Oh, The Humanity!

Written by Ben Pogany Thursday, 03 June 2010 10:01

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Baseball is a game that we all call on to be bigger than us.  We infuse it will myth and lore, propped up on the shoulders of giants from eras past.  We look to it as a living history, the records and stat lines left behind unassailable truths of past triumphs and heartbreak.  And yet when we get right down do it, baseball is merely a reflection of ourselves, capable of greatness and yet instilled with human frailty.   I’m brought to this line of thinking by two very distinct stories that hit the sports world yesterday, Jim Joyce’s squandering of Armando Galarraga’s shoulda-been perfect game, and the retirement of Ken Griffey Jr.   

Baseball, more than any other sport is a game in which its records are held in everlasting reverence.  We painstakingly monitor of every home run and strikeout, striving to break the game down into math or science, to solve the riddle all the while not realizing (or choosing to ignore) that baseball is played by humans who could never truly be reduced to a simple equation.  Part of us wants see the sport as neat and infallible, and what could be neater and more infallible than a bunch of numbers.  We invent grand occurrences and track them fervently, the unassisted triple play, hitting for the cycle, the perfect game.  Achievements to be remembered and treasured for a lifetime.  These occurrences go well beyond the specific player, or his specific city.  These are triumphs for baseball itself, and all who love it.  Maybe that’s why I still feel so upset about Galarraga-gate.  I feel personally slighted, like myself and the sport I love have been robbed of something dear.   Armando Galarraga did something that only 20 others in the history of the sport have done (well, since we starting writing stuff down), and because some fraud of an umpire called the 27th batter safe when he was clearly out by a step and a half, Armando and the baseball world at large went to sleep feeling wronged.  Jim Joyce’s miscall was nothing less than a complete and utter travesty, a blight on the game.  There’s no going back, no rewriting history.  It just wasn’t supposed to happen this way.  It shouldn’t have happened this way.  The sanctity of our record books, of our history, have been tarnished.  Armando Galarraga retired 27 batters in a row, and yet somehow was not perfect.  Baseball, despite our yearning for it to be so, is not perfect.  Last night, human error trumped greatness.  

Which brings me to the second headline of the night.  The Kid has retired.  A beacon of unassailable greatness amid an era of cheaters and frauds has taken his final swing.  Like Ruth and Dimaggio before him, Ken Griffey Jr embodied the magic and majesty of baseball.  Capable of the greatest greatness, and yet you never forgot that he was just a kid having a blast playing his favorite game.  Griffey transcended the sport, instilling in us the hope and wonder we all yearned for and sought after in watching baseball.  Though his colleagues committed unspeakable afronts against the game through the use of performance enhancers, Griffey always shone above them, ever reminding us what was truly possible in this sport.  While countless others of the era were far less than their numbers signified, Griffey was so much more.  Though baseball will always be fraught with the inevitable tinge of humanness, Griffey reminded us that that isn’t always such a bad thing after all.