One of the best Hall of Fame classes in history will be inducted this weekend. That's a great thing, but museums are futile, there is no truth, and the dodo is extinct, damn it.
When we began this here baseball page about 18 months ago, one of the initial questions we had to answer was, "Why would anyone do that?" There was the obvious answer, which is that we had a full-function sports platform without any baseball coverage, and perhaps that looked like trying to sell fresh-baked apple pies with one slice missing. That wasn't a good enough reason, though -- a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small web sites.
And so the question lingered, because as much as we love baseball, a lot of other publishers love baseball too, or at the very least treat it like a necessary evil, and there's more content out there than anyone can reasonably consume. All the niches are covered. If you want hot takes, you know where to find them. Sabermetric-style analysis is covered by a handful of sites of long standing. There are some massive media properties doing basic news. It was all already out there.
No one wants to be redundant, so we kicked around a lot of ideas. Ultimately, we realized that the unique thing we bring to baseball coverage is us. That is, whereas there are a lot of baseball sites, there are none that have Grant Brisbee, Marc Normandin, Cee Angi, Mike Bates, myself, as well as the extended family of SB Nation writers such as David Roth, the great longform material produced by Glenn Stout and Chris Mottram, and so on. Rather than try to be any gimmicked-up Baseball Disneyland, we'd just tell the stories we wanted to tell and hope you enjoyed reading them as much as we enjoyed telling them.
Must Reads
The Rockies' front office is a mess
Nobody knows what's going on in the Rockies' front office. It's been that way for years, and it doesn't appear things are changing anytime soon.
It's a very writerly ethos, and one that is consistent with the mission of SB Nation.com as a whole. That may sound like boasting and maybe it is, because it's something I'm proud of. No site is above doing the basic things it has to do to stay in business, but every day we talk about doing what's fun to do, not what we have to do.
Today I feel like I have to write a Hall of Fame induction story, because the inductions are this Sunday (we'll be posting on the speeches as they happen). It's a great Hall of Fame class, one of the greatest ever, with three highly-qualified managers, a pitcher who might arguably have been the greatest of all time (Greg Maddux and Pedro Martinez can wrestle for this distinction), another pitcher who had both great peak seasons and unusual longevity, and a guy who spent half his career being the right-handed Ted Williams. That's worth celebrating.
Yet, you can love the Hall of Famer and hate the Hall of Fame. Actually, come to think of it, I hate all museums. When I was a kid I loved them. My parents took me to various Smithsonian instillations seemingly about once a month, even though they were a four-hour drive (at the speed that my father tended to drive -- in his mind he was always operating a Model-T Ford that would shake itself to pieces if you pushed it over 45). Now that I am aware of the politics of museums and the utter futility of their mission, I'm reaching a state of emotion in which "hate" is probably not too strong a word.
Never mind the wastefulness of all the dead animals -- I would trade all of baseball for a live pair of great auks, or moas, or Tasmanian tigers -- but I never need again be saddened by another slowly decomposing dead one -- but all the omissions and castrated history. Recall the 1995 controversy as to how to present the Enola Gay (the B-29 bomber that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshimi) National Air and Space Museum. There was no way to do it that would satisfy everyone, and so ultimately the plane went on display in a darkened gallery with almost no context at all.
Enola Gay fuselage at the National Museum of Air and Space, 1998. (Getty Images)
I am not blaming anyone who felt motivated to comment on a weapon of war that to this day embodies some very difficult moral choices. They were all right. They were all wrong. History is like that. I once got into a very heated discussion with a scholar of Constitutional law about the meaning of that document. I said you couldn't know what the Framers meant because if you read what they said, they didn't know what they meant. The disagreed while they were debating it, writing it, and arguing its points after. If they had known what they were talking about, they would have written it better, so as to foreclose all the arguments we've had in the 220-something years since then.
The scholar got red in the face and shouted, "You can't just say that the words mean whatever you want them to mean!" I smiled then, because I realized that, like the description of the fox and the hedgehog, that he knew many things, but I knew one big thing, and that is that the words mean anything you can convince people they mean. It could be the Constitution, it could be the Bible, it could be 50 Shades of Grey. That's why we have literature classes. That's why the Jews have the Talmud, a 6,200-page document that explains the Old Testament, a book that is a lot shorter than that. Literature is an argument. History is an argument.
