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Journal North: Home | Sports | Opinion | Obits | Entertainment
Sunday, June 14, 2009
I'll Pay To See Chemical Manny
By Phil Parker
Of the Journal
I was recently proud to cast a ballot for Manny Ramirez to play in this year's All Star Game — hold up; I just did it again — and if he comes through Albuquerque to play in Isotopes Park, I'll be supporting that also. By being there.
Many likely disagree. My colleague Rick Wright wrote recently: "Now, Manny having committed the ultimate crime against the game, I'd never want to see him ... in Isotopes gear."
Let's catch up here real quick. Manny Ramirez is one of baseball's weirdest players. During his tenure on the Red Sox, he spent some time peeing in the fabled Green Monster. He is also one of the greatest right-handed hitters of all time, and one of the single biggest reasons the Red Sox won two World Series in the past five years after winning zero over the previous 86 (due to a curse involving Babe Ruth).
Yada yada yada. ... Manny is a Dodger now, and this season he tested positive for a female fertility drug that boosts performance on the field, or masks actual performance boosters like steroids or does some such baseball illegality.
Righteous anger from righteous sports fans has pervaded since the truth began to unveil itself, during the past decade, that the best players in Major League Baseball have used chemicals to improve performance. Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa. ... These men used to be icons. Now they're villains.
This anger is misplaced. To get to the root of professional baseball's numerous problems, including steroids, look not at the players, for they merely throw balls and swing sticks. Instead turn your gaze upward, toward the money-crazed vampires in business suits who have made it their mission to forsake a game's once-great integrity to make way more money than they deserve.
There are all kinds of reports out there of baseball players union honchos warning players ahead of time about "random" steroid drug tests. These honchos were undoubtedly suit-clad and probably vampires — just look closely at Major League Baseball Players Association Executive Director Donald Fehr.
Owners knew their guys were juicing; both of MLB's previous commissioners knew these guys were juicing. These are all men with the actual power to effect change, and they let this go on for years without stopping it.
Why? Selena Roberts' recent book about Alex Rodriguez, who put up even more astounding numbers than Manny with an assist from PEDs, quoted former Rangers player and union representative Tim Crabtree: "The union knew about (steroids) for quite some time, there's no question in my mind. And because of the numbers people were putting up, putting more people in the seats, better for the game overall, better for bargaining and all that ... it was just kind of 'Look the other way.' "
This went on with the suits' knowledge.
It is certainly Manny's own fault if he injected or ingested or did whatever to put steroids into his own body, but is it that hard to understand why he did it? He used to be a kid in the Dominican Republic; now he's one of the greatest baseball players who ever lived, and he's worth nine figures. What's the suits' excuse?
America's recession is not the fault of people who took no-down-payment loans to buy houses they couldn't afford, although those people should have known better. It's the fault of the powerful people running powerful companies who sold those loans, knowing what they were doing was wrong. Steroids in baseball is the same thing.
Except it's baseball. After 9/11, some were saying or writing the awful event might be just what the country needed to put sports into its proper perspective. (From Sports Illustrated, shortly after the attack: "The games, and the people who play them, have become so much a part of our lives that we have come to believe they matter. And they do matter, of course, but not in the way we thought. It turns out that sports is no more than an extravagance of our particular civilization.")
What happened to that?
I'm a Cleveland Indians fan (a pox on Jose Mesa, the horrible closer who blew Game 7 of the 1997 World Series!). As Wright wrote in his column, Manny ditched the Indians in 2000 after he and his devil-goat agent Scott Boras decided $119 million wasn't enough to stay in Cleveland. But his combination of amazing talent and startling goofiness (he once made a catch in the outfield and climbed the wall to high-five a fan before throwing the ball back into play, where runners were advancing) have made Manny impossible to hate. He's one of the pre-eminent athletes of this era, and he's fun. When you get a chance to see someone like that, you take it.
His offense of probably taking performance-enhancing drugs isn't enough to say, "No way I'm going to see that guy if he plays here." Not when so many other players were doing it as well; not when so many suits let and even encouraged players to "cheat."
It's time to accept it — Joe DiMaggio is dead. Roberto Clemente is, too, killed in a crash trying to deliver aid to a disaster area. The idea of a Great American Pastime made a lot more sense when stadiums weren't named after Enron or Citibank. Let's just go watch a goofy Dominican guy play some awesome baseball. Even with the PEDs, he's more of a bright spot on baseball than a blight.
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