Saturday, May 29, 2004
In Our Time
Some nights offer baseball writers nothing except score, winning pitching, losing pitching and all the stuff in between. Home runs, doubles, stolen bases, errors... Nothing but a litany of box scores and stat lines.
Other nights offer much more. Sometimes much more than one writer can do justice to alone. Last night was one of those nights.
On any given day, my favorite thing about following baseball is the connection that everything in the present has to the past. The managers and coaches in the dugouts today were in those very same dugouts 10, 15 years ago, albeit as players. A group of players (which includes Bonds, Clemens, Palmeiro, Griffey, Johnson, Sosa, et al.) are passing career milestones every day. And the names they're passing, if we allow for a moment of reflection, conjure up all kinds of images and anecodates rattling around in our brains.
Lou Gehrig is probably my favorite "old time" ballplayer, i.e. my favorite player that I never saw play. Players I only know about via grainy video clips, scratchy audio tapes, articles and books. Gehrig has been at the top of this particular list for me since I was probably 11 or 12 years old.
I gravitated to his story: the streak, the illness, the success on the ball field, his role of playing second fiddle to Ruth. And his nickname, "The Iron Horse," a moniker that conjures a sort of epic heroism, has always been my favorite. As I've gotten older, Gehrig has remained my favorite historical player, for those reasons I've stated and more. It's easy to lose heroes as one gets older, yet that aura of dignity that his name carries with it, whether real or imagined, remains enough to inspire me to some exent.
In what was a footnote, or at the most a side feature to one of the great baseball nights in recent memory, Ken Griffey Jr. hit home run #493 of his brilliant career in a 7-6 win over Montreal. His clout in the 5th tied him with Gehrig for 20th on the all-time list, and his next home run will knock Gehrig out of the top 20 for the first time in about 70 years.
Unless I'm off as I'm reading through the list, when Gehrig retired in 1939 he was #2 on baseball's home run list, behind only Ruth. The subsequent decades has seen his name knocked down the list, slowly steadily, one peg at a time.
I'm sure at one point in time, it was a very big deal to pass Lou Gehrig on baseball's home run list; and I'd like to think it's still a fairly big deal now. ESPN.com's little blurb on their main Baseball Index page reads "Junior Ties Gehrig." But it's not that big a deal. In fact Griffey, and I can't blame him, seems only focused on his next batch of home runs, the ones that will land him on the magical 500 mark:
When a modern player passes someone's achievements, someone who has been gone for a long time, I like to pause and try it give it some reflection. My thoughts this morning when pulling into Dunkin' Donuts to fuel up, were "Wow, Lou Gehrig hit a lot of home runs." I know that sounds simplistic, but it was one of those moments when simple words are representative of a bigger feeling, bigger thought.
Ken Griffey, Jr. has been playing a long time, since I was in middle-school in fact. Trust me that's a long time. And it took that time, with some injury-riddled seasons in there, to catch Lou Gehrig. Just a subtle reminder of what a productive and great player he was in a different time. That's all.
Some nights offer baseball writers nothing except score, winning pitching, losing pitching and all the stuff in between. Home runs, doubles, stolen bases, errors... Nothing but a litany of box scores and stat lines.
Other nights offer much more. Sometimes much more than one writer can do justice to alone. Last night was one of those nights.
On any given day, my favorite thing about following baseball is the connection that everything in the present has to the past. The managers and coaches in the dugouts today were in those very same dugouts 10, 15 years ago, albeit as players. A group of players (which includes Bonds, Clemens, Palmeiro, Griffey, Johnson, Sosa, et al.) are passing career milestones every day. And the names they're passing, if we allow for a moment of reflection, conjure up all kinds of images and anecodates rattling around in our brains.
Lou Gehrig is probably my favorite "old time" ballplayer, i.e. my favorite player that I never saw play. Players I only know about via grainy video clips, scratchy audio tapes, articles and books. Gehrig has been at the top of this particular list for me since I was probably 11 or 12 years old.
I gravitated to his story: the streak, the illness, the success on the ball field, his role of playing second fiddle to Ruth. And his nickname, "The Iron Horse," a moniker that conjures a sort of epic heroism, has always been my favorite. As I've gotten older, Gehrig has remained my favorite historical player, for those reasons I've stated and more. It's easy to lose heroes as one gets older, yet that aura of dignity that his name carries with it, whether real or imagined, remains enough to inspire me to some exent.
In what was a footnote, or at the most a side feature to one of the great baseball nights in recent memory, Ken Griffey Jr. hit home run #493 of his brilliant career in a 7-6 win over Montreal. His clout in the 5th tied him with Gehrig for 20th on the all-time list, and his next home run will knock Gehrig out of the top 20 for the first time in about 70 years.
Unless I'm off as I'm reading through the list, when Gehrig retired in 1939 he was #2 on baseball's home run list, behind only Ruth. The subsequent decades has seen his name knocked down the list, slowly steadily, one peg at a time.
I'm sure at one point in time, it was a very big deal to pass Lou Gehrig on baseball's home run list; and I'd like to think it's still a fairly big deal now. ESPN.com's little blurb on their main Baseball Index page reads "Junior Ties Gehrig." But it's not that big a deal. In fact Griffey, and I can't blame him, seems only focused on his next batch of home runs, the ones that will land him on the magical 500 mark:
"It's just one of those things that I'll take one day at a time and see what happens -- I'm still a few away" Griffey said. "My main objective is to win ballgames and see what happens from there."
Courtesy of the AP
When a modern player passes someone's achievements, someone who has been gone for a long time, I like to pause and try it give it some reflection. My thoughts this morning when pulling into Dunkin' Donuts to fuel up, were "Wow, Lou Gehrig hit a lot of home runs." I know that sounds simplistic, but it was one of those moments when simple words are representative of a bigger feeling, bigger thought.
Ken Griffey, Jr. has been playing a long time, since I was in middle-school in fact. Trust me that's a long time. And it took that time, with some injury-riddled seasons in there, to catch Lou Gehrig. Just a subtle reminder of what a productive and great player he was in a different time. That's all.
