Jose Fernandez reminded us of all that is good about baseball
— -- The season began back in early March, with a cover story in ESPN The Magazine in which Bryce Harper, the 23-year-old reigning MVP of the Washington Nationals, declared that baseball is "a tired sport."
It will end with the crowning of a World Series champion.
In between, the season has played out in the background of a presidential race in which immigration became one of the pivotal issues.
Jose Fernandez was an immigrant. He tried and failed three times to defect from Cuba before he and his mother finally made it on a fourth try. Last year, he became a U.S. citizen. And on the baseball field, he was anything but tired.
Harper's argument was the game's unwritten code limits self-expression. "You can't do what people in other sports do," he said. "I'm not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it's the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair."
He singled out Fernandez. "Jose Fernandez is a great example. Jose Fernandez will strike you out and stare you down into the dugout and pump his fist. And if you hit a homer and pimp it? He doesn't care. Because you got him. That's part of the game. It's not the old feeling -- hoorah ... if you pimp a homer, I'm going to hit you right in the teeth. No. If a guy pimps a homer for a game-winning shot ... I mean -- sorry."
Fernandez not only had the flair that Harper admires but an unfiltered joy for the game. As teammates, opposing players and reporters talked about Fernandez the past two days, everyone mentioned that he simply loved playing baseball, always played with a smile, heck, could even make Barry Bonds laugh in the dugout:
On Twitter, two moments from his rookie season were continuously retweeted as a form of grief therapy. The first one was when Fernandez improbably snagged a line drive off the bat of Troy Tulowitzki:
"Did you catch that?" the cameras captured Tulowitzki asking. Fernandez grinned. "Yeah." Of course he did.
The second one was his reaction after Giancarlo Stanton hit a game-tying home run in the ninth inning of a game nobody now remembers except for this:
The Marlins announced that they will retire Fernandez's No. 16. There were cries to allow him to be elected to the Hall of Fame or name an award after him. But this should be Fernandez's lasting legacy: Keeping baseball fun again.
That's an important idea to understand in this most divisive of years. Watching the pregame ceremony at Marlins Park before Monday's game, I saw Giancarlo Stanton and Christian Yelich, a black man and a white man, doing their pregame sprints together, both with red-rimmed eyes. I saw teammates from America, from Cuba, from Taiwan, from Japan, from the Dominican Republic, from Venezuela, all wearing jerseys with Fernandez's No. 16 on the backs. I saw Bonds, the son of a major leaguer, a man with his own large footprint on this game, crying as a high school choir sang the national anthem. I saw Dee Gordon, another son of a major leaguer, cry as he rounded the bases after impossibly leading off the game with his first homer of the season. I saw the Marlins place their hats on the mound after they had defeated the Mets.
It was a team rallying around a kid who was born in Cuba, escaped to Mexico on a boat, made his way to Florida and became a baseball star with a movie-star smile. It was all a reminder that this game brings together players from all over the globe. They all bring their own codes, their own style of play, their own idea of flair. It's up to all of us -- players and fans -- to understand our differences, to understand there are different ways to play this game. That a bat flip is sometimes just a bat flip. That we can have Mark Fidrych talking to the baseball, Rickey Henderson making one-handed snatch catches, Dennis Eckersley pointing at batters after a strikeout, the Red Sox "Idiots" breaking a curse and Asdrubal Cabrera hitting a walk-off home run and throwing his bat like he's competing in the Olympic hammer throw. It's all baseball.
I read somewhere -- sorry, forgot who wrote it, but it was a good line -- that Fernandez was one of those players kicking and screaming to bring baseball into the 21st century. There's something to that, although as Jeff Passan of Yahoo wrote, Fernandez had "a blissful ability to take neither himself nor what he was doing too seriously."
In other words: Have some fun. It is, after all, just a game.
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