Cities Should Retire Numbers
There is many a city out there that loves their sports, either by throwing celebrations when winning championships or pushing hard to bring an expansion franchise to a city. These are great team honors and all, but what about the individuals that make it happen? Well, I feel as though a city should retire numbers across all of their sports. In fact, this kind of exists already as the Miami Heat retired Dan Marino’s number 13 upon his retirement because of what he meant to the city of Miami.
How would this work? My general thought is that if two (or more) teams across both men’s and women’s sports in one city have retired a number (i.e. Boston retires number 4 because the Red Sox retired it for Joe Cronin and the Bruins for Bobby Orr) or a number is retired by a team twice (example: the Yankees retiring 8), then the city should retire the number across its sports. Numbers unofficially retired or otherwise removed from circulation would count as well.
What if there are too many numbers retired by one city? In these instances, if more than ten numbers are eligible, I feel that it should be if the two players (be they on different teams or the same one) are both in the Hall of Fame of their sport—if, say, a third team retired a given number, then it would not apply. This would apply to Boston, as under the idea of 2+ teams retire a number regardless of Hall of Fame status, Boston would have retired 17 numbers (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 33, 34). With the Hall of Fame status accounted for, that number goes to 11 (1, 2, 4, 5, 8, 9, 14, 15, 22, 33, 34).
As for numbers unique to one team, they stay retired. Having this stipulation keeps open the possibility of more numbers being available, especially with the National Football League preseason rosters having 90 players (although at times the same number is worn by two players). Because of the aforementioned transcendence of certain players’ impact and city pride, I feel as though this should be implemented.
