Maybe it’s my natural allergy to anything that resembles a listicle in format or spirit, but color me truly mystified(d) as to how it took me, of all people—I, who exist in the Fertile Crescent created by the confluence of the rivers Baseball and Teaching—this long to write an article on this specific subject. I suppose it’s understandable: elegiac isn’t my usual mode when I write about sports, and I’m on record questioning the functional literacy of a number of active ballplayers.¹

Therefore, it should not come as a surprise that this wasn’t my idea. After my last piece, in which I mostly grumbled that people have real issues both with thinking about the interaction of rich pro athletes with the rest of the economy and with anything that would mean paying teachers more, Felina—whom longtime readers will remember from my linking to her WBC retrospective in a previous What Have Friends Wrought? edition, after I was embarrassingly unable to help secure good food or cocktails in Puerto Rico because I go to the island to hang out with my parents—suggested this idea. I jumped at the chance to write something about baseball and education that doesn’t make me sound like Eeyore on tilt.

If you’ve never read me before, here are my qualifications. I’ve been a teacher² for fifteen years (almost half my life) in two different subject areas and for six different grades of students. I’ve edited student writing, coached student sports, moderated student activities, and dealt with a level of mission creep which now makes me also responsible for teaching everything from study skills to emotional resilience to basic personal hygiene to an audience that can’t deal with anything presented in chunks longer than a few seconds. There’s a reason I’m desperate to find something else to do.

What was that about not sounding like Eeyore on tilt?

Anyway, when Felina brought up this concept, I immediately felt a name pop into my head, and that was enough to decide we should do it.

Before I launch into my chosen trio, I should draw a couple lines of exclusion. First, there are at least two ballplayers I know of who were also educators by trade. One is reluctant Hall of Famer Eppa “Jephtha” Rixey, who, like me, taught Latin (though in his case, it was during MLB offseasons, and included a baseball coaching gig to boot). Rixey was also a Red, like I am (although we might mean that differently), and he’s one of the few ballplayers to have achieved something I think I could equal: losing 251 major-league baseball games while throwing left-handed.

I don’t have Rixey’s teacher evaluations in front of me, so I have no idea how good a teacher he was. Nor do I have them for, say, Miracle Met Donn Clendenon, who will come up again later in this article, and who taught fourth grade upon graduation from Morehouse College, where his big brother was Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who will also come up again later in this article. Nonetheless, neither man makes the list.

Also missing here are those few players who have made it their mission, after their playing careers, to educate us about the roads less traveled of baseball. This contingent has a giant of its own: (eventual) Hall of Famer³ Buck O’Neil, without whose work as chief rhapsode of the Negro Leagues we would all have a blander, more sanitized picture of the way men played the greatest sport on Earth long before we were born.

Otherwise, I think anyone can ascertain what qualities I find most important in a good teacher with a quick gander at my selections. I’m including Felina’s responses under each of my choices; to read her choices (and my responses!) you can visit her blog, & They All Went to the Ballpark.

As they say in the produce department: lettuce begin.

Pick #1: Roberto Clemente

If you thought my first choice would be anyone but The Great One, you must be new here.

Your confusion is understandable, though: Clemente doesn’t seem like the type. He was famous for not smiling enough, he could be moody and difficult even with people he liked, he took and held offense easily, and thanks to the difficulties he faced as a “foreign” player who also happened to be Black, he had consistent trust issues throughout his MLB career.

That’s one side of Clemente, though God knows that if being prickly on occasion makes you unable to teach, I would never have considered doing it. I had plenty of teachers like that, and as a kid with serious impulse control and anger issues, there was genuine comfort in seeing them trying to overcome their own preloaded software.

Fortunately, there’s also the side of Clemente that would end a friendship over misrepresenting the work of a reporter, and apologize to that reporter personally besides. There’s the side of Clemente that fought to be called Roberto, not “Bob” or “Bobby,” like he is on scouting reports and early trading cards.⁴ There’s the side that could make a soul as irrepressible as prime Dock Ellis see sense, because Clemente could understand and relate to his profoundly justifiable anger. There’s the side that, along with the aforementioned Clendenon, organized a leaguewide stoppage to accord proper respect to Dr. Martin Luther King as he was laid to rest. There’s the side that asked, in the loveliest language in the world, for his mother and father’s blessing immediately upon winning World Series MVP.

Most of all, there’s the side that so consistently put other people first that Clemente died what I consider the most Puerto Rican death possible: an accident caused by a deathtrap plane and an idiot whom a federal agency awake at the wheel would have nailed to the floor so he could never fly again, in an attempt to bring much-needed supplies to a suffering people under the thumb of a corrupt USian puppet.

Before his death, Clemente gave a long interview that’s very much worth watching.

In today’s world, where sports are all sleek, smooth spectacle, you don’t tend to see a ballplayer patiently explain himself like this. That kind of generosity of spirit and, ultimately, that willingness to put your actual human body on the line for others is the exact kind of commitment you’d want from a teacher.

Felina:

Incredible first pick. Good teachers aren’t always the most cheery, soft people. Noah highlights traits here that remind me of the grassroots reasons why people should get into education. It’s not about making cutesy TikTok videos where you decorate a classroom or incorporate pop culture in your lesson plans for clicks. Working with kids is about helping them navigate how big the world is, and advocating for them in it. Mr. Clemente would have been the head of a class that maybe wasn’t everyone’s favorite, but he would have challenged his students, and they all would have respected and appreciated him in the end. I’ve also never seen this interview, and holy… moly. The way he describes MLK’s legacy is powerful. Love this.

