I would be remiss if I didn’t blog about baseball. I spend a lot of time reading blogs about baseball, checking baseball scores and attempting to keep up with the current standings. I am sad to note that my “hometown” team, the Minnesota Twins are in the middle of the pack when it comes to standings. Since joining Twitter for this class I have started following various baseball figures such as MLB_Updates, a few twins writers, washtimesbb (because my friend updates it and I caved to peer pressure) and my absolute favorite RonGardenhire. Gardenhire is the manager of the Twins and all around entertaining guy. Fans know him for sticking up for his players and because of this he gets ejected from games a lot. The reason I love his Twitter updates so much is because they are all related to being ejected from games. Currently Bobby Cox, the Braves manager, hold the record for all time ejections and Gardenhire is looking to break his record.
The importance of stats and records in baseball got me thinking about what a rich history the game has. There are the big examples, such as the Women’s League that played during WWII and Jackie Robinson breaking the race barrier. Then the are the smaller things that mirror larger history, like how the diversity in the game has increased to include more foreign players and the MLB adopting new technologies, such as the use of instant replay on close calls. Those are fairly easy to call “history,” they’re well known and have some social implications. If Gardenhire breaks Cox’s record is that also history? Carl Becker, historian and former president of the American Association of Historians, stated that any event that happened in the past is history and thus everyone who remembers past events is an historian. He uses this “everyman” as a way to remind academic historians that authority must be shared. If this is the case then I think I should get to consider Gardenhire’s quest to break a record part of history.
In other baseball news Randy Johnson, a pitcher for the Arizona Diamondbacks, recently won his 300th game, something only 24 other men had done in history. Due to the way the game is evolving and pitchers are being used there was talk that Johnson may be the last man to reach that mark. Does that make the event more valid history, if it is rare?
As a fan I like to consider records history, partly as a way to bring together two of my greatest interests. I also really like the idea Carl Becker proposed that everyone is in some way a historian. Plus, since I’m a public history student I know that authority doesn’t just come from one place, and in this case I’m not going to get worked up over traditional academic ideals of history. So when Gardenhire does break that record I’ll put it down in my own personal list of interesting history trivia. And of course, it’ll be on Twitter.
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