RUBICON FOR THE RELIQUARY

THE transition for the Baseball Reliquary since the death of Terry Cannon in 2020 has been slow and arduous: its charismatic yet oddly inscrutable creator literally was the glue for an anti-organization that continually challenged and celebrated the double-edged world of baseball. Cannon was the conduit and catalyst that took an impish art project and built it into a viable (if still somewhat unlikely) alternative to the increasingly bloated, bathetic Hall of Fame.

How do you put such an anti-organization into some kind of institutional framework without destroying its unique aura? Terry Cannon attracted several sidekicks and many admirers, particularly after his invention of the Shrine of the Eternals, which we've championed here on numerous occasions as "Cooperstown for the rest of us." 

But none of those folk--from Cannon's long-time collaborators on art and history programs to the now-in-charge team of Joe Price and Terry's devoted wife Mary--have shown the type of creative resolve that is needed to establish the Reliquary in what is now a changed world. 

One key sidekick--Albert Kilchesty--has sadly pushed himself out of contention to maintain the aura that Cannon embodied. The original collaboration of "Terry and Buddy," combining the surreal with dead-earnest cultural anthropology, was essential to the multivalent strands of the Reliquary's endeavors. 

We characterized their partnership (in an allusion uttered during our keynote speech in 2009, reproduced here for those who love tiny type...) as two boys with the magical power to let go of their balloons at the beach while strolling the shore, confident in the knowledge that somehow they would reach up and magically retrieve them without a second thought. 

How on earth can you institutionalize something that operates in such gleeful defiance of natural law?

Such could only exist in such a form so long as the original creator was alive to embody it. We mean no offense to Joe Price when we say that his attempt to channel Terry during the Reliquary's 2023 Shrine of the Eternals event was a well-intentioned but ill-advised failure. While the "art project" aspect of the Reliquary still appears to be on solid ground, the loss of momentum with the Shrine of the Eternals points to a "Rubicon moment" for the ongoing viability and sustainability of Cannon's vision.

IN fact, there were some cracks in the Shrine of the Eternals concept that Terry had not addressed in the years immediately prior to his tragic bout with cancer. Cannon and Kilchesty began with an inspired combination of inductees that ran the gamut from the historically overlooked to the downright zany; from the culturally relevant "in the now" to the great players who'd been shunned (or banned) by Cooperstown. But for more than a decade, the Shrine drifted away from that last category of inductee--in particular those individuals from the dawn of the game who were in danger of being completely forgotten. 

The three years of lost balloting have also taken a heavy toll. For the Shrine to return to full force, and to address some of the areas that had even escaped Terry's  attention, an intervention into the original design of the Shrine is desperately needed to jump-start a renewed awareness of its potency as a viable alternative to Cooperstown. 

David Nemec

Here are the actions that we propose in order to do that:

--First, create a special class of "Eternal" that involves those who embody the Reliquary's commitment to pioneering research. (Given that the Reliquary is now formally aligned with Whittier College and is umbrellaed into an arrangement with its Institute of Baseball Studies, this makes eminent sense.) 

We suggested this in our 2020 post after Terry's passing, proposing that Cannon, pioneering nineteenth-century historian David Nemec, and pre-eminent baseball lexicographer Paul Dickson be enshrined as this special class of "Eternal." 

Paul Dickson

(These men are true giants in the field, eminently deserving of such special recognition. And, of course, Terry is an "eternal" for having invented the Shrine of the Eternals...)

From this point forward, the Reliquary can reserve the right to induct additional "special Eternals" based on its own discretion--but limited to the area of enhancing baseball knowledge. 

--Second, address the paucity of nineteenth-century representation in the Shrine by announcing a set of special elections to add three players and/or relevant historical personages from that era per year for the next three-to-five years. 

A list of qualified candidates is already in hand within the second volume of  David Nemec's magisterial Major League Baseball Profiles 1871-1900 (second volume), where he lists twenty individuals who are clearly deserving of a slot in Cooperstown. 

The Reliquary can get the jump on the Hall of Fame by enshrining individuals such as Jim Creighton (baseball's tragic first superstar), Bob Caruthers (the greatest of the two-way players in the nineteenth century), and Doc Adams (the pioneer of the game who, among other elemental acts, set the distances between the bases).**

--Third, revamp its 2024 ballot with an additional brace of names featuring players who are currently shunned by Cooperstown. In its early, somewhat rowdier days (possibly egged on by the fiery side of Buddy Kilchesty), the Reliquary saw fit to admit Joe Jackson and Pete Rose into the Shrine, in part to forgive, but also to stir up some dust with institutional puffery. 

For 2024, then, the names of several shunned all-time greats--Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Roger Clemens--should be added to the candidate list with the announcement that for the next three election cycles, a total of five Eternals will be inducted per year, which in 2027 will bring the total back to what it would have been save for the issues that ground things to a halt in 2021-23 and prevented the usual yearly elections. 

To leaven this idea from being seen as a present-day gimmick, we recommend that a slate of "shunned second basemen"--Bobby Grich, Lou Whitaker, Jeff Kent, Larry Doyle--also be added to the ballot to remind the Reliquary's voting population that they can make their voices heard in ways that are both tangible and relevant  with respect to the ongoing myopia of the Hall of Fame.

ALL of these actions will add a dynamism to the Shrine that has been lacking for some time--and it will make the yearly ceremony into something that truly balances substance with showmanship. 

That latter quality is difficult to produce on demand, of course, because there are only a handful of people who can balance all of the tonalities between surreal silliness to serious critical/cultural reverence/relevance the way that Terry Cannon did for a quarter-century. 

By adding more specific categories to the candidate selection process, and providing a faster path for neglected areas of baseball history, the current Baseball Reliquary brain trust can create a "safety in numbers" scenario that will ensure a more robust and more varied combination of content at its annual events--which will provide added visibility.

FOR it is the Shrine of the Eternals that is the best way for the Baseball Reliquary to capture the imaginations of those seeking a more freewheeling, more joyous, less pompous and less institutional celebration of baseball. These tweaks and augmentations are urgently needed to reinvigorate the Shrine as that "place of grace" for baseball lovers who want an expanded consciousness of the game's beauty and significance. 

It is, of course, far from certain that these proposed ideas will get incorporated into the planning for the Reliquary's 2024 event. But there is an urgency at this moment in time to create a more dynamic path forward, one that can create a strong, flexible institutional structure for an anti-organization that was juggled masterfully by a man no longer here to show us how to let go of a balloon, run down the seashore of imagination, and reach up to bring that fleeting, flittering, capricious object back into his as if by magic. 

We need that magic to survive, even if we have to make Terry's trick more just a bit more prosaic. The time to take the bold steps to make that happen is now: we cross our fingers. Stay tuned...

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**The full list of David Nemec's "Twenty for the Hall of Fame" as presented in Major League Baseball Profiles 1871-1900 is as follows: Doc Adams, Ross Barnes, Charlie Bennett, Pete Browning, Bob Caruthers, Jim Creighton, Bill Dahlen, Bob Ferguson, Jack Glasscock, Ed McKean, A.G. Mills, Tony Mullane, Fred Pfeffer, Hardy Richardson, Jimmy Ryan, Jack Stivetts, Harry Stovey, George Van Haltren, Gus Weyhing, and Deacon White. The nine underlined names would be our choices for the nineteenth-century "Eternals" who would augment the current roster of inductees.