Baseball Is Breaking Our Hearts

Another report, another hero bites the dust.

The New York Times is reporting that a 2003 report names two prominent members of the 2004 World Champion Boston Red Sox as having tested positive for steroids. One, Manny Ramirez, also tested positive for steroids earlier this year and was suspended from his current team, the Los Angeles Dodgers, for 50 games.

According to the New York Times article, the other player who appears in the 2003 steroid report is David Ortiz..

The big guy who points upward after a homer to remember his late mother. The guy everyone calls Big Papi. One of my favorite players.

I have always been a baseball fan. I had no choice in this, I think a love of the game was encoded in my DNA: I was born into a household of fanatically loyal Brooklyn Dodger fans just a few weeks after the Brooklyn Dodgers won their one and only World Series title. I heard my family yell their love of the game and their team, and I must have been born cheering. Even as my two favorite teams (New York Mets and Seattle Mariners) test my patience year after year (after year, after year), I still keep rooting for them. I have said 'wait 'til next year' so often I should put it on my tombstone.

So being an underdog rooting, suffering fan appreciating, lifelong baseball fan, when the Boston Red Sox finally threw off the dreaded curse and claimed their first World Championship in 86 years in 2004 I freely admit I cried like a baby. I loved that team, the bunch of crazy idiots. I enjoyed their freewheeling style of baseball. They were a team of characters, and my favorite was Big Papi. I loved the way he pounded his hands together at the plate, those giant hands that looked like bear paws. I loved his big grin. And I loved the breathtaking moment when he connected with a baseball and the thing took flight like a 747 bound for Honolulu.

If you're not a baseball fan this might sound crazy. But it's the way I was raised - if you were a baseball fan in our house, with my baseball fanatic father, it meant you loved your players. Sure, we rooted for our team because we lived in their state but if that's all you had, if that was the only reason you rooted for them, then you were just a fly-by night fan, a johnny come lately, a 'pink shirt' (after the pink shirts with team logos on them that become quite popular after a team becomes champion, among non-fans of course). A real fan knew the players, personally. Tom Seaver, Ed Kranepool, Buddy Harrelson, Cleon Jones, Ed Charles, Donn Clendenon, these guys were like family members to me. If you think this is fanatical, OK I give you that. But it was the way I grew up, again partly because my father was a Brooklyn Dodger fan. Fans of that team really DID consider The Beloved Bums part of their family; they asked after their kids, were nice to their wives, memorized the players birthdays so they could sing Happy Birthday to them when they took the field. And the way I was raised, that's how I raised my kids. Edgar Martinez, Jay Buehner, and Ken Griffey Jr. couldn't have been more a part of our family unless they'd lived next door.

But I'm starting to flounder. My enthusiasm for the game is being smothered under the weight of needles, creams, and positive tests. I rode the McGuire/Sosa wave for one glorious summer but was crushed by the aftermath; watching Mark McGuire squirm in front of Congress a few years later made me sick to my stomach. When I watched Barry Bonds as a young man I thought his raw talent was a marvel, when he 'broke' Hank Aaron's record all I felt was disgust. Add the others, including All Stars like Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens and Jason Giambi, and the steroid list is the who's-who of baseball for the last 10 years.

I don't know how to be a baseball fan anymore. As more and more players are shown to be cheaters, I'm having a harder and harder time rooting for anyone. Before I cheer for another player, do I have to mentally prepare myself for a day when he too is exposed? One thing for sure: I love the game too much to model myself after those Los Angeles Dodger fans who warmly welcomed Manny Ramirez back with open arms. Manny Ramirez is a cheater and a liar. His stats are phony. He willingly and knowingly took steroids in the past and again just this year. Dodger fans stood up and cheered for that? Why, exactly? I would really like to know. I would like to know what those fans were cheering for, because they certainly were not cheering for baseball.

Real baseball fans know that something's got to be done to save the game. Baseball's had a weak ineffectual excuse for a commissioner for years, an owner who's done nothing to help further the sport. His fingers-in-the-ears as long as there were butts-in-the-seats attitude toward this long-standing and long-recognized abuse has gotten us where we are today. The game needs better, now. It needs action, now. Definitive, tough action on every player proven to have taken steroids. Those who took steroids in the past, you lose your glory (Roger Clemons, give the Cy Young's back). Those who take steroids now, you are out of the game. Fifty games is not enough. Fifty years is more appropriate. Because you don't want to lose the crazy fans, the fanatical fans, the fans who consider the players part of their family. They are the ones who keep showing up, year after year. Lose them and those beautiful new stadiums that sprouted like flowers over the last decade will be sad empty monuments to a game that got lost.

So now, Big Papi. Added to the list of players that cheated at the game I thought they loved.

Well, I do love it. I can't help it, I still do. I just don't know how much more I can take.

Comments

[JayMonaco]

Oh, who cares, man? Let them all take the drugs.

