You can accuse me of hyperbole, but I felt like this weekend’s celebration of Adam Jones entering the Orioles Hall of Fame might have also been a final recognition of something else.
It wasn’t the last time we’ll celebrate the 2012-2016 Orioles. Other members of that those teams will still be recognized by the team in the coming years. Zack Britton and Buck Showalter should be in before I finish typing this sentence. For all of the awkwardness of how his time here ended, Chris Davis remains deserving. Whatever Matt Wieters wasn’t as an Oriole, he was definitely an Orioles Hall of Famer. Jonathan Schoop, Chris Tillman, Darren O’Day and Brad Brach seem like pretty likely candidates.
There will be many more celebrations of those teams in the coming years, but there won’t be another celebration quite like this. Because there won’t be another Adam Jones in the future history (I know that’s an oxymoron but I think you get it) of Baltimore sports.
I don’t mean there won’t be athletes as great as Jones. For chrissakes, we’ll literally be watching one of the greatest players in the history of football play quarterback here in Baltimore again in the next couple of weeks.
What Jones represents, however, is a combination of greatness on the field, hell-bent passion for winning, exemplary citizenship and unrelenting commitment to and availability within our community. I don’t believe we’ll see anything like that combination from an athlete ever again.
I think Jackson is close! If Johnny Unitas is the greatest athlete to have ever played in our city, Jackson will ultimately challenge him for that title. And his passion for improving and winning is admirable. He truly appears to love Baltimore. But given his overwhelming celebrity, it’s tough for him to be quite as available in town. That doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a special relationship with our city. But fewer of us have our own personal Jackson stories. When he goes anywhere, he creates a frenzy. It’s tough to be a community fixture because of that.
Jones might not have been a Baseball Hall of Famer, but he was a top-10 all-time Oriole in the “Hall of Extremely Good” territory. Yet his availability in our community rivaled the stories your father told you about Unitas and Brooks Robinson and Lenny Moore. He was everywhere. He was involved with everyone. He knew us. He was a major star and yet he was very much “Smalltimore.” Lots of you posted the pictures you had taken with him at various times throughout the years because he was on your mind this weekend. You weren’t in rare company. Everyone has one. That’s how ubiquitous of a presence he’s been.
Jones wasn’t from here, but this was his city nonetheless. “I’m a black man in a black city,” he’s reminded me hundreds of times over the years. It mattered deeply to him to be a representative of our community.
But it wasn’t just that. Showalter recently asked me why I thought those 2012-2016 resonated with our community so much. The unspoken part of his question was the recognition that those teams never won a playoff game past the divisional round, yet we celebrate them like conquering heroes. There is no doubt that wandering through the baseball wilderness from 1998-2011 created a starvation. But it wasn’t just the winning. It was the accountability.
Jones said he wanted Showalter to be the one to put his jacket on him at the Hall of Fame ceremony because of the reverence he has for the accountability Showalter brought with him to the club. It resonated with us. It was a reflection of something intrinsic to our city. We don’t care about the bullshit. We just want to do our jobs. We just want to win. Jones didn’t suffer the bullshit. Showalter, as he noted after his first game as Orioles manager, didn’t care about the save rule. He cared about the win rule.
These men should have stood next to Barry Glazer to remind us not to urinate on their legs and suggest that it was raining. Jones was a ballplayer you were proud to have on your team, your father would have been proud to have on his team and your grandfather would have been proud to have on his team. He was completely self-aware and completely aware of what he meant to the community. He stood on the sidelines in the freezing cold to root for the Ravens on the road. He threw tailgate parties. He spoke openly about the treatment of black baseball players.
There will be great athletes here in the future. There will be athletes who care about winning. There will be athletes who care about Baltimore. There will be athletes who share special bonds with Baltimore.
But there won’t be another Adam Jones. And we should celebrate him every time we get the opportunity.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Baltimore Orioles