It's all about the Small Ball. Going to bat with a Book.
According to ESPN poll, baseball players no longer hold first place in the hearts of American youth . Some perspective - A 1910 poll of Congress asked members if they played baseball. All but three did, and two of those were disabled. More perspective: In the same year as Take Me Out to the Ball Game (1908) was published , Stars of the National Game was published. It’s lyrics included this classic: I’m as dippy and as daffy as a daffodil in May When the heroes of the diamond come on the field to play Then its hats off to Wagner, Lajoie and Cobb… The concern then was not would a baseball player be chosen as a hero but which one had the largest contingent. The National Game was baseball. Ask a kid today who Ty Cobb was. Honus Wagner? Napoleon Lajoie? You don’t have to be an ESPN pollster to predict the results. Cy Young once said of Napoleon Lajoie: “He was such an idol that crowds followed him down the street like the Pied Piper. Kids worshipped him and I have been told that when he endorsed a certain brand of tobacco, half the kids in the nation got sick giving the foul weed a tryout in the hope it would make sluggers of them like Lajoie.” I have heard all the explanations for baseball’s demise across the country. Now, according to another poll by ESPN, MLS is ahead of MLB in youngsters’ allegiance. What I can’t stomach is that Napoleon Lajoie is a name unknown by the youth in his hometown- Woonsocket, RI. How many kids in the Woonsocket Little League know who he is? How many school children? Very few. This should be fertile ground- Rico Baldelli, Gabby Harnett, and Clem Labine all were born in or near Woonsocket. And so I will soon dress up in a 1912 Cleveland Indian reproduction jersey. I will carry a bat that has two knobs, a glove that has no lace between the fingers, and a beat up Dead Era ball. I will become Napoleon Lajoie. The audience will be Little Leaguers and middle school students in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. I guess that not one of them will know who he was, the greatest baseball player in New England history. Not one will know that he was born but down the street, that like many of them now he once faced a future as bleak as many of them do. Working in the cotton mill and driving a team of horses wasn’t his dream. I will give each of them a book I have written for them on Napoleon Lajoie and a curriculum guide to every teacher helping students to understand what a true Horatio Alger figure he was , a source of community pride. It is a story of baseballs torn from their covers, of record achieving feats, including the highest average in American League history, of great popularity and a local and national love affair that culminated in naming the Cleveland team after Lajoie, the Naps. The book is dedicated to my two favorite Little League coaches who made me ride my bike recklessly to get to practice on time and to my Dad who once shook hands with Lou Gehrig at his school. All I can ask is that a few of those youth take the book home that night and dream. I can at least promise that they won’t get sick Wish me luck. It’s all part of Bring Back Baseball campaign that if supported will include a statue of Lajoie. It will be called Unearthing Our Treasure and the RI Historical Society will join in. I am speaking to rotaries and all that profess community building missions. I plan on asking the Red Sox’s Pawtucket brass to make the books part of a giveaway, not a Jabba the Hut uniform giveaway, but a book meant to help youth enter the lived -in imagination of a time when baseball’s heroes ran rampant. I want to put the book in the hands of grandparents reading to their grandchildren during library grandparent reading days, in the hands of mentors reading to mentees, especially boys who as we know are less apt to pick up a book. Hopefully, Baseball’s brightest minds are strategizing how to bring back the game as we speak . All I can do is fight the local battle. I wonder whether MLB should follow my model in other cities and towns across America that have a moribund baseball history awaiting resurrection……MLB wage a civil war town by town- it’s all about small ball!
