(Wilfrid Sheed)
Speaking now as a former fan about baseball, I want to address Joe Morgan's recent letter to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Morgan says just about everything I expected he or any other player from the analog days of baseball would say about the continuing refusal to induct some former players who are eligible for induction into the Hall. The reason is by now no longer what it was when these players were active: a secret (although it was the subject of widespread rumors). The problem with Morgan's letter is that the issue isn't nearly as black and white as it seems. Morgan wrote:
"The Hall of Fame has always had its share of colorful characters, some of whom broke or bent society's rules in their era. By todays's standards, some might not have gotten in. Times change and society improves. What once was accepted no longer is . . . But steroid users don't belong here. What they did shouldn't be accepted. Times shouldn't change for the worse."
(I am heartened by Morgan's faith in society's improvement through the years.)
I learned to love baseball through the eyes of my father. Born in Lagrange, Georgia, his team was the Atlanta Braves. He was a devoted fan, which you had to be if the Braves was your team. "Cellar Dwellers" is the old term for sports teams that commonly occupied last place in their divisions, and in the late 1960s and early '70s the Braves lived up - or down - to it year after year. The only ray of sunshine during those years for a Braves fan was one player - Hank Aaron. I remember when Willie Mays and Aaron were neck-and-neck in the race to break Babe Ruth's record for career homeruns. Week after week, I would check the Sunday newspapers for the lists of the top homerun hitters of all time. There was Ruth's name at the top with 714 homeruns, with Mays' and Aaron's names beneath. Mays, who was older, gradually faded away. He retired with 660 homeruns. But Aaron kept going. When he finally broke Ruth's record, in May 1974, I was in hospital recovering from an appendectomy. I also celebrated my 16th birthday there, which is why it's easy for me to remember the date of Aaron's feat.
When I look at the current list of Major League Baseball's Top 300 career homerun hitters, it feels like I'm being wrapped in a warm blanket on a December night. The names that stand out for me are Willie McCovey (521), Boog Powell (339), Dave Kingman (442), Willie Stargell (475), Harmon Killebrew (573), Reggie Jackson (563), and Frank Robinson (586). Mea culpa - I remember their names because they were sluggers, "long ball" hitters. For a kid, there is nothing in sports more impressive than a homerun.
There have always been great baseball players who didn't hit homeruns. Pitchers, for instance, were expected to be poor hitters, which is why they were almost invariably the ninth batter in the lineup. Barry Bonds was a gifted hitter and had a dependably high batting average. But, too often, he found his accomplishments ignored because he hit comparatively few homeruns. "Cleanup" batters, at number four in the lineup in game after game, were always the long ball hitters. They couldn't match Bonds in average, on base percentage, in runs scored. But it didn't matter as long as they could knock the ball out of the park thirty, forty, or even fifty times a season. That's why Bonds decided to become a slugger, and why he, and some other sluggers - Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Alex Rodriguez - changed baseball by cheating. They took their natural talent for hitting the ball and enhanced it to the extent that they broke - shattered - existing records for single season and career homeruns. Both McGwire, Sosa and Rodriguez later admitted to "doping," but Bonds has always denied it. Their long ball stats are impressive: Rodriguez 696 homeruns, Sosa 609 homeruns, McGwire 583 homeruns. And Barry Bonds sits atop the list at 762 homeruns. So why aren't they in the Hall of Fame?
It seemed like it happened all of a sudden. In 1998, it became obvious that Roger Maris's record for most homeruns in a single season - 61 - was going to be beaten. By whom wasn't exactly clear, since there were two contenders. Mark McGwire had forearms so enlarged that he reminded me of Popeye. He and Sammy Sosa made the breaking of Roger Maris's record into an appalling circus. McGwire finished the season with 70 homeruns, while Sosa had a mere 66. One would think that, getting close to the record, these hypertrophied antiheroes would've perhaps slowed down so it didn't look so obvious that they were doping. But, no, they approached the record in haste, it seemed, broke it, and then kept on going into stratospheric heights of absurdity. Not to be outdone, Barry Bonds nullified McGwire's record in 2001 by hitting 73 homeruns.
Joe Morgan was a great member of a great baseball team - the Cincinatti Reds - that also included a cheater - Pete Rose. Morgan is a member of the Hall of Fame. Rose is not, and may never be. Rose never doped, but he participated in gambling while an active player and was proven to have, on occasion, bet against his own team.
Americans invented baseball, basketball, and their own kind of football, but the principles behind these games and the rules that bound its players were all invented in 19th century England. Wilfrid Sheed could write with some authority on the subject because he was an Anglo-American whose dreams of playing any sport were forever extinguished by a brief bout of polio at the age of 13. As Sheed wrote in his essay, "Why Sports Matter," "But perhaps the greatest benefit of all, to judge from the fuss that would be made about it, was that sports not only outlawed cheating but drilled its devotees to detect and despise it in each other and by extension in themselves."(2)
When I think of great baseball players of the past, like Joe Dimaggio and Mickey Mantle, both of whom played with sometimes crippling injuries, I think of what they accomplished and what they might have accomplished if they hadn't had to contend with injuries. But then I think about the fate of the record-setting balls. According to Wikipedia, "[Barry Bonds's 756th homerun ball] was consigned to an auction house on August 21 [2007]. Bidding began on August 28 and closed with a winning bid of US$752,467 on September 15 after a three phase online auction. The high bidder, fashion designer Marc Ecko, created a website to let fans decide its fate. Subsequently, Ben Padnos, who submitted the (US) $186,750 winning bid on Bonds's record-tying 755th home run ball also set up a website to let fans decide its fate. 10 million voters helped Ecko decide to brand the ball with an asterisk and send it to the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Padnos sold 5-year ads on a website, www.endthedebate.com, where people voted by a two-to-one margin to smash the ball."
Now that the entire Russian Winter Olympic team has been banned from competition in South Korea early next year because of substantial evidence of systemic and institutionalized doping, the issue of performance enhancing drugs is once again in the spotlight. While sports organizations have all decided that it is bad for every sport, I wonder if a majority of fans really care. I mentioned above that I am a "former" baseball fan. Contemporary professional sports is exasperating to me because it doesn't seem to even want to make up its mind. Like everything else, professional sports has been tainted by money. I don't watch baseball much any more, but if players like Bonds, Rodriguez, McGwire, and Sosa are voted into the Hall of Fame, which is probably nothing but a matter of time, I will never watch another baseball game, not in my home, not at a friend's house, if I am in a bar and a baseball game is on the TV, I will get up and leave. Before lights were installed in stadiums, baseball games used to be called on account of darkness. For baseball, it's getting darker by the hour.
(1) "Why Can't the Movies Play Ball?," The New York Times, May 14, 1989.
(2) "Why Sports Matter," Wilson Quarterly, Winter 1995.
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