Ruth, Bonds, Rodgriguez: It's Just A Game

This whole idea that steroids have tainted the game of baseball is ridiculous. First of all, baseball ain't no sacred undertaking - delivered to us by the Gods, as a symbol of the precision of the universe, that epitomizes the ideals of America to the rest of the world - as George Will and Bob Costas would have us believe.

IT IS A GAME. And, a boring game at that.

World peace or the cure for AIDS, or solving the 21st century financial crisis does not rest on whether some juiced-up hitter, knocked a grand slam off another juiced-up pitcher, in front of some drunken fans, who snuck away from work.

Alex Rodriguez’s emotional confession, after he was outed by Sports Illustrated, only fed into the hypocrisy. I find it hard to believe that Costas and other sports personalities did not know that Mark McGuire and Sammy Sosa were juiced when they were sailing baseballs into the center field bleachers like bullets out of a shotgun at a turkey shoot. They were too busy celebrating that baseball and their livelihood was being saved after the 1994 strike.

Costas and others made Barry Bonds the poster boy for the evil steroid era and Bonds came right out of Hollywood casting for the part. He was surly, rich, spoiled, petulant and even a bit bi-polar. The fact that he was black and told sports writers and fans, who are mostly white, to kiss his ass on a regular basis, made dirtying him up in the Heartland even easier.

The Owners hoped Rodriguez, a baseball savant, would, only in a matter of time, take the home run crown from Bonds and restore the integrity of the game. Now that A-Fraud has been caught, we are now left with Bud Selig's hypocrisy. Selig has announced that he is considering fining Rodriguez.

I must admit that I took far more satisfaction watching Roger Clemens' rise to junkie status than A-Fraud. Clemens had carefully crafted the image of the hardworking, All-American Roy Hobbs, who became a Hall-Of-Famer because of his work ethic. Have you ever noticed that white athletes have work ethic and black athletes have natural talent? Well, Clemens like the rest of baseball, including the owners and sports writers, were dirty.

The game has never been pure. Babe Ruth, who held the home run record for decades, never played against the best athletes of his era. How possibly could his name not have been removed from the record books or attached with the dreaded asterisk "*" that so many sports writers and fans claim should be next to Bond's record. Imagine Larry Bird making a claim to greatness and never having competed against Magic or Jordan.

Most of the major league pitching records were accomplished in the dead-ball era. Does that make CY Young any less of a pitcher?

What is most disturbing about Rodriguez' situation is that he was tested under an agreement between the Union and the Owners to determine the extent of steroids in the game. Those tests were never supposed to be public and no player was ever supposed to be subjected to retribution for testing positive. Well, that did not happen.

Rather than tearing up on ESPN, A-Fraud should have sued the Union and Owners for a clear breach of players’ privacy. Maybe, like Curt Flood a generation before him, he should have put the rights of his fellow players before his own selfish P.R. needs. But then, if he had that kind of integrity, his fellow players would not be calling him A-Fraud in the first place.