The Boomer ballplayer
When I loved baseball, really really loved baseball, it felt as if baseball fans my parents' age were more in love with the baseball players their parents liked than the baseball players their own age.
Maybe it is the same trap, everyone reflecting fondly upon things from when they were ten. But when I turned ten, Boomers seemed to care a lot more about long-gone Koufax and Spahn than Hershiser and Stewart.
Stewart?
Dave Stewart.
Not the-
Not the Eurythmics guy.
I felt like I had legends in front of me, when I really really loved baseball. Dave Stewart, Dave Winfield, Dave Henderson, Dave Parker. There were others, not named Dave. There was Doug DiCinces and Devon White and Don Baylor.
Ahead of me, pictured in polyester on baseball cards featuring birthdates from the 1950s, I had my own Williams and Mays and Mantle and all that shit. Mustachioed, bearded, Boomer ballplayers.
By my time they were deep into their 30s and sometimes 40s, decades into routinely running knees aground on artificial grass ...
... trying to slug for power in teetering ballparks the '27 Yankees couldn't sprinkle the infield with.
All twenty-seven of 'em.
Inside this, I do not understand why Dave Winfield was not protected by the by-then burgeoning Boomer baseball establishment when a provably felonious shitbag baseball team owner paid money to try and dig up dirt on Dave Winfield, so that the shitbag owner didn't have to own up to his end of a contract owed to Dave Winfield.
It is the same establishment that sold us A. Bartlett Giamatti – later, a famous actor's father! – as some sort of friend to the little man, and not the guy brought in to cap free agent salaries (but legally this time). Bob Costas preferred pleasing peoples' parents rather than prosing up for someone his own age.
When I heard about Dave Parker on Saturday, listening to a baseball game on the radio while driving up and down and around a sunny afternoon, I got angry. Nothing has made me angry in a long time because I've spent the last five weeks driving to and from NBA games, where they let me in to write about them.
I have half a brain and I'm watching what's happening outside basketball arenas in my half of the world and also the other half of our world and yet I've managed to keep, relative, wits. But driving on Saturday, with my favorite team in the middle of its comeback win crackling through crystal-clear radio timbre, I was angry. And I know that's part of grief, but Dave Parker shoulda been in the Hall of Fame a very long time ago, since before I was allowed to drive. It wasn't enough that Dave Parker knew he was going into the Hall of Fame this summer, three decades too late.
Had Parker picked up the playing-era promotional trip around the bases he earned while in uniform – making an All-Star team in 1990, slugging for the A's through the late 1980s, crushing in cavernous Riverfront Stadium on zero knees in the early 1980s – maybe there would be more sentiment behind his candidacy, first balloting in 1996.
He never received one, his career reduced to "Sister Sledge B/W Drugs."
Know who made the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1996? Fucking nobody.
The sport coulda used a boost, especially amongst a younger generation that didn't watch the previous October's World Series, in favor of the 'Jenny McCarthy Show,' or the World Series before that, in favor of 'Singled Out.' Chagrined, the baseball writers elected Phil Niekro in the Hall of Fame in 1997.
That was it. That's all we got. Phil Niekro, born in 1939 but looking like he shares the rotation with Harry Gumbert. Shoulda sought Phil Niekro cards, kids, now that you're selling them off to try and buy that first car.
Voters older than Boomers wouldn't vote for anyone young enough to lust after a muscle car in high school, only whatever jalopy Duke Snyder was promised in his first contract.
Dave Parker? Get outta here. Keith Hernandez? Are you high? Fred Lynn? Doesn't he still play? Sorry, I have this column about Shaq's rap album to file.
Every younger sportswriter in place to appreciate the same-age Lynn or Hernandez or Parker was elsewhere drooling over Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods and John Elway and for good reason: Tyson has another fight with Holyfield coming up.
What, baseball?
Uh, Cal Ripken! Changes the way he stands at the plate every season, but never sits!
It was as if Cal Ripken was the only ballplayer born between D-Day and the Cuban Missile Crisis that was worth humanity holding off on splittin' too many atoms. Like Cal Ripken was the only jazz album someone's parents owned.
Dwight Evans? Lou Whitaker? How are these giants not in the Hall of Fame?
Bobby Grich, he did all that at middle infield. Wasn't Don Mattingly "Donnie Baseball?" for a while there? Didn't writers give Dale Murphy, like, six MVPs? But he's not a Hall of Famer?
