Thomas Boswell: By Numbers Alone, Character Counts

The Washington Post
Monday, July 30, 2007; E01

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.

Jim Palmer, Cal Ripken Jr., Earl Weaver, Brooks Robinson, Frank Robinson and Eddie Murray.

As the sun set over the Adirondacks on Saturday evening, you could get a clear radio signal for almost every major league game east of the Mississippi on I-88 to the Hall of Fame. In Baltimore, Nick Markakis slapped a single to left off Roger Clemens. In New York, the Nats began a rally to beat the Mets. The Phillies, Pirates and Red Sox whispered as you sped along the ridges. However, as the town where Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn were inducted into the Hall on Sunday came into view, one broadcast was absent. Nowhere on the dial could you find the Giants, or any mention of Barry Bonds.

Here, baseball reaches out and embraces you, welcomes you back, restores your faith, not just in games but in the people who play or love them. You gaze into the game's history and realize, since human nature changes as slowly as mountain-range rock, that our future, no matter what we fear, will resemble nothing so much as our past. A "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, Pete Rose or Bonds may disappoint or gall us, make us plead, "Say it ain't so," but we still have our choice of models, even heroes -- Christy Mathewson, Lou Gehrig, Hank Aaron or, on this day, Gwynn and Ripken. Records are broken. Character remains.

On Sunday as a bus full of Hall of Famers approached the vast fields and hillsides where the induction ceremony would be held, the greats began gasping like children. "They're saying: 'Oh, my goodness, look at all the people. I've never seen them way up on those hills,' " Gwynn said. "Cal and I thought they were messing with us, making us nervous before our speeches."

But they weren't. The 53 Hall of Famers, the largest such group ever assembled, were simply marveling, like everyone else, at the sight of 75,000 fans, jammed, sprawled and congregated as far as the eye could see. And why had they come? Just to hear a couple of dignified, honest ballplayers give their modest remarks.

To give a sense of the jaw-dropping scope of the scene, neither Ripken nor Gwynn, ever in his career, had played a game before so many fans, since no major league ballpark holds so many. For comparison, when Brooks Robinson was inducted here in '83, a crowd of 15,000 set what was then a record. On this Sunday, however, a throng worthy of any World Series had trekked, as a pilgrimage and testimony to their values, to one of America's more inaccessible villages.

"Nine hours by car from Annandale with one rest stop," said John Falardeau, who came with wife, Margaret, and daughters Lydia and Emma, ages 4 and 2. "We had dual DVD players in the back seat -- cost $140. By the time we finally got here, I'd have given Target another $300 just to thank them."

This sea of fans, with signs such as "My Son is Named Cal Because of You," came from distances and in numbers never before seen. Few, if any, overlooked the confluence of this induction with Bonds's failed attempt to steal the sport's spotlight on such a symbolic day. The Giants outfielder could have rested Sunday -- standard practice for a 43-year-old in a day game after a night game. Instead, he eloquently chose to play and swing for No. 755.

None of the men whose faces grace the plaques here missed the meaning. On Saturday, at a reception for Hall of Famers, word passed through the crowd, "0 for 1" or "0 for 3." Everyone knew the subject. Everyone said, "Good."

In recent days, as this weekend became a closely watched juxtaposition of steroid scandal and Hall celebration, estimates of the eventual crowd continued to rise. On Saturday, reports arrived here that an additional 250 buses had been added to bring all the fans. Coincidence? After all, baseball is hot, setting a one-day attendance record on Saturday: 717,000. Or referendum?

After their acceptance speeches, Ripken and Gwynn were asked, "Do you think so many people showed up because they wanted to make a statement about how they want the game to be played?"

"I don't think there is any doubt of it," said Gwynn, not mentioning Bonds by name. "The fans felt they could trust us. They could trust how we played the game, especially in this era, that we did it the right way.

"And I think the writers [who vote] felt that, too. There's no way I'm a 97.6 [percent] guy," said the eight-time batting champ, referring to his vote total, almost as high as Ripken's. On the same ballot, Mark McGwire got only 23.5 percent of the vote, perhaps the most resounding rejection in Hall history. This crowd, Gwynn said, was "about the type of people we were."

Tony was right. But so was Ripken who, refusing to concede Bonds any part of the stage, said that this day, this huge revival on a hillside, was simply about the sport itself -- and its health, in spite of all that is inflicted on it.

"This was about the fans love of baseball, from generation to generation. The game continues long after any of us put away our glove," Ripken said. "This demonstrates that baseball is alive, popular and good."

That last word -- "good" -- may have slipped out courtesy of Dr. Freud. Few athletes have, grudgingly at first, then eventually with a whole heart, so completely embraced the job of understated hero as a career mission. Throughout his acceptance speech, Ripken addressed this task of combining personal behavior with athletic performance.

"I didn't understand when I was younger," Ripken said. Once, he threw a helmet and teammate Ken Singleton showed him a tape of it and asked, "How does that look?" Another night, Ripken learned that a family had saved money to come to a game in which he had been ejected in the first inning "and their little boy cried the whole game." Eventually, he realized that he was a role model whether he liked it or not. "Kids see it all," he said. "Not just the big things. Everything." After that "baseball became a platform," he said.

"Games were and are important," Ripken said, "but people and how you impact on them are most important.

The chains of habit, it has been famously said, are too light to be felt until they are too strong to be broken. Perhaps that insight can be taken a step further. In many ways, our character is little more than a lifetime's collection of habits -- some consciously chosen, too many fallen into unawares.

Some people, by the guidance of family or who knows what, make crucial choices that lead them to the habits, to the relationships with others -- to the inspiring character -- that we find in Ripken and Gwynn. On days like this, we not only praise them for their athletic records. A Bonds can do as much. By the tens of thousands, we trek to a rural village for a reason we can hardly express. In a game, we have discovered people who can help us decide which chains of habit will define us.