” Evans felt
terrible because the walk cost Johnson a couple of runs, so he gave Johnson an opportunity to complain. “How’d that one look to you,
Walter?” he asked. “Maybe a trifle low?” Johnson said kindly, and he smiled, and Evans later said, “A better man has never played the game
of baseball.” Here’s another one: You know the story about Wagner’s refusal to appear on a tobacco card—that’s why his T-206 card, the few
that were printed before he made his refusal known, is the most valuable baseball card in the world. Johnson had what might be an even more
compelling story. A cigarette company offered him $ 10,000—more than $ 250,000 in today’s money—to appear in an advertisement, and all
he had to do was say he smoked that brand. Unfortunately, he could not do it because he did not smoke at all. “I needed that money badly,” he
would say. “But I couldn’t take it. I don’t object to cigarette smoking. But I don’t use them. And I believe it would have been worse than thievery
if I had urged the kids to buy a package of my ‘favorite’ brand and helped to increase the habit of smoking among our youngsters.” There are
countless examples. My favorite might be this: People often called Walter Johnson the “Big Swede.” This was somewhat disconcerting in that
Johnson was not Swedish. He had, as far as he knew, no Swedish ancestry whatsoever. And yet he accepted the nickname with the same
gentle equanimity he accepted all well-intended things. And when asked why, he simply said: “I didn’t want to offend anybody. There are a lot
of Swedes I know who are nice people.””
— The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski
https://a.co/bMFWdAk

49. Williams 1. “Chapter 5: Bid Kid Adieu Even a fleet of sportswriters wasn’t enough to feed Williams’s insatiable need to boil. It’s funny, people
talked about his incredible eyesight—measured at 20-15 when he was in the service—but it was actually his hearing that was supernatural.
Ted Williams could hear a single boo in a Fenway Park filled with cheers. Those boos terrorized him all his career. He spit at fans more than
once. He supposedly tried to hit a couple with foul balls. When he met awed young fans, he would sometimes say, “You’re not one of those
booers, are you?” “He never blamed fans for watching him,” Richard Ben Cramer wrote. “His hate was for those who couldn’t or wouldn’t feel
with him, his effort, his exultation, pride, rage or sorrow.” Especially rage. Williams might have been the greatest hitter ever. He also might
have been the greatest fisherman ever; he is in two fishing Halls of Fame. But everyone who knew him well will tell you he definitely was the
greatest swearer ever. Nobody, it seems, could spew blasphemy in the sort of poetic bursts quite like Williams. He was the Ella Fitzgerald of
profanity. In any case, at some point very early in his career, Williams decided that if fans were going to boo him, he would never, ever tip his
cap to them. It was an oath that made sense to him, and he kept it his entire career. He hit more than 500 home runs and might have
approached 700 had he not gone to war twice. His .482 lifetime on-base percentage is the all-time record. He had a 1.045 OPS as a 20-year-
old kid full of vinegar and 1.096 OPS as a 41-year-old with a bad neck and legs that ached all the time. All that time the fans, almost all of
them, cheered like mad. But he still heard the boos, and he never tipped his cap. Which brings us to the last game. It was September 28,
1960. Williams had turned 42 a month earlier. He’d had one last great season after a dismal and injury-plagued 1959 season—that season
was so bad that Yawkey asked him to retire. But Williams refused to go out like that, so he took a $ 35,000 pay cut and came back and hit
.316 with 29 home runs in only 390 plate appearances. And on that last day, 10,454 dreamers came out to Fenway Park for one last look. It
was a dreary day, cold, damp, a brisk wind blew in from right field. John Updike was among those who had come to see if maybe, just maybe,
the Kid could hit one more home run. Williams knew what everybody wanted. He tried. He hit two long fly balls, the second of which he
believed was as hard as he could hit a ball. Both died on the warning track. Then came the last at-bat. Baltimore’s Jack Fisher was on the
mound. His first pitch was a ball. His second pitch was a fastball over the middle of the plate and Williams swung right through it, almost falling
to the ground on the follow-through. Williams knew that Fisher would challenge him with another fastball after that. Fisher did. He threw one
more fastball, and Williams connected, and the ball soared to right field. “From my angle, behind third base,” Updike wrote, “the ball seemed
less an object in flight than the tip of a tower, motionless construct, like the Eiffel Tower or the Tappan Zee Bridge. It was in the books while it
was in the sky.” The ball sailed out, home run No. 521, and Williams ran the bases his usual way, head down, quick as he could—“ as if our
praise were a storm of rain to get out of,” Updike wrote—and he went to the bench…

