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WPCNR VIEW FROM THE UPPER DECK. By John Baseball Bailey. April 3, 2005: This used to be the best day of the year next to Christmas for yours truly, but this year the magic of Opening Day is no longer there. Not a scintilla of heartbeat is there within my breast for the First Pitch. There is no anticipation on my part. The thrill is gone.
WRIGLEY FIELD, CHICAGO. 1975. Pete Rose at the Plate. Photo, From WPCNR Sports Archive.
The magic of Major League Baseball was killed for me in 1994, when the players and owners killed a season over money. They showed then they did not care about the legions of fans like myself who believed in them and cared about their success on the field for our town, who bought the concept that they were playing for us…that they were our boys.
I knew it was a business. I knew it was all about the money, but still when the Bombers went out there or the Dodgers went out there on that immense green, they were playing for us and we cheered for them. Their success made us happy. Their failures lingered long. To me a ballpark was as good as being in a church, and I got the same feeling as I did when in church.
Then the strike broke out and killed the balance of the 1994 season. That strike was orchestrated by none other than Bud Selig and his nouveau riche owners who had the owners stay firm insistent on a salary cap. Well there still is no salary cap today. When Selig and the owners took that strike in 1994 – they shattered the illusion that baseball was a sport not a business. The strike showed us all that it was a business flat out.
Now in 2005, Selig and the owners and the media (those shills for the house), who cover major league baseball have destroyed the other pillar that major league baseball was built upon for one hundred and fifty years: integrity.
By the owners and the media unwillingness to expose the steroid use problem the last fifteen years, and the created enhancements of the game: pumped up baseball, the shrunk strike zone, the shift to interleague play (in a meaningless format),. the hideous wild card system, the game has been transformed into a travesty of cheap homeruns, and records that mean nothing any more, and a regular season that is beginning to rival the NBA in triviality.
This was all brought about by the powers that be creating a tighter-seamed baseball, wound so tightly that when it is hit it ricochets off the bat like a pinball and flies out of the ball park no matter where on the bat the hitter connects with the ball. Balls are hit off the end of the bat and the handle and they go out.
Tom Seaver proved the baseball of today is different than 25 years ago on live television, dissecting a baseball from 1969 and a circa 2000 baseball. He showed the difference in the winding, the tighter seams, and I believe the smaller core. Yet, the media still bought the propaganda that the baseball has not substantially changed. The keyword being substantially.
But baseball needed to excite the fans after the strike.
Then the Major League Baseball geniuses said let’s shrink the strike zone. This made the mediocre big league pitcher worse (more walks, forcing him to throw down the middle), and took away the sleight-of-hand of the superior pitchers who worked the corners knees and letters. Now the strike zone is knees to the belt. That forces you to throw down-the-middle – not a good place. The men in blue are also not giving pitchers the black or the knee pitch. The formula is set for disaster: less strike zone, livelier ball, sucker locations demanded.
Then, of course, there were the cheaters: the homerun king with the corked bat (how many cork bats had Mr. Sosa used? How come no one asks that question?) There were the incredible productions of Mr. McGwire, Mr. Bonds, Mr. Sosa. The records of the Babe, Roger Maris fell by the wayside — a little too easily, I felt at the time.
The media chalked this up to the narrower strike zone and superior stronger athletes. This was what was written about the homer barrage of the late 90s.
Did any one write about steroids? I can’t recall that even being mentioned by any leading sportswriter when Sosa and McGwire and Bonds were being hailed.
Well, now the public knows differently.
Steroids may have been taken by more than Messrs McGwire, Sosa and Bonds. How many other inflated performances were there? Does baseball care? Did their teamates care?
Baseball has never cared. I happen to recall Steve Howe who was involved with drugs seven times and baseball simply welcomed him back.
Well now we have an opening day or night, as it were where fans have to wonder, how many out there are enhancing their performances with junk?
How many still remain? How will baseball enforce a no steroid policy?
It has been pointed out to this reporter that there never was a ban on steroid use in baseball. So the players did nothing wrong.
Well if gaining an advantage by drugging yourself isn’t wrong what is? It is why drugs are not allowed in horse races.
