Cooperstown, put down the phone and pick up your gaze. Watch the sun set. Ride a bike. Take the stairs. Hold a door open. Greet “no” as an invitation to be better. Listen to the Baseball Hall of Fame induction speeches of Fred McGriff and Scott Rolen.
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Hall of Fame inductions can seem more coronation than reward. And the rolling hills and quaint roads of this hamlet are most clogged when the confirmation of greatness is as inevitable as succession to the throne. Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn. Greg Maddux. Mariano Rivera. Derek Jeter.
On Sunday, under a brilliant sky and before a more modest crowd, the day and the message belonged to McGriff and Rolen, two players who never dreamed they would be standing onstage with the best view in baseball: from behind the Clark Sports Center, these bucolic hills and baseball immortality stretched in front of them to the horizon.
“At no point in my lifetime,” Rolen said, “did it ever occur to me that I would be standing on this stage.”
Between them, McGriff and Rolen were rejected 15 times by writers voting for the Hall of Fame, diminished by those who preferred throwing support to players publicly connected to PED use, as if how greatness was achieved mattered none. But when their day in the sun finally arrived, both men delivered odes to humility and work ethic that were as beautiful and memorable as an Alfred Tennyson poem.
McGriff, the son of a schoolteacher and TV repair shop owner from Tampa, Fla., was cut from his high school baseball team. He hit .148 with no home runs in his first pro season and was traded when he was 18 years old, then went on to hit 493 home runs and bat cleanup more times than anyone except Eddie Murray and Honus Wagner, two of those royalty-type Hall of Famers.
Rolen chose baseball over basketball, playing it with such humility he typically placed his bat on the ground upon hitting one of his 316 home runs, as if setting the family dining table, and ran the bases in a hurry to get it over with. To hear him speak you understood he is every bit the son of Jasper, Ind., a town named after a passage from The Book of Revelation, as much as Ed and Linda Rolen.
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We live in the age of the Attention Economy. An increasing flood of diversions fights for our attention, but our brain capacity to process those diversions is finite, as capped now as it was when Rolen’s hometown got its first telephone in 1896, at the Jasper City Bakery. And so we reflexively allow room mostly for the Culture of Est—what wins in this fight for our attention are the easiest, the loudest, the vainest, the snarkiest and the like.
By the way they played and carried themselves as ballplayers, McGriff and Rolen never were good at the Culture of Est. As they spoke so eloquently about, they were good at working hard, persevering and honoring their parents. As they reminded us, heaven help us if we consign those values to “old-fashioned,” “boring” and unworthy of our limited attention.
McGriff told the instructive story of trying out for the Thomas Jefferson High varsity team as a sophomore in Tampa, Fla. An upperclassman had first base locked down. The school had no jayvee team. So he tried out as an outfielder. He thought he did O.K. At the end of tryouts, the coach told the players he would post the names of those who made the team that night. McGriff snuck over to the school late that night with a flashlight. He scanned the list. He did not see his name. His heart sank.
Getting cut from his high school team was the beginning, not the end, for McGriff. It motivated him to train harder. He rode his bike three miles each way to work out. Two years later, in 1981, he was drafted in the ninth round by the Yankees. McGriff made sure in his speech Sunday to thank one of his coaches from those formative pro seasons: Ed Napoleon, one of those many baseball lifers who spends an entire career out of the limelight but forges careers and values. Napoleon played 1,307 games over 14 years, all but 36 of them in Class A or below, before putting in another 37 years as a manager, coach and instructor in the minors and majors.
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“My goal,” McGriff said, “was simply to make it to the big leagues.”
Rolen held a similarly simple dream. I made the mistake of thinking his defining moment was hitting a pennant-winning home run off Roger Clemens in Game 7 of the 2004 NLCS. Instead, Rolen eloquently described “the greatest moment of [his] career” as watching, from third base at Veterans Stadium, as his mother and father walked to their seats behind home plate in the fourth inning of his major league debut in 1996.
“A feeling,” Rolen said, “never topped in my career.”
With impeccable timing, Rolen told the story of the simple yet life-changing advice his father gave him when Rolen complained, after two months of playing summer baseball, that he could not measure up to the other players in an Indiana vs. Kentucky high school basketball all-star game. “Well, what can you do?” Ed asked him. Rolen thought about the question and figured he could rebound, hustle and dive for loose balls. A spark was lit. Focusing on what he can do rather than what he cannot became Rolen’s guiding principle. Simple. Yet powerful. An honest, best effort was the message of the day.
This was the 74th Hall of Fame induction ceremony. Doubtlessly, there have been much bigger stars. Bigger crowds. Bigger careers. But there was something very much welcome, even needed, by having McGriff and Rolen go in together. None of the 74 inductions dripped with more gratitude than this one.
Never were they locks for the Hall of Fame, even as candidates. With just 10% of the vote in his first year on the ballot, Rolen set a record for the lowest percentage of a debut candidate eventually elected by the writers. McGriff never reached even 40% of the vote total in 10 tries with the writers. A committee acted unanimously to undo that injustice.
“When your career is validated by players and executives that saw you play,” McGriff said, “that’s as good as it gets.”
By taking so long to be inducted, and then going in together with the same modesty and gratitude, McGriff and Rolen became baseball brothers of a sort. Rolen acknowledged the pride of sharing the stage and the historical link with McGriff. They stood there onstage together, their arms around each other’s backs, sharing in the moment and in the message upon which Tennyson ended Ulysses: “To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
