Baseball has so many detractors. They say baseball is pointless. It’s a bunch of grown men playing a kids’ game. Mostly, they say it’s boring. So it’s a treat to walk into Grant Smith’s Prairie-style home in Old East Dallas, where the grand old game is central. Smith is an artist whose paintings have places in the homes of baseball bold names like Johnny Damon and Keith Olbermann. Sure, Smith loves baseball — he was born a Cubs fan on the North Side of Chicago. And he grew up in Arlington, so he’s a Rangers fan, too. But it goes way deeper than your average fandom. Baseball is this artist’s muse. “All the men in my family are into baseball,” he says. “Baseball is kind of our language.” Smith’s paintings typically portray the lives of baseball’s greatest players, but they’re not necessarily about the game. They often touch on moral dilemmas and the myth of hero. A favorite subject is “Shoeless” Joe Jackson, who was accused of throwing the World Series in 1919 for a promised $20,000 from gamblers. Another is Ty Cobb, who was tortured to the end by perfectionism and his father’s disapproval. One painting is a 6-foot by 7-foot portrait of Babe Ruth’s face, titled “The White Josh Gibson”. A catcher and power hitter in the Negro Leagues from 1930-46, Gibson often was pegged as “the black Babe Ruth”. “A lot of them had really tragic lives — drugs, alcohol, racism, greed, abuse of power,” Smith says. “I try to put myself in the players’ shoes. I’m not judging them. You wonder, ‘Would I make the same mistake in that situation?’” While some baseball nerds memorize stats and clip box scores, Smith pores over biographies. He’s an encyclopedia of baseball scandals, characters and anomalies. He painted Ruth Ann Steinhagen, the woman who stalked and shot Phillies first-baseman Eddie Waitkus in 1949, the basis for “The Natural”. He painted Roy Campanella, the Brooklyn Dodgers all-star who was paralyzed in a car accident at age 36. Recently, he made a portrait of Sandy Koufax for the National Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in New York. The painting is based on a photo of a smiling Koufax icing his elbow — he had severe arthritis. “It has a frailty theme,” Smith says. Baseball isn’t boring. It’s romantic. It’s dramatic and tragic, warm and fuzzy. For Grant Smith, baseball is a language, and with it, he can express anything in life.
• See pictures of Smith’s artwork at grant9smith.com.
