#GoingDeep: By using grandfather clauses, baseball history often comes full circle
For the official Rawlings Major League Baseball, that work is done in Costa Rica, where skilled hands sew together two pieces of cowhide over a ball of yarn with a rubber core inside – 216 red thread stitches altogether.
Even in repose, the five-ounce baseball is a thing of beauty. In motion, either off the hand of the thrower, or the bat of the hitter, it takes on a compelling life of its own.
Baseball – The National Pastime – is also worthy of our fascination. It’s been sewn together by players and executives, fans and umpires, writers and broadcasters, over the course of a century and a half. But as such, it is a work in progress. Every now and then, Baseball, the one with the capital B, needs a little doctoring.
Which brings us to the “Grandfather Clause,” a provision applied to a new rule the way, say, Burleigh Grimes applied a coating of saliva to the ball he was about to pitch. Grimes was trying to win games and further his career with added spin.
The executives are also hoping to change the flight of the game, and the grandfather provision is their way of slipping one by their opponents. Yes, it can be a little messy, but it is an attempt at fairness.
The most famous example of this kind of bargain came in the offseason between 1919 and 1920, when both leagues decided to ban the spitball. But eventually, they exempted 17 practitioners of the pitch, including three Hall of Famers: Red Faber, Stan Coveleski and Grimes.
That was the last game for a regular big league umpire who wore one of those big outside protectors. And Neudecker wore it well – when he passed away at the age of 66 in 1997, fellow umpire Bruce Raven said: “He had a big heart.”
Like the protector, he wore that on the outside, too. At the time of his death, Neudecker was training a new generation of umpires.
The other artifact is a size 7 1/8 Florida Marlins helmet worn by Hall of Famer Tim Raines. “Rock” had made seven All-Star teams with the Montreal Expos while leading the NL in stolen bases four times and winning the batting title (.334 in ’86), spent another four years with the White Sox and won two World Series rings with the Yankees. So why the Marlins, with whom he finished his career in 2002?
Well, it just so happened that Raines was the last player to wear a batting helmet without earflaps. In 1983, four years after Raines arrived in the majors, MLB mandated that all players wear helmets with ear protection. Exemptions were made, however, for veterans who had submitted written requests. By 2002, Raines was the only writer left.
To commemorate the 50th anniversary of Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Major League Baseball retired his number, 42, in April of 1997. One little problem: 13 players already had that number.
So they were “grandfathered” and allowed to keep the number. For the record, and trivia contests, the players were Butch Huskey, Mike Jackson, Scott Karl, Jose Lima, Mo Vaughn, Lenny Webster, Tom Goodwin, Marc Sagmoen, Kirk Rueter, Jason Schmidt, Dennis Cook, Buddy Groom and Mariano Rivera.
By the start of the 2004 season, all but one of them had retired from baseball: Rivera. The Hall of Fame reliever hadn’t asked for the number when he first showed up in Yankee camp in 1995 – clubhouse manager Nick Priore gave it to him. But 42 figuratively came to grow on him. “I decided I better learn about him and understand what he was all about,” Rivera recently told MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand.
Just months after Rivera retired after the 2013 season, he was given the Jackie Robinson Foundation Humanitarian Award.
While Rivera may have been the last major leaguer to wear No. 42, a man who actually knew Robinson was also given dispensation to wear the number. He is Art Silber, the owner of the Class A Fredericksburg Nationals. He grew up in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, near Ebbets Field. “We hung around the ballpark all the time,” says Silber, now an 82-year-old actual grandfather of three. “He and Roy Campanella would often talk to us and sign our baseballs.”
Later in life, Silber became a successful banker and minor league owner, and came to know Rachel Robinson, Jackie’s widow. When the major leaguers who wore his number were grandfathered in, so was Silber, who coached first base for his team, the Potomac Nats.
He stopped coaching a few years ago, but his new team, the FredNats, is located at 42 Jackie Robinson Way in Fredericksburg, Va., and every year, they conduct a Jackie Robinson Essay Contest. “He changed so many lives,” says Silber. “He certainly changed mine.”
The purpose of baseball is to get back to the place where you started. So there’s a certain poetic justice in the history of the game’s Grandfather Clause. It was first used to help draw the color line in baseball. One hundred and ten years later, it was used to honor the man who erased it.
Steve Wulf is a freelance writer from Larchmont, N.Y.
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