A little over three years ago, the Baseball Writers Association of America finally removed the name J.G. Taylor Spink from the award conferred upon baseball writers enshrined in the Hall of Fame's writers' wing. The removal was well overdue. Baseball's highest honors should not be named for known bigots.
Spink published The Sporting News for half a century. For a long enough time, it was considered a baseball Bible, or at least its L'Osservatore Romano. But it was also the place where Spink wrote against allowing black people to play Major League Baseball. One of our sickest historical ironies is that the Spink Award was established the same year Jackie Robinson was elected to the Hall of Fame.
Five years before Robinson was called up to the Brooklyn Dodgers, Spink wrote, ridiculously, as Daryl Russell Grigsby noted in Celebrating Ourselves: African-Americans and the Promise of Baseball, "that baseball did not have a color line, but that segregation was in the best interests of both blacks and whites because the mixing of races would create riots in the stands . . . Spink's defense of segregation was largely not based on fact, but on fear and prejudice."
Well. There have been baseball fan riots during my lifetime. One prevented the second edition of the Washington Senators from ending their life in the nation's capital with a win, when heartsick fans stormed the RFK Stadium field before Senators pitcher Joe Grzenda could pitch to Yankee second baseman Horace Clarke to finish the game. Others have been caused by copious alcohol. (Ten Cent Beer Night, anyone?) Still others by large enough groups of opposing teams' fans in home ballparks.
A fan brawl inspired by race is far, far, far less likely than one inspired by a not-so-friendly dispute between, say, Cub and White Sox fans during interleague play. (Or, between players, as long-retired ex-Cub Michael Barrett and ex-White Sox A.J. Pierzynski could tell you.) Heaven help us Chicago if the Cubs and the White Sox ever tangle in their second-ever World Series.
But I digress. Removing Spink's name from the award was the right thing to do. Giving it a new name that amounts to nothing better than the equivalent of a platinium retirement watch was and remains wrong. Especially with long-overdue Thomas Boswell the latest recipient who will be inducted come July. So how should the award be re-named?
How about re-naming it for a writer? Boswell himself comes to mind, for decades worth of top-of-the-line work at the Washington Post, much of which has been collected in five imperative anthologies. But there are other candidates for the re-naming, too. In alphabetical order:
Roger Angell — The first non-BBWAA member elected to the Hall. He wasn't a daily baseball beat writer, which blocked him from BBWAA membership. It took San Francisco Chronicle writer Susan Slusser, when she was a BBWAA president, to nudge and push the BBWAA into recognizing Angell's oeuvre as long overdue for honor. Yet again, with the same feeling: Angell isn't baseball's Homer; Homer was ancient Greece's Angell.
Alison Gordon — The first lady to be sent onto the baseball beat, in 1979, covering the Blue Jays for the Toronto Star. Said she, a well regarded humorist when handed the Blue Jays, and who died in 2015: "You had to have a sense of humor to cover the Blue Jays, at least in the first few years." Said one-time Jays outfielder Lloyd Moseby: "A lot of women that are in the profession right now should be very thankful for what Alison did and what she went through. She took a beating from the guys. She was a pioneer for sure." She also went on to write some fine crime novels hooked around baseball. (Highly recommended reading: her memoir of life on the Blue Jays beat, Foul Ball! Five Years in the American League.)
Sam Lacy — One of the first black members of the BBWAA. Lacy was to the Chicago Defender and the Baltimore Afro-American what Wendell Smith was to the Pittsburgh Courier, a consistent but prudent pressure point upon major league baseball to end segregation in the game once and for all. It's a shame that he could and did write a fine memoir but his baseball journalism, so far as I know, remains un-collected in a volume of its own.*
Jim Murray — The Los Angeles Times fixture (1961-1998) was what Fred Allen would have been, had Allen chosen to become a sportswriter instead of a transcendent radio comedian. Murray was actually awarded the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1990, about which he rejoined the committee gave it to the wrong man: he said the award belonged to one who brought a corrupt government down, not one who quoted Tommy Lasorda correctly.
Shirley Povich — The grand old man of Washington sports journalism. Which is very good for a grand old man who became the Washington Post's sports editor at the ripe old age of 20 and raised that sports section all by himself. "Shirley Povich is the only reason I read your newspaper," Richard Nixon once told then-Post publisher Katherine Graham. Well.
Damon Runyon — He may or may not be remembered more on Broadway, but Runyon is actually a Hall of Fame baseball writer (elected posthumously in 1967) who's credited with being perhaps the first to highlight the unusual, the eccentric, the weird, and the surreal, on field or in the stands. (If you don't believe me, you might have a gander at Guys, Dolls, and Curveballs: Damon Runyon on Baseball.)
Claire Smith — The Padres tried to manhandle her out of their clubhouse after Game One of the 1984 National League Championship Series. Padres first baseman Steve Garvey said not so fast, then buttonholed Smith to give her an interview. It provoked then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth to rule equal clubhouse access for writers regardless of gender. From the Hartford Courant (the first woman assigned to the daily Yankee beat, in 1983) to the New York Times, from the Philadelphia Inquirer to ESPN (she was a news editor before the network included her among 300 staff cuts in 2020), Hall of Famer Smith's career can be described in two words: baloney proof.
Red Smith — He may have been as close to a poet laureate among daily baseball writers as the art got. Winning his Pulitzer Prize in 1976 helps his case. So does being big enough to do what the comparative few have done, admit when he got things wrong in the past, whether it was coming to see baseball's owners weren't exactly among the pure or whether it was seeing the International Olympics Committee was (and too much remains) a 19th century relic.
Wendell Smith — He was the first black member of the BBWAA, not to mention the first black sportswriter to be enshrined in Cooperstown. His writings for the Pittsburgh Courier carried the heaviest water on behalf of ending baseball segregation. He also planted the name of Jackie Robinson into Branch Rickey's ear, when Rickey seized upon Kenesaw Mountain Landis's death to put into motion what he'd long wanted, bringing black players to the "organized" game. Smith's criminally un-anthologized; the Hall of Fame has a considerable collection of his thanks to his widow's donation, but this Smith deserves far deeper recognition and honor.
That might be a far tougher group from whom to choose renaming the writers' Hall of Fame award. But on this we should agree, once and for all: "Career Excellence Award" simply swung and missed.
* Lacy, Wendell Smith, and other significant black baseball writers of the pre-integration era have been collected in a splendid anthology, Black Writers/Black Baseball: An Anthology of Articles From Black Sportswriters Who Covered the Negro Leagues (Jim Reisler, editor).
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