Steve Garvey held up autographed ball in a Convention Center exhibit hall. Photo by Chris Stone
William F. Buckley, Jr. once famously remarked “I should sooner live in a society governed by the first two thousand names in the Boston telephone directory than in a society governed by the two thousand faculty members of Harvard University.”
By comparison, in the current race for United States Senator in California between Congressman Adam Schiff and baseball legend Steve Garvey, Schiff would be associated with the intellectual elite of that exalted ivy institution while Garvey, despite his stardom, would represent the common man to be found in the opening pages of the metropolitan phone book.
Schiff is, after all, a graduate of Stanford (with distinction) before matriculating at Harvard Law where he received his Juris Doctor cum laude. He went on to a relatively brief law career before becoming a state senator and then member of Congress. Garvey graduated from Michigan State with a health and physical education degree received shortly after he began a career swinging a baseball bat, from 1969 to 1987, and doing a creditable job of that.
Schiff is perhaps best known for promoting the allegation that President Trump’s campaign colluded with Russia during the 2016 election and prosecuting Trump in the first impeachment trial over the charge that he improperly delayed military aid to Ukraine to induce that country to investigate alleged corrupt influence peddling by political opponent Joe Biden and his son. The Mueller investigation did not establish collusion in the former matter, and the Senate acquitted Trump in the latter.
On the issues presently of concern to most California voters, Garvey’s positions would seem to align more with the electorate than Schiff’s: a secure border, strong support of law enforcement, and lowering inflation through fiscal discipline and increased energy production. Yet, by the polls, Schiff holds a 20-plus percentage point lead over Garvey, with perhaps 40% of the vote being the most “the Garv” might capture in this heavily Democratic state.
But there are undecided voters in this race, maybe many. And in his candidacy, Garvey is tendering them more than contrasting policy positions with Schiff. For whatever his personal shortcomings, Garvey represents, or strives to represent, the values that so closely bind Americans to the country’s national pastime: honesty, hard work, patriotism, tradition, community, respect, fair play.
Jacques Martin Barzun, French-born Columbia University history professor from the late 1920s to the mid-1970s, remarked that “Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America would do well to learn baseball.” Whatever you think of Garvey (I didn’t like him as a ballplayer), he does embody the sport’s virtues.
In the climactic baseball speech in A Field of Dreams, the reclusive writer (played by the late James Earl Jones) tells farmer Ray Kinsella who must decide whether to fulfill his baseball dream and as a consequence face possible financial ruin:
“America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game — it’s a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good, and it could be again..”
Garvey, who presents himself as a moderate, seems to want to bring back to the Golden State all that once was good: safe streets, economic well-being, civility. Pollsters will take their polls, but what voters say in the ballots they cast could be different. As novelist Phillip Roth once observed: “We must not forget that baseball played a decisive part in the youth of many of us.”
W. “Michael” Waterman is a retired lawyer in San Diego County and the author of “Playing for Pasta — An American Plays Ball in Italy in 1976” (2024).
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Publish date : 2024-10-08 11:30:00
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