The press convention for Robin Yount’s retirement started with Bud Selig talking for six minutes, pausing after every sentence in an approximation of gravitas. Sal Bando, GM and Yount’s former teammate, added a number of phrases of his personal. Behind them, the inexperienced and purple eyesore of a model overhaul loomed, an unsubtle warning: change is right here, and it’s not gonna go properly.
“You might say I’ve by no means actually seemed ahead to today,” Yount started, failing to talk into the mic. “Nevertheless it’s right here.” That the speech was taking place now, on February 11, made that clear: the bosses who had mentioned such good issues had additionally been those telling him, in no unsure phrases, that his providers as a beginning ballplayer have been now not vital. There’s a Roger Angell passage on Yount that I can’t discover now—as with the whole lot Angell, it will probably simply be dreamed in his voice—that casts the Corridor of Famer as nearly wordless, not out of an absence of intelligence, however by means of a pure internalization of his craft. Yount speaking about baseball was like a violation, breaking the fourth wall; he was baseball. His speech, which was an evidence that he’d been supplied a nebulous job by the group however would pursue some exterior pursuits for a yr, lasted one minute and 9 seconds earlier than he opened the ground for questions. He seemed relieved when it was over.
