Heads in the Sand (And Why Baseball Survives)

Donald Fehr, who heads baseball's players' union, launched his spring training barnstorming tour yesterday by assuring one and all that just because 103 players in addition to Alex Rodriguez tested positive in 2003 for banned substances, this by no means taints the reputations of everyone else.

A foolish claim, but not unexpected.

It is Fehr's job to protect his rank and file -- both in their earning potential and in their reputations, no matter how badly some of them have behaved. So forget any retreat on the arrangement that assured that those names remain confidential. Fehr is no fool and, like Commissioner Bud Selig, must know that the names will leak, just like A-Rod's.

With each new name will come more calls for a full airing of every documented juicer. The response will be the inevitable palaver about putting the "steroids era" behind us, and instead focusing on all the many things the game now does to crack down on the dopers.

Even as several of the game's luminaries -- Brad Lidge, Curt Schilling and Lance Berkman -- are calling for a release of all those names, the sense here is that Fehr, Selig and, most importantly, the owners will ignore those pleas in the belief that they can wait the critics out.

And, sadly, they are probably right.

They are right because there remains a healthy portion of baseball fandom that would like to forget the whole, sordid business, and who can point to the public humiliations of such outsized stars as Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, and now A-Rod as evidence of the sanction that awaits those who dare besmirch the sanctity of the great game.

But there is something else at play here which explains how it is that baseball endures, even in the face of scandal: modest expectations.

Contrary to its prevailing myth, baseball is not a national sport, certainly not like football. Rather, it is a local game, which explains, in part, how it is that attendance can rise even as World Series ratings decline. People love and follow and wear the colors of their teams, their stars. It much the same way that people think of, say, schools: the state of American public education is forever held in low regard. But people do love their kids' schools.

Baseball rose to the lofty perch of National Pastime not by design but by default -- no other professional team sports that could compete with baseball until the 1960s. But, in truth, baseball was not so much an organized sport as it was a series of fiefdoms, presided over by -- forgive the metaphor -- warlords, the most powerful of whom were motivated by the overwhelming desire to enrich themselves as the expense of everyone else.

The domineering owners of the past -- the Dodgers' Walter O'Malley, the Yankees' Del Webb (who when he wasn't building hotels was building casinos) -- cared very little about the greater good of the game. They cared about themselves, and made sure that the game was presided over by figurehead commissioners who could be relied upon to their bidding.

Only once in baseball's long history was there a moment when the greater good was imposed by a higher authority -- when the sport's first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, banned for life the eight Chicago White Sox accused of throwing the 1919 World Series. Landis spent the next 25 years meting out fines, assuming a resolute demeanor, and ensuring that baseball's shameful color barrier endured. He was otherwise a self-important fool.

Baseball has almost always been a game without a center, without an organizing logic or prevailing sense of what might be in most everyone's best interests. There is nothing in baseball that resembles the "league think" that the late Pete Rozelle imposed upon the NFL when he was its commissioner. This is not to say that pro football is a model organization. But consider that football embraced revenue sharing in the 1960s, and with it the promise to its fans that on any given Sunday any team could beat any other. It took baseball over 40 years to appreciate that tenant of sporting wisdom.

Baseball was slow to integrate, slow to acknowledge that its players deserved pensions, slow to embrace the possibilities of television, slow to appreciate how the perception of widespread cheating could undermine the sport.

How could it be otherwise? No one was in charge. And because the value of the game -- as measured by the value of franchises -- continued to grow, there was no incentive to change. Wealthy men came to the game, and grew richer merely by cashing out. The players saw this, and quite reasonably wanted a piece of the action.

And so it is that baseball has been plagued since, yes, the late 1980s, by a scandal from which it cannot extricate itself.

The names will leak. Testing will one day presumably begin on Human Growth Hormones, which may well uncover yet another cache of cheaters. Congress will call on Selig, Fehr and perhaps several more players. Righteous anger will follow.

But there will be a game that night. And another game the next. People will come out to see the local fellows play.

San Francisco loved Barry Bonds, even as fans everyplace else turned out dressed as hypodermic needles to taunt him.

Bonds was a cheater, but in San Fransisco he was "our" cheater.

Give A-Rod until his first two-home-run game of the season to be celebrated with a curtain call.
So long as the home crowd pays to see him, baseball can delude itself into believing that all is good in the world.

Comments

[jcwtts1]

Here is what the Commish should have done three years ago:

"I am granting a full and general amnesty to anyone who, at any time previous to this press conference, used any substance that enhances or alters physicality. There will be no investigations no process by which grievances will be heard and no further conversation about the past. There will be two changes to current standing practice in the MLB, the first, every player will be drug tested after every game. No exceptions. If the union doesn't like it strike. The second change -any player with any positive test for anything will get the death penalty just as if they gambled on the game. No second chance, we will test the A and B sample and there will be no lengthy appeal process. If you pop positive you are gone. Forever, no reinstatement. You will be banned from every ball park at every level, you will lose your opportunity to enter the Hall, you will be unable to participate in any sanctioned memorabilia show or anything ever. The amnesty ends right now."

J

[jerzyjc16]

There will always be cheaters; that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to stop them. (For the same reason you don't stop giving breathalizer tests to drivers for alcohol)

Here's how to stop steroids:

1) If you sign a minor league contract you must be tested and agree to random testing
2) College programs that don't stringently test their baseball players for steroids on an agreed-upon model previously installed at the major league level will be banned from the major league baseball draft.
3)If you play baseball at the high school varsity level you must be tested--failure to have a testing regime will make your players ineligible for college level play.
4)Upon entering the major leagues you must be tested regularly as in 2)

Of course there are always people who game the system and cheat, and this will be no different. But let's at least try. Let's at least ruin your baseball career if you test positive for steroids or other banned substances.

[Artboyz]

Professional sports is no different than professional wrestling, just alot less honest. A professional athlete is a circus freak, appreciated for his bazaar ability. Pump them up with all the drugs their bodies can take. It will only make them more amusing.

The problem arises when we try to suggest to our children that there is something heroic in these physically and emotionally damaged performing clowns.

[kmsbt]

"Wealthy men came to the game, and grew richer merely by cashing out. The players saw this, and quite reasonably wanted a piece of the action." Baseball will continue to delude itself and us as long as its main mouthpiece, broadcast sports coverage, is licensed by the owners and remains no more than a propaganda vehicle for the owners. I'm tired of hearing ESPN and local talking heads chatter on about this and that players' contract amounts while never a word is mentioned about how much money the owner made last year or the tax revenue or breaks he got at our expense to build a new stadium. The Black Sox, Pete Rose and now the Roidmen are perennially vilified while the blatantly anti-trust maneuvers of everybody from Charlie Comiskey to Steinbrenner go on without a word. The light of the mass media day may be the only way baseball will be forced to change, but it's a big challenge because sports media is more blatantly corporatized than the rest of the "mainstrea­m."

[Nommo]

As soon as ARod resumes his habit of disappearing in crucial moments, people will at least wonder why he wasted all that time sticking needles with strange substances in his behind. Of course, the Yankees will not come close again until they get rid of ARod and if they had any real smarts they would bring back Bernie Williams if only to appease the gods of the diamond, so they won't ever look so bad again as they did when they lost 4 straight to the Sox.

This from a Yankee fan.

[RobinSeattle]

"the promise to its fans that on any given Sunday any team could beat any other. "

Actually, this mediocrity is one reason why I stopped watching pro football back in the early 1990's. And I find it the height of irony that the owners, who are almost all Republicans, resorted to socialism when it came to managing their sport.

I like having elite teams. It makes victories over them even more sweet and it is fun seeing the mighty fall. It also sets a standard of excellence for the rest of the clubs. But if all the teams are a bland mishmash then that is like making everyone eat oatmeal because it is good for them even if there is little else to recommend it. That gray mediocrity just is not fun. And even with revenue sharing in baseball the Royals, Reds, Pirates and the Nats still suck and have since the inception of the 90's.

[3fingerbrown]

So true--nothing sweeter than beating the Yankees. It's such a universally held American belief, they wrote a whole Broadway musical about it. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPj0hoVpYSg&feature=related

[grailknight]

The players' union should sack Fehr after having guaranteed their anonymity for the drug tests.