Baseball’s Betrayal

Bart Giamatti told us that baseball would break our hearts.

He said it was designed to.

“The game begins in the spring,” the former commissioner famously wrote. “When everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.”

But baseball has never had a “fall” quite like this one – as the national past-time’s supposed “savior” has been implicated in the same sordid scandal that he was supposed to rescue the game from.

The revelation that Alex Rodriguez tested positive for steroids in 2003 is the one shock to the system that the “system” just wasn’t ready for – particularly after A-Rod went on national television during the height of the steroids scandal and told us “No,” not him. Not steroids.

When Rodriguez gave us his word on 60 Minutes two Decembers ago, an exhaustive report prepared for Major League Baseball by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell had just come out.

The “Mitchell Report” implicated over a hundred major league ballplayers – including seven MVP’s, 31 All-Stars and the greatest pitcher of the modern era – as cheaters.

And then there was Barry Bonds – the greatest cheater of them all – who had just “broken” the greatest record of them all, Hank Aaron’s mark of 755 career home runs.

A month before the Mitchell report was published, in November of 2007, Bonds had been indicted on four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction of justice related to a government investigation into the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative (BALCO), which supplied steroids to Bonds and several other major leaguers.

Conveniently, Bonds’ obstruction of justice trial begins this March – just two weeks after pitchers and catchers report for spring training.

Two years before the Mitchell Report came out, Mark McGwire, another home run hero, disgraced himself by pleading the Fifth Amendment regarding his alleged steroid use before a Congressional panel.

“My lawyers have advised me that I cannot answer these questions without jeopardizing my friends, my family, and myself,” McGwire told the panel.

Similarly, home run greats Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmiero and Miguel Tejada have all been clouded by steroid accusations.

But Alex Rodriguez was supposed to make everything right again.

Like the legendary Bronx Bombers of yesteryear – Babe Ruth and Mickey Mantle – Rodriguez was supposed to sweep in with his pinstripes and perfect swing to restore our faith in America’s game, to reclaim baseball’s integrity from all the cheaters and their artificial records.

And even though he’s a fragile prima donna who can’t get along with the media, his fans or his teammates, we were all still pulling for A-Rod on some level, if for no other reason that it simply wouldn’t do for the holder of baseball’s most celebrated record to not be in the Hall of Fame, right?

How do you explain that one to your kids?

After all, an untarnished home run king is infinitely more palatable than the ugly truth, so eloquently encapsulated recently by Sports Illustrated writer Jack McCallum.

“We are a juiced nation,” McCallum wrote last March. “We are a nation on dope. We are a nation looking for enhancement, a way to age gracefully, perform better and longer, and, at the outer edge, vanquish what was once considered that all-time undefeated opponent known as aging. We do that by Botoxing our wrinkles, lifting our faces, reconstructing our noses, de-spidering our veins, tucking our tummies, augmenting our breasts and taking a little pill to make sure we’re ready when, you know, the right time presents itself.”

But now our fake plastic world has to go in search of a new hero, because in the flash of a moment A-Rod is no longer capable of absolving the game – or any of us.

His 553 career home runs, .306 lifetime batting average, museum-full of awards and hundreds of millions of dollars are all suddenly not just worthless, they’re less-than-worthless.

Now he’ll forever be remembers as “A-Roid,” “A-Fraud” or Alex “Roid”riguez.

Which is as it should be, because what Rodriguez and his fellow steroid dopes fail to get is that they’ve committed a fair greater sin than just cheating against their competitors on the field, or the record-holders of bygone eras.

They’ve cheated against things much bigger than that – our trust, our hope, our memories.

It’s been said that 95% of men cry at the end of Field of Dreams, during that poignant scene of suspended disbelief in which the simple love of a game brings a father back from the great beyond to share a game of “catch” with his grown-up son.

In that moment, men become little boys all over again, and memories of games of catch with their own fathers come flooding back.

Also, earlier in the film, we’re reminded how that simple game of catch – and millions like it that take place everyday across America – are part of a fabric that has brought this country through thick and thin.

“The one constant through all the years has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It’s been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt, and erased again. But, baseball has marked the time. This field, this game, is a part of our past – it reminds us of all that once was good, and could be again.”

And yet now, America, in its relentless quest to be bigger, better, faster, more – may have killed baseball, too, as if the “Me first” modern athlete, luxury sky boxes, organized labor disputes and stadiums named after bailout-backed banks hadn’t already done the game in.

“One of the game’s greatest players has engaged in a variety of acts which have stained the game, and he must now live with the consequences of those acts,” former Commissioner Giamatti said when he banned Pete Rose from baseball for life in 1989 after Rose was caught betting on baseball.

Ditto, A-Rod.

But unlike Rose, the “consequences” of Rodriguez’s indiscretion go much deeper … to the very soul of a country that was hoping against hope that he were telling us the truth.

Comments