Monument Park – By Jon Schwartz

Lucky Day

(This story originally appeared in the July 2021 edition of Yankees Magazine.)

It can be a bit too easy sometimes to think of Lou Gehrig’s famous speech, and the happy tones in which we use it to craft our memories of the Iron Horse. The luckiest man? Why, that sounds wonderful!

In reality, Lou Gehrig was dying of a cruel disease that is as deadly today as it was in 1939. Indeed, patients diagnosed with ALS in 2021 have the same likelihood of survival that Gehrig did.

All of which is to say that the first league-wide celebration of Lou Gehrig Day was about more than recognizing the death of a great baseball man. Rather, the hope is that adding attention to more than just the speech and the ballplayer can help finally move the needle toward a cure.

A couple of interesting things that stood out to me from my reporting on this one. First, I was asking Gerrit Cole (whose father-in-law, Mike Crawford, was very involved in the effort to make MLB adopt the league-wide recognition) what it meant to be a Yankee during the first Lou Gehrig Day. How did it compare, I asked to being a Pirate on Roberto Clemente Day? What was interesting was that he reminded me that, on top of those two examples, he also played baseball at UCLA, where Jackie Robinson starred, so he really has an attachment to all three days on the MLB calendar that honor individuals.

The other thing was something that Crawford told me, a ray of light that could come from the struggle against COVID. What we all saw in the last year was that when all of the scientists and medical workers can focus on something, we can do amazing things. We got a vaccine for COVID in a matter of months. So rather than viewing ALS as an impossible problem, there’s hope that with the right amount of money and the right publicity push, maybe there are lessons to learn from the struggle to find a pathway to eradicating COVID.

The inaugural Lou Gehrig Day was a special celebration throughout MLB and America. I was proud to write about it.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/yankees-magazine-lou-gehrig-speech?t=yankees-magazine

The Final 42

(This story originally appeared in the Monument Park Commemorative Edition of Yankees Magazine. To purchase your copy, visit www.yankees.com/publications or call 800-GO-YANKS.)

I’ve always been of two minds about the idea of retiring uniform numbers. On the one hand, I certainly understand the sentiment — it’s a recognized means of appreciating greatness, and I’m on board with that. The downside to me, though, is that in doing so, your taking away the opportunity for players to recognize their heroes by choosing to wear the number. When Carlos Delgado wears 21 to celebrate Roberto Clemente, that’s obviously a meaningful tribute; does it really make sense that a player for the Pittsburgh Pirates can’t make the same choice?

I’m pretty sure that I’m in the minority on this, so I don’t feel any real need to harp on it. I kind of liked it a few years back when the University of Michigan — my alma mater — began honoring greats from the team’s past by “unretiring” their numbers. Essentially, they tried to establish the idea of wearing those numbers as a privilege, rather than celebrating the university legends by keeping their numbers out of rotation. I liked seeing Michigan QB Devin Gardner wearing 98, as a tribute to “Old 98” Tom Harmon. But again, your mileage may vary.

Embed from Getty Images

Anyway, that’s a long lead-in to this Q&A with Sharon Robinson, daughter to the legendary American pioneer Jackie. In 1997, on the 50th anniversary of his big-league debut, Major League Baseball retired Jackie’s No. 42 throughout the league, while grandfathering in the right for players already wearing the number to keep it until they retired. Mariano Rivera eventually became the last player in the league wearing the hallowed digits, even as it already hung in Monument Park, as it did at the other 29 Major League stadiums.

When Rivera finally retired after the 2013 season, the number went with him. Now it only appears every April 15, during the league-wide celebration of Jackie Robinson Day, at which all players on all 30 teams wear Jackie’s 42.

I think Sharon is a terrific person to speak with — I’ve long admired the way she honors her parents’ legacy by her work in educating children about the era in which her father played, and the struggles that continue. I thought a lot of her answers about Jackie’s legacy — and especially about Jackie as a father — were exceptionally interesting.

https://www.mlb.com/yankees/news/sharon-robinson-qa/c-263620308?tid=163658034

Legends Never Die

(Story originally appeared in the Home Run Commemorative Edition of Yankees Magazine.)

Weird confession here: Until I decided to write this story, I had somehow never seen The Sandlot. I don’t know how I had avoided it through the years, but it just never happened. But as I describe in the opening scene in the story (which was a pretty accurate chronology of my reporting), I didn’t have any choice once I started talking to some of the players about their first contact with the legend of Babe Ruth.

We were producing a special edition of Yankees Magazine that was celebrating home runs and home run hitters in Yankees history. I decided to write a story about the Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum in Baltimore, and I was extremely fortunate to have the museum’s curator, Michael Gibbons, take me around the exhibits, then drive me and a photographer all over the Babe’s Baltimore, showing me other places he lived, the boarding school where he was discovered, and other places from his life. As I detail in the story, though, I didn’t end that day with any clear picture of what I wanted to write. Something about spending time around all these places from Ruth’s past made him smaller, in a way; it was diminishing. That’s not a knock on the museum at all — it does a wonderful job showing Ruth the human. But it’s hard to square that circle with the image of Ruth the superhero.

Confused as to how I should proceed, I posed the question to a bunch of players on the team — what was their first contact with the legend of the Babe. How did their shared experience of being Yankees color their perspectives. I was hoping that the players could help me bridge the gap that separated who I felt Ruth was, and how he was perceived. But the first three players I spoke to — Andrew Miller, Chase Headley and Aaron Hicks, literally the first three players! — all mentioned the same thing: The Sandlot.

Well, I guess I had to watch the movie.

And it was great, of course. I reached out to the writer and director, David Mickey Evans, to see if maybe he could help me answer the question better. And then the inspiration hit, and the words started flowing. I’m really proud of this story, as I think it does a good job looking at the way that we create heroes, and the people that they really are. As the

We discuss this a lot more on this episode of the Yankees Magazine Podcast. Take a listen (and subscribe!).

Anyhow, enjoy the story.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/209340058/legend-of-babe-ruth-lives-on/

Confidence Man

(Story originally appeared in the Derek Jeter Commemorative Edition of Yankees Magazine)

When Derek Jeter announced his retirement before the 2014 season, we knew that we needed to do something extra special to celebrate his career, so we put together a special edition of the magazine, looking back on the Captain’s entire career. It was an awesome project, with so much awesome material that we were able to unearth. We reran a bunch of old Yankees Magazine content and supplemented it with some great original pieces.

Obviously, there are only so many different ways to talk about Jeter on the field, particularly when you’re a house organ like Yankees Magazine. So it was really important to me that I find something a bit off-beat. I had always been intrigued by the story of Dick Groch, the scout who signed Jeter. The main is famous — trying to alleviate the concern in the Yankees’ war room that they were going to use the 6th pick in the Draft on a player who would spurn them to go play college ball at Michigan, Groch, the legend has it, insisted:

“He’s not going to the University of Michigan. The only place Derek Jeter is going is Cooperstown.”

That’s a lot of confidence, and as Groch says in the article, if he had been wrong, he probably wouldn’t have lasted much longer in the industry. But the belief paid off. Jeter became a generational player, a certain Hall of Famer and one of the most beloved Yankees of all time. Not a bad scouting job.

Here’s my attempt at putting Groch’s whole story together. Hope you’ll enjoy.

http://m.mlb.com/news/article/229038088/dick-groch-scouted-jeter-for-cooperstown-in-92/