Baseball Midrash: Remembering Our Sacred Humanity

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The intent of this archive is speaking the sacredness of the forgotten and remembering with reverence the humanity. I just wanted to start with that because that's the real tone of this work.

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This is an honoring. This whole project for me first started returning to baseball cards last year, actually on my birthday — with a 1960 Topps Bob Gibson and

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what this really is about, I mean, I think on the deepest level, there is something very personal about it because my dad's dad sold newspapers in New York City. And he was, he struggled to survive during this period of time in history. This was the fifties into the seventies.

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And he ended up dying of alcoholism. He was a huge baseball fan. The New York teams, particularly the Giants. We’re sure he saw Gehrig, Ruth, Robinson… DiMaggio. So I grew up with Willie Mays being a New York Giant and coming back around to be a New York Met in the final years of his career.

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What there really is here —

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this is a human history.

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And I pulled up this picture here of Daffy Dean, Dizzy Dean's brother, because it says so much in terms of his expression. This is a man who suffered so deeply. This is a man who was the son of poor sharecroppers in the American South, who went on along with his brother to become one of the best pitchers on a team that not only defined an era,

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but defined a nation for a whole generation. The Gas House Gang — this was the team of the American South and the American Midwest because that was the team that they had. The other teams were more Northeastern. The Cardinals were their home team.

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This is where concepts of empathy and human feeling and emotion and the dignity of the struggle of others are so important. And it can be deeply, deeply, deeply captured through baseball.

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Because what baseball is —

baseball is really fundamentally a history of human suffering and human dignity through suffering. And what I mean by that is that when you look at the vast majority of these players — you even take someone like Christy Mathewson, who was America's golden son during the time that he pitched — he goes off to World War I and dies a horrible, horrible death. He comes back from the war after being exposed to mustard gas and he is never the same.

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Grover Cleveland Alexander goes off to World War I and comes back after being exposed to mustard gas, significant shelling; suffers with PTSD and epileptic seizures and alcoholism exacerbated by his experience in the war.

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We look at American history or baseball history. You take someone like Babe Ruth whose entire childhood was fragmentation and loss, growing up in foster homes.

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I already brought up Lou Gehrig. Growing up a poor child of immigrants in New York City.

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You look at what the players in the Negro leagues went through. Rube Foster, the son of the son of enslaved people, had to find a way to create something that would allow him and his fellow black ball players to play baseball in the United States, not just in Cuba. He creates the Negro Leagues, the organized professional black league in America.

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What you're looking at is this real inroad, a profound inroad, and I'm going to say very clearly — a spiritual inroad to consciousness. Because we're not looking at baseball in terms of statistics, who won where, who won what, who was on what team. We are looking at the human being. And what you see here, and this is such a shame to me and an indictment on our current culture, our current art market, you name it.

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Is that what you have here is one of the most profound portraits of humanity that emerges from America that I've ever seen.

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This is taken in 1934. This is taken in the midst of the Dust Bowl. It's taken during this period of incredibly difficult suffering across the nation in the Depression. And this is a picture taken of a man who — he and his brother became two of the best pitchers on the biggest team in baseball. Rose to these great heights.

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As children of poor sharecroppers who worked in the fields. And they would just, they would pitch acorns and learn how to play — learn how to pitch a baseball.

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If you want to understand the meaning of life, you have to understand and be present with the suffering of others. And this leads me, I have a really great quote from the Buddha actually. It's a really good one.

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The quote goes something like

every being holds life sacred and life dear. And with it is a picture of a little boy and a fish in a pond.

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Every being holds life sacred and every being holds life dear. Every being treasures life. So if you think about a squirrel or a fox or even a tree.

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A human being, your fellow human being, right? They treasure life as deeply and as dearly as you do and they marvel at life and appreciate life and respect life and experience life in this profound way. And this is profound way of looking at suffering. It's a profound way of looking at human experience and it changes survival as a perspective into an appreciation of life and a love of life.

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The most important thing about baseball and baseball history is that it is a history of human suffering.

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And that the real goal of baseball history is not to document facts. It's not to document events. It's not to do any of that. It is to hold dear and treasure and respect and give dignity and illuminate. Restore.

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Restore the lives of those who played a part in the creation, development and unfolding of this great game of baseball. Because what you're doing there is it's a human history, really. It's not an American history. It's not a baseball history. You're looking at the human being here. You're looking at Paul Dean. The son of poor sharecroppers who pursues baseball.

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Has very little options.

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You're looking at Christy Mathewson — someone who stood up for ethics, who stood up for truth, who wanted to play the game the right way. And in doing so gave baseball a new image, a new face, a new name, a new way of being perceived.

