“Playing Ball” Major League Baseball’s Way

By: D.K. Wilson

With all that was going on last summer it was difficult to deal with some of the larger issues of and problems with Major League Baseball. This spring and summer it is time to make time to dig in an explore MLB and baseball, in general, much more deeply. The following is the first of many articles and commentaries to be written this spring and summer on our National Pastime.

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I smelled a rat in Major League Baseball’s summer of 2007 but could not find its carcass. There was something terribly wrong with MLB and baseball, in general. Everywhere I turned there was a scandal. Most had to do with “performance-enhancing drugs” (PEDs) like steroids and human growth hormone (HGH), but there were others like Tony LaRussa’s drunk driving charge and the specter of Ken Caminiti’s cocaine-induced death and his flat statement that perhaps 80% of MLB players were using PEDs. There was a rebirth of public knowledge of baseball’s private war with amphetamines used largely to recuperate from long hours of air travel followed by playing a baseball game some 12 hours later. But amphetamines are dangerous drugs and I wondered how many MLB players had a bottle of them at home.

Yet through Congressional hearings and public scorn MLB flourished in 2007. The game reached an all-time high in attendance. Its revenues were greater than ever before. Despite paying ridiculous salaries (the average salary is over $2 million) teams were making money hand over fist. Some teams’ total payrolls were insanely low, some outrageously high, yet all made money. Some teams with bottom-barrel team payrolls were competitive. Some with high team payrolls were failures.

But still, all the owners made money.

Early in the season Jackie Robinson was celebrated by MLB. Selig spoke glowingly of Robinson’s sacrifices to integrate the game. He even appeared with Robinson’s wife at a game and gave a speech. But there was something stiff and disingenuous with Selig’s moment. Selig’s true feelings toward the celebration were played out, not by him, but by the teams. There was haphazardness to displays of Robinson’s achievements, of his value to the game. Some teams barely wanted to recognize the man. Most black players wanted to wear his number and some Hispanic players wanted to join in and wear his number as well, most notably Albert Pujols.

But through this process it was revealed that some teams were devoid of black players. In a country where 13% of its population is black and 750 athletes play in the big leagues, there were teams without black baseball players. When the numbers were crunched, it was found that the percentage of black players hovered around 7%, percentage-wise barely more than half of the population.

The embarrassment of these revealing figures was met with preposterous excuses. White baseball writers across the US ran to MLB’s side and excused the game and blamed the paucity of black players on the living environments of black people and basketball; urban and without requisite parks in which to play the game, but plenty of concrete basketball courts - natural extensions of the streets. To excuse baseball’s perceived lack of influence in rural areas where huge tracts of open land exists, they blamed the lure of big-time college and professional football.

They said the equipment was too expensive. They said the history of the game was lost on young black people. They said the salaries weren’t high enough.

They spoke and wrote any lie they could to lay blame at the feet of black people and keep the blame from being laid squarely at the feet of Major League Baseball and a public school system bereft of government funds and care.

Jackie Robinson Day was a grandly-produced fiasco, ill-conceived, ill-thought out, and poorly executed. Many black MLB players were quietly angered by the goings on, with quietly as the operative word. I could see MLB writers actively skirting or stopping only briefly at black players’ lockers so they could spin the day their way and paint baseball as sports’ manifestation of a pastoral America that never was.

I smelled the rat again.

While MLB commissioner Bud Selig publicly fretted and acted humble in the face of Congress people he was, at the same time, defiant in his displays of ill will toward all-time home run king, Barry Bonds. Selig elicited the support of other owners, allowed shows of hate toward Bonds to go nearly unfettered; fans in San Diego threw syringes onto the left field grass when Bonds played.

Selig said nothing.

Bonds broke Henry Aaron’s home run record. Bud Selig was nowhere to be found.

But previously he used his former employee Henry Aaron to speak for him on the issue of PEDs and Bonds. Aaron, in the tradition of athletes who see their names fading from the limelight because of the younger, stronger, more gifted, yet equally pompous athletes spoke of Bonds with an unnatural vehemence. It appeared that Aaron knew Barry Bonds in a way that no one else did - and “knew” he was evil incarnate. The baseball press happily hopped in on this one way home run hitter turf skirmish and, as all the sporting press does when it come to issues where race are potentially at hand, listened to Aaron with baited breath and immediately and gleefully added to their already caustic Bonds-related writings.

I was closer to finding the root of that smell.

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For about seven weeks during the summer of 2007 Rick Ankiel of the St. Louis Cardinals provided a reprieve from what baseball writers were calling, “the summer of discontent.” Once a pitcher for the Cards, Ankiel mysteriously lost his command and could no longer throw a strike. Golfers of all distinctions know the feeling when they suddenly lose the ability to sink the simplest putt. They even have a term for it: “the yips.”

Ankiel got the yips. He came down with this disease so badly that his career was in jeopardy. He decided to give up on pitching but not on the game. Rick Ankiel chose to come back as an outfielder. Unfortunately he hurt his elbow, which required surgery. The injury once again jeopardized an already fragile career.

But almost miraculously, Ankiel recovered, and was better than ever. He made his way back to the big leagues with St. Louis and propelled a flagging team to the heat of the race for a spot in the MLB postseason. He was phenomenal in the field and at the plate. In one week he managed a series of game-winning hits and home runs. The national press was ready to anoint Ankiel as baseball’s Comeback Player of the Year and more importantly, the game’s savior.

But.

In checking the paperwork from the bust of Signature Pharmacy of South Florida, Ankiel’s name popped up. It tuned out that Ankiel purchased enough HGH to last him a year. The thoroughly embarrassed outfielder lamley tried to say that he used the drug only a couple of times and threw the rest of the year’s supply away. He also said he purchased the drug legally through a doctor.

