Phil Jackman went back to a time when baseball journalism still included human beings and not just accumulations of arithmetic and algorithms.
He covered the Baltimore Orioles in their glory years for a Baltimore newspaper called The Evening Sun, and capped that career writing a sports column for PressBox. Across the decades, he never lost sight that the games were played by grown men with beating hearts and not just by faceless automatons creating bloodless lists of new-age statistics.
For Jackman, who died the other day at 87, baseball was Brooks Robinson diving behind third to stuff a double into his mitt. It wasn’t about launch angles or spin rates. It was about Jim Palmer on his little hill, mowing down Reggie Jackson with men on base. It wasn’t about the difference between a two-seamer or a four-seamer.
The games were meant to be fun — and that’s how Jackman reported them, with wit and caustic bite and irreverence. Ballgames were played by men with actual personalities, and some of them were flawed.
Whenever Earl Weaver ran onto the field and electrified a sleepy Memorial Stadium crowd, this was a gift to Jackman from the gods. There was Earl, about to bite some umpire on the ankle. Now Jackman could use the English language to describe something spectacular beyond the routine pop flies and passed balls.
It was all about grown men playing a game for little kids, and sometimes acting like children.
He arrived here from Boston, where he covered the Red Sox for the Worcester Telegram. He got here just in time to cover the dawning of greatness: the arrival of Frank Robinson and the world champion 1966 Orioles who swept the Los Angeles Dodgers in four straight games; those Orioles who reached the World Series four times in six years; the O’s whose overall 20-year record surpassed all other major league teams.
And Jackman stuck around for the rest of his life, a native New Englander who became a Bawlamer home-towner with his columns at the Evening Sun and his stint at WMAR-TV and, later, years when he shared some of the richest of his sports memories writing a column for PressBox.
He was part of a whole generation of local sports writers who thought their job was more than just coverage of raw numbers. It was about personality, about narrative, about laughter. It was about strong bodies grown fragile with the years.
That’s what binds us to sports. You can have your damned launch angles. Without the human element, the arithmetic leaves us feeling like accountants. Phil Jackman had a grand press box view of the games, but he wrote about the human beings behind the four-seamers and the spin rates.
A former Baltimore Sun columnist and WJZ-TV commentator, Michael Olesker is the author of six books, including “Journeys to the Heart of Baltimore” and “Michael Olesker’s Baltimore: If You Live Here, You’re Home.”
Michael Olesker pays tribute to WJZ’s retiring Marty Bass, a longtime fixture on local TV screens.
A former resident of Baltimore and central Florida, Ritt was active in the Soviet Jewry movement of the 1970s and 1980s.
The Orioles' weak defense plays a major role in the nightly carnage, writes Michael Olesker.
For more than four decades, Goldman played a vital role in the supervision of elections in the city.