Joe Posnanski – Jim Stafford's BlogOKC

An Ode to the Celebration of Joy

I’ve celebrated the joy of discovery this past week.

This past week, with a lot of illness-related downtime on my hands — I’m fine, now — I did some casual scrolling across Youtube and came upon the video of a young musician named Jacob Collier leading a full orchestra on a 20-minute improvisational performance.

It was pure joy.

I had never heard of Collier, but he’s a young Englishman, musician and composer from a family of musicians. In this performance with a San Francisco orchestra, he directs each instrument section to play a certain chord over and over. He leads them section by section, so you don’t know where it is heading.

In fact, in a note posted with the video, Collier said the entire performance was accomplished with ‘no rehearsal, no sheet music, no prior discussion.’

When Collier finally leads every instrument section to play together as he begins to play the piano, you discover where it’s actually gone. He sings Coldplay’s ‘Yellow’ and it’s a perfect fit with the instruments. Then it morphs into a mix with ‘Every Breath You Take’ as he leads the audience to join in singing key lines.

It an uplifting performance, and you can see it in the reactions not only of the audience but of the members of the orchestra. Every participant seemed caught up in the joyous moment.

I must have watched it six times. Watch it yourself below.

Collier has other videos posted where he interacts with audiences and orchestras the same way, and it’s all for the purpose of nothing more than celebrating joy.

In today’s us-vs.-them dystopian world, doing something with no motive other than to celebrate joy brings a breath of fresh air to us all. Or at least all of us who celebrate joy for, well, the joy it brings.

I’ve uncovered a few other gems that brought me joy this week that I’m sharing in this post.

First is a column by Joe Posnanski, one of America’s preeminent baseball writers. Written shortly before the Major League Baseball season began, Joe presents ‘The Most Fun Teams in Baseball.’ It’s an innovative way to consider all 30 MLB teams and rank them according to the number of ‘fun’ players rather than pure statistics. Read the column here.

Posnanski celebrates baseball with a joy that makes you want to love the game as much as he does.

Next is author and tech reporter David Pogue, whose reporting on Apple and other tech innovators over the years is always presented in an upbeat and positive manner with a touch of joyous humor thrown in. I mentioned Pogue in a recent post about the hundreds of people who lined up outside Apple retailers when the first iPhones and iPads were released nearly 20 years ago.

I’m including him in this post because he’s written a wonderful article about how he became a tech reporter and his personal interactions with Apple and Steve Jobs over the years. It turns out that we have David to thank for the ability to make screenshots on the iPhone. The comments of his readers are just as interesting — and joyful.

Finally, I ran across an ESPN Instagram feed featuring their reporter, Omar Raja, who is sort of a mobile deliverer of unexpected joy to unlikely people. In one post, he surprised a kid of about 10 years old and his dad in the far upper deck of Pittsburgh’s Acrisure Stadium with field passes AND front row seats to the game. The kid actually spent his own Christmas money to treat his dad to their first Steelers game. It’s a feel good story.

But there’s more from Omar.

ESPN’s Omar Raja bringing the joy on Super Bowl Sunday

On Super Bowl Sunday he drives past a kid who has set up a lemonade stand just blocks from Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif., site of this year’s Super Bowl. He slows down and apologizes to the kid because he has no cash to pay for a lemonade. As he drives off, the kid runs up to the car window holding a complimentary cup. Omar rewards him and his dad with Super Bowl field pass and tickets and ushers them into the stadium.

Tears of pure joy.

Another loss from our youth as time marches on

Screenshot — Willie Mays makes The Catch in the 1954 World Series

In his magnificent book “The Baseball 100,” author Joe Posnanski ranks Willie Mays as the top major league baseball player of all time. Better than Aaron. Better than Ruth. Better than Ted Williams.

Better than them all.

Here’s a sample of what Posnanski wrote about the Say Hey Kid:

“Who is the greatest player of all time? You know. Maybe your father told you. Maybe you read about him when you were young. Maybe you sat in the stands and saw him play. Maybe you bask in his statistics. The greatest player is the one who lifts you higher and makes you feel exactly like you did when you fell in love with this crazy game in the first place.

“The greatest player of all time is Willie Mays.”

Sure it’s Posnanski’s personal opinion, but who could argue? Mays played 23 seasons in the Major Leagues, from 1951 through 1973, but also played one season in the Negro Leagues. The list of the statistics he put together across the years is astounding.

To give his long career some perspective, I wasn’t born until 1953, and when I graduated high school in 1971, Mays was still playing.

Baseball and all of sports lost a titan this week in the death of Willie Mays at age 93.

It’s another loss of a part of my youth, which I’ve written about previously in this blog. I wasn’t old enough to be aware of Mays’ incredible back-to-the-plate catch in the 1954 World Series, but I’m pretty sure that by the time I developed an interest in baseball around the age of 8 or 9, I learned of The Catch.

Here’s a video clip that breaks down The Catch:

So we’re mourning more than just the passing of a bright star — maybe the brightest — but also the loss of another piece of our youth. Mays was a presence in box scores, sometimes on television and in baseball cards throughout my entire youth.