Cap Anson, Hall of Famer. (Getty Images)
What we get as a result of trying to codify the argument about history is often fake or misguided. Thomas Jefferson's house Monticello has been preserved, as has his frenemy George Washington's. Both of those domiciles passed through enough hands, inside and outside their families, and were looted for souvenirs by so many relatives, that although they have been "restored" and as much of the original furnishings recovered as possible, I'm 100 percent certain that if TJ or George walked through their respective front doors today their first question would be, "What the %^$$^ have you done to my house? Where is my stuff?" Yet, we tell each other it's the real thing like we tell visitors to Cooperstown that Cap Anson is a Hall of Famer -- or that the racist who helped introduce the color line to the game is a more legitimate Hall of Famer than Barry Bonds. These are very fine and possible nonsensical distinctions.
See? I'm arguing. You can argue anything, and whereas we should be prepared to argue any of a million life or death matters that will affect us and our children and our children's children, to debate something so slippery and subjective as history in the way that we do is basically masturbatory. It requires a higher level of education than we typically allow ourselves and even then we might never arrive at the same conclusion, like two people reading a Wilkie Collins novel and coming away with a different feeling about it.
What's that? Never read Wilkie Collins? He was a pal of Charles Dickens, kind of invented the mystery-thriller. Never heard of Elmer Flick either, right? He has a plaque on the wall at Cooperstown. Things recede, we lose important details. We come to the fight with different levels of preparation. We argue anyway. It's exhausting and unresolvable.
My old friend and former colleague Jay Jaffe has had great success with his JAWS method of measuring a player's Hall of Fame credentials. As you can see from the link, it's part of Baseball-Reference's array of stats, which is as close to a Stamp of Utility as you can get in baseball. As time goes by, I believe the Hall of Fame debate will be more and more dominated by JAWS, not just because Jay is an articulate spokesman for both his statistic and baseball history in general, but because he gave the lazy a labor-saving device: A number to do our thinking for us when we could just think -- but again, that would require knowing who Elmer Flick was.
More than that, Jay has done something very sneaky and clever. By comparing Hall of Fame candidates to already-enshrined Hall of Famers, he's created a de facto definition for a self-defining (i.e. undefined) institution. He created a cutoff line, a threshold, that, had it existed in the 1970s, might have barred the door to all of those Frankie Frisch-motivated Veterans Committee inductees such as Freddie Lindstrom.
The Hall of Fame for Great Americans, Bronx Community College (formerly New York University), New York. (Getty Images)
And yet, maybe someone could convince you that Lindstrom was a Hall of Famer anyway. Again, if you can convince someone, then he is, because there is no right answer. It's the argument that matters to us more than the museum, and at the end of the day -- and here I repeat something I said almost two years ago -- there are other Halls of Fame. People forget about them, stop caring, forget the people who are in them who once seemed important. And someday, in the wreckage of our own time, they will melt the Hall of Fame plaques for the metal. They will remember Frank Thomas just as well as you might remember the 19th Roman emperor or the 55th Pope.
Despite the service that Jay performed, I suspect undefined might be better. Then you could include anything, everything, anyone, and the decision as to who or what was important could be left up to you. The one thing a museum can do is make you think. Most of us, left to our own devices, would not find time to mourn for the dodo, or Elmer Flick and his neurotic, career-ending stomach. Maybe the Hall of Fame should include a major display on Charlie Hollocher and Willard Hershberger, ballplayer suicides. That might be a more valuable thing to dwell on than Jim Rice's career. Or maybe it isn't. Again, there's no correct answer. It's just whatever you can convince people of.
To bring us full circle, I don't want to write a Hall of Fame induction overview. You can find that stuff all over the web. We don't do stories here we don't want to do, just the ones we find moving. So instead of talking about what will happen this Sunday -- and again, I will be here on Sunday to tell you what is happening on Sunday -- I want to tell you about the Museum at the End of Time. As it was recognized that time was ending, everyone agreed that all the important accomplishments of humanity must be preserved, but no one agreed one what should be preserved or how it should be presented. And so the Museum at the End of Time is glorious, a palace that shames the Louvre or the Hermitage. There are a billion floors and each floor is one billion square feet. It sits completely empty.
Paraphrasing John Lennon, the Hall of Fame is over if you want it. See you Sunday.
from SBNation.com - All Posts http://ift.tt/WRDYlQ
0 commentaires:
Enregistrer un commentaire