Good Bit on Bonds

The fact that this was one of the first things that I got when I googled “Barry Bonds,” which I guess means that people have been reading it, is one of the first things in a long while that gives me some sort of vague sense of hope. I really couldn’t have done better myself. She even gets points for blithely working in a reference to a semi-obscure gangster movie: “The feds have made Bonds into Al Capone, when he's more like Pookie than Nino Brown.”

Scott Schoenewies: Took Steroids, Still Sucked

I guess I feel vindicated. I am fucking infuriated that they signed this guy for three damn years, and let Chad Bradford go because three years was too long of a contract for a relief pitcher: the Mets were Chad Bradford away from a playoff birth.

Gilbert Arenas (whose blog is excellent)feels very strongly that the Marc Ecco/Barry Bonds baseball/ asterisk incident is a travesty for a variety of reasons, some of them valid and some of them unhinged. I pretty much agree; I think that Ecco’s involvement is moralistic, pompous and obnoxious. First off, the thin pretense of making his judgments a popular decision is crummy and degenerate: of his three options, the asterisk is the only one that could ever conceivably be chosen by a popular vote. Shooting something to into space could never appeal to a large enough mass of people: the voters have been told by the baseball establishment, the media, themselves, and even Mark Ecco’s stupid poll that the ball is valuable, they want to keep it on earth—relinquishing it to the void of space would never gather enough popular support. Also, doing nothing to it is not an interesting enough option to get people to vote for it en-mass. Because the poll was conducted by voluntary participants, the only people likely to vote were those who felt that Bonds had tainted the legacy of baseball, and that his ball needed to be marked by an asterisk, to ensure his infamy into the age of the robot ball-player.

The asterisk is fucking stupid. Look, one hundred years after the fact I know that Ty Cobb was a racist motherfucker; I also know that he probably bet on and fixed a game or two; I know this despite the fact that there was no interest or effort made by the baseball establishment or anyone else to keep either of these aspects of Cobb’s history in the public consciousness-- the latter fact was actively suppressed by Commissioner Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who banned all the Black Sox participants for life, in order to avoid the disastrous fallout that would come from the utter disgrace of the best (white) baseball player of all godamn time. I somehow think that people will be able to remember the doubts about Bonds and his record for as long as there is an interest in the sport.

And really, Marc Ecco, how do you see the asterisk functioning? Eons in the future when archaeologists or aliens uncover the Hall of Fame, do you actually imagine some pith-helmet wearing motherfucker picking up the ball and saying “well, other artifacts indicate that this was a baseball, part of a vaguely incoherent game played on a diamond shaped field—however, the presence of the branded on asterisk indicates that the player who hit this ball might have done so with the aid of performance enhancing drugs.” Does this strike you as fucking likely? If that is the scenario that you are preparing for, they should start branding all of Babe Ruth’s bats with a hotdog, just so the future archaeologists will have more insight into our ancient sport. Or are you more thinking: “look, son, that asterisk got on the ball after Marc Ecco bought it and let people vote on the Internet.”

In conclusion, Scott Schoenewies is a crappy pitcher, a fact that was completely unchanged by his taking steroids. This, and several other things, indicates that the relationship between taking steroids and not sucking at baseball is a little more complicated than any idea that can be effectively conveyed by an asterisk.

If Scott Schoenewies feels like proving me wrong and being amazingly damn useful for the Mets next year, I’ll send him a letter of apology.

The Commissioner is a Son of a Bitch

The first Commissioner of Baseball, or any other sport, was Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. His name was the only good thing about him-- actually a possible second good thing about him was the fact that he eventually died, paving the way for the integration of baseball. As a federal judge, Landis jailed Wobblies, including Big Bill Haywood; he also managed to get Jack Johnson, an amazingly successful boxer and the first super-star black athlete, banned from boxing and sent to jail on a Man Act conviction for mailing his white girl-friend a railway ticket—these sterling credentials inspired the team owners of major league baseball to offer him a job cleaning up baseball in the wake of the Black Sox Scandal. Landis was only interested in accepting the gig if he was given sole authority over all aspects of organized baseball. The owners couldn’t see how they would make money selling tickets to games that were widely known to be fixed, so they agreed to Landis’ demands and the office of Commissioner of Baseball was formed.

