Museum of Dreams

This post originally appeared in the Blotch section of the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To consume it there : https://www.fwweekly.com/2018/01/10/sports-rush-museum-of-dreams/

I had a dream the other night and it inspired me to write this column. 

I actually have this dream every so often in various forms, and it involves the idea that the Rangers have scheduled a game back at old Arlington Stadium and I am going. Usually in this dream, I am just a fan at the game, navigating narrow concourses and acres of bleacher seats. Sometimes I am working, trying to remember where the press box entrance is. 

I have no idea why I have this dream (crowd-sourced psychoanalysis welcomed), but I do know I had a lot of fond memories of going there as a kid and watching Major League Baseball.

Of course, the team won’t be scheduling a throwback event at the old stadium because they tore it down when they built a new facility. The Rangers are about to construct their third ballpark, but this time the (tentative) plan involves repurposing the former home rather than demolishing it. 

If they’re going to trade on nostalgia, they should go all in and bring back one of Globe Life Park in Arlington’s former features. They should have a baseball museum.

The current facility would be a great place to house such a thing. How do we know? It already did.

When the place opened in 1994, the Legends of the Game Baseball Museum occupied a storefront facing Randol Mill on the ballpark’s south side. The downstairs portion housed exhibits on the game’s great players, its equipment, its uniforms, broadcasting and more. The displays included artifacts on loan from the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York - not a small thing for a museum to possess.

The second floor told the story of the Texas Rangers and baseball in North Texas. On the third floor, one found interactive areas geared toward young people.

If you loved baseball, you couldn’t help but find the museum absorbing. Objects owned by Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb stood on view alongside videos of Nolan Ryan no-hitters and Mantle/Maris/McGwire/Sosa/Bonds home run chases. If one re-opened such a museum, it would become a must-see for hard-core baseball fans.

But the longtime fans aren’t why the museum should come back. The biggest reason is the need to create the next generation of such people. Those of us who fell for the game at a young age developed a curiosity about it and began to take the deeper dives into its rich heritage. For me, books on the game and stories from my father got me fascinated with the game’s colorful past. That depth of engagement ensured I would want to continue to interact with the game into the present day, and attend games in any ballpark available. 

Before the museum closed after the 2009 season, every school group that toured the ballpark visited it. Schools could justifiably consider it an educational experience and thousands of children had a chance to realize how much there is to the national pastime.

The Rangers need baseball fans. This is a football state, and sports like basketball, ice hockey, soccer, and many others compete for allegiance. No sport has a history as storied as baseball’s. The Rangers should use it to their advantage.

Of course, you’d want to update the presentation, and have a plan for continuing to do so. When you’re competing for loyalty with e-sports and cellphones, the technological setup has to resonate. One issue the previous incarnation had was lack of commitment to keeping the exhibits fresh. As a Rangers employee, it took me years to find the money just to update a few videos so kids wouldn’t think Roger Maris still held the home run record or Oddibe McDowell was the only Ranger to hit for the cycle.

Would a new museum work from a business standpoint? According to museum personnel I talked to before the front office repurposed the space, it was still profitable to the end. The way it made a lot of its money was through events (including my sister’s wedding reception), but the Rangers thought they could make more profit by taking out exhibits and creating a more open floor pattern. The current Rangers Hall of Fame is the result.

Between the new ballpark and whatever is left at the old one, though, the team will have plenty of event space to rent. They could easily retain plenty of short-term profits from parties and corporate functions while also investing in cultivating the long-term fan base. And you could still host the right kinds of happenings at the museum, like the Batty at the Ballpark Halloween event pictured in this post’s featured photo. Note the baseball displays behind my niece‘s cool balloon/flower headdress.

If you want kids to have big league dreams (sometimes literally), you have to help them envision such things. A shrine to baseball would put them in the right frame of mind.


Rush Olson has spent more than two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns, television programs, and related creative projects for sports entities through Rush Olson Creative & Sports, Mint Farm Films, and FourNine Productions.