50. Williams 2. The fans called to him. Teammates pushed him. The umpire asked him to come out. Fisher even paused on the mound to give
Williams a chance to take a curtain call. He stayed out of sight. Then Red Sox manager Pinky Higgins tried to trick Williams into saying
good-bye. He sent Williams out to left field for the top of the ninth and then, before the inning actually began, sent Carroll Hardy out there to
replace him. His hope was that Williams would hear the cheers—even he would not have been able to hear a boo in that crowd—and just
tip his cap on the way back to the dugout. “Our noise for some seconds passed beyond excitement into a kind of immense open anguish, a
wailing, a cry to be saved,” Updike wrote. “But immortality is nontransferable.” Ted Williams did not tip his cap. He’d made a promise to
himself years before. And he did not break promises to himself. He disappeared into the dugout for good. “Gods,” Updike wrote, “do not
answer letters.” Epilogue In 1999, Ted Williams rode to home plate in a golf cart for the All-Star Game at Fenway Park. He had suffered two
strokes and a broken hip in the previous months, but still he stood. The greatest living players—from Henry Aaron to Willie Mays, Bob Feller
to Stan Musial, Ken Griffey to Cal Ripken, and all the All-Stars of the day—surrounded him and hugged him. He tipped his cap, and the
crowd cheered as loudly as they ever had. “Hey, McGwire,” Williams shouted out to Mark McGwire, the most prodigious slugger in the world
then. “You ever smell the wood when you foul one off real hard? You ever notice how it smells like burning wood?” “I’ve smelled it,”
McGwire said. Maybe he had or maybe he was just saying so, but Ted Williams smiled and nodded and said it was the best bleeping smell
in the whole world.”
— The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski
https://a.co/ekgAN4W

51. Bonds. "So for Barry Bonds, unlike every other
player, we have no choice but to write two
stories. It works like so: If you like Bonds—or at
least respect him enough to read about his
greatness without losing your mind—you only
need to read the sections headlined “For Bonds
Fans.” And if you dislike Bonds—or maybe just
don’t have any room in your mind for anything
but criticism for him—you can stick with the
sections headlined “For Bonds Critics.” If you
veer into the wrong section, you do so at your
own peril. That’s just the deal with Barry Lamar
Bonds."
The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski:
https://a.co/5j58UbN

52. Ruth. "baseball surprisingly had something that no other American sport—perhaps no other feature of American life—had: timelessness. This was true on
the field, where time was measured by outs instead of clocks. But it was true off the field, too, where Walter Johnson becomes Bob Feller becomes Nolan
Ryan becomes Gerrit Cole; where Ty Cobb leads to Jackie Robinson leads to Pete Rose; Lou Gehrig leads to Cal Ripken Jr.; Willie Mays leads to Mike Trout.
The world around baseball progresses so rapidly, too rapidly, and it’s all but impossible to keep up. But baseball, in a large way, stays constant. Still 90 feet.
Still 60 feet, 6 inches. Still four balls and three strikes and three outs. They still call locker rooms clubhouses. Sure, it’s not real timelessness. It’s a fairy tale
we baseball fans tell ourselves. Ottavino is right. It is a different game. Ruth played in a time when black players were shut out. He played in a time before
night games, before air travel, before television, before closers, before weight training, before anyone cared about nutrition, before exploding sliders,
before 100 mph fastballs, before West Coast games, before a million other things. But here’s the thing: Baseball is the game that lets you pretend time can
stand still. And that, at the heart, is the magic of Babe Ruth. He makes time stand still. Maybe it’s pretend. But it feels real. He hits a home run in 1927 and
it feels as current and vibrant as if he did it last September. We see his record .690 slugging percentage and we set it side by side with Mike Trout’s .581.
We see grainy black-and-white film of his big swing and his tiny-step, pigeon-toed running style and we imagine it in full color. We believe in Babe Ruth
because we believe in baseball. The question of “how good would Babe Ruth be now?” might be intriguing, but it entirely misses the point. Babe Ruth is
great now, just like he was great in 1975; just like he was great in 1936 when he was elected to the Hall of Fame; just like he was great in 1927 when he hit
60 home runs; just like he was great in 1918 when he was throwing scoreless inning after scoreless inning in the World Series; just as he will be great 100
years from now. Minutes, hours, months, years—those don’t count in baseball. Only outs count. “That’s only two strikes, boys. I still have one coming,” he
shouted at the Cubs before his called shot. And that’s where time stands for eternity. Babe Ruth, forever, will still have one strike left."
The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski: https://a.co/22V3uUx

