The Four

Abstract

The Four Cary Heinz (bio) It was spring. I love spring. One of the things I like most about spring is the return of our national pastime. Baseball. Listen to the speech by James Earl Jones in Field of Dreams. If you’re reading this, those words probably give you goose bumps. The problem was, it was the spring of 2020. Baseball wasn’t the only thing missing. We were trapped in our homes, many working from there, staring endlessly at computer screens. The NCAA tournament was canceled (my college roommate and I had a thirty- four-year annual bet paused), and the NBA postponed their season and finished it in a “bubble” in Disney World. Spring training stopped, and a shortened sixty- game season followed in late July without fans. It was surreal. With no live games, I turned to the MLB channel, noting they were filling time with any baseball content imaginable, including old movies and documentaries. Robert Redford broke a lot of lights that spring. One night after working remotely numbed my brain, I sat down on the couch with a cold beer and rewatched Ken Burns’s Baseball. I was a happy man. I am on record stating he could make a documentary explaining how Q-tips are made and it would be interesting. When this first appeared in the fall of 1994, it was much like his 1990 work The Civil War. It was long, it was interesting, and it was really good. Watching it now, as I approach the age of sixty, I am a far different man then when I viewed the original broadcast. During the episode “The Seventh Inning,” which covered the 1950s, the black- and- white ghosts, men I grew up watching now appeared in color. An amazing photograph appeared on my screen: Henry Aaron, Ernie Banks, Willie Mays, and Frank Robinson, the icons of my youth. Their faces were printed on cardboard rectangles, statistics on the back. These artifacts were the foundation of my baseball card collection I saved from my mother. She gave a treasure trove of comic books from the 1960s, which I’m sure would have little value today with the popularity of superhero movies. Excuse my sarcasm, but it still hurts. All these years later, however, I still have the cards. [End Page 104] These aren’t just four ghosts from baseball’s past; they had a remarkable amount in common. All were first- ballot Hall of Fame selections, four of the first eighteen chosen that way since 1936. Each of them hit five hundred home runs, four of the first eleven to do so. All were an MVP twice (except, inexplicably, Aaron), won at least one Golden Glove, lived past the age of eighty, and were awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America’s highest civilian honor. Banks, Mr. Cub, even had the distinction of being presented his medal by a White Sox fan, Barack Obama. I coincidentally thought of four words, all beginning with C, to describe each: Aaron, consistency; Banks, cheerfulness; Mays, charisma; and Robinson, competitiveness. Each word matches their temperament and playing style. Their statistics are legendary, especially when looked at in a Street & Smith’s Official 1978 Yearbook, the first published after their careers had ended. That was a different era, and in that context and perspective their numbers are better appreciated. At the time, all were in the top ten in home runs, hitting a combined 2,513 dingers. They played 11,626 games and created 15, 558 runs (runs scored and runs batted in). Their cumulative total base numbers added up to thirty- nine miles. They rapped out 12,580 hits and 2,082 doubles. All but Banks stole over two hundred bases, and they appeared in sixty-four All- Star rosters. Each was an All- Star more than ten times.1 Today, with the baseball that’s been played since Henry Aaron and Frank Robinson retired after the 1976 season, it’s difficult to appreciate just how good they were. In the past forty-five years, we have had a steroid era and baseballs that many have accused of being juiced. There now are twenty- eight players who...