BAT to BAT
The years have not tarnished Tesser’s hypothesis. But the BAT’s surly origins are long forgotten, and today it stands as simply the highest accolade many a sportswriter can hope to achieve. The Cupronickel BAT–as Tesser’s original Golden BAT was renamed two years ago in deference to the era of homelessness, joblessness, and shrinking standards of health, education, and morality from which baseball distracts us–is an unalloyed alloyed honor.
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Last April we announced that history had been made. The Sun-Times’s Toni Ginnetti became the first woman ever to receive the BAT–and not by proving herself the best of a pathetic lot, which is the usual case, but by truly excelling. Ginnetti picked three of the four 1992 division champions. “If the ethos of the BAT permitted serious research,” we wrote a year ago, “we’re sure this research would find her performance unprecedented.”
Our Heisenbergian meddling saw justice done, and we intend to meddle again. You won’t find Ginnetti’s picks in last Sunday’s special baseball section of the Sun-Times (for no better reason than that she’s been covering basketball), but here they are in Hot Type:
A Play That Will Live in Infamy
The Mets, as we’ve written before and no doubt will write again, had tied the score before Wilson hit his grounder. The Sox were one strike away from nothing. It was painful enough to see sportswriters concoct this myth; now it’s being taught to a new generation of kids.
They’re all talented writers, though we wish Johnson hadn’t once described the vandalism that followed a Bulls championship as “uninvited shopping” and Warren hadn’t just come back to Chicago after some 15 years in Washington. What’s important is that Possley has put them out there to be emulated.
