October 29, 2018--The Bambino

During my childhood, on the streets in Manhattan where the UN is currently located, as unlikely as it may seem, there were slaughterhouses and meat packing plants.

One plant, Paramount Meats, was owned by my Uncle Eli. He and Aunt Tanna and their son, my cousin Chuck, lived less than a half mile from us and so, on occasional weekend mornings, Uncle Eli would pick me up at about 6:00--he and I were very early risers--and take me with him to have breakfast at Garfield's Cafeteria, an glitzy dairy restaurant on the corner of Church and Flatbush.

We would get in line and slide our trays along until we got to the grill area where we would order eggs or pancakes or various kinds of pickled and smoked fish.

Being there with him, talking as we did about things I was reluctant to raise with my parents, we discussed everything from politics (he hated Eisenhower), the state of the world (not good), and family matters (complicated). We also spoke about the "birds and the bees"--he gave me a book about this, The Stork Didn't Bring You, But above all else, in this way, he was the first person to treat me like an adult and not a kid. And so I loved him and our time together.

One Saturday he got permission from my mother to take me, after breakfast, to his plant. He had a new Buick and it also felt good and adult to drive in it with him across the Brooklyn Bridge and then up the East River Drive to Paramount. 

There was a garage across the street from it and he had a reserved spot, another reminder that his life was different than most of my other more immigrant-cultured relatives, many of whom did not own cars or speak unaccented English.

"You know, Babe Ruth, from the Yankees also parks in this garage," Uncle Eli said as he left the car with a dollar tip to the garage attendant. He knew I was a passionate Yankee fan.

"Really? The Bambino?"

"Himself. In fact, you may get to meet him. In our smoke house today we're making pigs knuckles, and once that smell gets out into the street, if the Babe is coming to pick up his car, he may stop in. More than anything else he loves pigs knuckles right out of the oven. I always put a few aside for him."

"Really? For the Babe?" I was more excited about this than our talk earlier about storks.

"First let me show you the smoker. It's pretty big so we can walk into it and you can see the pork butts and cow's tongues we'll be smoking along with the rack of pigs knuckles. We have to be careful not to let the door swing closed. We could get trapped in here and get smoked ourselves!" I knew this wasn't true, that he was fooling with me, which also made me feel grown up. He talked with me as if I were one of his boys.

From the garage we walked to his office where I would spend the rest of the morning helping him add up his bills. He read out the numbers and I would enter them in the adding machine. I wan't sure if this needed dong or if he was creating something for me to do to make me feel important. Which it did.

Rather quickly the smoke oven heated up and fumes from it permeated the plant and poured out onto 45th Street. It did indeed smell delicious and I couldn't help but think about the pigs knuckles and The Babe.

With that, framed in the office door was the shape of an enormous man, and from what I could see--he blocked the light--he was wearing a double-breasted camelhair coat that almost reached the floor and a signature Babe Ruth cap, both of which, from pictures of him in the newspapers, confirmed that indeed it was the Sultan of Swat.

"Are you making what I hope you're making?" Ruth asked Uncle Eli with a gravelly voice. It was well known he had a serious case of cancer. 

"I am," Uncle Eli said, "I was hoping you were in the neighborhood. They should be ready in just another few minutes and I'll get you a couple. In the meantime, let me introduce my nephew. He's a big Yankee fan, which can be dangerous when living in Brooklyn. Everybody there roots for the Dodgers."

"Did I ever tell you I was their first base coach back in '38? Most people don't remember that, but I was. I wasn't very good at it, but I could use the money."

Uncle Eli left to check the status of the pigs knuckles.

Alone with the Babe, shyly I said, "That's the year I was born." 

"Let me take a look at you," he said, "So you must be about nine. You're pretty tall for nine." I walked toward him and he tousled my hair, smiling broadly. "I'll bet you play baseball."

"Not really," I said, "Sometimes on the street. You know, mainly punch ball and stick ball. Also, softball. The guys on my block aren't good enough to play hardball."

"Stick with it," he said, "If you keep growing you never know."

Uncle Eli was back with a couple of ham hocks. 

The Babe reached out for one and with great relish took a big bite out of it. "Hot," he said, "I like 'em hot like this. There's nothing better than right out of the oven. Thanks, Eli, I need to get going. And nice to meet you kid." He reached out to shake my hand, careful not to use the one with which he was holding the pigs knuckle. What's your name again? I'm not always good at remembering names."