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I Had A Dream

This post originally appeared at the Fort Worth Weekly's website. To view it there : https://www.fwweekly.com/2017/01/16/baseball-realizes-dreams/

Any baseball franchise would want to employ a powerful first baseman with a career OPS (On-base Plus Slugging) over 1.000 who could also play the outfield.

Clubs would also welcome a hard-nosed second baseman who had won a Rookie-of-the-Year Award, an MVP, and a batting title.

Teams would be thrilled to add a smooth center fielder worth nearly 80 career WAR (Wins Above Replacement).

They’d be even more interested if you told them each player was a Hall-of-Famer and had served his country as a soldier in time of actual war.

I learned things about each of the above players at a new exhibit called Chasing Dreams: Baseball and Becoming American. The Congregation Ahavath Sholom on South Hulen hosts it through March 5. You can get more scoop on its contents and how it came to be in Fort Worth by reading my article in the Fort Worth Weekly print edition due on stands this coming Wednesday.

 

It seemed especially appropriate to write about the exhibit as we celebrate Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. King chased dreams, and, indeed we remember one of his most famous speeches as the “I Have A Dream Speech.” He delivered it August 28, 1963 in Washington, D.C., and it contains one of my favorite passages ever:

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

King’s address also spoke of the injustices done to African-Americans of the time and of difficulties they faced in a country whose laws denied them a level playing field. The exhibit talks of the discriminatory obstacles Jewish ballplayers faced, and includes mentions of the struggles and triumphs of black, Hispanic, and even female ballplayers.

We learn, for instance, that while early Jewish ballplayers could at least play in the big leagues (unlike African-Americans), many felt compelled to change their names to something that made their ethnicity less apparent. We also learn that baseball played a role in helping to overcome prejudices, both within the game and without.

“Baseball really became the place for cultural change in America, with Jackie Robinson as the place where America really began its integration,” posited event organizer Rick Hollander.

 

Robinson was the second baseman I described in this column’s opening paragraph. His status as MLB’s first African-American player in the modern era has deservedly cemented his status as a legend, and Robinson’s performance on the baseball diamond would have earned any player Hall of Fame consideration.

Rick Weintraub, a lifelong baseball fan who attended the exhibit the day I was there told us he had once gotten to meet Jackie Robinson. The nearly 80-year old white Jewish man said, “It now just almost brings tears to my eyes because he was such a great man, much less a baseball player.”
As one of the first Jewish ballplayers to keep his traditional surname, the first baseman/outfielder described above also faced racially-tinged abuse. Detroit Tigers fans, however, liked Hank Greenberg’s two MVP seasons and pair of World Series wins.

Both Greenberg and Robinson used their play on the field and their strength off it to power through much of the flimsy excuse for a mindset that is racism. They left baseball observers with little choice other than to judge them by the contents of their characters. I would submit that such developments have value in the wider world. Once one realizes that a member of a maligned group defies negative stereotypes, it makes it more difficult to project suppositions of inferiority onto other individuals.
Open competition, and sports especially, rewards such rational choices. Fans of that era discovered they would rather brag about their teams winning than obsess over whether the players looked like them or attended their church.

Speaking of winning, there’s another important day on the national calendar this week. Another prominent citizen will have a chance to address the public from the capital. Friday is Inauguration Day, and the incoming POTUS has talked a lot about winning things.

One thing the exhibits explains is how first-generation Americans used baseball to successfully bridge cultural gaps.

“Regardless of what all the politicians say in the world today, we are an immigrant society,” said Hollander. “They came here as young as eight, nine years old. They went back and fought in World War II for their new country and the patriotism was real. They understood the opportunities that America had to offer and baseball was one of those opportunities.”

 

All three of the men mentioned at the top of the page also served in the armed forces during WWII. One of the exhibition’s panels features a photo of Greenberg with the center fielder I cited. Joe DiMaggio might have been the most revered ballplayer in the world in 1941 and would join the Army from 1943-45. But when war broke out, the authorities wouldn’t allow his Sicilian father to earn a living fishing in San Francisco’s coastal waters because of where Giuseppe DiMaggio was born.

