When all was said and done, I wrote what I thought was a stellar paper. Ty Cobb was the greatest. And when all was said and done, Ms. Saltzbart graced that paper with a U and U-. U for research, and U- for the writing itself.
Now for the record, I was an A student. I was in the honors programs, and even in Ms. Saltzbart's class I had almost all Aces throughout the year so that my final grade averaged to be a C in the fourth quarter even with these bad marks, my first C in high school. And like the dutiful "good kid" I was, I accepted my fate... except, I had to ask why this happened. Where had I gone wrong.
When I went to speak with her after class the following day she replied that I failed because, "Joe Dimaggio is the greatest baseball player of all time." That was the sum total of why I failed. She had nothing more to say.
All these years I dismissed her conclusion as wacko. Until today, actually. It may be that all my rambling comparisons of baseball stats missed something important. In Hemingway's Nobel Prize-winning Old Man and the Sea, Santiago took inspiration from DiMaggio, the man who never gave up. The theme song from Oscar-winning The Graduate features this Paul Simon line, "Where have you gone, Joe Dimaggio." The great pop culture status icon Marilyn Monroe even married the guy. In other words, I never factored in the effect Joe DiMaggio had on the broader culture.
Seven player strikes and all the wrangling over contracts, salaries and taxes for stadiums has taken a lot of luster off the Great American Game. There was a time when It Happens Every Spring played on Saturday Night at the Movies the weekend before the season opener. There was a time when everyone knew at least a few of the stars. And literary giants wrote about the men who played it.
One such literary giant of our century past was John Updike, and the player he wrote an incredible baseball essay about was Ted Williams. Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu is a must read if you were ever a fan of baseball. The essay, which begins as follows, appeared in The New Yorker in 1960, back when I was reading Casper the Friendly Ghost comics. The opening is wonderful.

Ted Williams was another of the great ones. It may be that had I read Updike before writing about Ty Cobb I would have produced a better paper. Or if I had taken a typing class freshman year instead of senior year since my handwriting may have been a tad too illegible for a teacher staring at a pile of term papers through eyes befogged by cocktails. ("Objection! Calls for speculation.")
I would strongly encourage you to follow this link and bookmark the Updike piece. It's a masterful work and one of the greater bits of baseball literature ever written.
Trivia: Joe DiMaggio's contract, when making appearances, stipulated that he be introduced as "the greatest baseball player of all time." May we ourselves never be so vain.
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