Bob Schwartz

You probably don’t care that much about baseball. And I’ve been writing less and less about it, though it remains by far the greatest of our popular team sports, even if football has sort of taken over as America’s game. More’s the pity, as we seem to have chosen brute force in the service of skill and strategy over grace and talent actually forbidden to collide or be gratuitously aggressive.

Ken Griffey Jr. is going to the Baseball Hall of Fame. The official announcement will come late today. There will be plenty of stories to explain why and what it means, and you might enjoy reading a few of them.

He was known as Junior, in part to distinguish him from his baseball-player father, Ken Griffey Sr. If a son ever exceeded his father, exceeded even the highest expectations, and exceeded just about everybody else who played the game, Junior is it.

Read the stats. Watch the videos. And remember that just before baseball was mired in lies and controversies about stars succeeding by using performance enhancing drugs, there were a few actual supermen who did it themselves. Those who could do it all, including possessing the perfect swing. Junior was a cultural hero because he was both incredibly talented (literally, you couldn’t believe it) and so very cool. Actually, he was more like a cross between Superman and Batman.

It is uplifting to know that in this world there are such people.