Course correction

Some wrongs have never been right. It just takes awhile sometimes for someone to say so, manners being what they are and all.

 

And so no one wanted to point out that the Washington Football Club had a racial slur for a nickname, until someone finally did. No one wondered aloud, until they did, why the hell a statue of its racist founder, George Preston Marshall, greeted visitors to a stadium that was home to a whole pile of black football players.

 

This does not mean people weren't thinking that. It does not mean they weren't wondering, for years and years, how it made sense to name U.S. military installations for Confederate generals whose troops killed thousands of U.S. military personnel. Or why statues glorifying men who led an armed revolt against the United States graced town squares across the U.S.

 

People are speaking up about all that now because the time's right. It's not an indictment of their sincerity that they didn't before.

 

Which is how we get to Kenesaw Mountain Landis today.

 

The Judge is famous for casting the Black Sox into outer darkness, even though some of those he cast out shouldn't have been cast. He is less famous, but more notorious, for also keeping black players out of the major leagues for the entirety of his 24-year tenure.

 

It wasn't until 2 1/2 years after the old coot died that Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. It was only several decades late, thanks to the Judge. All these years later baseball has black players and Japanese players and players from 19 other foreign countries, and the game is demonstrably better for it.

 

So of course Barry Larkin wondered why the National League Most Valuable Player trophy had Judge Landis' name and face on it when they handed it to him in 1995. He just didn't say anything.

 

He is now.

 

"Why is it on there?" the Reds' Hall of Famer told the Associated Press the other day. "(Because) I was always aware of his name and what that meant to slowing the color line in Major League Baseball, of the racial injustice and inequality that black players had to go through."

 

He's not the only one aware. And who wonders how it's at all appropriate in 2020.

 

Among others, fellow MVPs Mike Schmidt and Terry Pendleton are wondering the same thing. And wondering if perhaps it's time Landis' name was removed from a trophy that represents a game to which he's no longer relevant.

 

That's not revisionist history, no matter what the real revisionist would like you to think. It's merely a course correction, which is at times not just appropriate but necessary.

 

I mean, look what happened to the Titanic for not making one.