On Monday, Frank Robinson visited the Orioles spring training camp in Florida. That’s a big deal. Frank Robinson is the kind of hall-of-famer that other hall-of-famers regard with awe. He was Rookie of the Year in 1956, NL MVP in 1961, and AL MVP in 1966, when he won the triple crown. He hit 586 home runs — still enough to rank him No. 9 on the all-time list. And in 1975 he became the first black manager in the major leagues.
Maybe you already knew all that or maybe you didn’t. Maybe all that baseball stuff means nothing to you. Fair enough — you don’t play baseball for a living. But if you do play baseball for a living, then Frank Robinson is somebody you really need to know. Especially if you play for the Baltimore Orioles — a team Robinson led to two world championships.
Yet when Robinson showed up in Sarasota on Monday it turns out that 19-year-old Baltimore prospect Josh Hart didn’t have any idea who he was. Hart’s manager — or the man who will be his manager if he makes the big-league squad — decided to fix that. Buck Showalter gave the rookie some homework — a one-page report on Frank Robinson, due the next day.
This strikes me as potentially awesome and potentially awful, and I can’t quite tell from the linked article which it is. Because the key fact in all of the above is that Josh Hart is 19 years old. You’re not supposed to know everything there is to know about everything when you’re 19 years old. It’s kind of dumb to punish the young for not knowing things that they just plain haven’t had enough time to learn yet. So if that’s how Showalter went about this assignment — as punishment for the ignorant rookie who was too stupid to know who Frank Robinson is — then this strikes me as a fairly awful story.
So I hope it went the other way. I hope Showalter was excited to realize that he was given the great privilege of introducing a young Oriole to a living legend. I hope that’s what he was thinking — “You don’t know who he is? Oh, kid, let me tell you, wait’ll you find out who that was that just walked by. You’re in for a treat.” Give him the assignment in that spirit and the kid will be inspired by all there is ahead of him to learn.
This applies to more than just baseball, of course. The same dual possibilities also exist in every form of fandom.
“You’ve never seen Firefly?” Patrick was incredulous. I could hear the shock and disappointment in his voice, and right there the conversation could have taken an ugly turn into the realm of tribal snobbery. That’s always an option whenever we know something — something wonderful that everyone ought to know — and we encounter someone else who doesn’t yet know this. We can lament their shameful ignorance and exult in our superior insider knowledge. But if we take that turn, we ultimately become the kind of people whose identity is based on having such superior inside knowledge. And then instead of spreading the wonderful, joyous knowledge we have, we wind up hoarding it just so we can keep feeling superior to those whose ignorance we’re both mocking and maintaining.
Fortunately for me, Patrick is not a tribal snob. He broke into a big grin, “Oh, man, you have got to see Firefly!” I could tell that he was excited for me. He was happy on my behalf because I was about to encounter something awesome, and he was happy on his behalf because he had the great privilege of introducing someone else to this awesomeness.
I wound up renting Firefly the very next day. He was not at all wrong.
And but so, I seem to have three main points here: 1) Frank Robinson was a heck of a ballplayer; 2) You really should watch Firefly if you haven’t already, it’s amazing; and 3) You can either evangelize or you can reinforce tribal boundaries, but you cannot do both at the same time.
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