OldSpeak

Our National Pastime's Legitimacy Problem

By Neal Shaffer
April 13, 2004

Baseball season has finally returned, bringing with it all the customary hopes and dreams that coincide so nicely with spring. To some of us, this is a big deal. There was a time, however, when it was much bigger. Opening Day used to enjoy near-holiday status in America, but those days are long gone. The ’94 strike combined with a succession of idiotic moves by the game’s management structure (both MLB and the Players Association) to turn off many casual fans, and with good reason. The salary structure is out of hand, and suspect personalities like San Francisco Giants left fielder Barry Bonds and Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig are the game’s public face. These things are distasteful and annoying but could be ignored under the right circumstances. Alas, they’re not.

The usual Spring Training anticipation gave way this year to the cloud of a steroid abuse scandal. Some of the game’s most prodigious sluggers—including Bonds and New York Yankees first baseman/DH Jason Giambi—have been implicated federally in connection with an investigation into San Francisco’s BALCO labs, the company behind the designer steroid THG. With that investigation have also come rumors of more traditional steroid abuse. It’s not as if players like Bonds wouldn’t have been suspected of steroid abuse anyway, but the move toward confirmation has brought a swarm of controversy. Chicago Cubs manager Dusty Baker has compared it to a witch-hunt, and the tentacles have even reached Cubs pitcher Mark Prior (who, if you’ve seen him, is a bizarre target).

In a nod to the game’s history, it is traditional every year for the President to throw out a ceremonial first pitch on Opening Day. This year, President Bush did so for the St. Louis Cardinals (Vice President Cheney did the honors for the Cincinnati Reds). On top of that, Bush—who used to be an owner of the Texas Rangers—took time out of his State of the Union Address to speak about the issue of performance-enhancing drugs. Although it was an obvious message to baseball in particular, why bother? Because baseball is tied to our culture and, in many ways, is also emblematic of it. Yet there’s as much general animosity and apathy toward the game now as there ever has been in the modern era. It has gotten so bad that it resulted in Congressional hearings, during which Arizona Sen. John McCain stated that baseball has a “legitimacy problem.” That declaration was followed by a non-binding Senate resolution calling on baseball to “negotiate and adopt a more stringent drug-testing policy.”

Baseball is still called our National Pastime, but that’s mainly because it’s been around so long. Football dominates the hive-mind, and the NCAA tournament all but knocked Opening Day off the radar screen this year. Public interest in the game is not nearly what it could be—or what it once was. Not all of it, however, is tied to controversy. People point out reasons why they simply don’t enjoy the game: it’s too slow; the season lasts too long; it’s just not “exciting.” Such matters of taste do not threaten the heart of an entity that, at its core, is great and has endured for a reason. Yet when people add to this list that they no longer believe in its integrity or that they consider it a crooked joke, something is wrong. Because, whether you like the game or not, there are broader implications to consider. And in doing so, the problems facing baseball right now become interestingly reminiscent of one of the game’s darkest moments: the 1919 Chicago “Black Sox” scandal.

The Chicago White Sox at the time were the dominant team in the game, but the players had a tenuous and acrimonious relationship with their owner. Everyone knew the other shoe would eventually drop, and that moment came when the Sox lost the 1919 World Series to the Reds in a five games to three upset. The following year, eight members of the team were indicted on charges that they threw some Series games in exchange for payoffs from gamblers. The fallout literally shook the nation.

In response, the Black Sox scandal was dealt with swiftly and severely, perhaps too much so. Although none of the players were actually convicted of any offenses, they were permanently exiled from baseball, thus ruining their careers and legacies. In the case of Shoeless Joe Jackson, many believe the punishment was unjust, apparently with some justification. But there is a reason that the Black Sox (also the “Eight Men Out” of pop culture lore) were dealt with so harshly. Consider the words of the man who delivered the final punishment, then-newly appointed baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis:

Regardless of the outcome of juries, no player that throws a ball game, no player that entertains proposals or promises to throw a game, no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players where the ways and means of throwing games are discussed, and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever again play professional baseball.

Landis was something of a character, to say the least. He made his name as a federal judge, most prominently when he fined Standard Oil $29,240,000 in a freight rebate case. The decision was overturned, and it was one of several questionable actions he undertook from the bench. He is also noted for jailing members of the Industrial Workers of the World for espionage (debatable) and for making the proclamation during WWI that Kaiser Wilhelm and certain other Germans be “lined up against a wall and shot down in justice to the world and to Germany.”

For all his oddities and questionable politics, however, Landis understood what baseball meant to the country. When the Black Sox scandal broke, he was the owners’ unanimous choice to become commissioner because of his support, as a judge, of the game’s anti-trust exemption. It was a favor returned, to be sure, but one that benefited the game immensely. He is single-handedly responsible for restoring the public’s faith in the game and, by extension, for preserving its status as a treasured institution.

Because of the steroid issue, that status is now threatened like it hasn’t been since Landis’ day. Clearly, it is a minority of players who are cheating. But until there is a full accounting, we can’t be sure of the “who, where and how.” Such a situation gives rise to speculation and hysteria, and with each passing day, the damage becomes more permanent.

Selig blames the players’ union. And while there’s some veracity to that claim, the vast majority of individual players are not at fault. Atlanta Braves pitcher John Smoltz, as respected a player as one is likely to find, is on record in support of a stronger testing program—and he’s not the only one. And Dusty Baker’s “witch-hunt” claim is well taken, since the last thing baseball needs to do is allow the court of public and media opinion to decide this matter for it. The problem lies in the structural divide between the game and its players and, by extension, the public. For regardless of who might be to blame, if nothing is done—and done fast—all sides run the risk of losing.

And if nothing is done, it is not only the game and its players who lose. The country itself will suffer because baseball is a living link to our past, its rituals and processes a part of our cultural fabric. Few institutions can boast baseball’s history, and we simply can’t afford to lose it. Landis himself put it best when he said: “Baseball is something more than a game to an American boy. It is his training field for life work. Destroy his faith in its squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more; you have planted suspicion of all things in his heart.”

DISCLAIMER: THE VIEWS AND OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN OLDSPEAK ARE NOT NECESSARILY THOSE OF THE RUTHERFORD INSTITUTE.