A Fraud is A-Rod

Asterisks in the Hall of Fame?
Sure, But include apartheid era
By Terrance Gavan
With the Alex Rodriguez admission of duplicity regarding his use of steroids comes a bellowed demand for redress of an era.
An era that seems to line up increasingly in favor of Jose Canseco’s rabid anecdotal steroid prognostications and against the gentler, kinder, vaguely naïve, and more muzzled form-enhancing meanders and ruminations of baseball’s hardball, hard-nut commissioner Bud Selig.
Canseco wrote once that 60 to 80 percent of ballplayers in the late eighties, nineties and beyond were motoring around the basepaths juiced, cleared, or needled.
Canseco was tarred, feathered, and pilloried for his then outlandish output. Many sportswriters, broadcasters, owners, and a broad swath of the lumpen baseball proletariat felt that Canseco had taken too many pop-ups to the melon. Or that he was ingratiating himself to the loopy conspiracy theorists in some Oliver Stoney claw for a prodigious publishing payday and a large advance on his next book.
This latest admission of steroid use by A-Rod, once thought to be the poster boy for Selig’s less jaded version of events, comprises a blunt force fungo bat blow to baseball that enhances the demarcation of what has come to be known in the modern baseball lexicon as “the steroid era.”
This all coming on the heels of a very convincing interview A-Rod did with heralded CBS baseball insider and analyst Katie Couric a short while back. Look, I love Katie, but for gosh sakes, if we want to prod and poke a grumbling and mumbling baseball bear, let’s get someone who knows what the heck they’re asking and why. Someone who possesses at least a modicum of baseball bona fides, and someone schooled in the art of the quick-quip and jive.
Where’s Howard Cosell when you need him?
A-Rod lied in that interview with Couric, everyone’s favorite whitebread, lob-ball chucking media darling, and there’s very little he could say right now that would promulgate a belief that he’s telling the truth now. The admission conveniently covers only three years of his career. And it eschews any damning admission of performance enhancing in the period after steroid use was specifically banned by major league baseball - and the dulcetly duplicit Selig - in 2004.
Sorry A-Rod but the mea culpa looks a little too natty, neat, nifty and nimble. As in, “Rod be nimble, Rod be quick; Rod beat those newsmen away with slick schtick.”
A-Rod, like a lot of similarly disenfranchised switch hitters, is now playing for a stake in baseball’s greener field: Enshrinement in the Hall of Fame. Cooperstown is calling. But the walls surrounding that halcyon stage and green, green grass of home are crumbling under the weight of a looming asterisk.
Sportswriters who vote yearly on Hall of Fame nominees are seriously advocating adding an asterisk to the whole era. An era where Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and then Barry Bonds were credited with renewing the fan base after a debilitating lockout and strike in 1994-95. They brought people back to the parks and the corporate boxes because of their unique penchant for ripping cover from ball.
In the same time frame, Roger Clemens asserted himself as one of the greatest pitchers of all time. Prodigious hitting, superhuman pitching, and maturing veterans playing quixotic games, tilting at separate windmills of time and age. Getting better like Bordeaux wine in weather-beaten old oak casks.
Someone should have asked the right questions back then. Facts remain. Arms break, old hitters slump, numbers go down with age. Dorian Gray had that weathered portrait in the attic. Baseball had the roids, the bulls, the junk, the gear, and the clear. Sportswriters, owners, commissioners never thought to traipse up to the cobwebbed old garret to investigate why shirt sizes, necks, bat speed and deliveries rose so exponentially. Why the old guys were suddenly flourishing in their declining years. The curious case of Benjamin Button hit baseball long before Brad Pitt put us all to sleep this year in a Multiplex.
Nothing much is new here. Baseball’s list of cheaters is long and legend. Gaylord Perry juiced the ball. Legions of hitters corked their bats. When hitting percentages dropped, baseball lowered the mounds. When pitching suffered, baseball raised the mounds. The ball was wound tighter when baseball realized the fan power of the parked pitch. Teams regularly moved outfields in or out to accommodate team strengths.
Ty Cobb was a racist. Drug abuse of the recreational kind was rampant in the sixties, seventies and eighties. Pete Rose lied, Whitey Ford regularly nicked, scuffed, spat and shined balls to bend them to his will from his hill on the infield. Bat boys and third base coaches steal signs. Amphetamines or greenies, blues and uppers were once dispensed like Pez in major league locker rooms.
Sportswriters are saying that we should mark this era with an asterisk. Let the McGwire and Sosa and Clemens and Bonds into Cooperstown, but mark their passage with that lovely little stigmatizer, the lowly asterisk.
Websters defines it as: the character (*) used in printing or writing as a reference mark, as an indication of the omission of letters or words, to denote a hypothetical or unattested linguistic form, or for various arbitrary meanings.
Talk now turns to the condemnation of an era through an all-encompassing use of that little slice of delicious and delectable punctuation. An arbitrary catch-all.
The asterisk.
Funny little jumped up starburst.
In saying so little, it says so much.
Let it go people.
Or put an asterisk baseball’s apartheid era. That lovely little gentlemen’s dance that preceded Jackie Robinson’s smashing dalliance with baseball’s Jim Crowe hierarchy.
Put an asterisk on Ruth who never had to hit against black hurlers like Satchell Paige or Smoky Joe Williams. And add another because Ruth never had to be compared with that legendary long ball hitter, slammin’ Josh Gibson, who was credited with a not quite apocryphal exit of ball from the old Yankee Stadium and who caught for the Pittsburg Crawfords and Homestead Greys from 1927 to 1946. Gibson’s own induction to Cooperstown in 1972 accompanied by the all-purpose asterisk, if not literally then figuratively, on a colorless panoply of injustice. Gibson, labeled with that lumbering nickname, the “Brown Bambino” a hunkered homage to Babe Ruth, which belies Gibson’s own prodigious accomplishments.
Buck Leonard, regarded as the greatest first baseman in the history of the Negro leagues, was known as “the black Lou Gehrig.”
But that was not exactly the way the Hall of Famer and onetime Negro leagues star Monte Irvin saw it. “Buck Leonard was the equal of any first baseman who ever lived,” Irvin once said. “If he'd gotten the chance to play in the major leagues, they might have called Lou Gehrig the white Buck Leonard.”
Leonard was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1971.
But Buck never got to play in the major leagues. He was of an age that precluded playing when Jackie and Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey brought down the color barrier.
Who knows? With some HGH and an ample sampling of the clear, Buck Leonard might have had a few seasons in the sun, playing with Jackie at Ebbett’s Field, hitting scuffed spitters, with stolen signs, over a short porch down the line and out into the clear blue sky over Brooklyn.
And the Hall of Fame? It’s too late for the due diligence that should have been done a decade hence when Dorian put the painting in the loft.
Let ‘em all in I say. Pete Rose too.
Save the asterisks for the historians. Let the chips from the corked bats fall … where they may.