A most gracious man

It's been a good span of years now since I talked to the man, and no surprise there. Stuff happens, after all. Time does what it does. The years take us where they take us, and then one day I open the local newspaper's website, and there the man is again.

Carl Erskine. Still living life.

Still doing what he does deep into his '90s, which is be eternally gracious. Still giving and giving and giving some more, because that's who he is and a man cannot escape who he is anymore than he can grow gills and breathe water.

I know this because of all the times I talked to the old Brooklyn Dodger when I worked in Anderson, Erskine's hometown and the place to which he returned after his playing days. He was one of the Boys of Summer, and then he became a man for all seasons, and that's why I saw his name pop up again last week.

The Baseball Hall of Fame, it seems, was paying attention.

And so it's bestowing on Erskine the Buck O'Neil Lifetime Achievement award, only the sixth recipient of a relatively new honor. Giving hath its privileges, it seems.

Take that picture in the suite area of Parkview Field, for instance.

It was taken on a summer's day at McMillen Park in the early 1960s, when Wildcat baseball was in its infancy here in the Fort. Carl's sitting on a bench with Dale McMillen, Wildcat's founder. Some other folks are sitting there, too.

Jackie Robinson, for one. Ted Williams, for another. 

Mr. Mac called and they came, because of course they did. I don't know how that all went down, but I'm betting Carl had something to do with it. Jackie, after all, was Carl's teammate and friend with the Dodgers. And Carl was never very good at saying no.

And so there hangs that photo, and in Carl's Anderson home the phone rings and it's an area high school team or a baseball organization wanting him to come speak. Or the Dodgers requesting his presence in Dodgertown for another fantasy camp.  Or some guy like me starving for context to flesh out a story.

Because Carl is not only Mr. Gracious, you see. He's Mr. Context, too.

The man saw so much in his time, after all. When he started pitching for the Dodgers, the team was still riding the rails; by the time he retired, they were traveling by plane. Want to talk about the integration of baseball? Carl and Jackie Robinson were teammates and friends, and later would come Roy Campanella, and on and on. 

In his time, television transformed not only baseball but the nation, and segregation's death knell began to sound in both baseball and America. The Dodgers moved to L.A. and the Giants to San Francisco, and suddenly the very geography of the game was changed forever.

"I played in a specific era in the game," Carl told me once. "There were a lot of historic changes that happened in that era -- baseball always reflects those changes in society."

And if you just want to talk about the state of the game ... well, Erskine played in five World Series, and threw two no-hitters, and struck out 14 Yankees in Game 3 of the 1953 Series, a record that stood for a decade. 

And so the phone keeps ringing for Mr. Context. And, of course, for Mr. Gracious -- whose service to the game has never ended as a result, and who is now being recognized for it.

"Let me tell you," he once joked of the Mr. Gracious part. "My old Erskine saying is when you're cheap and available, you get a lot of work."

Along with much else.