What Is Baseball History For?

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This story was originally published at Baseball Prospectus on January 12.

In 1934, a tall, skinny southpaw named Stuart “Slim” Jones had a season nearly as good as any in history, going 20-4 with a 1.24 ERA. He allowed only 141 hits in 203 innings while walking just 47 and striking out 164 batters. The season would prove to be a one-off. Jones’ arm had been spent and the drugs of the time couldn’t repair it. He also drank heavily and, either consequently of all of the liquor or by tragic coincidence, other parts of his body, those more directly implicated in sustaining life than an arm, began to interrupt down. Slim Jones died in Baltimore in 1938. He was only 25. 

Jones’ sole yr of glory got here in 1934, the season which might someday put Dizzy Dean within the Hall of Fame. Dean pitched the St. Louis Cardinals to the World Series along with his 30-7, 2.66 ERA season. Because the Cy Young Award was still years in the long run, the baseball writers could only consider him for the National League Most Invaluable Player Award. This he won easily, however it’s easy to wonder how Jones’ season may need complicated his candidacy had voters been able to think about it; nearly as good as Dean was, he wasn’t as successful at stopping runs as a few of his peers. Despite winning nine more games than the Giants’ Carl Hubbell, Dean ranked second to Hubbell in ERA (2.30), whereas Jones was a 3rd of a run higher than his nearest rival, Satchel Paige, and almost 1.3 runs higher than the pitcher who ranked third, Lefty Holmes. Baseball-Reference figures Dean’s park- and league-adjusted ERA at 159, and Jones’ at 333. 

Little question the inclusion of Paige makes it obvious why the voters didn’t ask themselves if all of Dean’s 30 wins, 300-inning durability, and folksy charm were a greater mark of excellence than Jones’ more thorough stifling of hitters: They occupied separate universes. As a player of color, Jones was restricted to the Negro National League; the Philadelphia Stars were the recipients of his skill, though every team within the white majors would have benefited from his presence. 

Jones’ eventual fate can’t be blamed on the colour line, or at the very least the colour line can’t be blamed directly. Pitching being inherently destructive to the arm, sustained greatness in moundsmen is more the exception than the rule. Alcoholism has complex causes and we don’t know enough about Jones’ recourse to the bottle to comment. Similarly, the origins of his non-athletic health issues (his kidneys quit) are unknown to us, so we will’t say anything authoritative about how he got here to be in such dire condition, but we will indicate that the wide disparity in life expectancy between white and black people in the USA has been well observed for greater than a century. To the extent that Jones’ premature departure from this world may need been resulting from institutional issues like an inability to secure quality care, the reign of Jim Crow typically, and even perhaps its baseball component, the colour line, might be responsibly cited as a possible factor. Conversely, the colour line is—obviously, incontrovertibly—100% answerable for Jones’ failure to compete for the 1934 National or American League MVP award despite having a season that would make Clayton Kershaw weep with envy. 

The notion that up to now America has used legal, bureaucratic, and company strictures to systematically deny equal opportunity (and equal other things, like access to healthcare) to Americans of non-white hue has recently been subject to attack from the proper, particularly when that idea is being taught in schools. Two recent examples: On this Twitter thread from last week, Professor Jeffrey Sachs discusses the abrupt termination of a reading of Dr. Seuss’ The Sneetches to a category of third graders for an NPR podcast. One among the third graders did what you’ll hope they’d do—listen critically and process the purpose of Seuss’ allegory about prejudice based on superficial physical characteristics. The story is “Like, white people disrespected black people,” a baby said, at which point the varsity district’s assistant director of communications terminated the lesson. “I made a private judgment call we shouldn’t do the reading due to among the other themes and undertones that were unfolding that weren’t shared that we can be discussing with parents,” said the official. 

If the brand new standard for educating children about racism—including non-specific, generic, no-references-to-American-slavery-or-segregation-racism but easy fiction a few bunch of massive yellow ambulatory birds—is that oldsters have to be consulted, then there is no such thing as a way we will discuss Slim Jones or Satchel Paige or Jackie Robinson in any respect. Whether it is controversial that sometimes persons are mean to one another based on the way in which they appear, as Seuss suggested, then actual, honest-to-goodness examples of American prejudice directed at denying opportunity to high-performing athletes of color can’t be discussed sensibly. 

If children can’t be taught about Jim Crow then they’ll’t understand why a Robinson began with the Monarchs quite than the Dodgers or why, nearly as good as Slim Jones was, he never faced down Lou Gehrig at Yankee Stadium. It was due to the way in which he looked, full stop, but teachers would need to invent another reason. “We weren’t there; we will only speculate. Possibly Slim just liked it higher with an all-black Philadelphia team and wasn’t interested in pitching for the A’s or Phillies! In any case, those teams were pretty bad then. He was just showing discernment!” If the youngsters were told the reality, it would upset them or make them query the age-old, check-your-brain-at-the-flag idea of “My country, right or fallacious.” Worse, it would make us query certain self-protective judgments. 

That is already happening. Journalist Judd Legum has described in his newsletter Popular Information how a Florida highschool teacher with a perverse definition of “education” has used Florida’s “Stop WOKE Act” to demand that roughly 150 books be faraway from Escambia County, Florida school libraries, amongst them, When Wilma Rudolph Played Basketball, a biography of the Olympic track and field star. “Wilma Rudolph became an important American athlete. But do you recognize what she was like as a baby?” asks the book’s jacket copy. “From battling polio to playing basketball, Wilma was a determined and powerful child. This playful story of her childhood will help young readers connect with a historic figure and can encourage them to want to realize greatness.” The book is a component of a series directed at 6-8-year-olds from Picture Window Books called, “Leaders Doing Handstands.” Other entries include When Amelia Earhart Built a Roller Coaster, When Martin Luther King Jr. Wore Roller Skates, and When Rosa Parks Went Fishing. 

