Thursday, February 19, 2009
By Gene Collier, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
http://www.post-gazette.com/sports/
Some days it's hard to decide which is most unnerving -- the continuing stupidity of Alex Rodriguez, the range of nonsensical reactions by sensible people to the mess he's in, or the hopelessness baseball has to feel at its inability to crawl away from an ever-widening scandal.Tuesday was such a day.
Maybe it was because Monday I'd gotten an e-mail from noted Pitt historian Rob Ruck, a senior lecturer and an expert on multi-culturalism in baseball, suggesting that the game might need a truth commission "a la South Africa post-apartheid or Latin American nations emerging from their bouts of torture and repression. If nothing else, getting it all out in the open and allowing the scoundrels (of whom there are many in every part of the union and league) to confront reality and admit their culpability might allow us to move on."
Then, he added, "Yeah, probably not."
Rodriguez, in the center ring of another quasi-annual Yankees confession circus, said an unidentified cousin injected him with something called "boli" over the course of three years, which was a wildly different story than the one he spoon-fed Peter Gammons last week, when he tried to characterize his steroid use as the result of perhaps a lack of concentration while shopping at GNC.
"All these years," he said Tuesday, "I never thought I did anything wrong."
A bald-faced lie.
And then this staggering dissemble, in response to the simple question of whether he thought he cheated.
"That's not for me to determine."
Good thing.
Confounding and aggravating as Rodriguez is, some of the attempts to put his now clearly tainted accomplishments into some kind of historical context are even worse.
Chicago White Sox general manager Ken Williams expressed a common interpretation the other day to MLB.com.
"Each era has its baggage of inclusion or exclusion," Williams said in what MLB.com described as the philosophical high ground. "You go back to the days of Ruth and all those guys in the Hall of Fame from that period, and well, they weren't playing against black players. So, one could argue that those numbers are inflated. They weren't artificially inflated by substance, but they are inflated."
That's the philosophical high ground? Positing that Ruth would not have hit 714 homers if he'd had to face Smokey Joe Williams once in a while and that, by extension, A-Fraud's injections and resultant inflations therefore don't seem so grotesque?
What do Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson have to do with Barry Bonds and Mark McGwire? To begin with, nothing. Paige and Gibson weren't cheaters.
"I don't think you pull down the pre-1947 players and throw them in with the steroid era," said Ruck, who's at work on a new book about what baseball's integration meant to black America and the Caribbean nations.
"I'm not a big believer in stats in baseball as some sort of universal standard that allows us to compare players of different eras. There are too many variables. There's the dead-ball era. The live-ball era. Corked bats. Uncorked bats. Bandbox ballparks vs. Candlestick Park. The addition of multiple purpose relief pitchers. There are just too many contradictions.
"While I think that one can make the argument that Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak would have probably been less likely were he facing Bullet Rogan and Satchel Paige, you don't draw parallels from there to Bonds and McGwire; they're a separate problem."
Ruth's numbers, as a separate problem, were as much deflated by his own excesses as inflated by the absence of black players. It is perhaps impolitic to suggest that Josh Gibson wouldn't have hit as many homers had he had to face Bob Feller, but the position that were Major League Baseball open to blacks from its beginnings Ruth would have been something other than Ruth remains highly dubious, or at least hinges on a dubious premise.
"There was certainly a cohort of black players in the '20s and '30s -- Smokey Joe Williams, Oscar Charleston, John Henry Lloyd -- those who would earn induction into the Hall of Fame, who were really outstanding and who did play against major league players in barnstorming exhibitions in the Caribbean. The records we have in place would certainly indicate that they were as good as the top major leaguers.
"What that says about the average Negro Leaguer vs. the average Major Leaguer is a different story. I suspect it takes more practice and training and skill to play baseball so that you need training and infrastructure and leisure time to develop muscle memory, all things that would have been working against black players."
Whether we're in the pre- or post- or smack dab middle of the steroid era, the pre-Jackie Robinson game has no place in this discussion. The state of today's game has little or nothing to do with anyone's numbers, only everything to do with the game's soul.
"Major League Baseball has really created a terrible dilemma for itself," Ruck said. "And it doesn't seem to be able to resolve it."
Too true. As long as the game is administered and populated by the people who made this mess, it can't be cleaned up.
Gene Collier can be reached at gcollier@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1283. More articles by this author
First published on February 19, 2009 at 12:00 am
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