Ernie and Us

Ernie Banks was a ballplayer, touchstone and human being.  A good obituary of the man needs to go beyond the first two.

Banks looked taller than six-foot-one, so maybe his grace at shortstop shouldn’t come as a surprise.  Still, he is remembered more for the home runs than the fielding chances, which is wrong.  In an era of small gloves, rocky infields and stingy official scorers, Banks managed a .985 fielding percentage with just twelve errors in his second MVP season of 1959.  (It pains me to note that Luis Aparicio topped out at .983 in any one season.)  Clearly, Banks could handle the defensive part of the game.

But I wonder what he thought about being a touchstone for so many Chicagoans, or at least Cub fans.  There was no equivalent of Banks for followers of the White Sox.   An eight- or nine-year old Cub fan came home from school at three in the afternoon, turned on Channel 9 and there was Banks launching a home run into the left field bleachers.  There were precious few Sox games on after school; we had the ballpark with lights.  We also had homework to finish at night.  And no ballgame until you’re done.  Watching Al Weis was hardly what you would call an incentive to finish.  

Banks had his last great season at age 38 in 1969, when he hit 23 homers and drove in 106 runs.  That was the summer of Ron Santo clicking his heels and the Cubs collapsing, to which the Mets said, Thank you very much.  In a way, it didn’t matter.  That team, with Banks as its face and soul (no doubt to the disgust of manager Leo Durocher), brought out droves of kids to an otherwise iffy neighborhood.  So began the reign of the Bleacher Bums, from one generation to the next, until by the mid-2000s a small ballpark regularly drew over three million people a year.  In essence, Ernie Banks begat Wrigleyville, though I suspect he would have traded that distinction for a World Series ring.

To Cub fans, Banks was the time machine back to their youth, a role he didn’t appear to mind.  For now ex-Commissioner Bud Selig, Banks was “synonymous with a childlike enthusiasm for baseball.”  That’s cutting it close to a stereotype.  Part of Banks’ popularity was due to what he wasn’t, outspoken in a time of racial turbulence.  Roberto Clemente made waves, Ernie Banks didn’t, and a goodly number of fans wanted all ballplayers to be like Mr. Cub.  But how many of those people knew Ernie Banks?

Did they care about what it was like growing up in a family of fourteen or being black in the whitest part of Chicago?  Did they ask him his views on race or politics?  How many know that Banks’ foundation supported efforts to overturn wrongful convictions?  The stats at baseballreferendce.com don’t begin to measure the human being.