Conlin honored at Baseball Hall of Fame

COOPERSTOWN, N.Y. — His iPad teleprompter was balking on him, so Bill Conlin did what Bill Conlin does. He told a joke.

"I don't want you to think it was hot today," he said, "but Pete Rose was reported down on Main Street selling autographed Slurpees -- $5 for the autograph and $20 for the Slurpee."

Several thousand people who were gathered Saturday at Doubleday Field laughed. They were there, just down the street from the Baseball Hall of Fame, to honor Conlin, Marlins broadcaster Dave Van Horne and longtime general manager Roland Hemond for their lifetimes of work in the game. Afterward, they and about 50 Hall of Fame members -- including former Phillies general manager Pat Gillick, who will be inducted on Sunday -- rode in a parade through the center of town on the back of pickup trucks.

Conlin thanked his family and friends, and then the technology cooperated, and then he was off. All of the tools familiar to his half-century of readers in the Daily News were in evidence during his 10-minute speech: needle, scalpel, bludgeon, pie in the face, and Battle of Gettysburg.

He was him.

This is what he said:

Good afternoon and thanks for coming to this Hall of Fame weekend inaugural event. I am proud, privileged and humbled to be part of the first awards ceremony conducted in Doubleday Field.

Congratulations to Frick and O'Neil recipients Dave Van Horne and Roland Hemond. And like Terry Cashman, I'll be talkin' baseball. Also newspapers.

My first year on the baseball beat for The Philadelphia Daily News was 1966. The Connie Mack Stadium press corps included Evening Bulletin veteran Ray Kelly, Inquirer fixture Allen Lewis and Trenton Times "Roadie" Harold "Bus" Saidt. All have been Spink Award recipients. It was one tough press box for a rookie to work in.

Bus Saidt might have been the most unique of the 62 Spink Award winners. Willie Mays was introduced to the minor leagues when Trenton Giants broadcaster Bus Saidt picked him up at the train station. Years later, when the Phils were on the road, Bus would cover the Mets or Yankees. His newspaper didn't believe in airline, hotel or meal expenses. The title of his biography might  have been, "The Wayward Bus: Thirty Years of Baseball Writing on Nothing a Day."

I'm grateful to the BBWAA for hooking me up again with that diverse trio while I'm still upright. Better now than in extra innings -- right, Terry?

Casey Stengel once observed, "Most men my age are now dead at the present time." So, if I should go horizontal during this speech, the instructions for my arrangements are written on the right sole of my rental Florsheims. Michael Barkann, I appoint you executor. Just be sure to sponge off the words--or Hertz Rent A Loafer will keep the $50 deposit.

Due to time constraints, I will bypass growing up a Dodgers fan in Brooklyn and the agony of getting bounced from Bucknell University in 1954. I will segue to the ecstasy of joining the sports staff of the Philadelphia Evening Bulletin in 1960. The opportunity to work for a big-time afternoon newspaper fresh out of Temple University was the break of a lifetime.

The French have a saying: "Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose" -- "The more things change, the more they remain the same."

That seeming contradiction aptly describes baseball's turbulent 20th Century. The Black Sox Scandal drew a curtain of shame on the loosely regulated Deadball Era and began a new dawn when Babe Ruth picked up the game's most important save. George Herman Ruth was more than a larger than life figure. He symbolized a feel-good America that swilled bootleg gin on the bubble of an economic catastrophe. Sounds kind of familiar. I missed Ruth, but either observed or covered almost all the game's main events since his 1948 passing.

Before baseball could truly call itself the National Pastime, it had to be available to players and fans of all races. Jim Crow laws were out. George Crowe was in. Branch Rickey and Jack Roosevelt Robinson had seen to that in 1947. However, the integrated game was hardly a stable one. When free agency blew up the Reserve System in 1976, New York Daily News columnist Dick Young called arbitrator Peter Seitz, "a terrorist" after he granted free agency to Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith. There were disruptive strikes. Only one league adopted the DH rule. A strike canceled the 1994 post-season. The 21st century began under a chemical cloud. Everybody but Bud Selig was suspected of juicing. All Bud ever juiced was the cash registers of 30 clubs.