Pick #2: Jesse Barfield

If Clemente is the kind of teacher who would scold you for slacking off and demand the best from you at all times, and get it because you knew he was asking no less of himself, Jesse Barfield is the sort of teacher whose overflowing kindness convinced you that doing your best was your own idea.

Though Barfield is generally regarded as one of the nicest men to put on a baseball uniform, as free with his time and energy as he was with his swing decisions, he makes this list for two specific feats of kindness. The first came before I knew who he was: during lockdown, I remember a video of him showing off a hitting drill he’d suggested to then-Blue Jay Teoscar Hernández that emphasized rotating the waist and hips to control where you wanted the ball to go, and Hernández had used it to great advantage—he’d win a Silver Slugger at the end of that season. Maybe it’s that at the time I was more afraid of COVID than committed to doing my job, but I was surprised that a guy who wasn’t a paid hitting coach and had no reason to do anything but care for his family and relax would take the time out to show an active player a thing or two.

Most of you, if you’ve ever heard of Jesse Barfield, are thinking of a different thing he did, when he was much younger. When Suzyn Waldman entered the Blue Jays clubhouse after a game, she was subjected to a torrent of hideous, sexist abuse by George Bell⁵, who refused to talk to anyone as long as a woman was present.

Unsurprisingly, no one stood up for her. Not Bell’s teammates, who spent every day with him and could reasonably tell him what a prick he was being, and not the assembled press corps, who had very little goodwill to burn towards Bell and who should have thought of Waldman as one of their own.

Into this void stepped Barfield: he got Waldman’s name from someone else and promptly asked her if she wouldn’t want to interview the guy who went 3-5 on the day. In doing so, he sent a message: she belonged in that clubhouse as much as anyone else wearing a press pass. It is our job to ensure every student, even the ones we may have reasons to dislike (yes, some children just have bad vibes and are unpleasant to be around, and yes, it might even be your child) nonetheless feel welcome and cared for in our classrooms. It’s the least we can do for them.

Waldman, of course, went on to become the first woman to do MLB play-by-play, and Barfield ended up in an article written by two very smart people who like it when ballplayers are actively nice people, so I think we can agree the situation worked out for everyone.

Felina:

Admittedly I’d never heard of Barfield before this exercise, but anyone who hangs out with human-sunshine, Teoscar Hernandez, is a friend of mine. And in all seriousness, vouching for a female sports reporter is evidence that he’s obviously capable of understanding the complexities and social hierarchies necessary to manage the cliques of a high school classroom.

Also, as one of the aforementioned smart people, I can agree, nice ballplayers are the best.

Pick #3: Christian Vázquez

For the record, were Martín Maldonado not retired, this honor would be his.⁶

Before I get into what makes Vázquez my last pick, let me make sure you understand why they call Puerto Rico the island of catchers. Alomar, Caratini, Castro, Corporán, Feliciano, López, Maldonado, Molina,⁷ Molina, Molina, Morales, Navarreto, Ortiz, Pérez, Posada, Rivera, Rivera, Rodríguez, Rodríguez, Santiago, Soto, Thomas, Valentín, Valle, Villanueva, and Virgil, all of whom were born in Puerto Rico, played primarily as catchers, and have positive career WAR, are part of a proud legacy of boricuas with zero cartilage in their knees and endless patience for the weird bullshit 21st-century pitchers force on their coworkers. I suspect this is because if you grow up in Puerto Rico, you’re already trained to deal with unreasonable people who think everything should be going their way, even if you never work with them directly. Getting Framber Valdez to chill is basically a licensing examination.

Vázquez, who in WAR terms sits between Pérez and Maldonado on this list, is the type to a T. He’s a 35-year-old red-headed Puerto Rican built 45% of the way to a brick shithouse, he last had an above-average batting line in the first part of 2022, and his best season at the plate was somehow not the one where he put up 23 home runs. He’s won two World Series rings, but he’s never been an All-Star, Gold Glove, or Silver Slugger. Yet I’m certain to a fault that the pitching staff of every team he’s been on would say he’s an invaluable part of their operation.⁸

In almost certainly sacrificing some level of individual success to obsess over scouting reports, counsel his pitchers, and ensure team victories, Vázquez exemplifies an approach to catching that strikes me as fundamentally opposite not only to the individualistic mindset many pro athletes start getting drilled into their heads in high school, but also to how most of us think about our work. We want to see our names emblazoned in big, permanent letters for the things that we do, and we should want that, because we’ve learned that that’s the only way we’ll be recognized for anything, even by our fellow working stiffs. Vázquez, though, seems happy to have a legacy in each arm he’s helped succeed just a little bit more than usual. May all teachers be so unselfish.

Felina:

Vazqy is one of the very few Houston Astros I will ever compliment, and it certainly helps that as I type this, he is going 0 for 3 against my Oakla-mento Athletics.

Christian is absolutely the teamiest team player I can think of for exactly the reasons Noah highlights here. He has been part of so many successful teams, and yet his name will be lost to the annals of baseball history except for the few of us who will remember his key at bats and relationships with his pitchers. He buckles down behind the plate for his guys, but also seems to be a genuine good time off the clock. I’d be happy to share a copy machine with him any day.

I will abstain from sharing my opinions about the other player mentioned. Again, AL West girlie here…and I have thoughts.