Learning History

Michele had last week off; Clare has this week.  She called today to set up a date to go hitting and to complain about the ignorance of people clueless about the Negro Leagues.  “I mean, how many times did we go to the [Negro Leagues] Museum?”  At least once by my count.

 

But certain ears may have been burning from a comment someone made yesterday concerning the time my then 18-year old had an encounter with former Cubs’ great and recent HOF inductee Lee Smith.  How could she not know who Smith was, this person wondered.  I answered by noting Clare grew up little interested in the baseball that transpired north of Madison Street in Chicago.

 

This got me thinking as to how fans become knowledgeable about baseball history.  I think it takes time, and, in Clare’s defense, she knew about Frank Thomas and Robin Ventura from the time she could talk.  This strikes me as perfectly natural.  Young fans know about the team in front of them.  For Clare, the White Sox of Thomas and Ventura, for me the Sox of Gary Peters and Floyd Robinson.

 

At some point, youngsters hear from older fans about players traded away or retired, and so those individuals get added to the data base, which expands with each season.  Any serious 40-year old baseball fan should have thirty years’ worth of player memories to draw on.  Anything more than that, I think, is the result of special circumstance.

 

Maybe it’s a trip to Cooperstown; we visited when Clare was ten.  Maybe it’s a book, which is what happened to me.  It was the Sox 1966 yearbook, which that year included a pictorial history of the team.  This is how I first learned about Ed Walsh; Happy Felsch and the Black Sox; Ted Lyons and Luke Appling.  With that, I turned into a sponge for White Sox, as distinct from Cubs’, history.

 

The irony here is that my daughter understands the intricacies of the game far better than I do, hitting most of all.  Watching a game with her is like sitting next to a hitting coach.  It’s all load and weight and hips.  Me, I just want the guy to hit the ball.  The same goes for hitting the cutoff man or running the bases.  The girl knows the right way to do things.

 

Between us, I’d say we’re the perfect fan.  We got the game on the field covered, along with the games from long ago.  I couldn’t ask for a better partner, one who knew to call and ask who exactly Lee Smith was before getting his autograph.