It’s Monday. It’s the first day of the week. It’s early afternoon on the first day of the week, and already I desperately need a nap, if by “a nap” I actually mean…er, actually, I just need a nap. I stayed up until six in the morning reading The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, and now I’ve got two bendy straws from the deli on the corner propping my eyelids open, but even if I had time for a nap today, which I don’t, I don’t think I’d take one, because I vaguely recall having a sex dream about Phil Rizzuto after I finally went to sleep, and what if I curl up for forty winks on the couch and wind up pinned underneath a naked, sweaty, thrusting nightmare Boog Powell? I mean, no offense to Boog Powell or his family or anything, but…um, no. I’ll just go around the way for another large black coffee sweetened with a biiiiig lump of crack, and then I’ll crank up the volume on the ESPN rebroadcast of the 2001 Home Run Derby, and I’ll try to forget that Ted Williams’s own children want to make a cryogenic Splintersicle out of his head and that the plaque they gave Reggie at the Stadium over the weekend didn’t get his ‘fro right and that baseball locker rooms have more needles littered around these days than a dumb joke about New Jersey and that there’s another euphemistically named “work stoppage” looming.

It’s Monday. It’s the first day of the All-Star break. Baseball’s going all to hell. Again. And I don’t mind.

Well, I mind. I just don’t mind mind. Baseball has a nasty habit of going all to hell over and over again, and it just doesn’t bother me anymore. I cluck and frown and roll my eyes and turn the TV on at seven to watch the game just the same. It’s still baseball. It’s gone all to hell so many times over the years, but they’ve still shown it on TV.

Take the perennial whining about the All-Star roster (please), which I have to say I don’t really get. I’ve never cared much about the All-Star game one way or the other; I historically view it as an annoying interruption of the regular season, and in any case I root for the very team that everyone else thinks is wildly over-represented, so said over-representation doesn’t put a spider in my milk. Still. No, Joe Torre probably didn’t pick the team “fairly.” No, he probably shouldn’t use quite so many Yankees. You know what? It’s not a war-crimes tribunal. Joe Torre is not an officer of the court, sworn to uphold justice under the law. It’s an essentially meaningless exhibition game; Torre’s the manager, and the manager gets to decide who plays. That’s it. If you want to blame anyone for queering the line-up, blame the voters. Torre didn’t dick Jim Thome over; the voters did. Thome’s having a comparable season at the plate, if not better, than Jason Giambi, he’s having a marginally better season than John Olerud, and Mientkiewicz doesn’t belong on the list at all; his slugging percentage comes in miles under the other three. And it’s not like anybody ever gets voted onto the All-Star team for his defense, especially not a first baseman, so — the hell? Well, it’s a popularity contest, and while that doesn’t explain why Thome didn’t get more votes, we can’t blame Torre for the fact that Cleveland fans didn’t get their guy’s back. It’s a game that, for all intents and purposes, has nothing to do with anything. If it mattered, at all, in the context of the season, I’d understand why people get so het up about the bench selections and whatnot. And I’d understand too if it mattered in the context of the Hall of Fame — if All-Star appearances counted in the overall assessment of a player’s career — but I wouldn’t call election to Cooperstown an objective process, either. Not every player in the Hall deserved to get in (Don Sutton? Come on), not every player who had to wait a few ballots to get in should have had to wait, and as of this writing, the man who got more hits than anybody else in the history of the game can’t get into the Hall at all, and I promised myself I wouldn’t get on the subject of Pete Rose, but what the hell.

Pete Rose belongs in the Hall of Fame. Pete Rose fucked up in a big way. Pete Rose associated with known gamblers, bet on the game, took drugs, lied on his tax returns, and had brutally scary seventies hair well into the eighties. He’s not a good guy. You know who else isn’t a good guy? Ty Cobb. Ty Cobb is so not a good guy that there’s a picture of him in the DSM-IV next to “antisocial personality.” John McGraw? Not a good guy either. Mickey Mantle? Not the greatest guy. Drunk guy. Liver-wasting guy. The Hall of Fame is full of racists, drunks, blowhards, sociopaths, ball-scuffers, gamblers, wife-beaters, and all-around sons of bitches, but with a few exceptions, most of the sons of bitches in the Hall hit or threw like hell and set a bunch of records, many of which still stand decades later. “Yeah, but none of those guys bet on the game!” Okay. Keep telling yourself that. The Hall of Fame isn’t a citizenship badge. Pete Rose got more hits than anyone, ever, and I understand that allowing him in might send a confusing message at best, but so does keeping him out. Pete Rose has the most hits, period. Stick him with an asterisk the size of downtown Cincinnati if you want to — and I think you’d have to — but let him in. He belongs there.

[NB: Rose’s suspension and possible future reinstatement is more complicated that I’ve got time to go into today, but basically, the current obstacle to Rose’s consideration for the Hall is that he hasn’t apologized for gambling on baseball, because apologizing equals admitting guilt, an admission he’s apparently not prepared to make. Dan Gutman’s Baseball Babylon gives a clearer and more concise account of these issues than I can.]