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You have these struggles that occur within baseball. They're existential struggles, whether it's labor in terms of the Players League or the Federal League, whether it's over gambling and overthrowing games and betting. These are struggles that are at the deepest level. They're existential human struggles about values, about doing the right thing. Struggles against the atrophy and entropy of consciousness

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and the fallout of the failure. Of the failure to do the right thing, of the failure to be ethical, of the failure to understand the depth of the experience of the person next to you.

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And this to me is the real, it's the real root. It's the real treasure, the real gold, the real secret history of baseball. And you can see it all here in Paul Dean's expression. This is an incredibly vulnerable emotional portrait.

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You can see in his eyes and in his face — the confusion, the confliction, the struggle and the difficulty. This is a man who's risen to the top of his profession along with his brother and you can see the entire weight of the past in his eyes.

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This is what a real baseball history redeems, right? So I look at pictures of Rube Foster, like the Rube Foster image I showed you before in the Cuban League essay.

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We need to see and feel more deeply.

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We need to see and feel more deeply to penetrate the veil of human history. To penetrate the veil of experience, to see through time, to see through space and to feel the struggle, the turmoil, the plight, the difficulty. Someone like Rube Foster who raises this league.

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He has these experiences of organized, integrated baseball in the Cuban League and raises this league in his home country — a home country that is ruthlessly discriminating against him and his fellow players.

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To see and feel that humanity is again, it's the call of Christ, the call of Buddha, the call of Muhammad, the call of the prophets.

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Because what we're being asked to do is actually to see and feel and experience something much greater through this real ability to bridge the gap, to bridge historical distances, to understand the innate humanity of the struggle of people like Paul Dean or Rube Foster.

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We are being called into this relationship through space and through time. We're being called into the ability to truly perceive. And what that does is it adds real meaning.

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It adds real power. It adds real force because these are not, this is not just an artifact. It's not just a photo. It's not just a card. It's not just a memory. It's not just a story. But our only way into that is through real perception.

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Our only way into meeting the true force of human history is to learn how to see. How to feel. Whether that's baseball, whether that's a national history, whether that's a religious or ethnic history, whether that's a global history of humanity or a history of the cosmos. Our only way into that is through that covenant. It's through that ability to drop my possessiveness or my self-interest

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and enter into that deep historical covenant with the pain, the suffering and the trials of others.

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That's what adds depth. That's what adds power. That's what actually shows us the real meaning of baseball.

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Because other than that, it's just a game that's being played on a field. It was being played yesterday and it's being played today. Other than that, that's all it is.

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But when we see, right, this is like the roots beneath the surface. We might see the stage and the fields, but if we start looking down at those roots, we see this deep, deep, deep heritage.

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Through the struggles, through the trials and turmoils of these people. This is what makes today possible, but it also is what allows us

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to experience the real meaning of life. Not just that you look at something at a surface level and you ask how much does it cost or how much is it worth or even what does it mean. It's to feel the spiritual power of resonance with these people across space and across time.

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So I'll bring it back to the Paul Dean photo.

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Because this is just, it's so up close and personal, right? This is such a direct encounter. He's looking right back at you. And this is not, this is not a veiled emotional state. This is a full state of the expression of his inner humanity. It's almost like he's asking, he's asking, do you see me? And the answer unfortunately is no. He's not being seen. He's being objectified as a player. He's being objectified as someone who has statistics.

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He's being objectified as Dizzy Dean's brother or the pitcher on the St. Louis Cardinals Gas House Gang team of 1934.

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These are questions of the dignity of our innate humanity. And the failure to recognize it and retrieve ourselves and form that sacred covenant is our failure as a species, as a culture, as a civilization to come into real relationship with the true power, the essence and the existence of being. We fail ourselves in failing that covenant, because we fail to retrieve the sacred. The sacred is the timeless.

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And the timeless is our ability to return through time and touch hands and be present with these people who inform the legacy and the dignity of our tradition.

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This photo is just a way in. It's a portal. It's means of seeing and feeling the expression of the hardship of Paul Dean and his brother.

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This is just so deeply sacred because if we get into what these two children had to face… and who they became and what they ended up representing… I've heard several stories in my experience as a baseball archivist going back all the way back to my time in the Smithsonian, going back to all my research when I was just 15 years old. Several stories where people's grandparents, great grandparents lived and died

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with the radio, listening to this Gas House gang team in the middle of rural farms and rural farmlands. Many of them never even got to go to any games. But they experienced this.