But it’s not just the death of Willie May that reminds me that time marches on. In the last month, the sports world has now lost three beloved giants of their sport. First was Bill Walton a couple of weeks ago, then Jerry West last week.

Time marches on, and we’re helpless to stop it.

So, the best we can do is preserve our memories, save our baseball cards and cherish our heroes who are still with us today.

The Baseball 100: Fathers and Sons

For the past five months, I’ve walked around our house carrying a massive tome that resembles those old giant-sized King James Bibles that are cherished possessions of many families.

Only this Good Book is titled The Baseball 100 (2021, The Athletic Media Co.) and written by long-time baseball writer Joe Posnanski. It was a birthday gift last April from my friend Ed Godfrey.

Thank you, Ed.

If you’re not familiar with Posnanski, he made his reputation as the baseball beat writer for the Kansas City Star newspaper before moving on to Sports Illustrated, NBC Sports and The Athletic, among his credits. Today, he’s publishing his prose on his own blog at JoeBlogs.

More about Posnanski’s background here.

It’s obvious that Posnanski’s first love is baseball, and, in fact, his latest best seller in a long line of bestsellers is entitled ‘Why We Love Baseball.’

Anyway, back to The Baseball 100. I read it slowly and savored each individual profile of what Posnanski considers to be the best 100 players in Major League history. When I first opened the book, I flipped hurriedly through the pages until I found the Nolan Ryan chapter, just to make sure Posnanski included Big Tex.

Ryan came in at No. 50, and the logic of that ranking was that about half the baseball world (me included) thinks he’s one of the top pitchers ever, while the other half sees him as vastly overrated.

So, then I went back to the beginning and read the book through. What struck me was how often father-son dynamics played into the development and character of so many players.

For instance, let’s consider Oklahoma native Mickey Mantle. Mantle’s father, Mutt, began pitching to him at their Commerce home when the Mick was 6 years old, making him bat from both sides of the plate. Mickey didn’t exactly want to be a switch hitter and wasn’t certain he wanted to be a baseball player from the start.

But his dad willed it even before he was born.

“Mutt knew with a chilling certainty that his future son would be called Mickey, after his favorite ballplayer, Mickey Cochrane, and that Mickey Mantle would be the best ballplayer of them all,” Posnanski writes.

Mickey Mantle did turn out to be one of the great all-time Major League players. He was the All American boy who led the New York Yankees to seven World Series titles in 12 appearances from 1951 to 1964.

Ranked No. 11 all-time by Posnanski, Mantle also was an alcoholic who cheated on his wife and was mostly absent from the lives of his children. I’m pretty sure Mutt’s obsession shaped Mickey beyond baseball.

You learn how flawed so many of our heroes were in The Baseball 100, from Mantle to Pete Rose to Ted Williams to Barry Bonds to Roger Clemens. The Baseball 100 also shares stories about baseball heroes who were model citizens, like Ozzie Smith, Stan ‘The Man’ Musial, Derek Jeter, Albert Pujols and Brooks Robinson, to name a few.

But the theme of overbearing fathers came up again and again. Consider George Brett, who is a contemporary hero to those of us of a certain age and who comes in at No. 35 in Posnanski’s rankings.

“Fear drove George Brett,” Posnanski writes. “His father, Jack, made sure of that.”

No matter how well Brett played or what amazing stats he put up for the Kansas City Royals, it was never good enough for his father. Never.

In fact, on the night before Jack Brett died of cancer, he spoke to George on the phone and asked him how he did that day. George told him he went 0-for-4. “Well, did you at least hit the ball hard?” his dad asked. “I did, Dad,” George lied to his dying father. “I hit it hard.”

Brett had struck out three times that day.

Then there is Pete Rose at No. 60. We all know how his story played out, the betting on baseball, the relentless chase of the hits record, the womanizing, the Charlie Hustle reputation.

What Posnanski tells us is that Pete’s father, Harry “Big Pete” Rose never gave him the opportunity to develop as a person. Big Pete saw him as a Major League star, and turned him into a switch hitter at 8 years of age. He even demanded that his Little League coach let him switch hit.

It’s the Mickey Mantle story playing out all over again in Cincinnati, Ohio. Except Pete Rose was banned from baseball for life for betting on the game he loved.

And then there was Ted Williams, an all-time player and war hero who fought fans, the media and his own demons. Posnanski doesn’t write about an obsessive father in his life — he barely knew his father — but does quote Williams’ own daughter who said that her father was mentally ill.

“My father was sick,” Bobby Jo (Williams) said. “And it’s a damn shame that, because he was Ted Williams and because nobody wanted to tell him like it was, including myself, he suffered and progressively became more ill by the years.”

In addition to father-son relationships, there is another major theme that runs through the book.

Posnanski writes extensively about the plight of African American stars who never got the chance to play in the Major Leagues. For decades. they were forced to play in the largely invisible (to the white audience) Negro Leagues. Their stories come to life in The Baseball 100, as well.

So, who does Posnanski rank as the No. 1 player of all time? I’ll leave it to you to get a copy of this outstanding book and find out for yourself.

Hint: Say Hey when you finally figure it out

Read The Baseball 100 and savor the stories of the heroes of our youth.