The ninth man.

[Al C.risafulli]

Hi everybody!

Every year on Opening Day I refer back to this amazing piece that was written by Keith Olbermann in 1997 or so. At the time, he referred to the Ninth Man. Read the story below, and you'll see how amazing it is - it's what we all do on this board, to one degree or another, tracing the history of the game from its roots til today.

But it was 20 years ago that KO wrote this, and I think it's safe to say at this point that as much as I wanted it to be Derek Jeter, The Ninth Man was likely David Ortiz.

So the question is: who is The Tenth Man? Who do you think it'll be?

Here's the piece. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do each year. Play ball!



The ninth man

Baseball is often criticized for having an obsession with its own history. Yet, these days, it seems that history alone separates it from every sport. As the character portrayed by James Earl Jones said in the movie "Field Of Dreams," America has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, erased again, rebuilt again -- and all the time baseball has been there.

For better or worse, history, in baseball, is a living thing. And in this spring training, history walks the camps looking for one player to claim as his own.

He is out there somewhere, in Arizona, maybe in Florida. His may be a name we already know; it may be one we do not. He is probably 20 or 21 years old, maybe 22. And he will make his big-league debut some time this year, or spend his first full season in the bigs this year -- and he will retire in the year 2016 or 2017. He will be the grand old man of baseball. And they will say, he's so old that the year he broke in, Eddie Murray was still playing!

He is out there somewhere, in Arizona, maybe in Florida. And to him is about to be passed -- the torch. He will some day be the senior player in the game, representing an era at its end. And he will be the ninth man.

Murray, beginning his 21st season, is the eighth man. That's because he is so old that, when he broke in, Brooks Robinson was still playing. That was in 1977; they were teammates.

And at that time, Robinson, the grand old man of the game, had been playing so long that when he broke in, Bob Feller was still playing. Feller is the sixth man. Because, when Brooks Robinson broke in, Feller had been playing so long that when he was a rookie in 1936, Rogers Hornsby was still playing.

The fifth man. Hornsby had been playing so long that when he was a rookie in 1915, Honus Wagner was still playing; Wagner was the fourth man. He had been playing so long that when he was a rookie in 1897, Cap Anson was still playing. Cap, of course, was the third man. And when Wagner broke in, Cap Anson had been playing so long that when he was a rookie in 1871, Dickey Pearce was still playing.

The second man. When he was a rookie in 1855, Doc Adams was still playing. And Doc Adams was a member of the Knickerbocker club when on June 19, 1846, it played the first recorded game of baseball as we know it.

He was the first man.

Adams.
Pearce.
Anson.
Wagner.
Hornsby.
Feller.
Robinson.
Murray.
And now, someone new.

He is out there somewhere, in Arizona, maybe in Florida. His may be a name we already know. It may be one we do not. Now, he is only at the beginning. But some day, he will be ... the ninth man.