MLB Daily Thread: Echoes of the Past I: Baseball as Justice

[Misterfamous]

Our Supreme Court could take some pointers from baseball.

Certainly, the concept of fairness is more deeply embedded in the sport than in any other. In baseball when you're ahead late in the game, you can't take a knee and run out the clock. You have to put the ball over the plate and give the other team a chance . . . three chances, in fact.

In baseball you don't have to be nearly 7 feet tall or weigh 250 pounds to be a star. You can be a short, misshapen guy with bad teeth and still hit the cover off the ball (5' 6" Hack Wilson had 56 homers and 190 RBI in 1930). In baseball you can look like a sissy college professor posing in a uniform and still be an all-time great (Sandy Koufax), or you can be an uneducated, over-weight off-season baker and World Series MVP (Mickey Lolich pitching 3 wins for Detroit in the '68 Series over Bob Gibson's Cardinals). In short, in baseball "one size fits all" is a foreign concept.

Moreover, baseball is the only sport in which unjust history can be erased. That's right, erased. Witness the curious case of Bobo Osborne in 1961.

Stay with me on this. Like a vintage Chuck Stobbs fast ball to Mickey Mantle in old Griffith Stadium in Washington, D.C., the story is fat over the plate and well worth the ride . . .

You remember truly important moments in your life . . . such as the time you had that deep cavity filled without novocaine, or when you lost out to a lesser candidate for that primo job you deserved, or when you learned that Burt Reynolds wears a wig. Remember the sense of betrayal and outrage you felt?

Well, then, let me introduce you to Larry Sidney "Bobo" Osborne, who hit a rousing .206 over six big league seasons. Bobo will help restore your faith in a structured, orderly, and just world.


Hailing from Chattahoochie, Georgia, Osborne arrived in the Big Leagues as a would-be first baseman for Detroit in 1957. He immediately established a name for himself: Bobo hit pop-ups. Mile-high pop-ups. Neck-straining pop-ups. MAJOR LEAGUE pop-ups. No one else has ever come close.

On his better days Osborne would crack a nasty boomer into the broadcasting booth high
behind home plate ("Watch out fans! Here she comes! Arggggh!"), one just out of the reach of both first baseman and right fielder racing down the foul line, and one that bounced high off the Tiger dugout after completing a steep eye-popping 200 foot arc. I particularly appreciated the last sort because the opposing catcher--eyes fixed skyward as he hurried forward tracking the ball--was sure to disappear down the dugout steps as the Tigers in the dugout shouted to him, "You've got plenty of room . . . PLENTY OF ROOM!"

Osborne could be counted on to deliver in the clutch--deliver a pop-up, that is. Come to think of it, Bobo could have played his entire career in an empty Iowa grain silo. For this reason his teammates called him Pops. The rest of us called him Bobo, which is what he called himself.

But I'm getting away from the point of this story, the point being structure, order, justice. In the history of Detroit's massive Briggs Stadium, only five players ever tattooed a ball out of the park: Ruth, Williams, Mantle, Killebrew, and Frank Robinson. (You will note that a Tiger was not among them.) You see, the park had three decks about 110 feet high, except in dead center where the wall was a humongous 440 feet from home plate and had two decks holding about 60 rows of bleachers behind it. Only The Five ever managed to crank a ball out of Briggs.

Bobo tried to change that in 1961. In the second inning of a game against the KC A's being played on a cold, gray April day, Osborne hit the most spectacular pop-up of his short, undistinguished career. He pasted a Ray Herbert fast ball over the 370 foot sign in right-center field, over the three decks 110 feet high, over the light tower which stretched another 50 feet into the sky, and past Trumbull Avenue on the other side of the stadium (Reggie Jackson's titanic 1971 All-Star game homer hit the same light tower about half way up but ricocheted back into the stadium).

Osborne's ball is easily the hardest hit I've ever seen. It was as though it were fired from a mortar, not propelled by a bat. It must have carried over 500 feet because it was still about 160 feet off the ground and 400 feet from the plate when it disappeared beyond the light tower.

The roughly 7,000 of us in the stands were so stunned that Bobo barely got a hand as he circled the bases. We had seen it, but it was akin to seeing Phyllis Diller win the Miss America pageant. You sat there and said to yourself, "What was THAT?!" We had seen it, but it was difficult to process because it was impossible.

And so it was. In the third inning it started to thunder. In the fourth drizzle turned into hard rain. The umps stopped play, and it rained hard and steady for the next two hours. The game was called, the score sheets discarded, and later in the year the game was restarted from scratch per the rules of baseball. Bobo didn't relaunch in the redo. Big surprise, that.

Structure. Order. JUSTICE.

Ruth, Williams, Mantle, Killebrew, and Robinson. These five and these five alone.

Someday someone may try to persuade you differently--that Osborne belongs in that exclusive club. After all, some 7,000 fans saw him do it. Even I saw it. I saw it clearly with my own baby blues. But despite such eyewitness testimony, the official record shows it never happened. Maybe it was just a case of transitory collective insanity . . . or a bad dream . . . especially for Osborne.

As Casey Stengel once said in another context altogether, "You could look it up."


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Note: I am not the author of this series, though it is unpublished and the rights presumably exist elsewhere. He is, by all rights a lover of the game, and a good writer. If anyone is interested in the source, please let me know.