Spencer Thomas | editor-in-chief

Baseball can’t afford to spit in the face of its history

“How can you not be romantic about baseball?”

We ask that question all the time. It’s a sport that is loved for so much more than what happens on the playing field. Its aesthetic and history are unmatched by any other sport. But idiotic decisions like the one made by the Pittsburgh Pirates this offseason remind us of the importance of protecting America’s pastime.

Much has been made of the Pittsburgh Pirates choosing to get rid of the “Clemente 21” sign on the Roberto Clemente wall of PNC park this season to make way for an ad for Surfside Seltzer.

This isn’t an opinion piece calling Pirates owner Bob Nutting a greedy vampire, though he is, but we’ve written that before.

It’s also not an opinion saying that Surfside is disgusting, though it is. It tastes like an iPhone battery.

It’s a call for awareness that as baseball changes with the world, we can’t forget that it is more delicate than any other sport.

Removing a sign that honored a franchise legend wouldn’t have caused massive backlash in any other sport. However, in baseball, it rightfully did. There was outcry from fans, then media, then the Clemente family. Finally, Pittsburgh reversed course.

Even things like the removal of the “Bucco Bricks,” cobble stones that surrounded the ballpark, engraved with fans names, shows a complete disregard for the romance baseball entails.

The sport of baseball is carried on the shoulders of its legends. It earned the privilege of doing so by existing decades before any other. Since its growth in the 19th century, other sports have swept the country that have objectively more action from start to finish. Baseball has kept up with the likes of football and hockey because of the head start it had, and the mythical nature around it. The song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” and the poem “Casey at the Bat” are cultural fixtures passed down for centuries. They justify the sport’s existence by showing young fans it’s a pastime bigger than any one man who has ever played it.

The historical significance of Jackie Robinson, the celebrity of Babe Ruth and controversy of Shoeless Joe Jackson are gospels unparalleled across the sports universe. Compared to icons in other sports, their ghosts and memories feel much more alive. People just do not talk about them like they do about Gordie Howe, George Halas or Jerry West.

Clemente’s story is almost fantastical. He broke the door down for Latin American baseball players, who are now a fixture of the game. He was an all-time talent, winning Most Valuable Player and a pair of World Series Championships in 17 years with a single team. At the age of 38, he died in a plane crash traveling to help victims of an earthquake. The fact that in his final game, he got his 3,000th career hit, baseball’s greatest accomplishment, is so unbelievable it shows that there is something supernatural guiding the game.

The fact that a franchise like Pittsburgh gets to claim his legacy is wonderful. The fact that they clearly don’t value it is horrifying. The franchise hasn’t been relevant in years. They drew 8,000 fans to the ballpark this week. If Nutting is choosing not to be relevant, the least he can do is choose not to devalue the club’s history. It’s the one thing that the Pirates can hang their hat on. It’s something Nutting had nothing to do with, and something we can’t let him take away.

That Clemente sign is worth a whole lot more to the team than he realizes. Certainly, more than an ad for a drink brings in. Even in small ways like that, the suits risk alienating fans of Clemente’s generation who have had their heart broken by what has been done to their team this century. What’s unique about baseball is that not everyone is there to see what’s happening on the diamond. Definitely not with this Pirate lineup, anyway. Fans come to bask in the magic left behind by players who are long gone.

Pestering fans with incessant advertising makes them feel like commodities. As I write this, I’m watching the Cleveland Guardians home opener. As a pitch gets thrown, there are eight different corporate logos on the screen, distracting from the simple beauty of the sport that doesn’t have a lot of action. That has always been okay, suits like Bob Nutting need to understand they represent baseball and let the beauty of it breathe.

Baseball still can change with the times. Even if they feel arbitrary and unnatural, the pitch clock and banning defensive shifts are good things. That’s evolution — no different than lowering the mound in 1969 or banning the spitball in 1920. But changes like hiking ticket prices or replacing bleachers with luxury seats are insults to fans. It makes them feel like the sport they love doesn’t love them back.

Spencer Thomas can be reached at thomass15@duq.edu.