"Baseball as America" at the Museum of Science
I spent the morning at the preview for "Baseball
As America," the traveling Hall of Fame exhibit on display at
the Museum
of Science from June 15 through September 1.
And I cannot
recommend it enough. Go see it this weekend.
Aiming to
show how baseball serves “as both a
public reflection of, and catalyst for, the evolution of American culture and
society,” the exhibit comprises 500 or so artifacts — about two percent of Cooperstown’s total collection.
Among the
highlights: one of Babe Ruth’s bats, Jackie Robinson’s jersey, Schilling’s bloody sock,
a baseball recovered from the rubble of the World Trade Center, a scorecard from the
1903 World Series, the bat Ted Williams swung to hit his 521st and final home
run, the final out ball from the 2004 Series — and more recent additions, like
the cap Buchholz wore during his no-hitter and the tar-caked helmet Manny was wearing
when he hit his 500th homer.
Six Hall of
Famers were on hand to celebrate: Bobby Doerr, Carl Yastrzemski, Carlton
Fisk, Wade Boggs, Dennis Eckersley, and Eddie Murray. Lemme tell you: it’s
really something to walk into a room and see those living legends just milling
about and chatting.
Before
things got underway, I noticed that Pudge seemed to take special interest in
a couple of the museum’s science exhibits. Indeed science, as one would expect, does
play a role in “Baseball As America.” There are exhibits showing dissected baseballs, and stations where visitors can judge their reaction time,
measure their pitching speed, and try out their accuracy from 60 feet, six inches.
There’s also a cage where one can put one’s face where the catcher’s would be,
and stare down a machine-launched fastball, flying forward at 95 mph. It is ...
terrifying.
In keeping
with the theme, Dr. James
Sherwood, director of the Baseball
Research Center at UMass Lowell, offered a few words, remembering the time Sandy Alderson came to
him and said, “Jim, people are concerned the ball is being juiced. We want you
to use your expertise and let us know. If there’s a problem, we’ll address it.
But we don’t think there’s a problem.” They spent months doing exhaustive research. The verdict? “It wasn’t the ball being juiced,” said Sherwood to much
laughter. “I suggested [MLB] might want to look in another direction.”
(Sherwood
also spoke of studies examining the differences between ash bats and maple, his
take: there’s “no difference.” But, of course, “Dumbo put the feather in his trunk and thought he could fly; if you think you can hit the baseball better
with a maple bat, you can hit the baseball better with a maple bat.”)
The best speech came from Peter Gammons. He doesn’t have a lot of souvenirs
from his decades living the game, he said, but one of his favorite, framed in
his house on the Cape, is “a long,
impassioned, reasoned and statistically oriented letter” from Tip O’Neill arguing
that Smokey Joe
Wood deserved to be in the Hall of Fame.
Gammons
asked O’Neill why he wrote it. O’Neill replied that “the
Hall of Fame, maybe more than any museum in this country, is the museum that
counts. It’s not only the museum that binds generations of people together, fathers
and sons and grandsons, it is, without question, the museum
of the social history of the United States.
And I think you know better than anyone that it’s the museum that shows that
greatness is not accidental.”
And so Gammons offered plaudits to the game’s greats arrayed before him.
He’d never had the pleasure of covering Doerr, but “his
picture was in my parents’ kitchen, and I was always told that that was the man
I should emulate for the rest of my life.”
(I spoke
with Doerr, briefly, and at 90, his handshake is still firm and
strong. He says Jon Lester’s “a good-looking player.” He’s pleased that the
team is still playing well and keeping head above water in the absence of guys
like Ortiz and Matsuzaka. He loves watching
Jacoby Ellsbury — who’s from his neck of the woods — run the base paths. He
says the fishing in Oregon
hasn’t been too good lately.)
As for the
guys Gammons has been covering for the past 40 years or so, he offered a salient memory
for each:
-For Fisk,
he remembered him rehabbing his knee in 1974, on his own, in the days before
physical trainers were commonplace, eight hours a day, in the Manchester, New Hampshire
YMCA. People thought his career might be over. He returned to the game and caught more games than anyone in history.
-Eckersley,
he said, embodied accountability. Specifically, he remembered the game, during
the 1978 Sox-Yanks pennant race, in which a dropped pop fly — missed by five
Red Sox players, including fill-in second-baseman Frank Duffy, led to a five-run inning
and eventual 7-1 loss. As reporters swamped Duffy, post-game, Eck emerged from
the trainer’s room and let them have it. “Leave him alone,” he
yelled. “Frank Duffy didn’t put the three guys on base before that popup, I
did. Frank Duffy didn’t hang the 0-2 slider that Bucky Dent hit for two more
runs... The L goes next to my name.” It was, says Gammons, “the greatest moment
of accountability I’ve ever experienced.”
-Boggs was
lauded for his tenacity. After “his sixth consecutive year of hitting .300 in
the minors and still not on a major league roster,” Gammons visited Pawtucket to talk to him
and was struck by his “unflappable will to make it.” (He took ground balls like
a man possessed, said Gammons — and it paid off. “To be a two-time gold glove
winner is in some ways a greater thing than 3,000 hits and all the rest, because
people always told you couldn’t field.”)
-“I don’t
think Eddie Murray ever realized how much I used
to watch him take batting practice,” Gammons said, noting he’d heard someone
say Murray “was
the only person who practiced winning.” Instead of putting on a show, with
homers to all fields, Murray
would “dump the ball inside third, or to left field. All those great two-out
RBIs that were the hallmark of his career were not accidental.”
-As for
Yaz, Gammons simply looked at the Captain with a smile and said, “Carl, all the
work you put in. All those hours of hitting.... I think Yaz might be the
toughest man I’ve ever known."
(Apologies for the crappiness of these images. I am not a photographer by trade.)