If you've been following the posts on this website you may remember that I posted this past summer about my love of Baseball, and of the perennial feud between Cub and White Sox fans. Well, as a very remarkable year ends, while our newly-elected politicians get ready to do battle in January, and while most Baseball fans have gone into hibernation until Spring Training, I want to end this year with some thoughts and memories about the game I love, and of three former players who recently passed away.
Any adult who truly loves Baseball not only loved to play the game, but also loves the strategy, the statistics, the history, and the life-lessons of the game. You become attached to a team, or teams, and that attachment lasts a lifetime—reaching back to the history of the teams and forward to pass the love affair to your children and grandchildren.
Baseball is a game that, as it's learned and played, teaches both individual responsibility, and responsibility for the eight other players with whom you share a uniform and a field. It is a simple, yet deceptively difficult game that teaches hope, perseverance, redemption, and renewal; for any error on the field or at the plate can be overcome over the next few innings, in the next game, and over a lifetime of seasons. The best hitters fail 70% of the time, the best pitchers give up 3 runs a game, and the best teams have lost between 35 and 62 games in a season. In fact, of the 83 teams since 1892 that have won 100 or more games in a season, over 50 of them did not win the title; and of the rarified 6 teams that won 110 or more games, only 3 won the World Series. Those few moments of pure joy, when your team finally wins it all (or comes so close), can sustain a lifetime of attachment.
It is a boy's game that binds fathers and sons (and some mothers and daughters, too), and for some moments—like we experienced in October, 2005—it can bind a whole city in shared joy, expectation, grief, and hope. It's a boy's game that a few men have had the luck to play as adults; and some of those men have played it so well that they have stayed in our collective memory as the young men they were, long after they've stopped playing the game.
Three of those men recently passed away: Bob Feller; Phil Cavarretta; and Ron Santo. To end this year, I'd like to share what I know about each of them.
I awoke this morning remembering that on this date, 69 years ago, just after dawn on a beautiful Sunday morning, a reign of terror began that led over several weeks to the slaughter of thousands of American sailors and soldiers stationed in Hawaii and the Philippines—young men and women who were brutally surprised and killed during that holiday season of 1941, and who would never come home again. That day would be the start of the creation of the world we would inherit.