Fisk's Hall of Fame Induction

From SoSH

Carlton Fisk's Hall of Fame Induction Speech

July 23, 2000
Hi. I'd thank the Hall of Fame for honoring me, but it's the baseball writers who elected me. The Hall of Fame as an institution has all sorts of weird rules that prevent players from being elected on the basis of their playing merits -- Pete Rose and Shoeless Joe come to mind -- and I'm sure if my more embarrassing remarks about management had been publicized more, I wouldn't have made it in. After all, controversial figures who had an incredible impact on the game, like Curt Flood and Dick Allen, aren't in, while management flacks like the MacPhails and Tommy Lasorda get in just for showing up to work. So I'm thanking the writers for not making me subject to the whims of the Veterans' Committee.

And to be honest, and I'm an honest guy if ever there was one, there's a bunch of players who were at least as good as me who aren't even getting support from the writers. Gary Carter was better than I was at his peak, and most of my records are from having played six years more than he did. Thurman Munson would've been in the Hall of Fame -- after all, he was an MVP, an award I never got, but because he died young, he couldn't pad out the career stats. And for that matter, my fellow inductee today, Tony Perez, is as marginal a candidate for the Hall of Fame as ever there was, but the writers were swayed by sentiment over the 25th anniversary of the Big Red Machine and as a sort of political protest for Pete Rose, so here he is.

But, all that said, I'm sure I deserve being here. You can point to my work ethic, my career records, my excellent defensive and offensive reputation, my ability to hold a club together for a long season. But I'd like to point to a single incident that I think exemplifies my approach to the game, and why I deserve to be a symbol of excellence.

I was playing for the White Sox late in my career, in 1990, when that punk Deion Sanders came up to the plate. You know, Mr. Commercial-endorsement, Legend-in-his-own-mind, two-sport baseball wannabee who probably was playing only to match Bo Jackson's two-sport product endorsement pinache. You probably know the story: the little jerk first has the temerity to not run out a pop-fly to the infield, for which I yell at him to run it out. I admit I have old-fashioned ideas about baseball, but I think the real point of the story is that anything worth doing is worth doing well.

Then Sanders made one of the stupidest remarks I've ever heard -- and I've heard plenty in contract negotiations with Jerry Reinsdorf and Lou Gorman, trust me. He said something about "the days of slavery being over", which had absolutely nothing to do with the game or the issue at hand. I don't need to defend myself on any race issue -- and I won't here. Whether he felt genuinely aggrieved on a racial basis, I don't know. That's something for Deion's conscience to figure out. But beyond the stinging attempt to make a race incident out of a baseball thing, the sense of self-entitlement inherent in that statement was emblematic of what fans have come to loathe about professional sports and baseball in particular. This sense that millionaires and billionaires, because they're so well-rewarded for playing a game, don't have to abide by the basic rules of effort and reward that ordinary Joe Six-packs have to.

So, I lost it and had a screaming match with him. Maybe it wasn't the most mature thing to do, and even now I know I sound more than a bit self-righteous to be appointing myself a defender of the game's integrity. But it meant something to me, and I think that something, whatever it was, is at the heart of why I loved playing baseball and why baseball's such a great game. Don't ask me to give it a name.

I'll also note that in my original, official Hall of Fame induction remarks, I noted the contributions of Curt Flood, Andy Messersmith, Marvin Miller, and Don Fehr to the game of baseball. I should amplify these here. Fans today find it hard to sympathize with ballplayers taking home multi-million dollar paychecks and complaining about working conditions, but I need to take you back to the circumstances of the time. I don't think you'd like it if you trained as a steelworker, and couldn't get work as anything else, but you were forced to work for a particular company at a specific wage, and for only six months out of the year at that. That's the situation we were in prior to free agency. If the fans today think baseball is all about the players and owners, not the fans, then at least it's better than the old days, when it was just all about the owners.

These guys may have been looking out after their own self-interest, but they suffered for it. Curt Flood lost a lot of money and maybe some years on his life as a result of his struggles to simply be able to work in his chosen profession according to terms of his choosing, not the dictates of a legally-allowed monopoly. That's not self-entitlement -- that's self-respect that Flood earned in the end. That's why little whiny tadpoles like Sanders ticked me off so much.

Even so, it wasn't all gravy for me even with free agency. The Red Sox treated me like chattel, which is why I left them for the White Sox, not because of some contract technicality. And then working for the White Sox was no bed of roses. I'll confess I'm a cranky, ornery guy, given to the occasional fit of temper, but even in retrospect, management jerked me around over and over again despite my giving 100% at all times. I'd've made a good Dilbert cartoon if they'd been drawing it back then.

And, of course, for every hard-working guy like me who tried to play by the rules and give it his all, who got his ultimate reward in Cooperstown, there are ten thousand others who got far less from baseball than they gave to it or the fans. That's the way of the world, but still, I hope you fans don't forget that. You may live your dreams vicariously through me, but I hope you take the lesson of my career to heart. You must persevere and defend the integrity of the things you believe in, despite living in a world controlled by conniving, greedy, lying jerks. Love democracy even if you hate politicians. Love freedom even if you hate the things idiots say under its protection. In the specific instance of baseball, love the game, not the people who run it or even the people who play it. That's all there is in the end. Thank you.