Aaaaanyway. The All-Star flapdoodle happens every year, so it doesn’t trouble me much. Neither does Pete Rose, not really; I think it’s a shame, but it’s also one of those lightning rods for fascinating debate that baseball instigates so well, so in a weird way, I kind of enjoy Rose’s ongoing penance. But Pete Rose isn’t a pressing issue in baseball today, not when we’ve got a bunch of past and present players blowing the lid off of major-league steroid use. Oh, excuse me — “blowing the lid off of” steroid use. Yawn. I mean, don’t misunderstand me; if we believe the recent Sports Illustrated exposé on the subject, steroid use in baseball is endemic, and that’s a serious problem which I don’t wish to make light of. Baseball does not require testing for steroids, and that’s an equally serious problem. But I would hardly call the latest disclosures on the subject revelatory. Did these “eye-openers” surprise anyone? You just don’t have that many adult males with builds like The Tick occurring in nature. You just don’t see guys morphing from lithe doubles hitters into monster sluggers with giant boxy heads after the age of seventeen, much less after thirty. You just don’t see all those home runs coming out of nowhere. Yeah, yeah, they changed the strike zone. Yeah, yeah, the players have access to better equipment and prep. Whatever. It’s ‘roids. It’s obviously ‘roids. Anyone with eyes figured it out years ago, and it’s not going to stop any time soon; the players’ union won’t permit testing until it absolutely has to. It’s scandalous, really. But the scandalized reaction of the sporting press is almost as scandalous as the scandal itself. Doesn’t anyone remember when a bunch of players did time on drug charges? It didn’t happen that long ago, folks — and it’s happened as long as baseball has existed. The game doesn’t have A More Innocent Time. Guys used to show up for games drunk, or drink between innings, or drink on the bench, or a combination of all three. Guys have popped uppers for games since before they put lights in the stadiums; they did it in the thirties, they did it in the sixties, and they do it now. It’s certainly a major issue, and the commissioner needs to get off his ass and lean on the union to require testing for anabolic steroids, because it’s bad for the game and it’s bad for the players’ health and it’s a bad example for kids. But it’s not new, and it’s not news, and it’s not that upsetting to me. Okay, that’s not quite true; I’d suspected it for years, and having it confirmed scares and disappoints me more than I thought it would. But I won’t stop watching baseball because of it.

I won’t even stop watching baseball if there’s another strike. I feel like I should, but they’ve struck before, and I’ve always kept watching. I agree that the players make way too much money compared with, say, teachers or medical researchers, but I also feel that the players have the right to ask for whatever the market will bear, and to protest a salary cap if they feel it’s a bad idea. They might not win, but they have their reasons, many of which I can get behind because it involves sticking it to the owners. I can certainly do without the Norma Rae attitude from Barry Bonds, but it won’t turn me off of baseball. Let them walk out. Let them swan around all sniffly about how many more millions they need, giving interviews from the front seats of their Rolls-Royces in disgusting displays of short-sightedness and greed. Let them go fishing while I watch old Orioles games on ESPN2 and eat popcorn. They’ll come back. They always do. When they do, I’ll watch. I always do.

The game of baseball has always gone all to hell. Behind it in the dusty road, fans like me have always trailed behind it, waving and taking pictures. I understand if others hate the Yankees and change their middle names to Revenue Sharing and boo Ken Caminiti wherever he goes. I understand if others say they won’t go back to baseball if the players strike again, and if they mean it — if they really don’t go back — I’ll understand that too. Baseball is hard to love, sometimes. It likes to test us, to see how hard it can push us. It yanks the Dodgers out of Brooklyn. It adds a designated hitter and sits back with an evil smile, waiting to see if we’ll jump up and scream “bitch, you CRAZY” and turn the table over and stomp out of the restaurant. It fiddles with the strike zone forever and ever without end, amen, and then it says in a ditzy voice, “Oops, my bad!” It dilutes the talent pool with expansion teams, and it gives the expansion teams assy uniforms. It doesn’t put duct tape over Carl Everett’s mouth. It’s bratty as all get out, baseball. It’s spoiled and snotty and ungrateful, and it still hasn’t apologized to me for Juan Samuel, but oh, how I love it still.

It’s not that I don’t mind, that I don’t care. I care. Anyone who has mentioned the name “Vince Coleman” in my presence and witnessed the volcanic spluttering and bellowing that the hated name prompts will attest to that. It’s that…well, okay. I went to a spring training game a couple of years ago — a Reds game (don’t ask). Ken Griffey Jr. had just joined the team. I don’t like Ken Griffey Jr. one bit, and I don’t know why; he just bugs me and he always has. I sat sweatily in the stands with my dad and brother and ate a pretzel and hoped Griffey would screw up royally, both that night and long-term, thereby justifying my dislike of him. After about fifteen minutes, Griffey came up, took a ball low, and launched the next pitch out over the fountain past the center field wall with a clean crack so perfect as to make a Foley artist wet himself, and we all stood up to watch it leave, because we knew it would. And it did. It went up quickly, sailed for just a moment, and wafted down over the spray of water, flawlessly timed and marvelously spare even in the air just like all Griffey’s shots, and I don’t like Griffey and I never say “gosh,” but I couldn’t help saying out loud, “Gosh, that’s pretty.” Griffey annoys me, but I could watch him hit those beauties all day.

For over a century, baseball has gone all to hell from time to time, just for kicks, and every time there’s a hue and cry about how that’s it, that’s the end, the game is ruined, “national pastime” my ass, baseball won’t survive moving the mound back to sixty and six/letting African-Americans play/California baseball/the strike/lights in Wrigley/expansion/John Kruk’s mullet/free agency/enforcement of the balk rule/interleague play/the breaking of Maris’s record/the DH/Steve Howe/three-percent beer/A-Rod’s salary/Macarena Night/contraction/the next strike. Baseball’s going all to hell again. It does that. I’ll just sit here with a Diet Coke and watch it pack.

July 8, 2002

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