A Message For Every Minor League Clubhouse Wall
The game of baseball is a timeline more than a century old. Barry, Sammy, and Jose have set their part of it in sad stone. How will the young players reporting to minor league camp shape it?
Brian Ross
Sr. Editor
MLNSportsZone.com
[Opinion] - Welcome to the dream factory! If you’re here, then you’ve managed to get farther than thousands of other boys and young men who’ve dreamed about playing big league baseball.
Most of you are working on that thing or two that will get your game to the level that will make the instructors, scouts, coaches, and skippers sit back and take notice of you. There is one skill, though, that many clubs have difficulty in teaching: Character.
Sadly, many of the men who are the greatest stars of the modern game of baseball will go down in history for dragging the character of the game down while shattering numeric records.
Barry Bonds may take the home run record. It will put him into the record books. Press conferences like his 2005 spring tirade will fade from memory. What will remain though, is the perception of his contempt for everyone but Barry. He lacks the public graciousness of a Ruth. He has not evolved the dignity of an Aaron. No milestone humbles him. His public persona will taint every record. It will always be the thing that sours any conversation about his greatness.
Ty Cobb may be a legend. He was considered a dirty player in his day for his anything-goes tactics, not drugs. He was a great competitor fueled by hate as much as ability. To this day the legacy of his dark personality puts his achievements on the field a notch below the other superstars of his day. Yet even he knew his limits. The face that he put out to the media and the public was as good as he could muster, because he knew the secret which you will soon discover.
Mark McGwire, in his hunt for the magic mark of Maris, started out as a player who had a reputation for being aloof from the media and fans. In the great love fest that was the home run derby of his record-breaking year, he rediscovered the fans and the press. Not surprisingly, when he stopped treating them like the enemy, they embraced him in ways that healed him, and healed a strike-shocked game. Even though Canseco brought the steroid hunt to his doorstep, he remains largely untouched. Why?
Greatness is not measured entirely by the balls that sail over the outfield fence, or the number of times that the ball thuds in the catcher’s glove as the bat glides helplessly past it.
To be one of the great players of all time, a million little boys holding balls out for you have to remember that moment for the rest of their lives. The young men that they become have to want to be just like you. The old men they settle into must remember you kindly.
You don’t have to be a media darling, although the Ruths and McGwires and Stargells and Ryans who pass through the game certainly provide one kind of fan enjoyment. They show their character by doing things for the fans and their community that will be remembered alongside their baseball careers with respect and admiration.
There is quiet character. Mike Scoscia. Richie Hebner. Cal Ripken. Mickey Hatcher. Bill Evers. Men whose achievements over a lifetime come from a lot of hard work and determination, but are polished and remembered by the way in which they handle other people, and the grace with which they touch the game.
As a boy, I remember a night where Mike Scoscia held on to the ball even after being knocked out cold. As a man, I remember the kindness that he showed my kids on a cold, rainy night in Albuquerque where the Dukes' skipper could have gone into the clubhouse, but instead listened to the calls of “Mike! Over here!” and took a minute to make a memory for them. I know that he instilled those same lessons into the players in his clubhouse.
I think of all the great men that the Durham Bulls' Bill Evers has sent into life as much as the great players that he’s readied for the game. Baseball, at its best, is Bill Evers. People that made the game the national pastime, a reflection of the best parts of our national character in sport.
I talk to dozens of you every year. I watch young men with big dreams and good characters leave the minors. Even though we’re done with you, if I’ve ever done a story on you, I watch your progress. Not only in terms of your records, but who you are as a person. Not how the game “changes” you. That’s a cop-out. How you change in the game.
There is nothing “big league” about having a tantrum because they didn’t have a limo waiting for you at the airport. Or being under house arrest and whiling away your time writing poison pen memoirs. Or gambling on the game with the expectation that time will wash away the stink of your sin and your lies.
People say that it is the astronomical pay that a ballplayer receives that corrupts you. To get hundreds of thousands, or millions of dollars and not have life change when you’re used to having far less, or nothing, is almost impossible. Yet it’s not the money. There are players, sadly ones that the media tends to ignore, who remember that the ride can end at any time, and that they are part of not only a team, but a part of the timeline of a game that is more than a century old.
We don't help the process. The post-Vietnam era sports media is part of the broader media that operates on the theory that only the negative is true and real. The gentlemen's agreements that used to operate regarding a player's personal life have gone out of the window. Get chewed up a few times by sports writers, and your character is put to the test.
There are the memorabilia vultures, who haunt you at gates, trying to make a living off of you. People trying to attach your face or name to something to let a little of the magic rub off on them. There are the minor league groupies who want to be you, and lose a little perspective along the way.
When you enter a public business as a celebrity, your grace and character are sorely, and occasionally unreasonably, tested.
You remember the bigger picture. Your passion for the game. The struggle and sacrifice. The fun of just being out there and doing it and getting paid for playing the game that you love.
You walk through that door to winter camp and find that locker with your last name on it that stacks up with a hundred more like it. You want one of those sixty or so over in the next room, that fulfill the dream, and change the your and your family's financial destiny forever.
The difference between those players who define the game, beyond the stats, seems to be that they never forget that they were that kid on the fence trying to get Cal Ripken’s autograph. They remember that the media, good or bad, is a conduit back to the most important resource for a player in the game: The fans' memory.
A local columnist can ding you every day, but a fan whom you treated kindly will always remember that you came over and signed the ball, said a few kind words to a face that you will never see again. There is nothing that one person can write that will change who you are for that fan, or anyone that they know. Writers out of sync with the fans view of you don't sell newspapers or books. They can try to shape opinion, but you have as much, if not more impact on the fans than anything that they can put in print.
Those faces over their lifetime pay out the astronomical salaries that some of you will make, in the form of an extra few cents for their bubble gum, beer, auto insurance, shoes, and property tax that filter back into your pocket, or build that brand new stadium that you play in. It's when you're dog tired, and you don't want to deal with it, that the quick stop to remember the people who gives to you is even more appreciated. You hear the jerks. The ones who know what it took for you to be there for them usually acknowledge you with a silent respect.
You are the future of the game, whether your career takes you to New York or Newark. The rules about drugs or gambling, the perks like the limos and the trading cards and the sponsorship deals, the sex scandals, the over-the-top brawls that hurt fans, have defined a generation of the game in a negative way that will cause history to look before, and after this period of time with affection.
The secret that McGwire learned? You play to win for the day. Admission to the Hall of Fame is a magnificent milestone. To have a career that is considered with the greats of all time, you have to be great in the public mind. Barry may think that he wins the day with public displays of hostility and defiance, but he loses the career. It is the natural tendency of humans to tune out the negative. Unless Bonds gets his act together before he retires, count on the fact that the negative static will affect whatever records he achieves, whether you agree with him or not.
You have the power to change the face of the game. Don’t be Barry, Sammy, or Jose. Show the world what makes baseball great. Your choices shape the game. Take the field without drugs, play as hard as you can, and remember that it is all about the people on the other side of the fence, whose memory of you will one day be your career, whether your best day in the game was as a Sun King or a Yankee.
