BURGER SCOOT

I got Reggie Jackson’s autograph when I was about twelve years old. I had no idea who he was or any of the Oakland A’s players who signed my program from a banquet my father, brother, and I attended. I wish I had kept the program with autographs to the players on a future dynasty. Ironically, the only other autograph I remember on my program was Creighton Sanders, a local sports commentator for KCRA, Channel 3 (I think). My brother and father got a good laugh out of it. I felt stupid, but his face was the only one I recognized, and I didn’t know who he was. I remember feeling like I sullied the program since all the autographs were ballplayers, including an older gentleman from the San Francisco Giants.

The next time I got kind of close to Jackson, he was shagging fly balls in right field at the Oakland Colluvium before a game. I remember many games when the practice was over, he would throw the ball (if he had it when the National Anthem was close to being sung), including more than one time one of Charlie Finley’s experimental orange baseballs.

The video directly below is a testament to the racist shit Jackson had to endure as a young man just out of Arizona State and now a major league baseball player with Finley’s A’s. It is worth a view, and I am glad others on YouTube and in the blogosphere are re-running it least we forget racism didn’t stop at Appomattox in 1865 or Reconstruction, or with the passing of the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 24th Amendments. Racism was alive and well in the 1970s and today.

I think it is safe to say Jackson was my favorite player on my (once) favorite team. I even enjoyed the stories of him after he was traded to the Yankees, and I hate the Yankees! It was disappointing, though, when he rightfully was inducted into Cooperstown as a Yankee instead of an Athletic.

I was pissed when Bud Selig, the corrupt MLB Commissioner, blocked the sale of the Athletics in 1999 to an ownership group that included future Golden State Warriors owner Joe Lacob, but I didn’t know if Reggie Jackson was either in that group or in another group also shunned by Selig. Watch this video on how he and his group were excluded from buying (i.e. saving) the A’s from John Fisher.

P.S.: In case you never heard of an orange baseball. Here’s one of many you can see on a Google image search. A’s owner Charlie Finley who introduced the Designated Hitter for good or for bad, the Designated Runner that never got wheels, and the orange baseball were all intended to change the game for good, but many baseball fans hate the DH and never got the chance to hate the other two hopeful innovations.