Improve Conditions

The Amazin' Avenue Annual is out and it's free. I'm saying this not to be nice but because it's true: This is work of professional quality and will be an indispensible companion in the seven months to come if you for whatever reason want to follow along with the exploits of Alex Cora and co. Download the .pdf file, print it out, put a big bulldog clip on on it and you're gold, with everything from slick visualizations of player skill sets to a Gary, Ron and Keith drinking game.

I'm not a better blogger because I'm lazy for a few reasons, but a big one is that I'm just skeptical of the form because so much of it comes down to writing about writing about writing. That these guys, rather than falling into that trap, have put a book this fun and useful together and put it out there for everyone to enjoy for free makes me much less so. Here's to a bit more of this and many fewer pictures of drunk ballplayers in future.

I have a piece here rating baseball's 30 general managers, about which Rob Neyer makes a fair point:

when I see

Andrew Friedman, Tampa Bay Rays

at the top of the list, and

Dayton Moore, Kansas City Royals

at the bottom, I tend to focus more on Rays and Royals than Friedman and Moore. Andrew Friedman is a key performer in an outstanding organization. Dayton Moore is not.

This is absolutely true and something people should always keep in mind when bitching about idiot GMs. Andrew Friedman is a really smart guy, but the 'Andrew Friedman' I rate as the single best GM in baseball is a metonym for the work done by dozens of different people under certain specific conditions. It's not unfair to do this, both because the GM gets the credit or the blame for what goes on and because he has more power than anyone else to decide who those dozens of people are and change those specific conditions if need be, but it is a contrivance. If Omar Minaya were running the Dodgers he'd almost certainly rate in the top half of a list like this, and if Andrew Friedman were running the Royals he'd probably rate in the bottom half.

In a comment below, reader David rightly wants to know just what I'm on about when I say that in addition to being flat stupid, Pete Hamill's recent comments about Willie Mays evoke 'a whole complex of ideas about Mays as a sort of overgrown 12-year-old that always were and still really are kind of fucking racist.'

As many many people have noted before me, one traditional method of presenting some black men as angry, ungrateful or otherwise delusional and pretentious and thus not worth taking seriously has been to contrast them with milder, more pleasant black men less prone to saying unpleasant things. It's a recurring pattern and I'm sure you can think of any number of examples. The point here is that while today he's a secular saint, Jackie Robinson was an extremely controversial figure in his day and there was much muttering in the press about how he didn't know his place, etc. Mays, as a rather determinedly apolitical figure, was one of those held up as Robinson's opposite—as, essentially, a 'good Negro.' (This isn't an observation made in hindsight, by the way—James L. Hicks, renowned for his reporting on the Emmett Till lynching and a longtime editor of the Amsterdam News, wrote an interesting and quite angry column about this in 1955 that you can read here.)

Go back and read some of the contemporary coverage of Mays and it will just blow your mind. Where Hamill retails the legend of Mays playing stickball with little kids in Harlem as an example of how great things were In His Day, this article about it from 1954 is interesting not least for how ridiculously patronizing it is in parts. (Actual headline: 'That Boy's So Full of Play.') And it's entirely typical. Part of presenting Mays as a wholesome, unthreatening figure who salved racial wounds as easily as Robinson irritated them involved portraying him as a natural who didn't have to put a bit of work in to be as great as he was, a literally childlike figure who relied on such benevolent white fathers as drunken buffoon Horace Stoneham and notorious asshole Leo Durocher to guide him through life. This marks a pretty stark contrast to the way the intensely adult Robinson was depicted in the press.

How much of this was Mays consciously guarding his image is an interesting question, and I'm looking forward to reading the actual book Hamill was reviewing largely to get some insight into it. Take the famous incident where someone refused to sell Mays a house in a fancy part of San Francisco because he was black. This is what he had to say about it at the time:

"I've never been through this kind of stuff and I'm not even mad about it now," the normally exuberant "Say Hey Kid" said last night.

"I'd sure like to live in San Francisco, but I didn't want to make an issue about it."

Meanwhile, this is what Mrs. Mays had to say:

"Down in Alabama, where we come from," she said, "you know your place, and that's something, at least. But up here it's all a lot of camouflage. They grin in your face and then deceive you."

A man married to a woman capable of putting things like that probably felt more strongly about being barred from buying a house he wanted because he was black than he expressed by saying 'it sure looks bad for our country.' And was certainly no kid. But hey—stickball!

Mays shouldn't have tried to be anything other than what he felt comfortable being, and I mean it as anything but a slight to point out that a lot of his image is bound up in the racial anxieties of his day. But if people like Hamill are going to drone on about how great baseball myths were In Their Day (I feel duty bound here to point out that I grew up playing stickball in the streets of New York, too—literally!—and I was born in fucking 1978), they should at least think enough about them to notice some of the implications of those myths. The fact that grown black athletes aren't often presented as large 12-year-olds who owe everything to the guiding hand of their white fathers these days is not, when you consider it at all, entirely a bad thing.