This Sunday, July 26, the fearsome hitter Jim Rice, who played his entire 16-year career with the Boston Red Sox, will be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Joining Rice will be Rickey Henderson, the all-time stolen base leader who seemed to play for every team in baseball after leaving the Oakland Athletics.
Henderson was arguably the greatest leadoff hitter the game has ever known, a player who could singlehandedly alter the outcome of a game. Both players unreservedly deserve their plaques.
When a career Boston player like Rice is inducted into the Hall of Fame, all New England is said to celebrate. Yet the same level of excitement on display in 2000, when Carlton Fisk—who played less than half of his career with the Red Sox—was inducted is not in evidence for Rice's big day.
Part of the tempered response may be because it took Rice 15 years of eligibility to be voted into the hall. He just squeaked in this year on his final try. The sportswriters who vote on hall inductees hold grudges, and theirs against Rice is long-lived. Rice, like the Baltimore Orioles' Eddie Murray, did not have a chummy relationship with the media, particularly with the often-contemptuous Boston area writers. Their "punishment" for not playing along with the jock-sniffing charade was to have their careers denigrated after the fact. Many sportswriters thumbed their noses at Murray's 500 homeruns and 3,000 career hits, as though his remarkable consistency, lack of injuries, and clutch hitting were not worthy. Rice's career was likewise belittled.
During the 1980s, when I practically lived at Baltimore's Memorial Stadium (and its surrounding taverns), I saw Rice and Murray play many times. As an Orioles fan, Rice was the one player I never wanted to see come to the plate in a clutch situation, which was likely the same feeling that Sox fans harbored for Murray.
Above and beyond this, however, no player I've personally witnessed at a ballpark has been as mercilessly heckled as Rice. I recall one game at Memorial Stadium when an entire row of white fans in left field baited Rice with racial insults. Between innings, Rice peered stoically at them, clearly trying to contain the rage he must have felt inside. The scene was so grotesquely redolent of my memories of the openly racist fans at Atlanta Braves games that I complained to an usher (I've learned the hard way never to directly approach and reproach an abusive drunken fan). Soon enough, a crew of security people ushered the group out. As the hecklers made their way up the aisle, I was relieved to see their Yankees caps and T-shirts and to hear the other fans in the section applauding their expulsion.
Such was the elephant in the room that Rice faced playing 16 years in Boston, a city coated in racial enmity. The Boston Red Sox, perhaps reflecting the city's attitude, were the last franchise to integrate their team (in 1959, with Pumpsie Green), and for many years they had the fewest numbers of black players in baseball (reflected, of course, in the lack of fan support from Boston's large black community).
Howard Bryant, who grew up in Boston, wrote an excellent book about the atmosphere in which Jim Rice toiled, Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston (2002). Bryant, a Red Sox fan, told NPR, "The Red Sox were one of the most racist teams in baseball. You've got a 50-year legacy of difficulties between the Red Sox and the African-American population."
To the credit of current Red Sox owner John Henry and president Larry Lucchino, the team is actively reaching out to the city's black community. That effort may come as cold comfort to Jim Rice (and Reggie Smith, Mo Vaughan, Ellis Burks, et al.). Still, better late than never, for both Red Sox Nation and Cooperstown.
