Tim Marchman: Remember Ripken Right

Cal Ripken, Jr. was great, great, durable baseball player, one who deserves every bit of honor the fans and media have bestowed upon him in the past. That's all well and good, but an excellent column by the New York Sun's Tim Marchman* raises a great point about the mysticism and nostalgia surrounding Ripken, and urges us to remember him the way he deserves to be remembered:

I greatly admire Cal Ripken, but despise this myth. It grounded his appeal in resentment of supposedly lazy and greedy (and often black) modern players who didn't appreciate the gifts with which they were born and the rewards to which those gifts entitled them. That all the boogeymen and preening villains to whom Ripken was contrasted throughout his career, from the joyous Henderson to the odious Bonds, all worked just as hard as he did, and enjoyed the rightful fruits of their labor no more than he did, never really seemed to register. This weekend, we can honor him without pandering to this myth and thus implicitly denigrating players who were never held out as representative of values that existed in a mythic, hazily remembered past. The man was an incredible baseball player with an iron will, and he remains an icon of simple decency. That's more than enough, and more than worth honoring in its own right.

Just as ugly as pretense (and we've been over that enough, haven't we?), is nostalgia, flexed by the people who praise the "good old days", days which, when applied to American history, usually involve racism or bigotry or societal ills every bit the equal of those in the present. No matter: these are the same people who claim that all the great music was recorded in the 60's and 70's, and the same people who will likely, rather than just praise Cal Ripken for everything he means to baseball fans, use him as a starting point to complain about everything he isn't. That's a dishonor to baseball, and to Ripken. Don't fall into that trap.

*By the way, is there a consistently better baseball writer than Tim Marchman working right now? All suggestions welcome.

(HT: BBTF)