By Joe Marren
Buffalo, NY – A late and great baseball commish once said that baseball is designed to break your heart. It's supposed to, he intoned, because when the season is over it's already fall and it's cold and it's rainy and, well, the boys of summer don't listen to winter's frigid overtures.
Wait a minute, that actually sounded a lot like the B-Lo this past July, didn't it? Or it could describe any of those desperately seeking a cheap free agent phenom in the perpetual cellar-dwelling M-L-B cities. Let me explain that last remark: See, baseball doesn't have a salary cap. So there are certain teams seemingly always doomed and certain teams seemingly always buying top-shelf champagne. I'm not naming names cause I'm a Yankees fan. Let's just let it go, OK?
But anyway, baseball is gonna break your heart. Yeah, tell that to Ted Williams fans - and I admit I'm one of them. The Splendid Splinter's head was recently turned into a splendid golf tee. Unlike before, I'm not gonna explain what I mean by that. You just have to know. You just have to be aware. I'll only hint at what I mean by channeling Cleveland Brown, formerly of "Family Guy" and now the star of his own show, to explain what the keepers of Ted's head did: "Oh, that's just nasty." Look, I said I was channeling Cleveland, not impersonating him. I can't do impersonations. I tried. I think I was the only guy from the '70s who couldn't do a Tricky Dick Nixon impersonation. Or dance like the guy who taught John Travolta how to dance. Nixon was a football guy and I don't know if Vinnie Barbarino liked baseball. But he was from Brooklyn, so he undoubtedly had issues with baseball. He knew that baseball would always break some hearts.
Just ask Buck O'Neil fans - and I admit I'm one of them. I actually met O'Neil, talked to him, shook his hand. My father used to have this shtick where he'd say, "Shake the hand that shook the hand of F-D-R, H-S-T, J-F-K and R-F-K," completing the South Buffalo Irish pantheon and throwing in a few WASP refs for good measure. Now I can say, "Shake the hand that shook the hand of Mickey Mantle and Buck O'Neil. I'm working on the rest."
I only got to shake O'Neil's hand because I was in the right place at the right time. It was pure serendipity. A few years ago I was at an academic conference in Kansas City. Fed up with talk of pedagogy, one day I decided to take in the Negro Leagues Hall of Fame. Buck was there, getting ready to take the Royals' top farm prospects on a private tour. I was then - and remain now - gray haired and gentlemanly portly. I look more like a 19th century president than a top baseball prospect. But Buck let me go on the tour with them. It was magic.
I don't remember much of what he said. I remember what wasn't said. He was a batting champ in the Negro Leagues and the first African American to work as a major league coach. All he ever wanted to do was play baseball. But for a long time he couldn't in the big leagues and the only reason he couldn't was because he didn't look like white players. Yet all he wanted to talk about that day was his love of the game, love for others, and forgiveness. At some point I realized I was secretly wishing he was my grandfather and not a celebrity and yet also a stranger.
Yes, baseball is designed to break your heart. O'Neil's wasn't broken as a player or coach. And it wasn't broken a few years later when he fell one vote short of making the Hall of Fame.
Someone who did make the Hall, but struggled with the fame, was Mantle. I met him in Niagara Falls when I was a reporter covering a baseball card show. As a kid I identified with Frank Howard - big and bespectacled. But I wanted to be Mickey Mantle. I could never hit the inside curve because I kept bailing on it during flight. So I knew at a young age that I would never be Mickey Mantle. Baseball can break your heart even as a kid.
And it almost broke my heart as a reporter when the promoter wouldn't let me up on stage to talk with Mantle. I was enterprising sort, though, and figured out a way to ask him a few quick questions. He could have ignored me, but he smiled and talked to me, joked with the crowd around us, got in his limo and disappeared toward the Robert Moses.
I had met my boyhood idol and there seemed to be a weary sadness about him. A while later I read in S-I that his drinking problem was getting worse at the time and his liver just about quit on him. He almost died on a flight home from the East after a card show, the article said. It didn't say the show was in Niagara Falls, but it hinted. And I thought, "Wow, I could have been the last reporter The Mick ever spoke to." It took me a long time before I realized what I was thinking. Baseball can break your heart. Sometimes journalism can, too.
Listener-commentator Joe Marren is an associate professor of communications at Buffalo State College.
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