Baseball has managed to thrive during the worst economy since The Great Depression, despite the absence of a salary cap.

The excellence of the game itself keeps dragging it back from the edge. Between the white lines, it remains a game of infinite possibilities. Anything can and will unfold from first pitch to last. It is why we watch and those of us lucky enough to write about it will never, ever, run out of story lines. Unremitting unpredictability and routinely wild surmise make the Pastime our legal narcotic.

Super computers have calculated the number of possible moves in a chess match as 10 to the 120th power. Even the Bush-Obama National Debt doesn't have that many zeroes. OK, baseball can't match that level of complexity, but in my 45 years, not a season has passed without a play or situation I had never seen before.

MLB's next challenge will be to get both leagues playing with the same number of teams, with all 30 using the same set of rules. This is a surface no-brainer, but as always, a battalion of devils lurk in the details.

My endangered industry faces far more complex problems. Unlike major league baseball, newspapers are not awash in money. We've been shot at and hit. The way we did things for centuries literally vanished in a few mouse clicks.

We came late to the party, trying to keep pace with a technology so powerful a government can be toppled by a thousand protesters with smart phones, Facebook Accounts and a common cause. Picture the nation's Founding Fathers using WigBook to convene the First Continental Congress, or Thomas Jefferson quilling daily blogs, or Patrick Henry tweeting, "Liberty or Death LOL."

By the time our corporate big brains heeded the tsunami sirens, the cyber-ship had capsized.

Ironically, my first assignment for the Evening Bulletin was a rowing regatta on the Schuylkill River. My copy was dot-dot-dashed to the sports department by telegraph key. On Day 1 of the Battle of Gettysburg,  President Lincoln was informed by telegraph that Maj. Gen. Abner Doubleday's under-strength division had held Cemetery Ridge against 18,000 Rebels despite horrific losses. Thank you Abner. They should have named a ballpark for you...

Next time you're at a graduation party for a 21st century Benjamin Braddock, sidle up to him and whisper, "Forget plastics, Ben... Digital multi-media."

Like it or not, that's what we are now, not necessarily what my generation set out to be back when we were killing more trees than Dutch Elm disease.

Today, it's possible to run a multi-media enterprise using reporters with digital notebooks, tiny video cameras streaming to websites, editorial copy streamed to both the clone of a print edition and the website. With all of this dazzling digital drama directed by editors gathered around monitors like rush hour air traffic controllers.

I guess it's still journalism because one requirement has remained the same. Somebody has to gather the facts, to report the meetings, to cover the ball games, to go to the crime scenes. And somebody has to double check the facts.

In that respect, we are still very much in play.

Great staffs and excellent editors have kept my newspaper afloat through every crisis. Two are here this afternoon — Managing Editor Pat McLoone and Executive Sports Editor Josh Barnett. Both were entry-level hires by the great Mike Rathet, the Ben Bradlee of writer's editors. Daily News columnists and beat reporters have been honored by the Pro Football Hall of Fame, the NBA Hall of Fame and the Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame. Today, the Spink Award completes a staff grand slam and is the cherry on the sundae of my career.

The years of covering good, bad and ugly Phillies teams were both a thrill and a challenge.The team on the field today represents a franchise that has been getting it right for the past decade. The front office that put it there is as good as it gets. When Pat Gillick is on the scene, World Series rings are sure to follow.

One last thing: please get Pete Rose off Main Street and into the Hall. Keep the ban for the compulsive gambler we met in the Dowd Report. But enshrine the guy who played with his hair on fire, the overachiever who lashed those 4,256 hits. Commissioner Selig, tear down that Ban!

I'm out. Thanks to the Hall of Fame Committee and the Town of Cooperstown for this wonderful day and for tomorrow's main event induction of Robby Alomar, Bert Blyleven and Pat Gillick. You can forget about the shoes, Barkann. I'm still standing in them.