Due to his racism, and the fact that anyone who jailed Big Bill Haywood is an official enemy of Sam’s Mets Blog, Landis goes down as a particularly offensive commissioner. However, the Commissioner is almost by necessity a son of a bitch. Chosen by the owners, they are charged with keeping the fans, players, owners, advertisers and broadcasters working together in something that does not deteriorate into chaos or harm the bottom line. The commissioner is a little man who sits behind a desk and pushes pencils; he is charged with making sure the athletes—the big, the strong, the fast, the wild and the stupid—follow the rules. It is our love of athletes that draws us to sport, and the little man behind the desk pushing them around becomes a son of a bitch by necessity.

Current baseball Bud Sielig actually did something that I approve of this week by deciding to follow Bonds until he hits his record breaking home run. I’m not that big of a Bonds fan, and am not untroubled by his legacy, but it’s the damn home run record and Seilig’s the damn commissioner, so the guy might as well be there. It took Sielig long enough to decide to go, that his uncertainty about it allowed him to accuse Bonds implicitly, without actually coming out and making an accusation: exactly the sort of miserable, gutless behavior that is pretty much required of any commissioner. I hope that Bonds goes into a vicious slump that coincides with a hellish heat waive and that Bonds and Seilig both spend all of August sweating in ballparks and accomplishing nothing.

Anyway, it’s Basketball Commissioner David Stern who is really pissing me off this week. Recently it was revealed that one of the officials, Tim Donaghy, was a compulsive gambler, with mob connections, who had been betting on games that he officiated and making calls to alter them. I spent most of the winter listening to NBA fans crying about how poorly officiated the games were and how disgustingly little the league was doing about it. I was never really sure if they had a point, but they did. As Basketbawful (a good read and an inspiration to start this blog) points out, this proves that the officiating in the league in general is so god damn bad that a cheating, gambling, psychopath can fit right in with all the other crummy officiating: the NBA never found out about the guy, until the FBI filled them in. What makes this completely frustrating is that the David Stern regime has routinely sided with officials against players. It is important to understand that in basketball this has an overtone that is not quite present in other sports: an integral part of the spectacle of the NBA game is watching the large black men at the mercy of the calls and whistles of the officials, who tend to be shorter and whiter than the players that they adjudicate.

In an insultingly irrelevant press conference, Stern, however, admits no responsibility for any of this, and acknowledges no larger crisis in the league’s officiating. Instead, he wastes everyone’s time by describing the (obviously completely worthless) methods that they had in place to ensure that the thing that had already happened wouldn’t happen.

COMMISSIONISTIC FOOTNOTE: For the first years of his job, Sielig was the acting Commissioner and not the official one, which meant that the position was technically vacant. The owner of the Texas Rangers, a one George W. Bush, spent a fair amount of time angling for the job. The corollary to this little factoid seems to be the old ‘what if Hitler had been a successful painter? Would he have just done that with his life, and never been a dictator?’ question, which was the very debate that inspired a high school history teacher of mine to curtly tell the class that hypothetical history was a waste of everyone’s time. But would a country that at least felt like a democracy and wasn’t involved in pointless, murderous wars be worth living in if baseball had been reduced to a miserable, totalitarian travesty? Would I be willing to make that trade-off? Yes, yes I would.

All-Star Game

bThere are players who play the game and get by largely on the strength of physical skill. Others have more cerebral games, they search for mental edges in the battle between pitcher and hitter, manipulating the count and the strike zone to their advantage.

Rare, however, is the player who is able to keep himself completely focused on the big picture, and use a mind numbing level of strategery to manipulate, not the outcome of individual games, but the course of the entire season-- such a player is Billy Wagner.

