“Sports do not build character,” the late UCLA basketball coach John Wooden said. “They reveal character.”
Never was that more true than on a Wednesday night in June in Detroit, when Detroit Tigers pitcher Armando Galarraga was deprived by a blown call from umpire Jim Joyce — with two outs in the ninth inning — of pitching only the 21st perfect game in baseball history. You want character? Just pay attention to Joyce and Galarraga.
“This isn’t ‘a’ call. This is a history call. … I missed it from here to the wall. … I took a perfect game away from that kid (Galarraga) over there.”
That was what Joyce said in a postgame news conference, after he viewed a tape replay that showed the 27th batter, whom he had called safe, was clearly out. These are the words and actions of a stand-up guy who refuses to duck responsibility. We haven’t seen a lot of that on the evening news lately.
With uncommon grace, the wronged party, Galarraga, responded to Joyce’s public confession: “I say many times, ‘Nobody’s perfect. Everybody makes a mistake.’” He added: “There’s no doubt he feels bad and terrible. I have a lot of respect for the man.”
To prove he meant what he said, before the next day’s game, Galarraga personally brought the Tigers’ lineup card to the home-plate umpire, Joyce, whose hand he then shook.
Talk about class acts. Throughout, these men have conducted themselves the way grown-ups are supposed to and too infrequently do.
In a recent Wall Street Journal piece on how to avoid the self-inflicted wounds of institutions such as BP, the Catholic Church and Toyota, Peter Hart and Dan McGinn wrote that the public assesses the individual or institution in trouble to get “a sense of the values that are driving the response” and to see if “that response is slow, defensive or, worst of all, arrogant.”
Just think about the corporate chieftains who, unlike the courageously candid umpire Joyce, are, as Hart and McGinn wrote, “typically too slow to react, and their reactions are too often not honest or transparent,” who do not tell their “story as if you are talking to the person whose opinion you value most in the world, not like a lawyer talking to a judge.”
Their solid counsel continued: “Tell the full story. Always assume that the full story will emerge. In an age of ubiquitous cameras, microphones and global social networks, there aren’t many secrets. … No matter how unpleasant, get the whole story out fast.”
That advice has been overwhelmingly rejected by Wall Street and other major corporations caught in compromising situations, when their predictable reaction has been to avoid any admission of responsibility often by resorting to Washington’s preferred evasiveness, the passive voice. The dead giveaway line of those who seek authority without accountability: “Mistakes were made.”
Throughout the pain of the financial crisis and during the seven weeks of the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, men who had earlier boasted of their power have insisted they have, in fact, been powerless. Blame-shifting and responsibility-denial have been the order of too many days.
But thanks to a Wednesday June night in Detroit, people who don’t ordinarily follow baseball, at least until the World Series, were talking instead about how well and how admirably all those involved in the botched call and the lost perfect game — especially, but not limited to, Joyce and Gallaraga — behaved.
It was both refreshing and reassuring to see men under enormous public pressure being so manly. Let us just hope that Wall Street and Washington were watching.
— Mark Shields is one of the most widely recognized political commentators in the United States. The former Washington Post editorial columnist appears regularly on CNN, on public television and on radio. Click here to contact him.