Baseball celebrates life of trailblazer Irvin

Though you can’t see or touch me, I’ll be near, And if you listen with your heart — you’ll hear, All of my love around you soft and clear.

SOUTH ORANGE, N.J. — Monte Irvin was remembered with an inspirational “Celebration of Life” on Saturday morning at the South Orange Performing Arts Center, in the community where the Hall of Famer, Negro Leaguer, war veteran and New York Giants trailblazer grew up. Those apt verses from a poem were on the back of a program given to attendees whose lives he touched before his passing on Jan. 11 at age 96.

Giants president Larry Baer, whose club is in New York for a series against the Mets, was on hand to speak and called the celebration “a history lesson of America.” National Baseball Hall of Fame president Jeff Idelson told guests that “of all the talented men who made the perilous trip from the Negro Leagues to the big leagues in the late 1940s, Monte may have been the best.” Former National League president Bill White, Irvin’s former roommate, entered quietly and said he “had to be here.”

Speakers also included 1948 Olympic medalist and friend Herb Douglas; Rutgers professor Art Berke; Essex County executive Joseph DiVincenzo, who promised a seven-foot Irvin statue coming to the area in the near future; and Irvin’s daughters, Pat and Pam. But there was one especially notable face missing from this event, and there was good reason for it. Irvin’s protege and former Giants roommate, the great Willie Mays, wrote a letter and gave it to Baer to bring and read aloud — explaining that the Say Hey Kid is simply not ready to let go.

“You’re all going to hear a lot of things about Monte Irvin today,” wrote Mays, 84. “There is much to be said. He was a good man, a good father, a good baseball player, a great friend. You might all even think that you know all of the stories about Monte and me; that he was my first roommate, that he paved my way, that we were friends, good friends, and even that we opened a liquor store together. But I am not writing these words to repeat what you already know. I am writing these words first for his family, Pat and Pam, and then for the rest of you so that you will understand why I could not join you today.

“Monte came into my life at the beginning of my professional baseball career. I was very young, but like most youngsters, I thought I knew everything! Of course, I didn’t. But I wasn’t really open to learning. You could have put the smartest man in the world in front of me when I was young, and I’d have just turned up my nose and said, ‘Yeah, but can he hit?!’

“Monte let me know that he knew the things that I didn’t want him to know; …

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