It turned out he bought the HGH through a doctor online. And it turned out that that doctor was already under investigation for illegally prescribing the drug to other “patients.”

The Boy Who Saved Baseball became just another cheating jock caught dead to rights with both hands all up in the PED cookie jar. But the baseball press came to Ankiel’s aid. Poor Rick was just doing everything he could to play the game he loved so. Poor Rick’s daddy was a junkie, so for him to overcome the odds of making something of himself coming from such a debilitating environment was something of a miracle. Poor Rick, they said, of course he only did the drug a couple of times and threw the rest away. Besides, he used HGH before it was made illegal by Major League Baseball; of course, saying nothing of the fact that Ankiel’s purchase of the drug was illegal according to the U.S. government.

And the public bought that pile of press-produced feces like it was gold. The media-made excuses for Ankiel were reiterated in online chat rooms, baseball forums, and in comments to articles and commentaries related to Ankiel’s guilt.

It was as if the public, like its puppet masters in the press, was thrown into despair it would not recognize, nor from which it would recover.

But, induced by a conniving press corps, the public was made to forget. Ankiel’s name arose only once more, in conjunction with the news during the playoffs that Cleveland Indians starting pitcher Paul Byrd was also an HGH pal of Signature. Byrd tried the “legally purchased” excuse to no avail when it was found that he once received a prescription through a dentist.

Seriously, a dentist. But Cleveland lost their series to the Boston Red Sox and Byrd - and Ankiel - went away for good.

The 2007 baseball season died mercifully with the Boston Red Sox winning their second World Series in four years. Yet the shadow of steroids and HGH remained cast over MLB like a Northern Alaskan winter afternoon.

2008 began with Roger Clemens served as sacrificial lamb on a silver Congressional platter. What began as a bipartisan effort devolved into politics as usual. Previous to the hearings Clemens toured the halls of the Capital with his hard-boiled oil-catter attorney Rusty Hardin in tow. Roger the Republican visited those most like him, glad-handed, left gifts, autographs, his refreshing, blunt - when compared with a carpet-bagging Lone Star State transplant president - Texas demeanor, and a feeling that Superman had just left the building.

At the outset it appeared that the press would actually do the right thing and pillory Clemens as they had Bonds. But that would be too much to ask of the clique of owner-Selig fawners. No sooner than they spoke poorly of Clemens did they begin to provide reasons Clemens should never be equated with Bonds.

They lied and said Clemens, throughout his career, had been great with the press. Despite the portent of physical evidence in the way of needles, vials of steroids, and gauze, despite a witness who trained both Clemens and fellow pitcher Andy Pettitte (who admitted to using HGH provided by the trainer, Brian McNamee), despite that man sticking a needle filled with HGH in Clemens’ wife’s behind, these writers willfully lied and told America that the evidence for Bonds’ guilt was greater than that related to Clemens.

As for Bonds we have the words of a scorned lover, a man who might have stolen memorabilia from Bonds, and an alleged paper trail with coded language that might or might not deal with one Barry Bonds. With Bonds we have the man who ran the laboratory where Bonds was said to have received his PED cocktails saying that, to his knowledge Bonds never received from him the drugs that other athletes received. Each of these “other” athletes has all had their guilt proven.

With Clemens we have a preponderance of evidence. But Roger Clemens told America that his wife had HGH shot into her without his knowledge.

And the baseball press - and their willing columnist helpers - reported that insanity as if the words were delivered by a heavenly being.

As for the politicos, it appeared the Clemens passion play was produced so that when they sharpened their claws and attacked presidential candidate Barrack Osama with subtle race speak, they could all claim that they attacked Clemens with the ferocity that their IRS-federal friends attacked Bonds; that color is of no consequence when reality in the way of criticism is to be meted out.

The smell got stronger as I approached a group of boxes marked, “Major League Baseball.”

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On April Fool’s Day 2008, sportswriter Rob Parker of the Detroit News told morning sports television audiences that Major League Baseball, not the NFL, is the “Don” - the Mafioso leader - of sports. He averred that baseball has survived multiple Congressional hearings, its stars being raked through the coals, scandals of all sorts, accusations of cover-ups, accusations of racist practices, yet it continues to set attendance records, it continues to be the most talked about game in the country, it continues to rapidly grow.

And as I moved one box I saw the stinking culprit.

It smelled like money. So much more money than the public knows, than many baseball writers will let on that it knows. It smelled like tightly controlled information, pablum dressed as “real news” and disseminated to a public that trusts the source far too much. It smelled like racism. With so few black writers on the roster of the Baseball Writers of America, stories about black players are dwindling. Stories about former black players are nearly nonexistent. When these men do seek to do the work they are subtly dissuaded by MLB or their efforts are not given the proper platform to bring a story into the nation’s consciousness.

And with only a 7% black player population and even fewer black ticket-paying fans, MLB is on the verge of leaving black people out in the cold; out side of its stadium gates, as players and as fans. And the owners and their mouthpiece, Bud Selig, do not seem to give a damn.

With a burgeoning Hispanic audience that grows by the day the owners recognize they do not need black people’s money. They know the cheaply built “training camps in the Dominican Republic and other Hispanic-speaking countries are paying off in spades; saving them hundreds of millions of dollars in signing bonuses and initial contracts. They also know that one way to the Hispanic heart is through their MLB heroes.

The rat was found in the corner behind the boxes, now it’s time to figure out how it got there.

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    D.K. Wilson is a freelance sports writer. He is better known on the internet as "DWil," and writes for Sports On My Mind.

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    1 Comment

    1. bonds = evil incarnate?? that’s way too extreme for a baseball player, you have got to be kidding me. evil incarnate..?? wow just wow.

      Comment by Mark on April 11, 2008

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