Baseball Like Us
I'd written a lot about how major league baseball was a scam because of free agency and something I've called "competitive duplicity," the idea that the powers-that-be in baseball set things up so that certain teams are guaranteed to have an unfair competitive advantage to ensure the continued viability of the game. (Just as a heads up, some of my work is at EEEEEE! a San Francisco Giants fan site run by a very good friend, and my seminal writing is here.)
Recently lots has come out about major leaguers using steroids. Indeed just today former Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte confessed he's used them, but not to build up but to better heal from an injury.
I think the first thing that I feel, being a Giants fan and, as such, a great admirer of Barry Bonds, is how silly the whole asterisk thing is now. I was hurt every time someone would blithely speak about an asterisk next to Bonds home run achievements, and then laugh as though they were all above it. Now it is revealed that a whole crew of juiced players contributed to a lot of baseball's recent success, and I just wonder how much of the game are those same smug fans going to insist is accompanied by asterisks. Anyone for putting an asterisk next to each Yankees title from 1998 to 2000?
The other thing that gets me is how blind everyone still is to the real duplicity involved here. I must commend Los Angeles Times media pundit Tim Rutten for really nailing some of it, but he sadly doesn't get at what's really criminal about the game. His piece, by the way, is here.
I was quite taken by a quote he shared right off the, excuse me, bat. It was from historian Jacques Barzun, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game."
To me, baseball is indeed one of the wonderful matters of life. Even though, yes, I'm a forlorn Giants fan, I still love the game and will always root for my team. But I found out a long time ago that powerful forces were at work to keep my team, and dozens of other teams as well, from ever truly having a chance to be consistently competitive. Indeed any advantage my team would have would mean another team would suffer and that, quite simply, is not fair.
What would be the true meaning of a championship in this environment.
In 1998 I stopped paying any attention to any of it cold turkey. I have firmly held an earnest, complete boycott of anything baseball since then. I admit I did break that for a spell in 2002 when my Giants were in the World Series. Hey, had to get some small, brief whiff of success.
But what Rutten said is quite telling. "The Game = Our Life," he says in so many words. Hey, I didn't say it, he did. Here's a bit of it:
"That fact alone [the media being clueless about the steroids story] raises disturbing questions about whether most of our sporting press has become too much a part of the sports/entertainment/industrial complex to give its readers and viewers an honest account of what transpires on our courts and playing fields. Increasingly, the vast majority of our sportswriters and broadcasters appear to have looked away while drugs corrupted the highest levels of the pastime we Americans honor with a simple appellation -- The Game."
Well, yeah, for years I had been saying the media can't objectively get to the heart of the problem because, well, they are part of the problem.
Then there is this from Rutten, after he waxes eloquent about why the game is so great:
"Unfortunately our sporting culture, like our society as a whole, has bitten too deeply into the forbidden fruit -- not the grandly evil produce of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but that of its stunted and stunting stepsister, the tree of profit and loss."
But this is where Rutten can't get it, because the desire for profit, the need to have some recognition for success, is simply not inherently a bad thing. It is a wonderful thing, but it is such only in God's economy. So it is that one Tree after all, isn't it?
It is in the World economy where it is deceitful duplicity. It is fraudulent, exploitive, twisted, and underhanded. There are as many cheats in the World as there are on the diamond (oh, and to be fair, up there in the ivory tower boxes).
Yes, that is the World.
And it has been baseball for years.
They're just figuring that out now?
Could it be possible that they'd find the Tree of Life after it all?
Recently lots has come out about major leaguers using steroids. Indeed just today former Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte confessed he's used them, but not to build up but to better heal from an injury.
I think the first thing that I feel, being a Giants fan and, as such, a great admirer of Barry Bonds, is how silly the whole asterisk thing is now. I was hurt every time someone would blithely speak about an asterisk next to Bonds home run achievements, and then laugh as though they were all above it. Now it is revealed that a whole crew of juiced players contributed to a lot of baseball's recent success, and I just wonder how much of the game are those same smug fans going to insist is accompanied by asterisks. Anyone for putting an asterisk next to each Yankees title from 1998 to 2000?
The other thing that gets me is how blind everyone still is to the real duplicity involved here. I must commend Los Angeles Times media pundit Tim Rutten for really nailing some of it, but he sadly doesn't get at what's really criminal about the game. His piece, by the way, is here.
I was quite taken by a quote he shared right off the, excuse me, bat. It was from historian Jacques Barzun, "Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball, the rules and realities of the game."
To me, baseball is indeed one of the wonderful matters of life. Even though, yes, I'm a forlorn Giants fan, I still love the game and will always root for my team. But I found out a long time ago that powerful forces were at work to keep my team, and dozens of other teams as well, from ever truly having a chance to be consistently competitive. Indeed any advantage my team would have would mean another team would suffer and that, quite simply, is not fair.
What would be the true meaning of a championship in this environment.
In 1998 I stopped paying any attention to any of it cold turkey. I have firmly held an earnest, complete boycott of anything baseball since then. I admit I did break that for a spell in 2002 when my Giants were in the World Series. Hey, had to get some small, brief whiff of success.
But what Rutten said is quite telling. "The Game = Our Life," he says in so many words. Hey, I didn't say it, he did. Here's a bit of it:
"That fact alone [the media being clueless about the steroids story] raises disturbing questions about whether most of our sporting press has become too much a part of the sports/entertainment/industrial complex to give its readers and viewers an honest account of what transpires on our courts and playing fields. Increasingly, the vast majority of our sportswriters and broadcasters appear to have looked away while drugs corrupted the highest levels of the pastime we Americans honor with a simple appellation -- The Game."
Well, yeah, for years I had been saying the media can't objectively get to the heart of the problem because, well, they are part of the problem.
Then there is this from Rutten, after he waxes eloquent about why the game is so great:
"Unfortunately our sporting culture, like our society as a whole, has bitten too deeply into the forbidden fruit -- not the grandly evil produce of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but that of its stunted and stunting stepsister, the tree of profit and loss."
But this is where Rutten can't get it, because the desire for profit, the need to have some recognition for success, is simply not inherently a bad thing. It is a wonderful thing, but it is such only in God's economy. So it is that one Tree after all, isn't it?
It is in the World economy where it is deceitful duplicity. It is fraudulent, exploitive, twisted, and underhanded. There are as many cheats in the World as there are on the diamond (oh, and to be fair, up there in the ivory tower boxes).
Yes, that is the World.
And it has been baseball for years.
They're just figuring that out now?
Could it be possible that they'd find the Tree of Life after it all?
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