(Claire Smith elected as the J.G. Taylor Spink Award to the Hall of Fame)
By Yours Truly
www.throneberryfields.comBefore he developed a reputation as a serial fiance/father in the 1980s, Steve Garvey had one as a gentleman. In case anyone
forgot about it, Garvey showed it after Game One of the 1984 National League Championship Series, following his Padres being
smothered by the Cubs, 13-0.
Hartford Courant reporter Claire Smith, normally the paper’s Yankees beat writer but assigned to cover the NLCS, was
removed physically from the Padres’ clubhouse, in violation of a league rule allowing equal access to any and all accredited
journalists. Garvey simply followed her out of the clubhouse, reminded her and perhaps himself that she had a job to do,
and let Smith interview him.
The following day, then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth made the National League’s rule a baseball-wide edict.
Smith is going into the Hall of Fame as the newest J.G. Taylor Spink Award winner, the first woman to win the award, the fourth
African-American to win it, and she earned it the long, hard way. But before you lose yourself in any roll of stories proclaiming
her the first woman to land a regular daily major league baseball beat, save yourself the trip. She wasn’t. Alison Gordon, who
died last year at 72, was.
The
Courant hired Smith off the defunct
Philadelphia Bulletin and assigned her to the Mets in 1982, then the Yankees for six
years, before becoming a national baseball writer for it and, in due course,
The New York Times. Gordon was assigned to the
Blue Jays beat by the
Toronto Star in 1979.
“Yes, women reporters go into locker rooms,” Gordon wrote in her charming, wry memoir,
Foul Ball! Five Years in the American
League. “Yes, if the players are out to embarrass us, they make sure they’re naked when we get there . . . And I have to credit
one Tiger, who had the imagination to find a new name for women sportswriters. I walked in one day to a shout of ‘Watch out,
here comes the pecker checker!’ (It was a lot nicer than their usual greeting, which was ‘Meat!’)”
It wasn’t just ballplayers who found Gordon’s presence, shall we say, unsettling. “Madam,” a rather irate reader wrote to her, “I see
where you don’t mind male nudity in athletes’ shower rooms; neither would any whore.” Compared to that, Gordon—who resembled
what you might imagine as Joan Didion’s pretty, tomboy kid sister—probably thought the crudest ballplayers were the courtliest
gentlemen by comparison.
Gordon was barely on the Blue Jays’ beat when she learned the hard way that she didn’t have to overcome the Blue Jays’ prejudices
alone. When the Jays traveled to Arlington for a series with the Rangers, the Rangers’ then-general manager Eddie Robinson banned
all reporters from the Rangers clubhouse rather than let Gordon in.
“She could have very easily taken the words that a lot of guys said and took it to heart and went back to her bosses and said, ‘I’m not
doing this. I don’t get paid to take abuse’,” Lloyd Moseby, once a Blue Jays outfielder, and a lifelong friend, told the
Star upon Gordon’s
death. “But she never did. She kept showing up. And it was amazing, really.”
Gordon had a knack for drawing colour from the least likely sources. Dave Steib, a longtime Blue Jays pitching star, impressed her as
“for the most part . . . a chore, a spoiled brat,” but the day after he lost a tough one to the Twins, he fumed, “What a rotten day.”
“What’s the matter?” Gordon remembered asking. “Do you need a grey day to go with your mood?”
“To go with my mood,” Stieb replied, “the sky would have to be grey, the earth trembling, and the dead people crawling out of their
graves.”
Gordon was unimpressed with “the number crunchers” who arose as the progeny of Bill James beginning in the 1980s, but she was not
otherwise sinister. She was of a piece with her era, after all, an era which still didn’t understand the intersection where seeking new ways
to conjugate what a game revealed through its numbers met and never detracted from the joy of watching the game for its own sake.
“Thank goodness it is only the laymen who have followed the sabermetric piper,” she wrote in Foul Ball! “When ballplayers borrowed
my copy of [
The Bill James Baseball]
Abstract, the inevitable response was, “That guy’s full of shit.” Could you imagine what would
happen to the sport if players began believing in percentages? Can you imagine baseball with no surprises? Let the number crunchers
play with their computers. I’d rather go to a ball game.”
Gordon was also the first woman admitted to the Baseball Writers Association of America, leaving the daily baseball beat after five years
to become a novelist whose specialty was baseball-themed murder mysteries featuring sportswriter/sleuth Kate Henry.
Few appreciated Gordon the way Claire Smith did. ”Where others would be horrified by the remnants of an era clinging stubbornly to its
past, Alison usually laughed,” Smith wrote in a sweet elegy to Gordon for ESPN, where Smith has worked since 2007. “And she got you to
laugh with her.”
Alison’s razor-sharp humor taught me so much, especially how to shrug off the louts with a “didn’t land a punch” smile. Our
conversations were not pity parties, but wonderful opportunities to compare notes, laugh at the insanity of certain portions of certain
clubhouses. And behind the humor was an immense resolve. And when she did not cave or sink to the level of those who tried to torment
her, she made all of her peers proud.
It came in very handy for Gordon when she addressed the games behind the games. Or, at least once, the game above the game. After
leaving the Blue Jays beat, Gordon was in Rogers Center (known then as SkyDome) watching a game and catching something she wasn’t
expecting, a bird’s eye view of a couple having visible sex in front of a SkyDome Hotel window.
“He was corpulent, hairy and nude. She was blonde, buxom and wrapped non-too-securely in a towel,” wrote Gordon, by then established
as a novelist, for a special
Star article. “They were both old enough to know better than to sit in arm chairs pulled up to the window.”
Laughing or tongue-lashing, Gordon had a way of civilising the day’s game and events that slowly but surely reduced the volume of
loutishness she faced in baseball clubhouses.
Smith won’t forget Gordon when she accepts the Spink Award next July, if her reaction to her own honour is any suggestion: “There are so
many women who could have been chosen, so many women who broke barriers. I am overwhelmed, I am humbled. For every woman who
came before me and who stood by my side today. They are my champions. They are my sisters. And the men, who stood up in that room
today and applauded. They are my champions, too.”
It would be nice if the Hall of Fame could remember the woman who made the daily baseball beat reality for the Smiths, too, for a future
Spink Award. (Yes, that’s a vote for Gordon, for whatever this writer’s vote is worth, and I never held it against her that she believed we
Society for American Baseball Research types—yes, I am a member—are loonies.) Next year’s wouldn’t exactly be too soon.
Alison Gordon, in the Blue Jays' clubhouse.
