February 19, 2008--Pitchers & Catchers
Down here in Florida, baseball pitchers and catchers showed up last week for spring training. While we should be learning about how the Mets’ new acquisition, Johan Santana, is faring with his new team or how the three Yankee rookie pitchers who will enter the starting rotation on opening day are looking, all we are hearing about is Roger Clemens’ appearance before a committee of the House of Representatives and whether or not he is lying about taking steroids and human growth hormone.
His former teammate and workout partner, Andy Petitte, also accused of using HGH, gave a news conference yesterday in which he came clean, though he did not give up his pal. (NY Times article linked below.) So, please, can we move on?
It’s been a long winter, the economy sucks, Fidel Castro is no more, Paris Hilton just turned 27, and even Barack Obama has been exposed as having filched words from his pal, Massachusetts governor Duval Patrick. So it’s time to forget about these kinds of things and play ball.
But I’m having trouble putting the steroid-HGH stuff behind me. The fact that so many players have been cheating in this way has stolen the last shards of my innocence. The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs and cheap mustard, the relentless sun, and endless games are as evocative to me of things past (temps perdu) as Proust’s madeleines.
I’m so confused, for example, about what to think about the single-season homerun record. I grew up with Babe Ruth’s 60 looming as something magical and unassailable. My faith in certainty and the purity of numbers was challenged in 1961 when Roger Maris hit 61, but in a season that included more games than in the Babe’s day. And thus the famous asterisks. I could thus cling still to thinking bout Ruth as the eternal Sultan of Swat.
What then to make of Mark McGwire’s 70 in 1998? Or later yet of Barry Bonds’ 73 homers in the tragic year 2001? Both obviously the results of McGwire and Bonds getting steroided up—if you need proof, just take a look at the size of their heads.
So much, then, for history, which from forever has been one of the appeals of the National Pastime. Who cared about the French and Indian War and Appomattox when every kid who grew up on a street corner in Brooklyn or the Bronx could argue endlessly, by citing the historical record, about who was the best center fielder—Willie Mays, Duke Snider, or Mickey Mantle.
And so much for the mythic history that surrounded the game, richer to these same kids than being dragged though the fabled elements in Homer and Virgil. Archetypal stories about father and sons. Field of Dreams stuff. How Mantle’s father, nicknamed Mutt, a former semipro player, dying of cancer, in rural Commerce, Oklahoma, taught little Mickey, barely out of diapers, how to switch-hit while dodging tornadoes in the yard back of the house. The rest, as they say, is history. To kids like me—the real history.
That’s all gone now. Swept away in the glare of the media’s and Congress’ klieg lights. There’s nothing left of this kind to cling to in a perilous world. Baseball helped folks get through WW II and Korea and even Vietnam. Now, who or what’s going to get us through the War Against Terror?
OK, I hear you. “Grow up,” you say. And though I really don’t want to, you’re right. “What else is new,” you add. “Didn’t the Yankees build a stadium with a short right field fence to make it easier for Ruth’s fly balls to be transformed into homeruns? And didn’t Major League Baseball, after realizing that more fans would but tickets and five- buck hotdogs, liven up the baseball so more shots would jump out of the park and land in the bleachers? And didn’t they turn their backs on the rampant use of steroids and HGH because they knew more fans would watch baseball on TV if the players began to resemble the pumped-up cartoon characters who have made professional wrestling so popular?”
“I hear you. I hear you,” I say. And confess, “What’s so different about using ‘illegal’ drugs to improve performance when it’s all right for pitchers to have Tommy John surgery? Isn’t that an operation in which they take a ligament from your leg or foot and stitch it into your elbow and as a result you become a better pitcher? I hear that they even use ligaments from cadavers. Talk about ‘external substances.’ This procedure is so OK that it is not uncommon for fathers of Little Leaguers to have these bionic operations done on their kids.
“Hell, Andy Petitte yesterday confessed that his father was one of his suppliers of human growth hormone. I didn’t hear much about how they played catch together at the back of the house. Now the pops are their sons’ connections.”
