Cooperstown, New York © National Baseball Hall of Fame Library,
Eloquent Witness Paul K. Hooker
T
his summer, I crossed an item off my “bucket list”: I spent a day in the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York, where the heroes of professional baseball are commemorated with bronze plaques bearing information about their baseball careers. Statistics abound—home runs, RBIs, stolen bases, consecutive games played, years managed, pennants won, strikeouts, ERAs—it’s as close as a baseball geek gets to heaven. Unique among all the plaques is the one commemorating Harold Henry “Pee Wee” Reese, shortstop for Brooklyn Dodger teams of the 1940s and 1950s. I remember Pee Wee Reese not as a player, but from his early 1960s TV broadcasts— alongside Dizzy Dean—of the Saturday afternoon “Game of the Week.” Reese was quiet against Dean’s raucous humor, patient with Dean’s flights of factual fancy, down-to-earth against Dean’s outsized ego. But none of that landed him in the Hall. Reese’s plaque speaks of “intangible qualities of subtle leadership on and off the field” and of a “dependable” glove and a “reliable” bat—hardly the sort of hyperbole that earns one a place in the Hall. It lauds his infielding skills and “inspirational play,” but offers nary a stat. Indeed, it isn’t until you read the final sentence
Paul Hooker is associate dean for ministerial formation and advanced studies at Austin Seminary. An Old Testament scholar and author of 1 and 2 Chronicles, a commentary in the Westminster Bible Companion Series, he also writes and lectures extensively on the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.)
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