The baseball scout and I met on a pleasure craft destined for Pearl Harbor. I had never been to Pearl Harbor, not surprising since I’d never been to Hawaii.
Considering the inhabitants of the boat, it was a treat from Major League Baseball, a thank you or a perk for scouts and writers alike. The scout worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers; I was a baseball writer from Montreal. How we wound up on the same boat (there were others) making 20-minute return trips from Waikiki to Pearl Harbor was one of life’s coincidences.
A wonderful one at that.
The scout’s name was Eddie Liberatore and he was part of a Dodgers’ Italian family that included Al Campanis and Tommy Lasorda. So, Eddie, who spent 55 years scouting for four teams, probably bled “Dodger Blue “as Lasorda always told anybody who’d listen that he (Lasorda) did.
Eddie and I were friends for 20 years, even though our friendship was geographically undesirable. He lived in Philadelphia, I lived in Quebec, then British Columbia. He became part of our family, for at least a dinner or two, and we kept in touch long after I left the baseball beat. Whenever we were together, we talked a LOT of baseball, yet I can’t recall one time that Eddie tipped me off about a story or any baseball “breaking news.” The friendship meant more.
However, and this is the point of this column, he did share one prophesy that has always stuck with me:
“Babe Ruth saved baseball after the World War I. Jackie Robinson saved baseball [then rife with racism] after the World War II. And the next thing to save baseball will be when it truly becomes an international sport. I won’t be here to see it, but you will.”
He was right. It’s happening now.
You can point out that MLB games have been played outside North America for 30 years, an average of less than two per year. You can say, with conviction, that Japanese players were on major-league rosters long before that. And you can ask… wasn’t that the SIXTH World Baseball Classic that finished last week? It was.
However, this time seems different. The game christened America’s pastime—has anybody heard of football?—has a world championship won twice in six tries by the U.S. Three of the six went to Japan because, the Americans implied (at least in the first two), their best players were missing. Then Latin America players, who have been MLB stars for decades, rallied around their country’s flags and won twice, including last month’s 3-2 victory for the gold.
Now, more of America’s best are showing up. They seemed to treat the series like something between spring training and the All-Star game. More social than professional. Americans, flag-wavers forever, finally seem to be a little embarrassed about losing the game they invented. I may be wrong (it happens about once every decade) but you may see a different U.S. team at the 2030 World Baseball Classic.
Eddie Liberatore never lived to see 9/11, nor Taylor Swift, nor a Black man in the White House. How I wish he was here to see his vision come true.
