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Does Sotomayor deserve a place in baseball history?
of TheColumnists.com
One of the delightful
summer arguments, especially when a bunch of guys are sitting
around a picnic table with a hot dog in one hand and a beer can
in the other, is who invented baseball.
Was it those guys around Pittsfield, Massachusetts, as some now
claim because of recently discovered letters and newspaper clippings
with the term base ball in the text, in the early 1830s?
Could it really have been General Abner Doubleday who encouraged
his Civil War troops in the 1860s to take two and hit to right
when they weren’t hunting rebels.
How about those 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings who moved around
the country with flashy uniforms and the bragging rights to the
lasting refrain, “We play for pay.”
A hundred years later, in the summer of 1969, I attended a White
House event celebrating baseball’s 100th birthday. We sportswriters
and baseball executives named Joe DiMaggio the game’s greatest
living player at the event. The Yankee Clipper incorporated the
title and piled up millions as a result of it while Ted Williams
and Stan Musial were shut out.
Hoboken, New Jersey has a huge downtown plaque suggesting the
game really began there in the 1870s when New Yorkers took a
ferry across the Hudson to engage in the game.
As the beer cans are crushed and the hot dogs are downed, the
arguments go on. No matter. It is all fun in the summer sun.
Now a new argument has emerged in the springtime of 2009.
Who saved baseball?
Was it Babe Ruth for hitting so many home runs in the 1920s and
bragging that he should be paid more than President Herbert Hoover
because he had a better year than the president?
Was it Lou Gehrig in the 1930s for adding to his consecutive
game playing streak each day or Bob Feller for starting out as
the hardest thrower in the game at the age of 17 or Ted Williams
for hitting .406 in 1941 as DiMaggio batted in 56 consecutive
games?
Maybe it was Jackie Robinson for integrating the Great American
Pastime in 1947 or Bobby Thomson for The Shot Heard Round the
World in 1951 or America’s team of the time, the Brooklyn
Dodgers, for finally beating the Yankees in the 1955 World Series
and reminding us all that anything is possible in sports or life.
It could have been Curt Flood, as he battled free agency with
the help of legendary Marvin Miller, who saved the game with
a new business code.
Pete Rose challenged DiMaggio with hits in 44 straight games
and the country paid rapt attention.
Maybe it was the big boppers of the 1990s, saddled with chemicals,
energizing the game with record breaking home run titles and
distant blows.
Now it is clear, as new reports indicate, that it was a female
54-year-old Supreme Court nominee with the melodic name of Sonia
Sotomayor who did the deed.
President Barack Obama, in nominating Sotomayor, daughter of
Puerto Rican immigrants, pointed out that as a federal district
court judge in 1995, she ruled that the National Labor Relations
Board had a legitimate gripe against the baseball owners. The
owners, as the players struck for better conditions, attempted
to change the bargaining rules.
Sotomayor issued an injunction before the 1995 opening day preventing
the game’s fat cats from changing the bargaining rules in
midstream.
Yankee president Randy Levine, then the chief negotiator for
the owners, said the judge’s move led to “good faith
bargaining that produced revenue sharing, the luxury tax and
inter-league play.”
It still didn’t end the designated hitter rule. Maybe Sotomayor
is saving that one for her time on the highest court’s bench.
Baseball has survived for a century or 125 years or maybe more
than 150 if you connect it with English cricket through all sorts
of challenges.
President Franklin Roosevelt told Judge Kenesaw Landis to keep
the game going during World War II for morale purposes.
Strikes and lockouts slowed it down but never severely damaged
it. There were always home run hitters and strikeout pitchers
to pick up the slack as soon as play was resumed.
Sotomayor got the owners and players on the same course again
in her 1995 ruling. With or without her ruling, the guess here
is that the two sides would have found a way. They always did.
Obama seems good on spin control. This one will help Sotomayor
earn her confirmation. How could anyone vote against the lady
who saved the Great American Pastime?
Gee, wonder how she will vote when gay marriage comes before
the Supreme Court?
©2009 by Maury Allen. The Maury Allen caricature is ©2001 by Jim Hummel. This column first posted June 1, 2009.
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