How I became a liberal: (Part 1 in an on-going series)

This summer’s passing of baseball legend Tony Gwynn triggered a bout of contemplation, and as the end of the year approaches I’m in a similar mood.  I ended up jotting down some thoughts about it, at the time, and thought I might share those with you here in this space.

     The passing of baseball legend Tony Gwynn has produced a bout of reflection. This is always a bit perilous, since I tend to be somewhat of a pessimist.  As it happens, I walk into the gym locker room, completely spent from a workout, but happy. A flat screen hovers in the corner and a near silent talking-head floating above the crawl informs me that quite possibly the best hitter of his generation has died at the age of 54.

     I sat down on the bench with a protein bar and began to run through my personal file on Tony Gwynn-- .338 lifetime batting average, 3000+ hits, played in the ’84 World Series against my Tigers, all around good-guy, at least as far as media portrayals go. The talking-head says that it was cancer. Heck, I didn’t even know he was sick.

Since the world is sometimes a giant cliché that we just happen to be passing through, I had the thought that this is how you know you’re starting to get old. Your boyhood heroes passing away-- passing away, not flaming out in some epically extravagant overdose or in some tragic airplane crash, but dying the same way thousands of people do every day.

     I shifted my thoughts back to Gwynn for a moment and realized that aside from the big counting numbers--the importance of which baseball fans have had drummed into their heads from the time they are old enough to read a box score--the thing that stuck out to me was that Gwynn was the last player to take a serious shot at batting .400 for a season, but he was robbed of the opportunity by the 1994 players’ strike and the resulting cancellation of the season. It was my freshman year of high school and I remember being bitterly disappointed that he wasn’t going to have the opportunity to take a shot at it, but it went deeper than that. I felt betrayed. They cancelled the World freaking Series for Christ’s sake. I had just been shipped off to a school where I literally didn’t know a soul, and the only thing out in the world beyond my parents’ house that I had left to trust had abandoned me. 

     Gwynn and I weren’t the only people that got the shaft in this deal. Heck, a convincing argument could be (and probably has been) made that it effectively killed baseball in Montréal. By the way, explaining to a twelve year old that there used to be a baseball team in Montréal is another excellent way to feel old, but looking back I think that this may have been the moment that some of my views began to gel. I had read former head of the players’ union Marvin Miller’s book A Whole Different Ballgame, so I was actually pretty familiar with a lot of the issues being discussed. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I didn’t read the book critically. Miller was (and is even after his death to some) a pariah in some baseball circles, but he had written a book at least loosely associated with baseball, and in my Aunt Linda and Uncle Ken’s continuing quest to make sure that I owned more books about baseball than I could possibly fit on my shelf, that book had ended up in my possession. I devoured it. I found the behind-the-scenes aspect of it to be fascinating. In the book Miller notes several times that media figures used distorted language during earlier work stoppages, and here in this latest stoppage I found sportscasters and even former athletes using the exact same language, displaying an obvious bias towards ownership.

     It doesn’t seem particularly noteworthy, now. Big media has a pro-corporate bias, and in other news the sun rose in the east this morning, but to a fourteen year-old that mainlined Sportscenter every minute that they weren’t on a playing field or in a classroom this was some mind-blowing stuff. The same guys that spent all day, every day, telling me that these guys were the best thing since sliced bread were now not so high on the fellas, and the reasons were obvious. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t become a Marx-spouting radical overnight (That would come later and thankfully pass. Freshman political theory courses should really come with giant warning labels.), but it did serve to support some of the worst suspicions I had about the world.

     In a weird twist of fate, the federal judge that eventually ruled that the Major League owners had engaged in unfair labor practices during the 1994 labor stoppage was none other than current Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor. That’s just one more reason why I’m glad that Barack Obama is president.