A seemingly greater number than usual of famous athletes died this year, and while I obviously let all of them pass without notice, when Paul Hornung, the "Golden Boy" of late 1950s-early 1960s college and pro football, who had become my favorite old-time football player in recent years, died earlier this month at the age of 84 I said that I would write something about it, though most other of the other notable football and baseball players who have died within the past couple of years were probably better than he was, at least by the numbers. Though Hornung hung around the NFL for nine seasons, with one year off in the middle while serving a suspension for gambling, apart from a few isolated games in between injuries later in his career, his time as a dynamic, star player was rather fleeting, lasting about three seasons from 1959-1961, a period when professional football was in the midst of its transition from a relatively niche sport to the much less intimate, much more professional, and perhaps overly serious national spectacle that it has been for most of my life. Hornung was somewhat of a holdover from the old era in that he had a lively all around offensive game, including kicking, which if I had played in high school, which I kind of regret not having done now, I would have wanted to model my own play after. While I am not one hundred percent confident that he was not overrated, football has changed enough since 1960 that relying entirely on modern style statistical analysis to assess a player's worth from that era is not foolproof, and in the days of 36 (or so) man rosters, without specialized full time kickers and other more narrowly but highly skilled position players, a guy who could make all of his extra points, 60% of his field goals, was an outstanding blocker and could also give you 800 yards and double digit touchdowns from scrimmage was quite a valuable player; and if his "combine talents"--especially speed, bench press, etc, were a joke by today's standards, which is one of the more common accusations leveled at him as a player, one can only say "Well? In the years when he was in his prime, he was one of the most dynamic and elusive players on the field, and he was lucky that the more evolved super athletes of today were not being painstakingly cultivated in his time as they are in ours." Most of the people who graduated from Ivy League schools in that era would supposedly not be considered Ivy material today, yet they don't appear to have gone through life thinking themselves any less wonderful on that account. The same can be said with regard to many other fields. Many of Hornung's vaunted teammates with the Green Bay Packers as well as his legendary coach insisted that he was the best player on the team during the early part of their epic dynasty, and while he was a "man's man" in that 1950s sense of boozing and womanizing and being a man about town that we kind of tsk-tsk at today, he was extremely popular with men and women in own day, inspired an exceptionally high amount of confidence in the people he played for and with, and in general when he was at the top of his game injected some extra glamor into the atmosphere by his participation in it. These reasons, and the very brief period of excellence he enjoyed as a player which nonetheless was enough to give an aura to the rather prosaic long remainder of his life, are why I suspect I am especially drawn to him.
The other day (about a month ago now) was the announcement by Major League Baseball, Inc. that henceforth various of the Negro Leagues that operated from 1920-1948 would be officially recognized as Major baseball leagues, and the statistics from those leagues to be included in the official records, added to the career totals of any players who played in the National and American Leagues, and so on. Though the news cycle already seems to have moved on from this story, on the day it was greeted with the expected amount of moral posturing, as if this were something people had been impatiently waiting for for a long time (yes, perhaps they have been, but somehow I was not aware of it). I saw several exhortations by fans who gave the impression that their indignation on this matter had long reached its limit, to declare Negro League legend Josh Gibson, generally regarded as one of the greatest hitters all time, of whom it is often recounted that he hit around 800 home runs as a professional baseball player, the all-time home run king, with some commentators adding the aspersion of "cowards" to their demand.
Since the corporate leadership of MLB, Inc. has not in recent years demonstrated an especially deft touch in its dealings even with its lifelong fanbase, let alone the younger, more diverse, and more tech and modern media-savvy generations it is so desperate to appeal to, I wondered whether they had had any anticipation of these kinds of reactions at all, or had expected only positive publicity--or maybe they don't care about the rabble on Twitter, but that is mostly what I see nowadays, official and respectable channels being pretty much undigestible at this point. I don't understand, however, the use of "cowards" here. It would not surprise me if the powers that run baseball might actually welcome the opportunity to name Josh Gibson the record holder for home runs if there was any plausible way for them to do it. It would, if not solve their current Barry Bonds problem, provide an alternative narrative that hardcore stat nerds would probably not accept but would seemingly be welcomed by the people who consider everything having to do with baseball history at least prior to 1947 to be hopelessly tainted by racism. One's motives for publicly questioning the veracity of the record in some circles anyway would be subject to uncomfortable scrutiny. The oft-quoted figure of 800 home runs that Gibson is said to have hit has been around for a while. It is even written on his Hall of Fame plaque, which was erected in 1972 (almost 800, it says there). There does not appear to be an overwhelming amount of hard evidence for a number of actual home runs close enough to this to justify establishing it as a new all time record, especially in a sport that has a statistical record of every single game played in its (originally) white leagues going back to the 1800s, where in recent years extensive research has been undertaken to determine that Ty Cobb likely only had 4,190 hits rather than the 4,191 he was thought to have for most of the last century, that Hack Wilson had 191 RBIs in 1930 rather than 190, and so on. The 800 figure, it seems obvious to me, was picked as the number at the time because it was more than Babe Ruth, who was the biggest sports star of his day, hit, and therefore would be guaranteed to grab the attention and make one think about how awesome this Gibson guy must be in a way that a mere 638 or whatever would not quite do. And every account of him that exists indicates that he was quite awesome, and this was well known throughout the broader baseball world at the time among everyone who didn't have their head completely in the sand. But the calls to credit him in the list of all time records with several hundred home runs that no one has much of an idea whether he ever actually hit doesn't make any sense.
Yes, I would write more about these things, but I think too slowly in the small amount of time that I have to do anything.
So--the end of the year review. 47 posts this year between the two blogs. All of the most visited posts were on the other blog, and these were mostly my monthly updates. My five most popular posts of the year were:
1. "Alaska" 181 views.
2. "February 2020" 170
3. "April 2020" 160
4. "Jacinto Benavente y Martinez--The Bonds of Interest" 158
5. "July 2020" 154
The most viewed post on this blog was the perennial champion, my 2009 report on the Louis MacNiece poem, "The British Museum Reading Room", which must for some reason still turn up when people search for this poem. No one ever leaves a comment to say what they think of it though. That got 105 views. My most-viewed post from this year was my neurotic election post from September, which got all of 47 views.
As for searches, the Blogger stats only record 4 searches leading to the sites this year, two related to Louis MacNiece and the British Museum, 1 for "Erin Fehlau pokies", referring to the New Hampshire news anchorwoman I wrote about a few years ago as a kind of minor love interest of mine, and 1 for "Hitler bourgeois" which sounds about like the kind of search that would find me. I guess that will wrap it up for the 2020 review. I am still too jittering now and constrained for time when I write to really do anything I would like to do.
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