2 posts tagged “baseball”
Take me out to the ballgame! OK, I know baseball has pretty much been supplanted by football as the U.S. national pastime since the Baby Boom ended, but this is an area in which I’m a little old-fashioned. I love baseball—I enjoyed playing it, I enjoy watching it, and I’m a faithful reader of the sports pages from about mid-March until the playoffs finally die out—which seems to be sometime around Thanksgiving these days. Early April seems to be defined by baseball events—for example, Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers on April 10, 1947 (go to article), becoming first African-American baseball player in the 20th century to play in the major leagues.
The Canadians might be more likely to say Robinson was plucked from the Montreal Royals of the International League, a minor league team. Montreal eventually got a major league franchise of its own on April 10, 1969. Lester Pearson—former PM of Canada—threw out the first ball for the Expos, who beat the Cardinals 8-7 in that game, the first regular-season major league baseball game in Canada, and first outside the US. Actually, it was during his short tenure as an Expo that Pete Rose got his 4,000th career hit on April 14, 1984.
Jackie Robinson wanted to manage baseball after he quit playing, but he was never given that opportunity. It wasn’t until 1975, the year after Jackie Robinson died, that another Robinson—Frank—became the first African-American manager of a major league team, the Cleveland Indians. Apparently Al Campanis, general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, wasn’t too impressed by Mr. Robinson’s managing abilities, as he told Ted Koppel in an April 1987 “Nightline” interview that blacks may lack some of the "necessities" for becoming baseball managers. Unfortunately for Campanis, those who make such remarks lack the “necessities” for remaining in executive positions in a major league franchise, and he was no exception: he lost his job.
Campanis apparently also told Koppel that blacks are poor swimmers, because they didn’t have adequate “buoyancy.” He may have been among those who thought African Americans were not so good at golf, either, but Tiger Woods certainly proved that idea to be a fallacy, when he became the youngest golfer ever to win the U.S. Masters tournament on April 13, 1997.
Sports can be controversial, but it can also lead to some cultural insight, as it did in April of 1971 when the People's Republic of China invited the U.S. table tennis team to visit. From this event, we came up with the very cute term “Ping-Pong diplomacy,” which referred to the development of the first official relations between the U.S. and the PRC since Chinese Liberation in 1949. Before that, most of us probably thought the Chinese all talked like the cook, Hop Sing, on Bonanza.
Speaking of international sports, I notice that one long-standing race had a lot of April connections, too. The U.S. chose its first astronauts—the “Mercury Seven”—on April 9, 1959: Scott Carpenter, Gordon Cooper, John Glenn, Gus Grissom, Wally Schirra, Alan Shepard and Donald Slayton. Still, in spite of the cool moniker given the U.S. space team, as the BBC headline announced on April 11, 1961:
Soviets win space race
Probably not exactly how we in the U.S. would have announced it, but it was true: Yuri Gagarin will forever be remembered as the first human to go into outer space.
We did, of course, eventually win the race to the moon, but sometimes it seems like we never quite got over that initial loss. Maybe the shuttle program is another way we’ve been trying to make up for being second out of the blocks. After all, we were the first—and only—nation to launch a space shuttle. The first of these, Columbia, lifted off on April 11, 1981.
It looks good in the paper—heck, it looks good in the sky—but the whole shuttle program has been controversial from the outset, and with frequent budget cutbacks and lots of other programs wanting a piece of the budget pie, the shuttle has had a tough time.
I know this doesn’t sound like good sportsmanship, but at least the Soviets…er, Russians don’t have one!
As the Boomer generation began swelling the population, the U.S. was able to recruit a couple more states, so we’d have someplace to put all these people. Seems like Alaska by itself added enough acreage to take up the slack, but on March 18, 1959, President Eisenhower signed a bill into law that would welcome Hawaii as our 50th state, though it wouldn’t be an official state until August 21 of that year.
Then—in keeping with what seems to be the national notion that we can never have enough—we decided to expand into outer space. Also, we didn’t want to get beat out by the Commies, now, did we? Unfortunately, right up until at least March 18 of 1965, the Soviets were spitting in our collective eye. On that very day, as reported by the New York Times, the first spacewalk took place as Soviet cosmonaut Aleksei Leonov left his Voskhod 2 capsule and remained outside the spacecraft for 20 minutes, secured by a tether. (Go to article ). Two days later, the Ranger 9 was launched by the This unmanned lunar space probe sent photos back to earth as it neared, then crashed into the moon. (See: http://www.answers.com/topic/ranger-program) Though a bit miffed at being shown up by the Soviets earlier in the week, the was putting the pressure on them. On March 23—just five days after Leonov floated around in the outmosphere—astronauts Young and Grissom drove around out there in the first maneuverable manned spacecraft.
(The Europeans didn’t want to be left out, so just about exactly a year prior to this flurry of flinging ourselves into outer space the European Space Research Organization—precursor to the European Space Agency—was established on March 20, 1964.)
If we don’t get any more states on the moon or Mars to clamor for inclusion into our union, there are a couple possibilities still open to us here on earth. The Puerto Ricans, for example, have had more than one referendum on the subject, but so far have managed to hold off. I think this really hurt their chances at getting a Major League Baseball franchise, though, which is too bad. I understand they really love baseball there. I don’t know how the people of Guam feel about baseball, but it is another island that’s a territory. At least, I always thought it was just a territory, but I recently read that on March 23, 1983, the Apatosaurus was made the “official state dinosaur of .” I couldn’t figure out how could have an “official state dinosaur” if it isn’t an official state. And then I thought, apart from the question of its stateliness, it’s pretty weird for any entity outside a natural history museum to have an “official dinosaur.” Turns out Guam isn’t the only place that has its own dino rep. Already 10 of the “official” states, along with the , have “official dinosaurs.” Not , though. They talked it over in 1998 and just couldn’t decide which dinosaur best represented them. That legislature was so obstreperous that it couldn’t even come up with a state fossil! Maybe the whole thing about state dinosaurs is a good idea, though. It might make us stop and think about what can happen if you just get a bit too big for your britches.
For more info about this dino (but no explanation about why Guam chose it as its own official dinosaur):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apatosaurus
