Dedicated to Rickey Henderson (1958–2024)
Mike Piazza: “Rickey was the most generous guy I ever played with, and whenever the discussion came around to what we should give one of the fringe people — whether it was a minor leaguer who came up for a few days or the parking lot attendant — Rickey would shout out, ‘Full share!’ We’d argue for a while and he’d say, ‘Fuck that! You can change somebody’s life!’”
Baseball is a horn of plenty for our people: an abundant provider of thrills and laughter and heroes and legends and, yes, prodigiously diverse livelihoods, too. There is, or once was, the editor — without baseball, he might have been forced to write steamy novels and lose sleep over his pyramid of tax shelters. Or the keyboard knights up in the press box and the bloggers and podcasters on the web — all of them viewed with fear if not loathing by players and management alike; baseball saved them the bother of extending their fireplace mantels to hold all those Oscars and Pulitzers. Or the radio and tv announcers, who without baseball would have had to report on four-star generals and five-alarm fires for the six o’clock news. Or the artists and photographers and trainers and g.m.’s and p.r. directors … baseball “saved” all of them from having to do something greater by the world’s standards, if lesser by their own.
For what unites all of us folks on the fringe of the game (I include myself, of course) — we who have made baseball our lives but are peripheral to its play — is an abiding love for the game, combined with Peter Pan’s wish never to grow old, at least in our hearts. This is not to say that heedless infatuation plus arrested development is a surefire recipe for baseball success, only that, once again, Roy Campanella had it right about our game: “You have to be a man,” he said, “but you have to have a lot of little boy in you, too.” It may be hard to think of Rob Manfred or Hal Steinbrenner in those terms or, not so long ago, Roger Angell or Leroy Nieman or Vin Scully, but it is so.
And it is more evidently so as you move, to borrow Dudley Moore’s marvelous phrase, beyond the fringe: into the lotus land where mild-mannered fans by day become fanatic figure filberts or demon microfilm readers by night. Dice baseball, the myriad computer baseball games, the search for the new statistic or the lost player — even fantasy baseball camps for the over-40 set … all attest to the grip this great game has on America’s heart and mind.
Card collectors, autograph hounds, broken-bat scavengers — the fringe widens to become in fact far larger than the core of players, spectators, and workers at the ballpark. The demarcation between stars and spear-carriers begins to blur, and this is as it should be, for baseball is about community, not clans: a ceremony of inclusion, not exclusion. It is, as one of my old books is titled, The Game for All America, which would do well to follow its model.
The Fringe of the Game was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.