Month: January 2007

And yet, with all of that, I almost always end up buying for myself the CDs I didn’t get. There was only one I REALLY wanted, and that was Highway Companion by Tom Petty, recommended by both Lefty and Nik. However, I SO hate paying postage on Amazon packages, so I also ordered Corinne Bailey Rae’s debut album, based on a couple co-workers’ recommendations, and Other People’s Lives by the Kinks’ Ray Davies, based entirely on Lefty’s recommendation. If/when I get to Borders with that JT return, I’ll get whatever strikes my fancy at the moment. I’ve listened to Petty and Rae once each, and at work, not always the most conducive venue, and Davies will shed the shrink wrap today.

Don’t want to talk about slavery. “My people never owned slaves; they came to this country after the Civil War. How is that relevant? Besides, slavery is so 1865.”

Don’t want to talk about white skin privilege; that makes too many people uncomfortable, as one debates whether it even exists.

Don’t want to talk about prejudice. “The Civil Rights Movement took care of that. Besides, that was mostly in the South anyway, wasn’t it?”

Don’t want to talk about obscure black people “nobody ever heard of before. If they were REALLY important, they’d be in the REAL history books.”

Sure the heck don’t want to talk about reparations.

I know: we’ll do something with music and dance and food, which will make everyone feel good.

I recall reading recently someone suggesting that we have a REAL dialogue about Iraq in this country, as though we haven’t (and our leaders ignore us anyway, but that’s another matter.) Yet I don’t know what a real dialogue about race would look like in the 21st century.

If I sound a little peevish, in a Morgan Freemanesque sort of way, well, maybe I am. But I’m not of the “I am going to stop calling you a white man and I’m going to ask you to stop calling me a black man” school of thought. Race matters, still.

My wife and I were watching ABC’s World News a couple weeks ago, and we saw how a young filmmaker named Kiri Davis had replicated Dr. Kenneth Clark’s black doll/white doll experiment of a more than a half century before in a movie called A Girl Like Me; also, here. It was Clark’s study that helped bring about Brown vs. Board of education. When we saw the ABC piece, we both wept.

So, as we start the 45-day “month” of Black History, think about how people of different ethnicities can get real without rancor. And please let me know what that looks like.

However, there is, as lawyers are wont to say, another bite of the apple: the Veterans’ Committee. Currently comprised of living Hall of Fame members, and award-winning writers and broadcasters, the committee votes every two years. The vote in 2003 selected no one; Gil Hodges, the manager of the 1969 World Series champion New York Mets, and umpire Doug Harvey came the closest to the 75% threshold. The vote in 2005 also selected no one, with Hodges and long-time Chicago Cubs third baseman Ron Santo each coming up short.
(The person in third place in 2005, Tony Oliva of the Minnesota Twins, was one of my favorite players in the day, an eight-time All Star, who led the league five times in hits, four times in doubles, thrice in batting average, once in slugging percentage. He and Willie Mays both batted .211 in their last seasons according to one source; I’m not saying he’s Willie Mays – who is my favorite player – just noting it.)

Here’s the 2007 Veterans Committee ballot. A lot of familiar names from my childhood. Here are some stats on the players, and mini-bios on the non-players.

The one name I had never heard: Cecil Travis. “His career batting average of .314 is a record for AL shortstops, and ranks third among all shortstops behind Honus Wagner (.327) and Arky Vaughan (.318).” Cecil Travis, who played 12 years for the lowly Washington Senators, 10 before World War II, then after suffering frostbite at the Battle of the Bulge, two unremarkable post-war seasons.

Here’s the weird thing, though: on the HoF web page, it appears that you can look up every player who was voted upon by the BBWAA – we’ll call it the traditional way. Even those folks with zero votes show up. But there’s nothing indicating voting for Cecil Travis.

What’s a librarian to do but to contact the Hall of Fame directly.
I looked back at the voting rules and did not see anything that would have kept him off a ballot. If you go back to the voting results of the late 1940’s, there is no player listed that received zero votes. If he would have received one vote, he would be listed.

If you have further questions, let us know. Thank you for contacting the Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

Late 1940s? Shouldn’t it be the early 1950s, after the five year wait? I wrote back and asked.

The five-year waiting rule did not come into effect until 1954. No specific guidelines were set as to who was eligible for consideration nor to which committee would consider whom. The 75% majority was necessary for election by either committee, which continues today. A one-year wait had been in effect from 1946-1953 and no wait was specified before then due to WWII.

So, Cecil Travis’ name presumably came up in the late 1940s and he received no votes? As a guy I know wrote me: “They were still catching up to all the old-timers. Not surprised he didn’t get votes.” Yeah, but ZERO votes?

General: Now, Field Marshal Hague has formulated a brilliant new tactical plan to ensure final victory in the field.

Captain Blackadder: Well, his resignation and suicide would seem the obvious.

I didn’t know the source, though I’ve subsequently figured out – I am a librarian, after all – that it’s a bit from the fourth series of the popular BBC sitcom Blackadder, with Captain Blackadder played by Rowan Atkinson.

There was no ambiguity WHY he sent it, however.
So, my questions:

The downside is that I simply cannot tell you the names of Brad and Angelina’s kids, or who Lindsey Lohan’s feuding with now. The good news is that I don’t know the names of Brad and Angelina’s kids… The other good thing is when I’m in the doctor’s or dentist’s office, I always go for the People magazine, just to find out how culturally out of touch I am.

The one I last caught was the People Extra, 30 Exclusive Celebrity Excerpts from December 2006, with Teri Hatcher, Anderson Cooper (yes, GP!), Vanessa Williams, and the ubiquitous Rachael Ray on the cover. Some of it was actually rather interesting: Cooper on his brother’s suicide, Bob Newhart on becoming a dad, Larry David on “My Seinfeld Life”.

Then I read “The Son We Lost” by Elizabeth Edwards. She’s the wife of 2008 Presidential candidate John Edwards, and was writing about Wade, their 16-year-old, who was killed when the Jeep he was driving flipped off a highway in North Carolina on April 4, 1996. I knew it would be painful, but then I read this:
The grocery store was hard. How many times could I pass his favorite food, his choice of soda? Once he came crashing in on me, and I was thrown to the floor. I sat in the soda aisle and cried. Although the store was crowded, no one walked down the aisle in which I sat, flattened by Cherry Coke.
It was that paragraph that really got to me.