What Goes Around

About a year ago, when shortstop Derek Jeter passed Babe Ruth on the Yankees all-time hits list, the Babe Ruth Birthplace and Museum forwarded a request through the Yanks’ public relations office asking that Jeter consider donating something from that historic at bat that would forever link he and the Babe together.

Within a week’s time, an overnight parcel arrived at the Birthplace, and in it was Derek’s response to our appeal: his batting gloves from the at-bat…donated! This, from a guy we had never met, but who understood, I think, just how important sports heritage is, especially in the game of baseball, whose heavy tendency to compare present to past sets it apart from any other sport. That is why our museum can easily interpret the connection between Ruth and Jeter through those batting gloves.

With that said, it seemed appropriate that when Jeter smacked his historic 3,000^th hit for a home run at Yankee Stadium last Saturday, the young fan who caught it opted to return the ball to the man who hit it. The 23-year-old and the star shortstop had something in common…the corny notion that the ball has more value as a heritage memento than as a collectible worth X amount of dollars.

The kid could have sold the ball for half a million, paid off his college bills, and had a nice nest egg. But his altruistic sense and his love for the game told him to do the right thing, and he did…no questions asked. The ball needed to be returned to the man to whom it meant the most, the man who, one year earlier, gave away his valued batting gloves to a sports museum in Baltimore, no questions asked.

What goes around…comes around.

See you out there.

Mike Gibbons is the executive director for the Babe Ruth Birthplace Foundation, Inc. 

Interleague Play

Last Friday night I had tickets to the Orioles-Reds game at Camden Yards. As I walked to the park a few minutes before game time with my buddy, Ed, you couldn’t help but notice a different kind of buzz spurring through that lovely summer evening. Part of it could be attributed to the huge crowd filing into the ball park. Baltimore hasn’t enjoyed too many 40-plus-thousand home dates lately, and tonight would be a sellout. Yes, there were out-of-town fans, but this was mostly an orange and black event.

The other thing was that our Birds were playing the Cincinnati Reds, a National League standard with franchise roots burrowing back to 1869, when the Redstockings became America’s first professional team. The Orioles took their name in 1882, so tonight fans would be treated to two of baseball’s founding franchises, going head to head in the regular season for only the second time. The two teams had squared off once previously, with the Reds taking two of three in Cincinnati. They had never been to Baltimore during the regular season, so tonight’s series’ opener was special because of its rarity…which contributed to the buzz, for sure.

The other ingredient, for old-timers like me at least, is that these two teams had met in Baltimore one other time…the 1970 World Series. Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Pete Rose and Lee May, versus Earl Weaver’s powerhouse Orioles, Boog Powell, Frank and Brooks, and that fabled pitching rotation of McNally, Palmer and Cuellar. The Orioles took four out of five to snatch the crown from the favored Reds, and that was the series when Brooks Robinson established himself once and for all as the human vacuum cleaner. Hoover! God but did he have a series.

So walking into the ballpark that night was such the treat. The buzz, the big crowd, the storied franchises in a rare square-off, and special memories of Earl and his men, especially number five, Brooks Robinson.

All of which makes inter-league play something baseball ought to keep around, though I’d love to see them play National League rules in the American League parks, and vice-versa. How about you?

See you out there. 

Mike Gibbons is the executive director for the Babe Ruth Birthplace Foundation, Inc.