So, at the moment, Obama’s “plagiarism” is not looking that bad. Or Hillary poaching some of Bill’s and Obama’s best lines.
Anything new about Britney Spears?
His former teammate and workout partner, Andy Petitte, also accused of using HGH, gave a news conference yesterday in which he came clean, though he did not give up his pal. (NY Times article linked below.) So, please, can we move on?
It’s been a long winter, the economy sucks, Fidel Castro is no more, Paris Hilton just turned 27, and even Barack Obama has been exposed as having filched words from his pal, Massachusetts governor Duval Patrick. So it’s time to forget about these kinds of things and play ball.
But I’m having trouble putting the steroid-HGH stuff behind me. The fact that so many players have been cheating in this way has stolen the last shards of my innocence. The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, the smell of hot dogs and cheap mustard, the relentless sun, and endless games are as evocative to me of things past (temps perdu) as Proust’s madeleines.
I’m so confused, for example, about what to think about the single-season homerun record. I grew up with Babe Ruth’s 60 looming as something magical and unassailable. My faith in certainty and the purity of numbers was challenged in 1961 when Roger Maris hit 61, but in a season that included more games than in the Babe’s day. And thus the famous asterisks. I could thus cling still to thinking bout Ruth as the eternal Sultan of Swat.
What then to make of Mark McGwire’s 70 in 1998? Or later yet of Barry Bonds’ 73 homers in the tragic year 2001? Both obviously the results of McGwire and Bonds getting steroided up—if you need proof, just take a look at the size of their heads.
So much, then, for history, which from forever has been one of the appeals of the National Pastime. Who cared about the French and Indian War and Appomattox when every kid who grew up on a street corner in Brooklyn or the Bronx could argue endlessly, by citing the historical record, about who was the best center fielder—Willie Mays, Duke Snider, or Mickey Mantle.
And so much for the mythic history that surrounded the game, richer to these same kids than being dragged though the fabled elements in Homer and Virgil. Archetypal stories about father and sons. Field of Dreams stuff. How Mantle’s father, nicknamed Mutt, a former semipro player, dying of cancer, in rural Commerce, Oklahoma, taught little Mickey, barely out of diapers, how to switch-hit while dodging tornadoes in the yard back of the house. The rest, as they say, is history. To kids like me—the real history.
That’s all gone now. Swept away in the glare of the media’s and Congress’ klieg lights. There’s nothing left of this kind to cling to in a perilous world. Baseball helped folks get through WW II and Korea and even Vietnam. Now, who or what’s going to get us through the War Against Terror?
OK, I hear you. “Grow up,” you say. And though I really don’t want to, you’re right. “What else is new,” you add. “Didn’t the Yankees build a stadium with a short right field fence to make it easier for Ruth’s fly balls to be transformed into homeruns? And didn’t Major League Baseball, after realizing that more fans would but tickets and five- buck hotdogs, liven up the baseball so more shots would jump out of the park and land in the bleachers? And didn’t they turn their backs on the rampant use of steroids and HGH because they knew more fans would watch baseball on TV if the players began to resemble the pumped-up cartoon characters who have made professional wrestling so popular?”
“I hear you. I hear you,” I say. And confess, “What’s so different about using ‘illegal’ drugs to improve performance when it’s all right for pitchers to have Tommy John surgery? Isn’t that an operation in which they take a ligament from your leg or foot and stitch it into your elbow and as a result you become a better pitcher? I hear that they even use ligaments from cadavers. Talk about ‘external substances.’ This procedure is so OK that it is not uncommon for fathers of Little Leaguers to have these bionic operations done on their kids.
“Hell, Andy Petitte yesterday confessed that his father was one of his suppliers of human growth hormone. I didn’t hear much about how they played catch together at the back of the house. Now the pops are their sons’ connections.”
So, at the moment, Obama’s “plagiarism” is not looking that bad. Or Hillary poaching some of Bill’s and Obama’s best lines.
Anything new about Britney Spears?
posted by Steven Zwerling at
9:03 AM
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