The appeal of offering the gold medalist Rudolph to children of any race or gender is simple to see. As a way to develop into a star athlete, Rudolph (born 1940) had to beat each the incapacity inflicted by a childhood case of polio and the dearth of medical care available to an individual of color in pre-civil rights Tennessee. It’s an important story, however the (I exploit the term loosely) teacher, Vicki Baggett, reported the book as having the aim of “race-baiting” since it “opines prejudice based on race,” afterwards telling Legum that the book “white-shamed” white students. The “REQUEST FOR THE RECONSIDERATION OF EDUCATIONAL MEDIA” form that Baggett submitted to the district asks, “For what age group would you recommend this educational media?” She wrote, “None.”

If the litmus test for teaching children any aspect of our national story is, “Might make white people query the actions by their ancestors,” then all of our history fails that test; problems with race have been so pervasive in our national story that nearly every major episode accommodates race as a component. We are able to now not discuss Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and nearly every major moment in American history with anything like honesty or accuracy. Actually Dr. King must even be avoided or deprived of anything like a coherent context; Parks can’t be discussed rationally without invoking Jim Crow, and even Amelia Earhart goes, in her case not due to race but due to gender. As a female flier, Earhart was novel. But why were female fliers unusual? We are able to’t say; the reply might upset someone. Why wouldn’t it upset them? We are able to’t say. 

These types of arguments cloak themselves in a legitimate concern, one that each parent must face: What is the proper age for youngsters to find out about among the harder points of life (each generally and in regard to specific points of American history and culture)? The reply isn’t as complex because the advocates of for-the-children censorship wish to make it: We teach them fastidiously and in age-appropriate ways. That’s it. The goal is to coach, not blow their little minds. It’s why, once we broach the thought of reproduction, we start with the birds and the bees and never Last Tango in Paris. History is definitely easier than sex education: We don’t wait to start teaching a baby the difference between right and fallacious or respect for others, and you possibly can’t teach them “right” without depicting “fallacious;” the triumph of excellent over evil only has resonance if we understand what evil is.  

What’s strange is that somebody would feel so implicated by the facts of history that they’d seek to suppress them. The concept of collective versus individual responsibility is a fancy one, but teaching young children concerning the great moral issue of this country’s history needn’t address that, not straight away; it isn’t easy to grasp why one might feel shame for a criminal offense committed lots of of years before he was born, one during which he neither held the gun nor pulled the trigger. Young children don’t must grapple with that idea, but as adults we must, regardless that we don’t like to consider our parents or grandparents in a nasty way. Nor can we wish to doubt national myths and system during which we were taught to position pride. Query: If not all whites of the Jim Crow area were racists individually, but because the political and cultural structures that created and sustained it continued on the sufferance of the totality of whites, does it follow that even individuals who never had a hostile thought of their lives were tacitly complicit? How about those that pretty clearly did harbor some hostile thoughts? Does that make your late grandmother’s cookies any less delicious? On one hand it shouldn’t, but on the opposite, yeah, it should. In that dichotomy we discover the difference between immutable memory and evolving comprehension. It’s a great thing. 

It seems clear that some persons are so overwhelmed by these sorts of questions that they find it best to pretend that nothing fallacious ever happened. Thus a book that “opines prejudice based on race” is routinely suspect. This (pardon the expression) whitewashing is the one inference that might be drawn from the criticism, because in no other place is the topic open to interpretation: The facts of Wilma Rudolph’s life are usually not in dispute. What Baggett and people who agree together with her object to is the context inside which her life is presented. Note that the argument against the Rudolph biography shouldn’t be that it’s in any sense age-inappropriate (again, Baggett wrote that it’s fallacious for all age-groups), but quite that it presents, in her view, the opinion that Rudolph’s life was affected by race-prejudice.  

If this trend stands then all of baseball history has been rendered off-limits to children. Fleet Walker and Jackie Robinson now not make sense—they’ve been retconned to have departed and arrived from the majors in line with their very own impulses. Branch Rickey wasn’t doing anything special when he signed Robinson, because to say anything can be white-shaming. Bill Veeck claimed that Judge Landis stopped him from buying and integrating the Phillies. Neither Landis nor Veeck can have any coherent rationale for his or her positions; the previous couldn’t have been motivated by racial animus and the latter was attacking an issue that didn’t exist. Robinson died thwarted in his desire to see Black managers. Frank Robinson broke that barrier. If American life typically and their lives specifically weren’t affected by prejudice based on race, then Jackie’s agitation and Frank’s celebration are reduced to well-publicized matters of special pleading. And that’s only baseball. The remainder of our story can be destroyed by the identical virus. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that each one men are created equal, also wrote, in equal seriousness, that each one Black people smelled bad and lacked the flexibility to write down poetry. If that’s not evidence of “prejudice based on race,” then the onus ought to be on the deniers to clarify what the hell they think it’s.

Jefferson is the advanced course. He’s someone we’d like but can’t accept, someone who had certain thoughts that demand condemnation but had others which are too priceless to be thrown away. Save the cognitive dissonance induced by the founders for an additional time (early in life Benjamin Franklin owned at the very least one slave; later in life he founded one in all the primary anti-slavery societies—discuss). Higher to begin with Slim Jones, who for one yr had an arm that was powered by lightning, but only only a few people knew about it. Neglected, he soon died in obscurity. It’s type of like getting an A+ at school, only your teacher doesn’t write it in your report card. How would you’re feeling about that? Bad, right? 

At that time, the story becomes not only about race, but in addition about justice. It’s pretty easy, but you possibly can see why some people would find it threatening.