53. Mays. "And he finished his career with the Mets,
to the horror of all, by falling down in the
outfield. The only thing Willie Mays could not do
on a baseball diamond was stay young forever.
But even to the end, he sparked joy. What do you
love most about baseball? Mays did that. To
watch him play, to read the stories about how he
played, to look at his glorious statistics, to hear
what people say about him is to be reminded
why we love this odd and ancient game in the
first place. Yes, Willie Mays has always made kids
feel like grown-ups and grown-ups feel like kids.
In the end, isn’t that the whole point of
baseball?"
"The Baseball 100" by Joe Posnanski:
https://a.co/em3S4R0

54. Joe Posnanski asked his readers “Why We Love Baseball”... This response speaks to the character of the
fans, in this instance Cubs fans. My fellow Cardinals fans may consider it heresy, but I must acknowledge
their virtuous solidarity in love of the game.
This requires a little setup, but: yesterday
the Cubs called up Christopher Morel, a
top-15 prospect in their system who has
been absolutely knocking the cover off in
Double A.
He came up in the bottom of the 8th with
two outs and the Cubs up 6-0, so his at
bat wasn’t going to change the outcome of
the game and also didn’t really have any
personal developmental significance.
He started off the at bat by taking a close
pitch for a strike, then swinging through a
low breaking ball, but then managed to
work the count full by taking three balls.

55. This was his major league debut, so it was
great to see him stay calm and work the
count and not just swing through three
straight and go back to the dugout.
The crowd (and this is what I love about
baseball) got on their feet and started
making noise like he was the deciding run
in the ninth in game 7 of the World Series,
and what does he do to repay their support
but hit an absolute no doubter to the
concourse behind the left field bleachers.
The crowd erupted in cheers, the Cubs
dugout lost its collective mind in
celebration, and he was just so pumped he
missed first base and had to go back to
make sure he hit it. It was a beautiful,
beautiful baseball moment.

56. But what Angell did seemed different from the rest of us. It was alchemy in the
purest sense. He took the same lead the rest of us had — the same plays, the same
quotes, the same angles — and turned it into gold. I didn’t know what to say to him.
Instead, I followed him around that one World Series game … and learned little about
how I could follow him — how I could become him. Instead, I would read and reread
his essays, and rather than simply highlighting those passages that grabbed my heart
and turned my mind, I would write them out longhand in a notebook or I would type
them two or three times into a word processor, in the vague hope that just writing
the words would trigger something in my own writing. Joe Posnanski

57. “You didn’t want to disappoint him,” David Remnick writes, about the legendary
New Yorker writer Roger Angell, who died on Friday at the age of 101. “He
always had our affection *and* our respect.” http://nyer.cm/QjnYwlN
You didn't want to disappoint him because he was an exemplar of character,
virtue, excellence, arete...
David Cone praised him on a Yankees telecast: "he
was a player!" -because he "got a new girlfriend" in
his 90s. And Cone was supposed to be a Thinking
Man's ballplayer.