Brooks Robinson & Norman Rockwell

A nice story about baseball and Americana, with no political hoohah at all. Written by the always terrific Jonathan Pitts of the Baltimore Sun – one of the most consistently great feature writers I’ve ever read.

For many, Brooks Robinson’s most lasting achievement seems less the 16 Gold Gloves and two World Series titles he won as a player than the unshakable courtesy with which he won them. The O’s legend displayed a rock-solid decency that seemed, somehow, as quintessentially American as the national pastime itself.

If Brooks Robinson didn’t exist, in fact, it might have been necessary for Norman Rockwell to invent him.
[…]

The two met in January 1971 — Robinson was 33, the artist 76 — when the Orioles star flew to Rockwell’s hometown of Stockbridge, Mass., to pose for the black-and-white photos from which the artist did the painting. Later, the portraitist added a cigar-smoking version of himself, along with several Stockbridge friends, in the bleachers.

The scene that day was something straight out of — well, Rockwell.

“When I walked into his studio, it was like going back to my childhood,” Robinson says. “It was like a museum of American artifacts. I remembered a lot of the … [Saturday Evening] Post covers he had.”

If Rockwell’s whimsically realistic images etched a vision of 20th-century America — idealistic, hopeful, fundamentally happy — then Robinson seems an appropriate subject.

Read it all – you’ll like. It’s a nice way to end the night…or start the day, if you’re reading in the morning!