Well there should have been a ban. So does that make it all right to cheat, just because you can?
But, I allege it was all part of the major league baseball schtick: a phony homerun race, great hitting, no one cared. The message baseball has sent to players is it’s all right to cheat as long as your bottom line is fine.
A real commissioner, a leader would order mandatory drug testing of every player right after opening day. Those testing positive would be banned for life. Contracts terminated.
But Bud Selig is no leader. He is no Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
No media dwelt at length on what steroids did to the NFL’s Lyle Alzado (they killed him young). We expect that the same will happen to those pseudo-stars who have used steroids.
The Steroid Stars’ legacy is not being some of the great players of all time. Their legacy is that of the Black Sox – the men who forever tarnished the integrity of the game. The Steroid junkies make a mockery of the greats who perhaps played with no more vices than hot dogs, alcohol, and womanizing and still hit them out with a real strike zone against real pitchers, the Spahns, the Koufaxes, the Groves, the Three Finger Browns.
The game is at its lowest ebb in my opinion.
Commissioner Bud Selig, the owners, the managers, the trainers, the team doctors and the sportswriters of America have presided over this national tragedy. They gave us a phony game.
More so than the Black Sox Scandal of 1919, the steroid scandal calls into question the very nature of the “competition” we will see today.
I see no point in ever watching another major league game because I do not know what I am seeing. It has taken on the odor of a fixed horse race – a figure skating competition where the competitive balance is compromised. The strike zone inconsistent. Players unversed in the fundamentals.
I have scorn for the sportswriters, those pressroom buffet hogs who have as much nose for news in the club house as Fox News. I have to wonder at how the sportswriters are rehabilitating the local abusers of steroids on local teams in print.
The steroid users are not strong people. They are weak. They are small. To think that team management did not know they were taking is laughable. Junkies is what they are.
I weep for this beautiful game, I weep for myself and the loss of innocence, and have nothing but scorn for those entrusted with the game who have betrayed it by their dishonesty, their acceptance of performance-enhancing drugs on members of their team, their aggrandizement of profit at the expense of integrity. You have allowed this.
It saddens me that I can no longer make myself care when the Bombers take the field.
I’ll go watch the New Jersey Jackals, the Toledo Mud Hens, the Harrisburg Senators, the Norwich Navigators, the Lowell Spinners, the PawSox, the Cedar Rapids Kernels, the Arkansas Travelers, the Chattanooga Lookouts, the Modesto Nuts, the Rochester Red Wings, the Buffalo Bisons, the bushleagues – the wonderful minors – where they’re still playing to make the show.
Where they pay you in dirt, and in order to make the bigs, you have to agree to play for less dirt. You give them all the hustle you got, and you still might not make it. As it turns out the minors are the major leagues, and Major League Baseball is the bush league.
I’ll still root for the Twins — and I admire the Red Sox for their great achievement last fall. But I never saw an inning.
(Thought I’d go to the tube, last fall, got as far as the knob, would have turned it on but what for? They would have asked me to care, and I don’t get care much any more.)
The steroid stars insult the honest effort and hustle of those less gifted, by tarnishing the record book, destroying the game’s sense of fairness.
Their records should be expunged from the game.
What would Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis have done with these guys? He would have thrown them out. And removed all their achievements. No question.
Baseball, fastpitch softball they are still the greatest games. I still love a ballpark or a ball field. And I will watch a game I pass by in progress. I long to play it.
It fascinates me how those in charge of the game think so little of it. Of those players gifted enough to play the game for money are so insecure that they cheat. Who do not think of us. Of the effects their actions have on the children who idolize them.
I find it hard not to root.
But I am like a lover who has been betrayed once too often. It is hard to care any more when baseball has betrayed your love once too often.
As Jim Bouton wrote at the end of Ball Four, when he was thinking of whether he would go and pitch in an industrial league like the Cincinatti Reds Jim O’Toole, who was still trying to get back into the bigs, playing for the Ross Eversoles in an industrial league. Bulldog Bouton wrote:
“Then I thought, would I do that? When it’s over for me, would I be hanging on with the Ross Eversoles? I went down deep and the answer I came up with was yes. Yes, I would. You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
It is easier for me to think about baseball’s past.