I told him and with that he was gone.

Two weeks later, Uncle Eli came by to pick me up and again we went to Garfield's. "I have something for you," he said as we turned up Church Avenue. "It's in that bag on the back seat. Reach back there and get it. Which I did.

"Open it. It's for you, from a friend of yours."

A baseball fell out of the bag and landed on my lap. "Is it . . . ?"

"Take a close look at it." 

On it, the Bambino had written, "For Steve. From your pal, Babe Ruth."

It became my proudest possession. I kept it on a shelf next to my bed so I could see it last thing at night and right after waking up.

Of course I showed it to my neighborhood pals. Most didn't believe me, contending I was trying to pull a fast one on them. "I'm not," I said, not caring if they believed me. I knew the truth, I knew what I had experienced.

Later that summer, Heshy said, "Why don't we play a little hardball. I have a hardball bat and you have a baseball. You know, the one from your pal." The rest of the guys chuckled derisively. 

I went upstairs and came back with the baseball. We played with it for a couple of days and then lost it when it fell into an open sewer that we had been using as second base.

And then in the middle of August, The Babe died.

July 19, 2017--Trump Fatigue

I try to write five of these a week. One a day Monday through Friday. I've been doing this for 12 years, from August 2005, and have thus far posted 3,158.

For nearly two years more than half my pieces have been about the 2016 election; the emergence of Donald Trump; his election; and, for six months, his presidency. On occasional weeks all five, one way or the other, have been about Trump. Such has been my obsession.

During the weekend, when not posting, I try to come up with two or three subjects to write about for the upcoming week. To get ahead of the relentless pressure to produce five. Sometimes it feels as if I am physically "producing" them.

This is not a complaint. I love doing this. I like the discipline, the motivation to think things through and to approach issues in hopefully fresh ways, and especially hearing from readers who half the time like what I've been writing. The rest of the time, especially the last year and a half when my pieces have been disproportionately about Trump, I've received a lot of criticism that by taking him seriously, by attempting to write about him dispassionately, I'm "normalizing" him, and by so doing have been helping to position him in the mainstream of American presidential history. Not as an incompetent and dangerous pretender.

So, this past weekend, with Republicans in the Senate once more trying to ram viscous changes in healthcare policy through the system while seemingly every day there was another bombshell story about Donald Trump, Jr. eager to hear what "dirt" Russian operatives were pitching to spread around to sabotage Hillary and elect Trump, what with reports of this and infighting in the West Wing and stories about our raging president talking back to the TV, one would think I'd have seven things to write about, not my usual five.

But, if you've read this far, you are catching me writing about not any longer feeling I have things to write about.

If I can make the comparison, Seinfeld-like--writing about not writing.

I did manage to come up with an idea for Monday for a piece about Trump in Paris for Bastille Day and the monarchal ambitions of the new French president. And for Tuesday squeezed out something about John McCain and the now possibly doomed Republican health care plan.

But this lethargy that is the result of feeling overwhelmed, I am thinking, may be the point of Trump's brilliant strategy for governing. (There I go again calling it "brilliant.")

So overload the system that we no longer can remember all the outrageous things he did during the campaign, since entering the White House, and even last week. This cascade of outrageousness elicits so much frustration and anger that our circuits are blown.

I don't know about you, but this is the way I've been feeling.

Chipped away at I am wanting to give up and return to my cocoon and my distractions. I noticed over the past weekend that I was watching a lot of television. Not cable news but tennis and the Yankees-Red Sox series. I even surfed around looking for Seinfeld reruns. Caught the one with Elaine at Yankee Stadium!

Having confessed this, tomorrow I'll be reposting something I wrote in February during five days that I called "A Week Without Trump."

Tomorrow, I hope you will take a look to see how I did.

February 20, 2015--Jeb & A-Rod: Mistakes Were Made

In a speech in Chicago Wednesday, presidential-aspirant, former Florida governor, brother of one president, and son of another, to establish himself in foreign policy terms as his "own man" (to quote him), Jeb Bush said--

Look, just for the record, one more time, I love my brother, I love my dad, I actually love my mother as well, hope that's OK. And I admire their service to the nation and the difficult decisions they had to make, but I am my own man, and my views are shaped by my own thinking and my own experiences.

