(Re) Play Ball!
In baseball, the past is present
By Randy Horick
AUGUST 24, 1998:
Babe Ruth died 45 years ago last Sunday, but he made an amazing comeback
this year.The "Sultan of Swat" now wears a uniform of the St. Louis
Cardinals. And of the Seattle Mariners. And of the Chicago Cubs, in whose
northside ballpark he hit his famous, much-debated "called" home run. He
has even turned up in the uniform of his old team, the Yankees--one of whom
actually dons the Bambino's cap when he pitches.
It doesn't matter that, as a player, Ruth was superior to all of his
reincarnations. He hit for a better average and struck out far less often
than the Cardinals' Mark McGwire. He was an even more prodigious home-run
hitter than Ken Griffey Jr. of the Mariners. He was a better all-around
player than the Cubs' Sammy Sosa. And, back in his years with the Red Sox,
he was a better left-handed pitcher than David Wells of the Yanks--the man
who bought Babe's vintage cap. (Ruth, we might add, was also a vastly more
voluminous eater than the portly Wells; once, on an excursion to Coney
Island, the Bambino conspicuously consumed four porterhouse steaks and
eight hot dogs.)
Nor does it matter that McGwire, Griffey, and Sosa are hotly pursuing a
record--most home runs in one season--that hasn't even belonged to Ruth for
37 years. The most significant similarity between Babe Ruth and today's
Baby Ruths isn't on the field anyhow.
In 1920, baseball as a national pastime had been given up for dead. The
scandal of the year before, in which eight members of the Chicago White Sox
were accused of sand-bagging in the World Series, had left the game
discredited and a shambles. Baseball (and baseball attendance), the
prognosticators professed, would slowly recede, yielding its position to
newer, more robust games like football.
Instead, Ruth changed everything. That season, his first in Yankee
pinstripes, he established a record with a jaw-dropping slugging percentage
of .847. He batted .376 and scored 158 runs.
But his other mark--54 homers--was even more amazing. No previous
major-league player had ever come remotely close to that total; the
Cardinals' George Sisler, the National League's top home-run hitter in
1920, finished with only 19.
Ruth suddenly rendered antiquated the old, slashing, base-to-base style
of play epitomized by Ty Cobb. In the process, he captured the imaginations
of jaded fans. In 1920, one season after baseball went comatose, the
Yankees nearly doubled the previous year's attendance, becoming the first
team in any sport to draw more than a million spectators.
Baseball's predicament in 1920 was more than a little like the pinch in
which the pastime found itself just a year ago. The strike of 1994 nearly
dealt baseball a mortal blow. The greed and shortsightedness of the
players, combined with the avarice and myopia of baseball's owners, left
sullen fans calling down a pox on both houses.
When the game returned in 1995, the crowds did not. Even before the
strike, younger Americans appeared to hold more interest in other sports.
Baseball was too boring, the pundits pooh-poohed. Baseball games lasted too
long. Baseball needed more continuous, full-tilt action--like a video
game.
Just as Ruth, in the minds of some sports historians, once saved
baseball, so McGwire and Griffey are receiving credit for reviving interest
in the game now--credit that is well deserved. But the truth is, had it not
been Ruth in the 1920s, it would have been someone else--maybe Lou Gehrig
or Jimmie Foxx. And had it not been for McGwire and Griffey, others would
be stepping to the plate.
Professional baseball is a cyclical, rhythmic game, and its popularity
has waxed and waned like the tides over the course of 125 years. It is a
patient that routinely makes miraculous recoveries after suffering long,
presumably incurable illnesses.
This time, the healers are easy to identify.
The long-leaderless owners, whose stewardship of the game has so often
seemed incompetent, indifferent, and infantile, fortuitously blundered into
two brilliant strategems: interleague play and wild-cards. Both ideas,
initially reviled by baseball purists, have instead invigorated baseball.
The possibility of a wild-card playoff spot has resuscitated fan interest
in at least six major-league markets where the pennant races by now are
pretty well decided.
Meanwhile, interleague games have nurtured crosstown and geographic
rivalries. On top of all that, fans seem to have noticed that baseball is
the only big-league sport in which you can still get a good seat for under
$20.
Especially, though, baseball is beginning to thrive again because a new
generation of players is chasing hallowed old records.
Roger Maris' magical home-run mark of 61, which both McGwire and Sosa
still have decent chances of eclipsing (each had 47 by Monday), has stood
for 37 years--longer than Ruth himself held the record.
For better than half the season (and better than anyone in decades),
Juan Gonzalez of the Rangers looked as if he might improve on an almost
impossible standard: Hack Wilson's 68-year-old record of 190 RBIs.
The Yankees are on pace to win more games in a season than any team
ever, erasing a record that was established in the first decade of this
century.
And each time he takes the field, of course, Cal Ripken Jr. sets a new
mark that probably will never be broken.
That's baseball's comparative advantage. Every new achievement evokes
the glories of the past, in a way that's not possible in other sports.
Fans who last saw football and basketball in the 1920s would barely
recognize those sports today. The games have changed fundamentally.
Baseball has remained remarkably the same for 75 years. Because the game
has such continuity, the benchmarks of the past still have relevance to the
present.
Few football fans can tell you how many yards O. J. Simpson or Jim Brown
gained during their record-setting seasons. But any self-respecting
baseball aficionado can rattle off the two unsurpassed marks that were
established in 1941: Ted Williams' .406 batting average and Joe DiMaggio's
56-game hitting streak.
All records are made to be broken. But in baseball, they're not broken
very often. And when some player challenges an enduring old mark, it
creates not only fascination with the chase but with baseball's tradition
and cycles.
In our collective memory, McGwire and Griffey recall Ruth and Maris;
Gonzalez's RBI runaway this year forces us to look with renewed
appreciation upon Wilson's even more stunning accomplishment in 1930; and
the 1998 Yankees bring to life their famous, pinstriped predecessors of
1927.
In baseball, reincarnation is not only possible but essential. The
game's singular genius is that its old heroes live forever, because
twinkling new stars always appear to remind us of them.
"The poetry of earth is never dead," observed Keats in his sentimental
sonnet about grasshoppers and crickets and the rhythm of the seasons. He
just as easily could have been writing about seasons in baseball:
"On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one, in drowsiness half-lost,
The grasshopper's among some grassy hills."
The same sentiment, appropriately, was expressed more eloquently and
succinctly by the great baseball philosopher, Lawrence P. Berra. "It's
déjà vu," said the Yoge, "all over again."

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