Those stories used to make the Hall of Fame, and then at some point the unfortunate confluence of square as shit old-timers and square as shit stat-counters got together to keep anyone with a mustache out of the Hall of Fame. As if it was a player's fault that they knew where to get drugs, when clearly the BBWAA did not. Two generations colluded to make Dale Berra jokes, and with Yogi right there.
This changed a little in 1998, Nolan Ryan and George Brett and Robin Yount made the Hall and at least the last two have said "fuck yeah" out loud when "Never Been Any Reason" by Head East bolts out the radio. And players of the Boomer era did appreciate the BBWAA letting Gary Carter sit under his hooded dryer for a few years before they let Gary in the Hall, long before he died.
Joe Carter? I just finished driving up Joe Carter Avenue. You know who stands smiling, watching Avenues named after them? Not the Civic Members of the Very Good.
Joe Carter hit a home run that won a World Series. Watched it with my own eyes on a television reception sucked out of thin air. Yet the Boomers' own Bill Mazeroski – which player would anyone rather have? – can't make the Hall. Joe Carter was up to vote for in 2003, when we had LeBron James games to watch, Terrell Owens and Tommy Maddox controversies to consider.
And Dave Parker waited. Miles away from whatever spotlight the Green Monster gave Jim Rice on his Yawkey Way toward the Hall.
Harold Baines is not known for being a DH, but because nobody could remember what position he played everyone correctly assumes Baines was designated hitter. Harold's half-day made it into the full-Hall.
Yet Dave Parker – over 1900 games in right field on artificial turf over blacktop through four American presidents (three elected), finest arm since Carl Hubbell struck out five Hall of Famers in a row – can't inspire a movement.
I drove on Carl Hubbell Blvd. on my way back from Game 7, saw a Carl Hubbell museum and decided to rush on in, even if I wasn't fully confident I knew which team Carl Hubbell played for.
Dave Parker got a raw deal for many reasons, more and more mindless as they're considered.
He put up Hall of Fame numbers, did Hall of Fame things, won titles, kicked ass in three decades. Did drugs like many other players, drugs many many many of whom, unlike Parker, could not afford it. Parker did the same drugs as many, many executives his age, making the same money. But unlike those other players or executives, Parker got caught.
Nobody, in Clinton's 1990s, stood up for him. Dave Parker was left to fend off the same flake from the same old sportswriters who didn't want Dave Parker to have that big contract ahead of Pete Rose, anyway. Minds made up well before they found out he Hoover'ed up recreational drugs.
Those older sportswriters mostly (there were horses involved, for a while there) wrote about baseball. Their Boomer sportswriter children, to their credit, wrote about everything. Their sportswriting children wrote about football. Some of us do basketball, a structured fewer (the ones with degrees in other forms of academia, college ones) focus upon baseball.
From baseball's outside but alongside its newest order, we triumph Cecil Cooper and Willie Randolph and Chet Lemon and Darrell Evans and Andre Thornton like they're Dead Ball Era chumps who require lighting.
Not as if their finest champ takes weren't replayed on CNN and ESPN, broadcast brightly on NBC through co-axial cable:
Winfield and White and Parker and Brett and Evans and Randolph and Yount were on each morning's SportsCenter at 7 and 8 and 9 and 10 and 11 and then again on Baseball Tonight that evening, for a whole generation with a lot of summer to stretch.
My line of work? It's all Boomers: Magic, Larry, Dr. J, Kareem, Pistol Pete, plus the brilliant writers of that generation, whose work rose to the provocative level of the play at their purview.
Maybe sports fandom is finite, which is fine. Maybe it ain't, and Dwight Evans lost a few former Dwight Evans freaks to various video gaming or even health pursuits. Also fine, arguably as cool.
What isn't fine was so many sportswriters, paid to think about this, using what limited power they were assigned to exclude so many deserving players from the Hall of Fame.
Making the cognizant choice to deny recognition toward Dave Parker's contribution to the game Parker dominated, repeatedly, and until it was too late.
And this is too late.
MOTHERSHIP CONNECTION
Couldn't pass. Plus, I've learned at least two sportswriters have no idea where the lyric came from.
The baseball card in the opening image is not mine, yet, but if I open enough packs I'll find it. Can't buy it online, that'd be cheating!
Just for clarification, I meant no disrespect toward Sister Sledge or drugs.
It is hot out there! If anyone needs a five-buck break from a subscription for a month but still wants to hang, shoot me an email, we want you around! Like I'm tossing five bucks out there, willy-nilly. I'm not!
Basketball soon! Bet on it!
(It won't be a betting scold, I promise. Twenty Beasley words, tops.)
