The pale blue dot… in the last ray to the right.
1. I was looking at Twitter when I saw a Deadspin tweet alluding to an early report of an explosion at the Boston Marathon. There were five tweets right after it, and none of them mentioned anything in Boston. I turned on the TV and went to the news channels, and nothing. Other websites, nothing.. I got a little confused. I had to remind myself that Deadspin isn’t the Onion, so it wouldn’t be some joke I didn’t understand. And then seven or eight minutes after reading that first tweet, it became evident that it was all tragically real.
Fuck! What the fuck!? I was about to ask why, though terrorism doesn’t really need a why. It is self-explanatory. Still… why? We don’t know who did it. The FBI and police, as I write this have gotten a search warrant for an apartment in Revere, a suburb of Boston, but that’s all we know. Three dead, over 100 injured. When shit like this happens, I just think of- for some reason- Carl Sagan’s reflections on the “Pale Blue Dot”. I don’t know that it comforts me, really, though I suppose it does. I don’t know. We’re a weird beast. Thankfully, like Patton Oswalt pointed out today, the good far outnumber the bad.
2) The Red Sox game had already been completed by the time of the explosions. The Celtics game was canceled. The rest of MLB observed a moment of silence prior to each game. First responders and those that ran to help were given much deserved commendation. Virtually every MLB player with a Twitter account responded appropriately. The rest of Twitter? Not quite as much. A re-tweet from user @rolldiggity by Giants beat writer Hank Schulman summed up the Twitter universe pretty well: “Twitter does its best work in the first five minutes after a disaster and its worst in the twelve hours after that.
There is no phrase I can add to the end of this that seems appropriate or that matters.
…
I’m not gonna do a full nine items tonight, but I would be remiss if I didn’t mention what today was supposed to be all about: Jackie Robinson day.
Today marks the 46th anniversary of the day Jackie Robinson debuted with the Brooklyn Dodgers, thereby breaking the “unofficial” ban on black players that had been in effect for half a century.
Robinson’s day has been getting a bit more press than usual given the release of the movie 42, which is just great. Judging by tweets from so many players, it is obvious that many of them were not all that aware of Robinson’s landmark debut and what his character meant to that “experiment” succeeding.
Robinson agreed with Branch Rickey to “turn the other cheek” to abuse for three years before the plan to break the color barrier was put in motion. Robinson spent one year in the minors playing in Montreal before being called up to the Dodgers. I thought I remembered from Ken Burns series that Robinson had to go two more years in the big leagues without retaliating in any way to abuse. The EPSN radio host I listened to tonight said he only spent one year… I’m not sure that is true. I looked up many sources, and I only found a few that alluded to the amount of time. Whatever it is, the man put up with a ton of racist bullshit.
I haven’t seen the movie yet, but I will. Spike Lee wanted to make a movie of Robinson many years ago, and then was planning one on the Negro Leagues (Spike first wanted to be a baseball player- and if you’ll remember his landmark Do the Right Thing he spends half the movie wearing a Robinson jersey).
If you have Netflix Watch Now, Ken Burns 18-hour documentary Baseball is on there last I checked. If you haven’t seen it, I recommend the entire thing, but for today, you can just skip to Episode 6: The National Pastime, which documents Jackie Robinson’s arrival to the Dodgers. Seriously though, I’d take the time to start with Episode 5: Shadow Ball, which puts the whole thing into context, documenting the Negro Leagues and MLB’s exclusion of black players.
Finally, while Jackie Robinson Day is appropriately about Jackie Robinson, credit should be given due to Branch Rickey for leading the way. I don’t condone treating a white guy as a hero for doing what should have been done, but like I said, credit is due, and I bring it up mainly to share this link to legendary, and still current, Dodgers broadcaster Vin Scully talking about his interviewing with Rickey for a job all those years ago.
safe
Doctor, always do the right thing.
The Baseball Messiah League 