The Franklin D. Roosevelt administration judged a lot of Italians, Japanese, and others of Axis descent by something other than the content of each person’s character. The year after the U.S. government freed the last of the interned Japanese Americans, Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color barrier. As Hollander pointed out to me, the Major Leagues now feature players from all over, including Central and South America, the Caribbean, Korea, Australia, and, yes, Japan.

Society has made progress, too, since the 1940s. A more open world has resulted in all manner of free exchange of goods, services, music, and food. Indeed, as I walked into the synagogue to view the Chasing Dreams exhibit, a flier on the door caught my eye. This Jewish religious institution was advertising a musical Shabbat featuring the sounds of Latin America.

We’d like it if everyone kept an open mind about such cross-cultural experiences. When you adopt such an attitude, you can look at someone new or different as an individual and judge him or her accordingly.

If one views a person negatively because she shares a country of origin or a religion with billions of peaceful people and a tiny percentage of Bin Ladens, Torequmadas, Castros, or Maos; if one thinks just because a man rises to head a corporation or hedge fund, he therefore has no soul; if one believes that just because someone proved him or herself popular in an election, it automatically makes the official worthy or respect – or derision; In all these cases, one is not rendering judgement based on the content of that person’s character.

Baseball learned long ago how thinking that way prevents you from winning. The teams that employed Robinson, Greenberg, and DiMaggio won a LOT. One hopes that those taking power remember the lessons baseball – and Dr. King’s speech – have taught.

A Presidential Lineup

This post originally appeared on the Blotch page at the Fort Worth Weekly. To read it on their site : http://www.fwweekly.com/2015/07/14/a-presidential-lineup/

The old saying about the Washington Senators, as coined by baseball writer Charles Dryden, always went: “First in war, first in peace, last in the American League.” The Sens did tend to find themselves at the caboose end of their annual whistle stop tour of the A.L. They finished in the second division 41 times between 1901 and their move to Minnesota after the 1960 season. And the powerful people of D.C. could do nothing about it.

Baseball: America’s Presidents, America’s Pastime, the current special exhibit on display through October 4 at Dallas’ George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum, covers the sport of baseball and how U.S. presidents interacted with it. So that could beg the question:  What if the most powerful man in the world could do something about what happened on the field? Not by signing a minimum-run bill or conducting NSA-style surveillance on the Astros’ front office (that’s apparently already been done, anyway), but by actually contributing on the diamond.

If you had to pick any president to start a baseball team, whom would you choose?

Most presidents since the beginning of the 20th century have thrown at least one pitch a year. William Howard Taft began the practice of tossing ceremonial first pitches. On April 14, 1910, Taft addressed a women’s suffrage convention, then went to American League Park, where the Senators played their home games at the time. He threw out the ceremonial first pitch of the season to Walter Johnson. The Hall-of-Famer Johnson then threw a one-hitter in a 3-0 Sens Opening Day win against the Philadelphia Athletics.

The tradition continued, and, in fact, Barack Obama threw out a first pitch on the 100th anniversary of Taft’s inaugural presidential delivery.

One pitch, however, does not a Sabermetric analysis make.  Luckily, the exhibit had some information on which presidents actually played baseball, plus their heights, weights, and records of offices held.

With baseball known as the National Pastime, it follows that a lot of the National Heads of State have played the game. After reviewing the information, I speculated on how a GM might assemble an all-Presidential team. As you listen to their games broadcast by former Cubs play-by-play announcer Ronald Reagan, keep in mind that I’ve assigned them positions based on available knowledge of where they actually played or where their abilities would seem to place them.  It’s all subject to change, of course, because when you’re the Commander in Chief, you can really play whatever position you want to.

