Baseball is a beautiful game. Baseball is an ugly business.
When I think about baseball and my relationship with it, the first thing I think about is how young I was when I was first introduced to the game. Everything I know about baseball started with things I understood as a child of twelve or thirteen years old. Since then, a lot has gone into my memory bank, mostly on my TV screen, but once in a while, in person. There are so many great moments I’ve witnessed as a Blue Jays fan: Carter’s homer, Halladay’s playoff no-hitter, Brandon Morrow’s 17 k game. Those three come to mind, but as I start to list them, other moments keep popping into my head – none more so than games I’ve attended in person. I vividly remember the first game my father took me to the Skydome, when the Jays handed Randy Johnson a complete game walk-off loss. It was just one example of how the on-the-field aspect of baseball is always full of the unexpected, both the amazing and the amusing. My first blog was even about the weird and wonderful things that made baseball seem magical to me. The sport has no clock, so it’s easy to be drawn in by the romance of a game that might never end. Time is so much different when you are young. That’s the way I want baseball to be, anyway.
Once you step off the field though, outside that 90 degree angle of fair territory, beyond the dugouts and sunflower seeds scattered everywhere, baseball is a game of grown men and women. This year alone, in the middle of the season, there are many issues off the field that do a disservice to the game on it. Two players, Aroldis Chapman and Jose Reyes, have returned from being banned over domestic violence issues. There are a lot of questions about what punishment standard players should be held to in absence of a criminal conviction. Several players including the Blue Jays Chris Colabello are serving suspensions for using drugs to cheat and there are questions about what kind of penalties are effective in these situations. Major League baseball is crying poor over paying its minor league players a living wage, and there’s a bill waiting to validate their ridiculous claims about what financial burden these unprotected players would place on the game if they were to earn ‘real money’.
And here I sit wondering how much of this is my fault. I tweet about baseball every day and hope people will share it. I have money in my pocket that will go to concessions and souvenirs at the ballpark. You’re reading this, right now, on a site that only exists because baseball has fans who crave more information about the game. This website and others like it encourage you to deepen your interest and understanding of the game. My fellow writers and I all want you to love baseball more, and spend as much time with it as you possibly can. We like to focus on those things on the field that make the game interesting and beautiful. We talk about strategy and analyze pitch location and spray charts. We look at players who have changed and developed over time, we examine records that are about to be broken, and trends in how the game is played. Ultimately, we all want you to be fans of the game on the field. Like some sort of highly educated class of sixth graders, we want that feeling of discovery and learning to spread far and wide. We want you to be happy about baseball.
We tend not to spend all of our time dwelling on that other half of the game. Sure, we will talk about budgets and free agent signings. In a lot of cases though, the Hot Stove, the rosters, the minor leagues, are like a big Fantasy Baseball League. When we talk about cutting a player or ending his career, we don’t have to talk to the player in question and explain why he doesn’t belong any more. In fact, we kind of like to pretend that the grown up part of baseball isn’t a factor when we examine the game. This is, of course, not true. Josh Leuke, who raped someone, lied about it, and was convicted of lesser charges, still made 72 appearances in the major leagues and is still pitching in Japan. Ervin Santana, Melky Cabrera, and Alex Rodriguez are just three of the more notable players who cheated with PEDs and returned to earn large paydays and compete at the MLB level. Every time you see a player called up from the minors, you’re seeing someone whose daily salary now equals their old monthly wage. My point is that the ugly part of the game isn’t just in boardrooms and back alleys, it is right out there on the field. You can’t simply put a curtain up between the two parts. The game has been ugly since the very first amateur player took money to play for a team and help them win, either for their pride or for a bet. We, the fans, and the writers, look at the shadiest, sketchiest, most adult past of this game, and don’t know what we are supposed to say about it.
And I know why it’s so hard to do. This week, I walked through the Rogers Centre turnstiles for the first time in two years, and I headed up to my seat. I looked down on the field and checked in with my childhood memories. There were still 90 feet between the bases and sharp white lines of chalk. Drenched in sun, beaming out of a blue sky, the green turf and brown clay were postcard perfect. There were still hot dogs and popcorn and beer changing hands. The ball thumped into the glove, the bat cracked, and the crowd roared. We chanted for the MVP, we clapped for Tulo, we prayed for a hit with the bases loaded. It was beautiful. And I remembered how things were when I was a child. How can I offer up an indictment of this game, how can I undermine this institution when there is nothing like it in my world. What am I supposed to do?
The truth is, for me, I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to save baseball from the worst of itself. If I worked for a newspaper in the 1940s, would I get up every week and find a way to protest the segregation of baseball? What would I have said, could I have said to make a difference? In the 1960s, on top of what hill would I have stood to denounce the reserve clause and support the player’s right to free agency in the sport? At least those, like the issue of paying minor league players fairly, are clear cut stances in my mind. I know what the ethically sound course of action is.
In the realm of domestic abuse, I understand the direction that we need to go. There needs to be punishment, even without a legal conviction. MLB agrees on that point already. People, however, deserve an opportunity to prove that they have changed. I think that having only one poor choice standing between you and the rest of your career is a difficult position to justify. On the other hand, playing professional baseball is a great privilege, and maybe it should come with very tight restrictions on how you retain that privilege. I don’t know how the punishment and the crime fit together. I only know that the player here isn’t the victim, and we should not speak of him as such.
In regard to PED use, or cheating in general, well that’s a set of rules that’s been clearly laid out in the CBA. The aim here, though, isn’t to punish cheaters “properly” even though that’s the debate we often see happening in the public eye. The goal is really to eliminate the cheating entirely. As the Olympics and the World Anti-Doping agency have proven, though, the improvement in testing methods only dissuade cheating to a point. A certain part of the sport population just gets better at avoiding the tests. How do we eliminate the cheats when the act of avoiding detection is so perverse, and the advancement of detection method is practically a separate industry onto itself? Of course, most important is that we not let the owners be the guiding hand. They demonstrated their feelings about cheating in the early 2000s, when there wasn’t any problem with steroids in baseball provided people showed up and bought lots of tickets.
In terms of paying prospects, it’s another case where there isn’t any ethical ambiguity. Pay a living wage. These players are the talent that will fill out your All-Star rosters in years to come. Baseball hurts young men who will never see the big leagues by cheating them out of practical life experience, while teasing them with ‘opportunities.’ It also cheats itself by forcing those smart enough to see how raw the deal is in the minors, to choose something else. Teams burn millions of dollars every year on bad free agent deals, and if there were one team that would engage voluntarily in ‘fair trade’ in its minor league system, I would throw my Blue Jay colours in the dumpster and start a new website tomorrow. I don’t know how I encourage that, though, when there is no fair deal to support.
I want my game to be better. I want to be able to explain the whole thing to the kids sitting with me at the ballpark, to focus on the mysterious rules about what is and isn’t a strike. I want the grown up bits to be something I can share with them too. I want to have a conversation about how we treat those who have done wrong but served out their punishment, about the right way to deal with cheating, and fair play, and about fair pay for everyone who signed up to play the game.
I can’t do that right now, and I don’t know how to get there. Baseball, you grew up a long time ago, but you need to remember how you saw the world when you were young.
Lead Photo: Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports