photo: The Gates of Hell by Auguste Rodin "Let he who is without sin throw out the first ball" -Judge Landis It seems as though we as a people are incapable of enjoying our pleasures without a certain element of melancholy or even shame. Unpleasant as that might be, it does not compare with the crushing fatalism of the Mexicans or the Slavs, for whom the cycle of life is an unending wheel of humiliation and destruction; or the bottomless pit of psychic doom endured by the mentalities of the Catholic cultures, some of whom are incapable of shaking off their foreboding of eternal hellfire and destruction even by disestablishing the official church. By comparison, the Anglo-Saxon race is characterized by an almost sunny disposition about life, historically insulated from the humiliation of foreign subjugation, pillage and rape by the protection of large bodies of water. Go to your map. Every single English-speaking country, the U.S. and Canada, the UK, Australia and New Zealand, is bounded by water, rendering the threat of foreign domination almost academic. Naturally, human nature being what it is, we have invented ways of complicating our otherwise idyllic existence with Gordian knots of our own devising. Elizabethan England, having thrown off the Church of Rome, replaced it with the equally constricting concept of bourgeois respectability devised by Martin Luther and John Calvin. This was at once our salvation and our damnation, inspiring us with the ethic of work for six days punctuated by the pious study of the tedious and interminable King James Bible on the seventh, no bed of roses. This program remains embedded at the core of our national hard drive to the present day. Even as we might appear to be liberated by the luxuries of our material wealth, we still find it impossible to take our pleasures without a gesture of obeisance to the Calvinist ethic that has propelled us forward with such velocity. America is hooked on ethics and moral lessons like a hot air balloon weighted by ballast to keep it from shooting straight into the stratosphere. Naturally, this unquestioning craving for moral authority plays into the hands of certain unscrupulous personality types who use it to herd us like sheepdogs to their desired end. In reality, you can't force people to behave contrary to their own interests. They have to want to be manipulated. The job of the leader is to guide them, and, as is almost inevitable the case, it's the interest of the shepherd that is advanced, and not that of the flock. There was a time toward the middle of the last century when a sizable rump population began to see through the psychic morass of control and conformity and started to explore the possibilities of individual liberation, but the ruling classes quickly mobilized the effective tendency toward mass-conformity and political control and put an end to the movement. Nevertheless the residual effects of that liberation movement remain with us to this day, constituting what little happiness and meaning of life we still retain. Nevertheless, one area of culture that has always remained firmly in the grip of the ruling classes, with all the psychic baggage that that implies, baseball. Seen as a pyramid, the structure of baseball mirrors that of society as a whole. At the bottom, where there's no money, there's chaos. But as you get closer and closer to the top, the more constricted the controls get until you reach the pinnacle - the Commissioner of Baseball. It's a political situation. The Commissioner is required to keep the money coming in and protect the interests of the club owners, who in turn delegate him a certain amount of autonomy so long as the cash registers keep ringing. The immense national mania for the game has invested MLB with a power that other industries can only fantasize about. Truly, Major League Baseball is a state within a state, subject to its own laws. Back when other entertainment industries such as recorded music and cinema were still in their stages of infancy, baseball was already playing to capacity crowds equivalent to those of today, and the club owners took advantage of their power to force Congress to adopt the Exclusionary Clause, effectively exempting the baseball industry from the normal rules of collective bargaining, labor negotiations or anti-trust regulations. The Exclusionary Clause gave club owners a cartel and permitted them to essentially treat the players like indentured serfs and chattel. It is pure capitalism carried to its ultimate evolution of monopoly without controls. Over the years players have fought back for a share of the proceeds and the right to move from club to club without being traded and sold like barnyard animals, to the point where they have more-or-less become partners in the process, enriching them beyond all calculation. The salaries that the players are pulling down now just goes to underscore how sweet things were for the owners before, when they were throwing the players crumbs and then just discarding them like empty beer cans. But ball players are essentially workers, and aside from the money they don't have any interest in reforming the corporate culture. This still leaves the well-oiled combines that operate the franchises complete latitude to determine where their best interests lie and how to protect those interests. Naturally, with the players now acting in the role of more-or-less silent partners in the process, they have as much to lose as the bosses. So you won't hear any complaints from them. The one prospect that traumatizes the club owners above all others is that of gambling interests getting their greasy hooks into the game and corrupting the process. They abhor the notion that the public will come to perceive the sport as a put-up job like boxing, which would drive the fans away. An example of this is New England Patriots head coach Bill Belichick, who was caught red-handed engaging in what amounts to industrial espionage. Belichick was well on his way to getting away with it, even to the point of the NFL commissioner destroying the incriminating evidence but, as in a Hollywood move, he was undone in the last minute of the season, and now his days are numbered, believe-you-me! That's why he ran off the field. He knows his goose is cooked. Belichick will not be back next season. The football had not even cooled down from Plaxico Burress' steamy embrace when the NFL commissioner announced he was re-opening the spying case against Belichick. In professional sports nothing fails like failure. But now Major League Baseball has a new nemesis, performance-enhancing drugs. The ignored it for years because it was good for the industry. Players were getting bigger and bigger and they were hitting the ball longer and longer. Fans were in heaven and they were sucked in deeper and deeper, spending more and more. But moralists started complaining that the process was excluding players who didn't want to take chances with drugs that eventually can cause organ breakdown and amputation. As though you could find any of those pristine participants! A major league ball player who is not on the juice is about as common an occurrence as a nun at the Mustang Ranch. As the pressure built up, the club owners and the corrupt U.S. Department of Justice decided to focus on one black player, Barry Bonds. Throw him to the wolves. But that didn't work either, and, finally, after a long gestational period of public pressure engendered mostly by sports writers, Major League Baseball gave birth to the Mitchell Commission. The difference is, now that the players' union was so strong nobody had to talk to the Mitchell Commission. It wasn't like the good old days when MLB reigned supreme and they could crucify Pete Rose (we'll get back to him later). The best that Mitchell Commission could do was to get a couple of lowlife steroid peddlers who were on the verge of being indicted and compel them to spill their guts. And if these hapless losers failed to get results for the commission they were going to get sent up for long periods of time. And talk they did, like a Stalinist show trial. They implicated everybody, anybody. And then players started implicating each other just like in Russia, everybody trying to get himself off the hook by offering up their former friends and roommates as a sacrifice to the gods of baseball. The only player who is not going along with the program of mass denunciation is Yankee pitching superstar Roger Clemens. Maybe he really is clean, or maybe he is sure he didn't leave any incriminating evidence behind for his accuser, the weasel McNamee, to hang on him. Maybe he figured that this mess of sycophantic conformity is still America, and that to incriminate him you still have to convince a jury of his peers beyond a reasonable doubt. One thing is for sure, by disrupting the witch-hunt Clemens is showing himself to be a real man and a true American baseball player. Nevertheless, he is risking bringing doom and destruction down upon his head by not hiding under a rock like his colleagues and disrupting the best laid plans of an almost invulnerable industry and one of the most powerful branches of government, the corrupt Bush Justice Department. The six-time Cy Young award winner is stealing a march on his adversaries by using one of their own techniques against them, stalking through the halls of Congress and lobbying legislators the same as an accredited lobbyist for MLB. His accuser, the worm McNamee, is striking back by releasing photos of ten year-old garbage, which he asserts is graphic proof of Clemen's complicity in the steroid scandal. At the time of this writing he is now stating that he also shot up Clemen's wife as well, to bulk her up for a Sports Illustrated pictorial feature, though any thinking person would question what effect one isolated steroid shot, given just before the photo session, would produce. What's McNamee going to say next, that he shot up Clemens' kids to enhance their Little League performance? That he gave the family pet a shot preceding the dog show? That he injected the goldfish to make it swim faster? Give me a break! Nevertheless, McNamee's strategy of mass denunciations has worked out for his cohort, Kirk Radomski, who drew probation instead of a jail sentence. McNamee will probably dodge the bullet as well. There's no contesting that this monstrous blood blister of athletes using potentially lethal artificial substances to enhance athletic performance had to be lanced before millions of athletes became crippled, but the process is ugly and it is ruining reputations and lives. There are elements of it that bring to mind Major League Baseball's crusade to disgrace and humiliate one of the game's all-time great historic athletes, Pete Rose, who holds more records than Babe Ruth. Rose was also brought low by steroid dealers who turned informant. Though Rose never even considered using drugs, he used the worms Paul Janszen and Tommy Gioiosa to run bets for him to a bookmaker named Ron Peters. When Janszen and Gioiosa got busted for peddling steroids out of a Gold's Gym in Cincinnati, they served Rose up to the feds in an attempt to get themselves off the hook. Sound familiar? Instead of groveling and begging for mercy, Rose took the attitude of "What are you going to do to me? I've got one of the greatest records of all time!" He adopted the proprietary attitude of a valuable longtime employee who feels he has earned the right to special consideration based upon all his past contributions to the industry. In addition, he asserted, which nobody has ever denied, that he only bet on his own team, the Reds, to win. There was never any suggestion that as Reds manager he ever threw games or indulged in unethical behavior to enrich himself. In fact, after the feds went through Rose's personal finances with a fine-toothed comb they determined that he was a net loser at gambling. Rose admits he is not the world's smoothest operator. He probably could have saved himself a lot of grief if he had adopted a more conciliatory attitude toward the charges. His strident attitude of entitlement so enraged Major League Baseball that they decided to ruin him. After lengthy negotiations they agreed not to assign blame to him for gambling on baseball and he agreed to a one-year suspension from the sport. But even before the ink was dry on the compromise agreement Major League Baseball reneged, announcing that Rose was expelled from the game for life. Now this is where the morality play comes in. The Bible tells us that Moses led the Israelites on a 40-year winding trail through the arid wasteland of Sinai before arriving at the Promised Land, and then God forbade Moses from entering the land himself. In barring Pete Rose from entering the portals of The Baseball Hall of Fame, which is the Holy Grail to a man who dedicated every breathing moment of his life to the sport, who inspired every player who came into contact with him to transcend his own mortal limitations and achieve sports greatness, who holds more baseball records than any player in history, who received so many honors and awards that there is not enough bandwidth in cyperspace to recount them all here, is not Major League Baseball presuming to invoke a biblical injunction of punition and damnation down on him the same as God banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden for tasting the forbidden fruit? What entitles MLB to inflict the trials of Job on Rose, to take away his livelihood, bar him from ceremonies, banish him from entering the hallowed portals of The Baseball Hall of Fame so that he had to watch from a neighboring storefront as all his former colleagues entered baseball's Olympus to be anointed as gods, all for placing a few bets on his own team to win? When a jockey places a bet on himself, there's no conflict of interest. When football players Alex Karras and Paul Hornung were caught betting on NFL games they received one-year suspensions and are now back in the league's good graces, making an excellent living as affiliated sports announcers. When Belichick was caught cheating, the NFL commissioner destroyed the evidence! That destruction rained down on Pete Rose for a relatively minor infraction should tell us that the ethic of hellfire and damnation stemming from our Calvinist heritage is tearing our country to shreds. People are human and we make mistakes. A Baseball Hall of Fame that does not include Pete Rose because of a decision by some executives who never played the game is a worthless institution and an insult to the game. Major League Baseball is surely acutely aware of this. But their bloody-minded calculations probably include inducting him posthumously "for the good of the game", which means for the good of their cash registers. To deny Rose the satisfaction of being so honored during the course of his lifetime is a damnable sin against decency and against the soul of baseball. Fans should rise up in rebellion against this shameful arbitrary behavior on the part of Major League Baseball and demand with one voice "Bring Back Pete Rose!" After Stalin was dead many of the people he murdered and exiled were "rehabilitated". Shouldn't one of America's greatest living sports heroes be accorded the same treatment? By the same token, this Mitchell Commission is ripping the game to shreds by persecuting its greatest contemporary stars. It's Pete Rose all over again! If they want to get to the bottom of steroids, let them appoint a Truth Commission, where people could recount their own experience and advance suggestions for the good of the sport without fear of retaliation. That's the approach adopted by the Republic of South Africa after apartheid, where much worse things happened. America needs to be cut loose from these periodic witch-hunts and empty moralistic inflictions of pain and guilt. Medieval concepts of punishment and retaliation are a monkey on our back and should be relegated to the dustbin of history. |
| THE MONKEY: Roger Clemens, Pete Rose and MLB |
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