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Sunday, November 29, 2009
The Holy Writers name award after a sworn racist
I always thought it was cool in the NHL that they have an award named after various pioneers and greats in the game. It’s not the MVP, but the Hart Trophy. Best goalie? Nope, Vezina. And so on. And I thought that it would be good for MLB to name their awards similarly. Instead of the MVP award, why not call it the Babe Ruth award, and so on.
Well, the writers DO have an official name for the MVP, and if wikipedia is to be trusted, it is named Kenesaw Mountain Landis Memorial Baseball Award. For those not big on history, Landis was MLB’s first commissioner, a former federal judge brought in to clean up the game after the Black Sox scandal. But, he was also a racist:
Landis perpetuated the color line and prolonged the segregation of organized baseball. His successor, Happy Chandler, said, “For twenty-four years Judge Landis wouldn’t let a black man play. I had his records, and I read them, and for twenty-four years Landis consistently blocked any attempts to put blacks and whites together on a big league field."[6] Bill Veeck claimed Landis prevented him from purchasing the Phillies when Landis learned of Veeck’s plan to integrate the team. The signing of the first black ballplayer in the modern era, Jackie Robinson, came less than a year after Landis’s death on Chandler’s watch and was engineered by one of Landis’s old nemeses, Branch Rickey. Eleven weeks after Robinson’s debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Veeck became the first American League owner to break the color line.
So, these Holy Writers, so quick (and correct) in chastising the Cleveland Indians for its racially-charged logos, sit there all smug that they have an honor, their highest honor, named after a racist. And yet we will hear about McGwire and Bonds for the rest of our lives. MLB, so quick to put Pete Rose on its ineligible list because of the “integrity of the game”, does not ask for Landis to be removed from the HOF for the same reason.
It’s not that Landis was a racist like Ty Cobb. He was a racist that actually prevented the best players in the game from playing. That brings it to a whole new level. But, the Holy Writers have more important things to worry about than their highest honor. They have to make sure that they are all standing watch by the pearly gates, to make sure that those guys who did what half the writers themselves would have done had they been in their position, doesn’t get passed them.
“Do as I say, not as I would have done.”
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