Then, about his brother's decision to preemptively invade Iraq, he torturously added--

There were mistakes made in Iraq for sure. Using the intelligence capability that everyone embraced about weapons of mass destruction turns out not to be accurate.

He did not say that his brother made a mistake by pressing the CIA to "sex up" the intelligence to justify an otherwise illegal war and then waged war based on that cooked information.

What Jeb had to say represents a little progress from what brother George W said after he left the presidency, as part of his efforts to promote his memoir, Decision Points, when he reluctantly acknowledged, in the very passive voice, that "mistakes were made."

On the same day as Jeb Bush's speech, in his own handwriting, Yankee third baseman Alex Rodriguez wrote--

To the Fans

I take full responsibility for the mistakes that led to my suspension for the 2014 season. I regret that my actions made the situation worse than it needed to be. To Major League Baseball, the Yankees, the Steinbrenner family, the Players Association and you the fans, I can only say I'm sorry.

Who knows how sincere this is but at least he fessed up.

July 18, 2014--Best of Behind: The House that Ruth Built

With the baseball all-star game behind us and regular season play about to resume, here is something I wrote in September 22, 2008 that appears to be a baseball story but in reality is about family--

It was early April and the family was gathered at Aunt Tanna's and Uncle Eli’s apartment. After my grandparents died it had fallen to Eli to conduct Passover services and to Tanna, with the help of her sisters, to prepare and serve the sumptuous dinner.

As is traditional, Eli as the host, early in the reading of the Haggadah, set aside a napkin-wrapped portion of matzos, which would serve as the Afikomon. Since Jews no longer participated in sacrificing and serving the Pascal Lamb during Passover, this matzos symbolized that lamb and was to be the last taste of the evening—a sort of desert that was shared by all after the host broke it into enough pieces to serve everyone. Happily, to those of us still too young to understand or enjoy the magic of such symbolism, Aunt Tanna, and especially Aunt Gussie managed to bake delectable treats in spite of the Passover prohibitions against using normal forms of flour or leavening. It was well worth enduring what seemed an endless service and meal to get to Gussie's coconut macaroons and matzos-flour angel cake.

Though I did not at the time appreciate the meaning of the Afikomon, I did love the custom that required the youngest children (boys really) to “steal” and hide it from Uncle Eli. Which we always managed to do with his obvious complicity—he made an art form of looking the other way so that we could snatch and run off with it and hide it behind a sofa cushion in the adjoining living room. When it came time to need it to conclude the ceremonies, Eli would make a broad theatrical effort to search for it, of course--with great sighing and frustration--always failing to find it. Even though the previous year and the year before that my cousin Chuck, his son, and I hid it in the very same place. Obviously stealing and hiding things were not among our limited number of talents.

So when Uncle Eli would give up in faux-frustration, with much squealing of delight we would retrieve the Afikomon from the sofa and hand it over to him so he could do his symbolic thing and we, the best part, would get our reward. The year, before we--actually Chuck--asked for two pairs of boxing glove which through the year he used almost every weekend to pummel me, his pathetic sparring partner, as he “trained” to become the last in a long line of Jewish boxing champions. And though I was quite a good punching bag for him, he was better at schoolwork than in our improvised ring and went on to become a successful personal-injury lawyer. What else was appropriate for an ex-boxer?

But this year we planned in advance to ask Eli to take us to Yankee Stadium, to the House that Ruth Built.

Back then, with the Dodgers ensconced and beloved in Brooklyn where we lived, with Chuck, and me under his influence, unlikely and passionate Yankee fans—you could get killed on any Flatbush street corner for showing even mild interest in the hated Yankees—a secret trip up to the Bronx to attend a game in person was a transgressive treat. Eli, who liked the idea that in their risky enthusiasm for the Yankees his son and nephew showed signs of intrepidness—he himself had as a boy escaped from Tsarist Russia and made his way on his own to America—was happy to accede to our request, receive the Afikomon, and bring the long Passover evening to conclusion—it was getting late, the family was showing sign of restlessness, and some had to make the long trek back to Long Island.

A week later, Uncle Eli told us that through a friend he had gotten box seats for the three of us for June 13th. Though my memory is beginning to fail me I will always remember that date vividly because, as good fortune would have it, June 13, 1948 turned out to be the day the Yankees retired Babe Ruth’s uniform number. Everyone knew that the Babe was suffering from throat and neck cancer and did not have long to live, and so they wanted to honor him before he was unable to be there in person to bask in the cheers and love of the more than 100,000 of his fans who packed that great iconic ballpark.

