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I.
There are moments of individual athletic greatness, and then there are moments like the one above, which transcend mere greatness and veer into high art. Willie Mays made this Catch during the 1954 World Series, three years before Miles Davis released the album The Birth of the Cool, at a moment when baseball and jazz were culturally intertwined. Mays, wrote Tom Verducci in Sports Illustrated, was the synthesis of the two. “Mays is to baseball,” Verducci wrote, “what jazz is to music.”
The Catch, longtime columnist William Rhoden wrote, marked The Birth of the Cool in American sports. It was one of those revelatory moments that felt as if it had altered the cultural paradigm. Mays had style; Mays had pizzazz. Mays knew how to entertain. “His speed awakened what had been a boring, station-to-station game,” Verducci wrote. “Teams searched for the next Willie Mays, opening the game to more diversity of style … and skin color….he perfected flourish.”
II.
I’ve been thinking and reading a lot about Willie Mays this week, for obvious reasons, and that led me to start brainstorming an unofficial list of some of the coolest moments in modern American sports. Again, I’m not talking about great. I’m talking about transcendently cool. It’s the kind of thing that you know when you see, the kind of thing that establishes a whole new rhythm, like Birth of the Cool and Rubber Soul and Nevermind once did. I’m talking about Joe Namath winning Super Bowl III, Ali being Ali, Dr. J flying through space, Michael Jordan’s 63-point game against the Boston Celtics, the Joe Montana to Dwight Clark catch, the Texas-USC national championship game…1
As for baseball? Ask me to name a purely cool baseball moment from the past 30 years that was not eventually soured by steroid use, and I struggle to come up with one. Over the course of the seven decades since Mays made The Catch, baseball has so radically shed its sense of cool that I’m not sure if it can ever get it back.
III.
Let me say this first: Baseball is an empirically better sport to watch now than it was two years ago, in that its efforts to speed up the game have largely been a success. But none of that has made it cooler; if anything, it’s made it more a tidy and sanitized product. The game moves so fast now that there’s almost no room for flourish, even if it did exist, which it hasn’t for quite some time.
There are a lot of theories as to why this is: You can blame baseball’s unwritten rules, and you can blame the way the 1994 strike and cancellation of the World Series detached a generation of fans from the sport. You can blame the steroid era for delivering false hope, and you can blame the long tail of the steroid era, which baseball still refuses to close by keeping a few clearly deserving athletes out of the Hall of Fame. You can blame the Moneyball era for pogoing through an era of three-true outcome trends and reducing every encounter to an algorithm.
But I think we cannot discount the theory forwarded by a professor and writer named Lou Moore, who wrote about how Major League Baseball had been warned, via a Sporting News article, about a potential decline in black athlete participation 50 years ago, back in 1974—the year after Willie Mays retired—and largely did nothing to stem the tide. Black participation declined, then held steady into the late 1980s, even as Black colleges struggled to field teams and baseball started to be played less in black neighborhoods and scouts often refused to even come to the inner cities. Baseball still did nothing to help, at least not until the problem had become clear, and by then, Moore wrote, “it was too late. Baseball’s failure to get out in front of the problem in the 1970s and early 1980s had real and lasting consequences.”2
We are living through those consequences now. It may not seem so on an economic level, because baseball still makes plenty of money; it may not even seem so on a competitive scale, because Shohei Ohtani is an astounding talent, but he is also essentially a cipher. In terms of cultural cache, it’s now obvious that something fundamental is missing.
It is not enough to attract younger people and minorities by speeding up the pace of the game; the game has to embrace a diversity of style, a lack of uniformity, that makes it worth following. The game has to have a diversity of style. Ask me to name the five coolest baseball players of 2024, and outside of perhaps Mookie Betts or Aaron Judge, I wouldn’t even know where to begin. That’s what we lost last week, when we lost Willie Mays. There is no one left to carry on that unique rhythm.
…all of which led me to dream about a scenario in which Jordan, while on hiatus from his basketball career in 1990s, became a jockey and won the Preakness Stakes. (Apparently, my subconscious finds the Kentucky Derby overrated.)
Even now, as baseball attempts to make up for lost time by celebrating Negro League history, they are also abandoning Oakland, a city with a rich Black history, for Las Vegas, a city that lacks an actual soul.
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Not surprisingly, when I think of cool baseball players, I think of Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders. Two football players.
Your post caused me to do some pondering: who I, as a lifelong baseball fan, think is or was cool as a baseball player in the last 30 years. I have a couple of names, one a Hall of Famer and one not. I give you Ken Griffey, Jr., and Curtis Granderson.
I’m listening to the jazz station WBGO from Newark as I type this and they just played Lazy Bird by John Coltrane. That’s cool, and so was Junior. It was the backwards hat, it was his super smooth swing, his personality - a great heir to the Cool of Mays.
Every time I watched Curtis Granderson play, he reminded me of a Jackie Robinson-era 1940s/1950s player. He is not a Hall of Famer like Ken Griffey, Jr., but he always struck me as an exemplar of cool when he played.