What was he thinking when he gave up the decisive two-run homer in last night’s All-Star game? He was thinking “If the Mets play a game 7 in the World Series, I want it to be Jack Kerouac-style: on the road.” Why? Well, the abysmal Scott Shcoenwise hadn’t surrendered an earned run on the road, until the most recent trip. Both Carloses hate hitting at Shea. On the whole, the Mets have a slightly higher winning percentage on the road, than they do at home. And there is speculation that Willy Randolph had a traumatic experience with a cow-bell when he was a child—and the clanging of the cow-bell man evokes a Proustian anguish of memory that impacts his in-game decision making.

So only Wagner’s cunning and guile was able to negate the runs that Reyes and Beltran had recklessly put up, and people whose first reaction was “Well, if we lose game 7 on the road, we’ll have Billy Wagner to thank for it… although chances are we’ll be thinking less about the fucking all-star game, and more about the save he just blew,” are considering the thing only on the meanest, and most rudimentary level—regretfully ignorant of the game of chess transpiring in the back-ground.

My other All-Star game observation is that the commentators seemed to be unusually un-judgmental about steroids, and particularly accepting of Barry Bonds. The sense is, and they almost discussed this openly, that they are sort of preparing for a time, not necessarily in the immediate future, when people are retired and it becomes revealed that god damn everyone in baseball was on steroids in a period that began in the ‘90s and might or might not be ending now. When this time comes, both the sports-media establishment and Major League Baseball do not want to look like complete and utter jack-asses—and want to avoid inquiries into what role the people who made money selling tickets and providing commentary on the home-run races of the ‘90s had in encouraging, implicitly or otherwise, the chemicals that made these races possible.

The baseball establishment has begun to realize that by being shrill about steroids, they are very much like a serpent devouring its own tail. At the end of the day, the only capitol in baseball is the players themselves—not only their accomplishments and records, but also the drama that they provide as human beings. If the current, anti-steroid stance is maintained, revelations of massive steroid use will serve to massively de-value this capitol; and while being moralistic about steroids was fun and sold papers, it is just dawning on them that, at the end of the day, it might put everyone, from the commissioner to the hot-dog vendors, out of a job.

Indeed, baseball is beginning to realize that some sort of re-habilitation of Barry Bonds needs to take place if he is ever going to posses the home-run record. Since Bonds was always antagonistic to the media and kind of a jerk, they thought, until recently, that they could write him off with an asterisk and be done with it. But it is becoming increasingly obvious that Bonds is a symptom of a larger culture and the asterisk placed by his name would reflect on an era of baseball as well. The only way to avoid, probably damning, judgment on the entire era, is to rehabilitate Bonds in the public’s eye: he has already promised A-Rod his support if he ever approaches the record, something that Hank Aaron has denied him; we are inundated with stories of players going to him to discuss hitting; we are shown glimpses of his relationship with Willie Mays.

Roger Clemens Facts:

“Brother Soldiers, should not a half-pay officer roger for sixpence?”
-James Boswell’s London Journal, 1762-63

-As of now Clemens is 8th on the all-time wins list, behind Kid Nichols.

-Clemens once pitched inside to his own son.

-Clemens was the starter for Boston, in the infamous “Billy Buckner-error” Game 6 of the 1986 World Series. All season long he had followed a ritual of not shaving on days he pitched. After probably taking himself out of the game with a blister, after 7 innings, holding onto a 3-2 lead, he shaved to look good for the cameras at the Red Sox victory press conference…chump.

-Clemens has been mentioned as a juicer by both Jose Conseco and Jason Grimelsy, and seems to pitch as well as well in his 40s as he did in his 20s but BARYY BONDS IS DESTROYING BASEBALL! BARY BONDS! HOME RUN RECORD!

-Roger Clemens is white.

-Although Clemens was notorious as a “head-hunter” for most of his career in the American League, he only hit nine batters over two years while pitching for the Astros in the National League, where he would have been subject to retribution.

-If you take into account the 18th century usage, every time you say Roger Clemens’ full name, you also express my exact feelings about him.