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They got a glimpse at people who stood for them. And this goes back to the Lefty Grove essay. People who stood for rural America, these impoverished sharecroppers. They stood for their communities. And these are two young men who stood up on this stage for the 1934 World Series for the Gas House Gang.

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And the sense of resonance was so deep because the love of baseball was so deep. And then you have these young men who are from your township, right? Who are from your community. And they stand on this stage and they captivate an entire region of the country. They captivate the entire nation in their story of their triumph. One of the greatest seasons in baseball history. Colorful, memorable, magic. Legendary. They give these people during one of the most, if not the most difficult times in American history… they give these people something to believe in, something to lean on.

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A sense of meaning, a sense of purpose in a time when the economy is completely destabilized and destroyed — in a time between two world wars, in a time of racial fragmentation.

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This is the sacred work that was put on the shoulders of these young men. You look at him in this picture, he looks like a little kid.

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He's throwing acorns on a farm. And then before you know it, he's pitching in the biggest cultural event of American civilization during one of the most difficult times — when baseball means more than it ever has.

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Right? There is a man behind this. And it's not Paul Dean, St. Louis Cardinals, whatever his pitching record was or his ERA or what he did on the field.

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And it's the same with Rube Foster and Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth.

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The way in to our humanity is this gateway. And images can be such a powerful way of seeing.

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Because they capture feeling. This is more than art. This photo here — I brought up the WPA realism in our earlier photographic essays. This depression era realism. This is something that transcends art and becomes a documentary encounter with the human. Real human emotion and expression unfiltered by concerns of anything other than just capturing that and feeling that and seeing that and experiencing it. Otherwise we would lose this

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to time. And that's why it's so important that it's preserved. It's not because it's worth anything. It's not because there's some monetary value attached to it or a status symbol about it.

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It's because this is a young man who changes the fabric of American civilization, and he changes it coming from nothing.

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He and his brother.

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This is a man who had nothing. And you can see in his eyes the struggle and the conflict and the difficulty with coming to terms of his entire childhood.

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This is what we are meant to see and feel that is sacred, that is human, that is deeply, deeply spiritual. And it's something that we forget with the aggrandized modern perspective of images and value and, sort of like the hormone play of modern society and modern culture; screens.

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We lose not only our humanity, but the humanity of others. And perhaps we never had it — I would dare say. What do we know about the humanity of Rube Foster?

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This is a man who did everything he could to create one of the greatest and most important institutions in baseball history.

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This is a man who suffered in a gas accident and he ended up getting interned in an asylum before his early death.

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People like Ernie Lombardi.

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It's called Lombardi's snooze. It was a play in the late 30s — a world series where he gets knocked out on a play at the plate. And I think Joe DiMaggio scored from first base… and he was never able to live it down. He eventually committed suicide.

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This was a humble, kind man who was one of the greatest baseball players of all time.

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What does this all say about us?

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What does this say about our ability to recognize the humanity in one another? And that itself being the greatest failure.

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Can baseball redeem this quality? And can baseball history redeem it? The only way is if we learn how to see and we learn how to perceive. We're not looking at objects, we're not looking at their value, we're not looking at statistics, we're not looking at victories. We're looking at the humanity which weaves the real story of baseball, which makes the real story of baseball possible.

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People like Jack Myers, the Native American catcher for Christy Mathewson.

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We need to learn how to see.

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We need to learn how to see one another.

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This being our greatest failing as a species and as a culture, as a collective culture.

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We fail to see the inner life, the lived feelings, the emotion, the spiritual state, the dreams, the striving and the struggle of the humanity within. And so a lot of this has been increasingly veiled in modern society with status symbols, with glamour, with distractions, with posed images. And a great thing about these early baseball

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photographs; in early baseball itself — is that it was very unadorned.

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This is not a social media posture. This is not a posture for a magazine.

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There just wasn't any of that. It just wasn't possible. There was no sort of exaggerated luxury that allowed for this posturing, this pretend, this fakeness of emotion, this fakeness of feeling. None of it. This is a man who's standing before this documentary camera and he's bearing his soul. He's present. We feel the presence of the spirit. The agony. The turmoil. The trial of the soul.

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So this is what I ask… this is what I really ask of baseball history — is that we learn how to feel and we learn how to see each other through this gap, through this bridge, through space and through time. And that in and of itself is what avails us and allows us to have real, deep, meaningful experience. That is what avails us of profound spiritual life. And the failure to do that is what breaks, fractures and destroys us, our institutions, our cultures, our societies, our communities. The failure to do that destroys us all.

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That's what I have.