Beloved Mr. Cub, Hall of Famer Banks dies at 83

Beloved Mr. Cub, Hall of Famer Ernie Banks, dies at 83

That link is like a beautiful threnody from the Chicago Tribune about one of the most positive and generous human beings ever to play major league sports. Mr. Cub and Stan the Man, those two gentle souls who were baseball's greatest living ambassadors, have both left us in the past year or so, and there's just nobody who can take their places.

When Ernie Banks entered baseball, the National League had been in existence nearly eighty years and no man had ever hit more than 511 home runs in an NL career. Banks hit 512. From 1955 to 1960, he finished with 40 or more homers five times in six years. He led the league in homers in 1958 and 1960, and would have led in 1959 as well, giving him three in a row, except that Ed Mathews got to play two extra regular-season games because of a tie for first place. (In those days an NL tie was broken by a best-of-three series, and the stats counted in the regular season rather than the post-season.) The homer crown was slim consolation for Mathews that year, as his team ultimately finished second in the league to the Dodgers, and he finished second in the MVP balloting to some guy with 143 RBI - a guy named Ernie Banks, who had also been the previous year's MVP.

Banks did all that slugging while playing shortstop, a feat which was just about miraculous in those days. In 1959, for example, Banks hit 45 homers. The second-highest total for a NL shortstop was thirteen by Johnny Logan. The third-highest was nine, by Eddie Bressoud, a part-time player with a little pop in his bat.

Ernie was part of the infusion of great black ballplayers that transformed baseball, particularly the National League, in the 1950s and early 60s: Mays, Aaron, Gibson, Clemente, Marichal, two Robinsons, Cepeda, Banks, Campanella. They weren't just good, they were all superstars. If you picked the NL all-star team from their era, they would cover every position except third base and lefty starter. (I have no theory to explain it, but none of the greatest left-handed pitchers have been black men. The best black lefty I can think of is Vida Blue. Similarly, a gallery of the top ten or twenty third basemen would contain only white faces. I guess you could include A-Rod, but he played more games, and had better years, as a shortstop.)

Banks is also the most beloved baseball figure in Chicago history, and one of the small group of baseball players automatically associated with a city. New York has Columbia Lou Gehrig plus "Willie, Mickey and the Duke," St Louis has The Man, Baltimore has Cal Jr., and Chicago has Mr. Cub.

So whichever game you love to play, play two today in his honor.