Midlands Voices: Bonds of baseball endure

The writer is a middle-aged student at Bellevue University and a lifelong baseball aficionado from Kansas City, Mo.

As I approached my stadium seat, I could see that a couple of fans of the opposing team were already adjacent to me. I love sitting next to fans of the opposition. Those who drive to an opposing team’s stadium are not casual in their love for the game. Those are the people I most enjoy spending a summer afternoon with.

Three hours is a long time to sit next to a stranger cheering against your team. It is long enough to delve into his thoughts, feelings and experiences of the game. In an interview with a fan of most any persuasion, one of two phrases is sure to be uttered: “My dad ...” or “When I was a kid ...”.

This is the great common denominator of the game, which enables rival fans to share an afternoon of stories — the childhood experiences, the great emotional bonds of parent and child that are tied up in our collective memories with the crack of a bat and infield dust in our eyes.

Baseball, in a fan’s life, runs through it from beginning to end like a thread, sometimes through times of great significance but most often just there, with consistency and simple beauty. The thread of baseball intertwines with the threads of other fans. Those hours spent with our fathers in childhood connect our threads with his, just as his thread is twisted and joined with his father’s.

We connect with parents, grandparents, childhood friends and spouses through baseball. And when we have children of our own, we seek to re-create the experiences for them, and we begin their little thread of baseball, anchored firmly with a knot in our own thread.

These individual threads create a ribbon of baseball — frayed in spots, brilliant and glittering in others — that runs through American society. This ribbon connects baseball’s history and America’s history as surely as the individual threads of baseball connect our own families and personal history.

On the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s debut as baseball’s first black player, America’s ribbon of baseball gleamed as Commissioner Bud Selig declared Robinson’s No. 42 retired from every team in Major League Baseball. Players annually wear that number on April 15, the date that he broke into the major leagues in 1947, in tribute to Robinson.

Retirement and display of Robinson’s number is no small honorific. It is an opportunity, in every stadium, at every game, to teach a historical lesson. Every time a child asks “Who was ‘42’?” the story of Jackie Robinson is told.

It is a story of systematic racism and the courage it took for the Dodgers organization and Robinson to challenge it. It is a story of how baseball led American society across the color barrier. And it is a story of America righting its injustices of the past. It is an opportunity to teach that, in America, we can admit to being wrong and correct ourselves.

The Buck O’Neil Legacy Seat in Kansas City’s Kauffman Stadium provides a similar opportunity. Buck played in the Negro Leagues with Satchel Paige. He was the first black coach in Major League Baseball. He was the scout who signed Lou Brock.

Baseball was merely a conduit for Buck’s greatest contributions, though. While Robinson admitted to anger and frustration in the face of racism, Buck refused to allow racism to color his view of individuals and never felt weighed down by hate. While it’s OK to admit wrongdoing, O’Neil’s life teaches that it’s also OK to accept an apology.

In his book, “The Soul of Baseball,” sportswriter Joe Posnan- ski tells of an evening when Buck disappeared as they were entering a hotel. Posnanski checked the lobby, the hall, the bathroom — no Buck O’Neil. Walking back outside, he found Buck, talking and laughing with a young woman in a striking red dress. After several minutes, Buck rejoined Posnanski and quickly advised him, “Son, in this life, you don’t ever walk by a red dress.”

I imagine that the metaphorical baseball ribbon, running through American lives, loves, wars, depressions and booms, is red. America has been just as unable to walk past, unaware and dispassionate, as Buck O’Neil was.

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