What is it about what could have been that makes life so much more interesting? Over the past two weeks I found myself reading The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca and the Shot Heard Round the World by Joshua Prager. The book, of course, tells the story of the 1951 Giants Pennant, but pays special heed to the way in which the Giants cheated.
It makes you wonder. How well would that team have performed if they had not cheated? This year Elly De La Cruz and the Reds young core has served to light a fire under the Reds, propelling them into first place. Everyone talks about Elly De La Cruz’s “it factor.” But let’s take into account for a second the young core of the 1951 Giants. At it’s center were young pitchers, Maglie and Jansen, and perhaps even more importantly a young Monte Irvin and Willie Mays. Would Willie Mays have ignited the 1952 Giants in the same manner that Elly De La Cruz has done for the 2023 Reds? We can never be fully certain because it is fact that the Durocher’s Giants cheated.
It’s the not knowing that I find interesting though. While we can never really know if Walter Johnson would have pitched as well as Randy Johnson in the nineties, or know if Ty Cobb could have hit .400 in the seventies, or if the Fifties Yankees were better than the Nineties Yankees, the biggest question to me will always be how the Negro Leaguers would have faired in MLB.
This week I started working on a series of drawings of the Detroit Stars and of Detroit Tigers wearing throwback Detroit Stars uniforms in the style of 1933 Goudey Chewing Gum cards. I can’t help but feel curious about the what could have beens, but I also just feel so attached to the what was.
I’ve just started Buck O’Neil’s Right on Time. He talks of being so proud to have played baseball with and against some of the most talented ballplayers of the thirties and forties. A man who could have been so bitter, just wasn’t. I think there is a lesson in that for all of us. While Capitalism has built an entire monopoly off of FOMO, what is it to recognize the beauty in the what is and what was.
I think that is why I am focused on this little Detroit Stars project. These men were great, maybe not recognized for being so, but no doubt great. I feel like in my art that is all that I want, to be great, whether anyone thinks I am or not. And really, what is being recognized as great, when you know that you are more of Bobby Thomson shirking the spotlight than you ever will be a Satchel Paige embodying the spotlight.