Detroit visit shows the good, the bad and the ugly of baseball

This is the good, the bad and the ugly. The good goes like this. In Detroit for the baseball All-Star game, I ate at The Whitney, a lovely restored Victorian mansion. Upstairs was a jazz bar with two long serving African American musicians playing the standards. “There’s some history to be told there,” I said, pointing to the duo.

I meant jazz history, but there was more. During a break, the 70-something lady pianist came to sit with us. When she inquired about my work and found baseball broadcasting was involved, she said, “Oh, my.”

“My father was from Birmingham, Alabama,” she went on. “He acquired some land and money in his time. They took it all away from him. A Black man wasn’t supposed to be doing that. When he passed, I found all these records that have something to do with a baseball team he had an ownership in.

“There are ledgers showing the players drawing on accounts for pay. They are listed by name. There’s other stuff, but I really don’t know what all of it is,” she offered.

I nearly fell over. She thought the team might have been the Birmingham Sox or something. I think it might have been the famous Negro League Birmingham Barons.

Long story short, she gave me her number and address and I said I knew some folks at the Negro League Hall of Fame and would put them in touch.

As I’m leaving the hotel on the last day in Detroit, who is standing behind me but one of baseball’s greatest players, Buck O’Neil, whose baseball history is in the Negro Leagues. I told him the story. He said, “You’ve got to be kidding. That kind of stuff just doesn’t exist.”

I asked only that he let me know what they find. I can’t wait to hear. I’ll let you know.

The bad is this. I tried to listen to a baseball game on the radio the other night in Minneapolis. It seemed that after every pitch there was some other pitch for some product the announcers had to read.

The game had become a backdrop to 10-second ads that were endless and kept interrupting the game. What a sin. Baseball on the radio should be heaven, not an interminable purgatory of “cute” commercials. Unfortunately, the problem is not just in Minneapolis.

The ugly is this, said with a big grin.

One of my baseball broadcast partners at ESPN is former Cy Young award winner Steve Stone. His wife just bought him a laptop for this birthday as he ventures into the computer age for the first time.

We in the booth have nicknamed him Dr. Download. His first attempt at an e-mail was to me and it came ENTIRELY IN CAPITAL LETTERS. He couldn’t figure out how to type the lower case.

He signed off, “FOREVER LOST IN CAPS.”

He will never hear the end of this.

Old Town native Gary Thorne is an ESPN and ABC sportscaster.