Making memories "official"

ELItorial
   By Laurie Randell

Move over Babe Ruth: according to American baseball fans, you're eating Lou Gehrig's dust. An announcement at Atlanta's Turner Field on Sun., Oct. 24 revealed that—by a scant margin of 49,948 votes—Gehrig is the most popular baseball player of all time, heading up Major League Baseball's All-Century Team. Up next for baseball fans? The All-Century starting lineup, which fans will vote on over the next few weeks. The real issue, however, isn't whether fans will pick Cal Ripken, Jr. over Ernie Banks, or Yogi Berra instead of Johnny Bench. The real issue is the fact that the only thing that hasn't been voted on yet is whether anyone really cares anymore.

For the past few months, the sports world has been as obsessed with lists as David Letterman. The All-Century Team is merely the latest in a long line of pre-millennial gimmicks designed to increase readership and ratings by playing on Americans' need to classify everything in their lives.

COURTESY NEWSMAKERS Lou Gehrig overtook Babe Ruth as the All-Century team's most popular baseball player of all time.

The longest-lived of the bunch is ESPN's SportsCentury 50 Greatest Athletes. Unsatisfied with the standard shelf life for lists, ESPN is determined to make theirs last for the entire year. If the idea was to build suspense, it hasn't worked. It's a little hard to get worked up over whether the next Sports-Century athlete will be Ted Williams or Carl Lewis—especially since Ted Williams finished behind Gehrig in All-Century voting. Gehrig isn't even in the top 20 for ESPN.

Can't these people agree on anything? All the lists prove is that fans will never agree with the members of the "distinguished 48-member panel" in charge of choosing the SportsCentury athletes. Fans can't even agree with each other: ask any group of New Yorkers which is the best Big Apple team and see if you get a unanimous answer.

In reality, the All-Century Team is no more a true compilation of the best ball players of all time than the 100 Greatest Books list is an accurate reflection of literature. I don't know many people who agreed that Ulysses was the best book of all time, to say nothing of the rest of the list. Similarly, I challenge baseball to show me a single person who agrees with all the players chosen for the All-Century Team.

It's not that I object to compilation lists in general, even though they are one of the silliest side effects of popular culture since the chain letter. I'm sure that some people find it very interesting that over one million people deemed Gehrig to be one of the best players of all time, while only about 600,000 voted for Pete Rose. The rest of us already knew that. We don't need a fancy list to tell us who the great players of the past are—we already had our own opinions, views that are hardly likely to change as a result of the "official" All-Century Team announcement.

Even as the All-Century spectacle threatens to overwhelm the World Series, it is being joined by another favorite pastime of sportswriters and accountants: designating the best team of all time. Sports sections in the past few weeks have been filled with bickering writers promoting the Yankees as the best team of the century, or the Braves as the greatest team of the decade. Do the Braves deserve the honor as team of the '90s despite only capturing one championship—in 1995?

In all honesty, it doesn't really matter to the world which team is the greatest of the century, or the decade. Calling the Braves the team of the decade won't suddenly spark their offense into dominating the Yanks. Just because they lost the World Series doesn't mean that now the Yankees are automatically the team of the deade. Sportswriters should spend more time analyzing the games at hand rather than arguing over their effects on the teams' legacies.

It's nice that there have been enough great players and memorable moments that sports fans want to honor them years later. And I'd be the last to deride the emotional scene at this year's All-Star Game, when so many of baseball's greats stood on the field together. But creating arbitrary, insignificant rankings ends up cheapening the people and memories that they are intended to revere. Roberto Cle-mente is no less of a ballplayer than he was before he was omitted from the final All-Century roster.

I'd like to make a millennium wish that I believe reflects the desires of the public more than any poll or baseball compilation list. In the few remaining months of the millennium, it would be nice if sports fans were allowed to savor their memories of the past rather than having to pit them against each other in a fight for historical supremacy.

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