July 12, 2007--The Croak of the Bat

The first half of the baseball season just ended with the annual All Star game. It was played out in San Francisco and served as a sort of scene-setter for Barry Bonds who soon, with just four more, will pass Hank Aaron as the top homerun hitter of all time. Babe Ruth will then languish in third place.

So it was no surprise that home runs were the theme of the two-day event—the first night saw the increasingly popular Home Run Derby, where some of the leagues’ biggest boppers swung for the fences; and the game itself saw the first-ever All Star inside-the-park homerun off the bat of Seattle’s Ichiro Suzuki.

But though he did not manage to hit one during the game itself, everyone was talking about Bonds’ assault on Aaron’s record. It is a baseball tradition for record holders whose records are about to be eclipsed to say, in spite of what they really feel, that “Records are made to be broken.” Frequently, if the record holder is still alive, he will tramp around from game to game waiting for so-in-so to steal the record-breaking base, play the new record number of games in a row, or hit one more lifetime homerun.

With Hammerin’ Hank still around, one would expect this consummate good sport and gentleman to be in the stands next week when Bonds creeps up on his record. But he will not be there because, as everyone knows, there is considerable controversy surrounding Bonds’ achievement—he is at the center of a steroid-human growth hormone scandal. Nothing other than his cheating by shooting himself full of these banned substances can explain his massively bulked-up body and his cartoon-size head. And all the home runs.

Even the baseball commissioner, who hovered around the ballpark in San Francisco, has not as yet decided what to do—Should he be there when the inevitable occurs? Should he officially call the record into question, designating it as dubious by affixing an asterisk next to it in the record book? And what will they do about admitting Bonds to the Hall of Fame once he retires—will he join Pete Rose, an undisputedly genuine superstar, as banned for life because of his alleged cheating? No one ever called Charlie Hustle’s career hit record into question—Rose’s transgression was betting on his team to win. So what will they do with the egregiously transgressive Bonds?

And then there is the matter of the bats themselves. Like the ones that Barry Bonds uses to hit all his home runs. From a report in the NY Times (linked below), it seems that the ash tress from which Major League bats are made are about to become extinct. Because of a killer beetle and, can you believe it, Global Warming. In order for ash trees to experience the kind of annual growth they require to impart the special characteristics needed for the best bats—density coupled with flexibility--they need warm summers and cold, long-enough winters. They are no longer experiencing these kinds of seasonal rhythms and thus before too long there will be no more suitable ash.

If Major Leaguers have to move on to aluminum bats, with a feeble ping replacing the solid crack of a well-hit ball echoing in the still of a summer night, we might as well watch Little League.

But there is a potential bright side to this sad situation—President Bush, a certified baseball fanatic (apparently it's the only thing about which he is truly knowledgeable), doesn’t believe in Global Warming. Maybe the situation with ash trees will get his attention and he will finally drag himself up out of the La Z-Boy in the White House TV room and do something useful like endorsing the Kyoto Protocol.