1B : George H. W. Bush

This is probably the guy with whom you start the team. He played D-1 baseball and captained his Yale squad to the first two College World Series tournaments in 1947 and 1948.  A 1990 Topps baseball card of Bush 41 indicates he hit .251 (with a wood bat) in 175 at-bats those two years, some of which came against future Major Leaguers. He socked two home runs and eight doubles.

According to William Mead and Paul Dickson in their book Baseball: The Presidents’ Game, Bush 41 was probably the best natural ballplayer of all the presidents. John Sayle Watterson, in his book The Games Presidents Play: Sports and the Presidency, ranks George H.W. Bush as the top overall presidential athlete.

2B: Woodrow Wilson

He played college ball as a freshman at Davidson, so he must have had some ability, although Watterson ranks him as one of the least athletic presidents. Wilson loved baseball, attending many games after he left office. Perhaps he would have been a David Eckstein sort of player, who doesn’t look like a good ballplayer but finds a way to get it done. On the other hand, Baseball Almanac cites this contemporary observation about the 28^th president: “’Wilson would be a good player if he weren’t so damned lazy.’ – Comment by the Team Captain of Wilson’s Davidson College.”

SS: Herbert Hoover

Hoover loved baseball and played shortstop at Stanford as a freshman. Ted Williams (known for being the Rangers’ first manager, among other things) considered him America’s greatest president.

3B: Warren Harding

He played first base as a boy, but we’re moving him across the diamond because the team’s top player occupies that position. Baseball Almanac reports that Harding played in a charity game in 1920 and injured his finger.

C: William Howard Taft

According to Mead and Dickson, there are accounts that Taft was a young catcher who would have had a contract with the Cincinnati Red Stockings had he not injured his arm. Taft loved the game, though he missed throwing out the first pitch in 1912 due to an understandable preoccupation with the recent Titanic shipwreck. At more than 300 pounds, the 27^th president probably isn’t your leadoff hitter, but might be your Prince Fielder in the middle of the order.

LF: John Kennedy

One of the best presidential athletes, Kennedy grew up a Red Sox fan. He concentrated more on other sports, like swimming, but I think he’d be projectable as at least a good defensive outfielder.

CF: Dwight Eisenhower

The general loved baseball, but didn’t make the West Point team.  He wanted to be a ballplayer like Honus Wagner growing up, which is relevant here because the museum just added to its exhibit the most valuable and famous baseball card around, a T-206 Honus Wagner.

RF: Gerald Ford

Ford was an excellent athlete, having played football at Michigan. He played baseball growing up as well, and Baseball Almanac reports him as having said “I had a life-long ambition to be a professional baseball player, but nobody would sign me.” He played on the Congressional baseball team before occupying the Oval Office.

LOOGYs (left-handed-one-out-guy): Barack Obama and Bill Clinton

This isn’t a joke based on their politics. They both throw left-handed and a team needs situational southpaws. Clinton listened to Cardinals games growing up and later rooted for his wife’s favored Cubs. Obama likes the White Sox. Based on the video I’ve seen, Clinton looks to be the most game-ready. Obama, a fine basketball player, may have to take the Michael Jordan path and spend some time in the White Sox minor league system as he converts to a different sport.

Pat Venditte’s Position : Harry Truman

Truman could throw with either arm. He didn’t play that much as a kid, but loved the game and attended more games while in office than any other president. His wife Bess was apparently considered the best third baseman in Independence, Missouri as a young person, a fact one learns in the First Ladies section of the exhibit.

By the way, are there a kids in third-world countries wearing “Congratulations, President Dewey” shirts?

Closer: Abraham Lincoln

Lincoln apparently played ballgames on the White House lawn with local kids and had a baseball field built behind the White House. We don’t know his true position, but with his height, I am thinking he could throw some heat on a serious downward plane. If he can learn a breaking pitch, he could be a dominating closer.

RHP: Jimmy Carter

Carter pitched growing up and continued playing softball during his presidency. His mom loved the Dodgers and the exhibit shows a letter Carter wrote to Los Angeles owner Peter O’Malley thanking him for treating his mom well. Carter attended Game 7 of 1979 World Series but never threw out a first pitch as president. That’s kind of Arlington’s fault. Texas persuaded the Senators (an expansion franchise that replaced the one that moved to Minnesota) to vacate the nation’s capital in 1972. Presidents had no Washington team to patronize until the Nationals arrived during the Bush 43 administration.

RHP: George W. Bush

The younger Bush played on the Yale freshman team but didn’t progress to the varsity. Still, even playing at that level puts him ahead of most of us. Where the 43^rd president would prove especially valuable to your team-building would be in actually building it. He spent time as Managing General Partner of the Texas Rangers.

“One of the pleasant surprises for all of us, not knowing him when he put the group together to buy the team, turned out to be how much of a student of the game that he really was,” said Tom Grieve, who served as Rangers General Manager under Bush. “It was obvious when you talked to him that he knew the history of the game. He could quote lineups from 30-40 years ago. He loved baseball.“

Bush no doubt absorbed a lot of knowledge about building a ballclub through his interactions with the Rangers baseball operations staff

“He was in a lot of meetings. He asked a lot of questions,” explained Grieve. He never imposed his will or his thoughts on anybody else, but he was very aware of everything that went on in the baseball operation. He wanted to know about it.”

For his Assistant to the General Manager positions, Bush might choose Bill Clinton, who got involved in resolving the 1994 baseball strike or Richard Nixon, a huge baseball aficionado who turned down offers to head the MLB Players Association and to become MLB Commissioner. Also, Warren Harding owned part of the Marion, Ohio town team, which developed future Major Leaguers Wilbur Cooper and Jake Daubert.

Bush 43 had one of the most poignant presidential baseball moments when he threw out the first pitch at Yankee Stadium in October, 2001, shortly after the September 11 attacks. It was Game 3 of the Yankees/Diamondbacks World Series. Yankees (and former Rangers) catcher Todd Greene caught the pitch.

The exhibit talks about all the ways presidents impacted the game beyond just playing it. Perhaps the most historically significant artifact comes courtesy of Franklin D. Roosevelt. In 1942, he wrote the famous “green light letter” to Kennesaw Mountain Landis urging baseball’s commissioner to keep the game going during the war.

Most of the information for this article came, quite naturally, from the backs of baseball cards. In this case, we mean oversized cards in the exhibit you can pull off the wall and flip over to discover facts about baseball and presidents.

Many of the artifacts in the exhibit came from presidential libraries and the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. You’ll learn a lot, with details ranging from how George Washington played catch at Valley Forge, to why the athletically inclined Teddy Roosevelt disliked the sport, to a display of the jersey movie actor Ronald Reagan wore when portraying a ballplayer named after a president. There’s a video about baseball and presidents, narrated by the Bush Center’s Scott Robertson. Its highlight might be footage of Bush 43 at 2001 World Series where you see how the Secret Service did its thing, including an agent dressing up as umpire. And, of course, there’s a souvenir stand. You can pick up exhibit-branded jerseys, pins, and postcards, plus the inevitable baseball autograph (George W. Bush’s, on a $100 copy of his book about his father).

With a big baseball event on national television tonight, we’re reminded of an election none of these professional politicians would have likely won, even if they had continued to pursue power hitting instead of executive power: selection to the MLB All-Star Game.

Which begs the question of whether the public should actually elect All-Star starters or leave it up to a system of electors equal to the number of total congresspersons. We’ll address that in a future blog post.

Disclosure : The Bush Center sometimes pays me to help produce their webcasts. Also, I once had a dog called “Hoover.” He was named after a president, but not of the United States. I named him for the president of Delta House.

Rush Olson has spent two decades directing creative efforts for sports teams and broadcasters. He currently creates ad campaigns and related creative projects for sports entities through his company, Rush Olson Creative & Sports.

RushOlson.com

Linkedin.com/company/rush-olson-creative-&-sports

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