But
couldn’t a Chicago-oriented ballplayer have been used to accept the Beacon
Award that Major League Baseball wanted to present to the Queen of Soul? The
ceremony was held, after all, at U.S. Cellular Field!
I’M
NOT REALLY being facetious when I suggest that Harold Baines – the White Sox
coach who was a star of the 1980s and kept playing through 2000 – could have
done the duties just as well.
It’s
not like anyone who spoke during the pre-game ceremonies prior to the White Sox
taking on the Texas Rangers said anything all that eloquent. I’m sure that if
Franklin had showed up herself (health caused her to cancel, and we had to
settle for a video presentation about her musical life), she would have been
more interesting.
Not
that I’m knocking the ceremonies, which I caught off Comcast Sports Net (I wasn’t
at the ballpark). Surprisingly enough, the cable sports channel actually showed
the ceremonies – rather than just summarizing them with a few seconds of video
sometime around the third inning.
I
even got a kick out of seeing Minnie Miñoso, identified to the fans as the “first
professional athlete of color in Chicago.” He once was just simply called the
first black ballplayer with the White Sox, but we now acknowledge him as a
Cuban-American who happens to be dark-skinned – and one-time catcher Sam
Hairston gets to be the first African-American White Sox ballplayer for his one season back in 1951.
AS
FOR THE first black ballplayer in Jackie Robinson and the first black American
League ballplayer in Larry Doby, we got to see a pair of their siblings -- with promises that none other than announcer Ken Harrelson himself would get to interview Sharon Robinson. You can make your own insulting comment about such an event!
And
we also got to see the seventh tribute by Major League Baseball to the Civil
Rights movement. This was the Lucky 7, so to speak, Civil Rights Game – of which
the White Sox have participated in three of them.
It
might not have been the biggest deal in terms of tributes, although I was
amused to learn that even Gov. Pat Quinn showed up Saturday for afternoon
ceremonies at the Marriott Hotel on Michigan Avenue and at the ballpark itself in the evening hours.
 |
| The closest Aretha Franklin came to the South Side was on the stadium video board out beyond center field. Photograph by Gregory Tejeda |
It
was better than doing nothing, although I realize it pales in comparison to
those people in Washington, D.C., who, on Saturday, marched to the Martin
Luther King, Jr., memorial to mark the half-century anniversary of the day that
the civil rights leader told us of his “dream” – which we still have some ways
to go before it is achieved.
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