Musical Post
One of my favorite baseball songs is embedded above. Count Basie came up with this fantastic song for Jackie in 1949. For the classic Ken Burns documentary Baseball Natalie Cole put her vocals to the tune. I thought that it could make for a good background to the post. Although don’t let Yogi Berra hear the portion about stealing home. He still denies that it ever happened.
Throwback Photo
Since I have started really using Instagram to take pictures with my iPhone I think that I can stop using older Blackberry pictures on Friday’s. They will now be used here in the throwback section leaving iPhone Friday’s for just that. I thought that since the movie ’42’ is coming out tomorrow that I would post this picture that I took in Cincinnati in 2009. I was attending the Civil Rights Game at the Great American Ball Park, and of course they had a display honoring Jackie Robinson. It is really amazing to me how this country has behaved in the past. Sometimes that is the case even today. To me though to not have the best talent on the field regardless of race is just crazy. Even when the leagues were integrated it was still not easy for the new players. I am really looking forward to this movie tomorrow. It will be very interesting to see what kind of treatment they give both Jackie and Branch Rickey. Jackie as well as the other men who first broke the barrier had to endure a lot. They could not act when insults or worse were thrown at them. If they had the bigots would have gotten what they wanted. It is amazing that Jackie still played at such a high level with all of the stress that was put upon him. When you see a player today complain about the stress of playing just think back to what Jackie had to do. It was an amazing feat for sure. If you walk out of this movie wanting to know more Jonathan Eig wrote an excellent book called Opening Day. It was all about that first season with the Dodgers. I read it a few years ago, and I really enjoyed it. It also makes you wonder how things could have existed the way that they did. Things have gotten much better, but the finish line has not been crossed yet.
Technical Data
This was taken with my first generation Blackberry Storm. This phone had a decent camera on it, but the phone had issues where it would lock up, and I would have to take the battery out to reset it. I was never really happy with it. For this photo I had to stand and wait for the phone to boot back up so that I could take this picture. That is not ideal when you want a shot without others in it, and people are waiting on you to get out of the way. In Lightroom I used an HDR preset to make the photo pop a bit more, but with the quality of the photo you couldn’t do much to it.
Dave Wegiel Photography 