Before it was steroids, it was amphetamines. There is no "corruption of the 'modern game'" here. Let's be real with ourselves. There is nothing "pure" about any sport, now or at any time in the past. The deeper you dig, the more dirt you find. The world is not made of angels and birthday cakes, and if your father told you that it was, he was either ill-informed or lying to you.

[mamacat]

Bill Maher had a good comment about this last night; from now on, newspaper should only report when they find a ballplayer who is not on steroids. Sounds good to me. The sport has been tainted. From now on, the players are guilty, until proven innocent.

[intelliwoman]

The most boring sport in the world anyway

Bag em and tag em.

[oldschoololdsoul]

The saddest part of all this is that clean players didn't make it or had lackluster careers because some stars who did were on juice. Seems like after the '94 strike season MLB outsurced itself to the 3rd world and PHDs. Chicks might dig the long balls. But purists know that they're as fake or phony as the modern game itself. And so it goes in this the baseball era of the cheater and the asterisk.

[jcwtts1]

Bud Selig has mishandled this so badly. Either release everyones name or, and this is my personal choice, grant a general amnesty. Hold a press conference and say, "All past acts of steroid use fall under the amnesty. All of them. We will neither report on them or acknowledge them. It is as if they never happened. However, from this second forward, anyone caught using anything banned. Anything, for any reason gets the death penalty. It will be as if they gambled on baseball and they will be banned for life, up to and including hall of fame, working in and around baseball, setting foot in a stadium ever again. One strike and done. If the union doesn't take this deal, then forget them. I'll see them in court."

If Bud had done this three years ago we could have dealt with the problem. Instead, what we have is a diminishing respect for the game.

J

[DinkSinger]

The 2003 testing was conducted under an amnesty. It is not the fault of baseball or the players union that the results still exit and are being leaked. The records would have been destroyed but the BALCO prosecutors got search warrants to seize the results for ten specific players from the labs. They seized the test results for all 1,200 baseball players and for thousands of other people who had nothing to do with baseball. Three different District Courts found this seizure to be illegal but a majority of a three judge panel of the 9th Circuit overruled them and allowed the government to keep the records. The case has been appealed to the full 9th Circuit but although oral argument took place last December, the court has yet to rule. Meanwhile, by Federal law enforcement and lawyers with whom the Federal authorities have shared their list.

Your idea of an ultimatum to the union won't work because when Bud sees them in court he'll lose. Labor law requires that drug policies be negotiated between employers and unions. Also, the Hall of Fame is an independent organization and not controlled by MLB. The current agreement is a 50 game suspension for the first positive test, 100 games for the second, and permanent suspension from both major league and minor league baseball for the third. The commissioner can, however, reinstate a "permanently" suspended player after two years and his decision is subject to arbitration.

[DinkSinger]

When baseball conducted the "anonymous" testing in 2003, more than 93% of the tests came back clean (1,369 tests were administered, 96 came back positive). At any given time there are 1,200 players on the Major League rosters, so if there was a steroid era it was winding down.

But the performance enhancing drug problems in baseball have not been limited to steroids. Until baseball finally banned them in 2006, amphetamines had been widely used by players going back at least to World War II, and there has been cocaine use. Keith Hernandez admits that he used cocaine during almost every game in 1979, the year he was co-MVP. Hernandez came down very hard on A-Rod when the results of his 2003 test were disclosed, yet in 2002 Alan Schwarz at ESPN.com reported about the 1985 Pittsburgh drug trials:

"Like so many players today when faced with questions about steroids, Keith Hernandez in 1985 vigorously and indignantly denied "any involvement with cocaine, ever," and yet four months later took the stand and described playing high and waking up in shaking fits.

"One of the kids who couldn't help but hear of it was a 10-year-old in Miami named Alex Rodriguez.

" 'As a fan, you don't want to believe it. It's surreal,' Rodriguez recalls. 'My hero was Keith Hernandez. If you had said anything bad about Keith I would call you a liar. It tarnished the purity of the game.' "

[fabulousmennen]

Thank you, Marlene, for a really good article. I cut my teeth on the Red Sox. I used to volunteer at what was then called The Jimmy Fund Hospital just because Ted Willians was involved. I kept scrapbooks. I subscribed to all the newspapers and magazines that I could so that I would be up to date on everything going on in the game. I went to as many games as I could - I even cut classes to go to Teddy Ballgame's last game. Now - I hardly look at the sports page any more. I'm tired of spoiled and entitled grown men acting as children. I still love to see the game in person - no matter who is playing. The rest of it - they can keep it.

[seatea1967]

And this has anything whatsoever to do with politics how? It's bad enough that this c.r.a*p bogged down congress when it did.

[DinkSinger]

It doesn't. That's why it's in the ENTERTAINMENT section. I wish HuffPo had a sports section.