There is grainy newsreel film of the event that helps jog my recollection-- 

A stooped and fragile Babe, desiccated to half his bulky size, wearing his uniform with the familiar number 3 emblazoned on his back, no longer the physical manifestation of the Sultan of Swat he had been during his playing years, on that sultry afternoon, he shuffled haltingly to home plate where he stood, leaning heavily on his bat as if it were a crutch rather than the instrument of divine power it had been, to take in the adoration of his fans. 

And though Chuck, still harbored dreams of stepping into the boxing ring in this very Yankee Stadium, where not that many years before Joe Lewis avenged himself, and all of America, by defeating in slightly more than two minutes of the first round, the great Aryan hope, Max Schmeling, through my own tears I saw Chuck’s.

So many years later, with Chuck prematurely off with the Babe, now in an even-better, loftier box seat, last night my tears flowed again when the Bambino’s 92 year-old daughter Julia threw out the first ball at the last game that will ever be played in the house her father built, soon after that to be torn down and replaced by a new, antiseptic Yankee Stadium. 

More symbolism.

April 2, 2014--Kill the Umpire!

After a funky start last week that saw the L.A. Dodgers play two games with the Arizona Diamondbacks in Australia, yesterday was the full launch of the official baseball season. For me, a lifelong Yankee fan, this means the Bronx Bombers got off to a bad start against, losing to the Houston Astros 6 to 2.

In addition to a year-long celebration of Derek Jeter's last season (he got one hit and scored a run in the season opener), Major League Baseball is expanding its instant-replay rules. In recent years, because of a number of controversies about whether or not home runs were fair or foul, they instituted replays so umpires could get it right.

Not everyone was happy with any rule changes in America's most traditional sport, but since home runs are so consequential, umpires were allowed to use technology.

For this season, there are new, much more dramatic options available to umpires and, most debated, managers.

As in football and tennis, they are being given a number of challenges.

Up to the 6th inning, managers will have one challenge and then after that two more.

Umpires will still use replay for home runs but managers can challenge if a ball hit down the left-field line is fair or foul, if a runner is or isn't tagged out when running the base paths or attempting to steal, if a fielder catches a ball cleanly or traps it; on a bang-bang play at first base if a runner beats the throw or not; or if a hit qualifies as a ground-rule double.

Though this will reduce umpiring errors, it will slow down even more a game that routinely moves along at a languorous pace. It can take five minutes to check every camera angle to adjudicate an especially close call. Baseball is often referred to as a "game of inches." With replay it will become a game of centimeters. And if all six challenges are used they will eat up another half hour of game time.

Much more concerning than slowing the game down, this new-fangled approach (from this phrase alone you can see I belong in the traditionalist camp) will result in eliminating from the game any lingering controversies.

One of the best things about baseball has been that it permits controversies to fester, especially during the long off season when blown plays and bad calls are topics for endless discussion over coffee in the Hot Stove League.

Did Reggie Jackson intentionally move his hip in order to be hit by a throw in the 4th game of the1978 World Series, thereby breaking up a potential double play? If he did, he would have been automatically out. The umpired ruled otherwise. Probably incorrectly. And the Yanks went on to win. But who knows.

Did Ed Armbrister interfere with Carlton Fisk's throw to second base in the 2005 American League Championship Series? Who knows.

Was Jackie Robinson safe or out when attempting to steal home in the 1955 World Series? The umpire called him safe but to this day, nearly 60 years later, Yankee catcher Yogi Berra still claims Jackie was out. I saw the play on TV and though I was half-blinded by the snowy black-and-white picture think Yogi's right. But then again, who knows.

Isn't that the point? Who knows indeed.

For certain things getting it exactly right is important, even essential. In triple-bypass surgery, for example, you want things to be exactly right. But for close plays at first or home, not being certain reflects the reality of life itself, where so little is certain.

It is for this reason, before they automate everything, including the calling of balls and strikes (and there is the technology to do so), that baseball endures as sports' most metaphoric game.

Where, as in life, there's a role for stealing; in baseball's judicial system, a place for "judgement calls" and "appeal plays"; and a place for getting something for nothing--bases on balls come to mind. Also, for "errors" as well as bottom-of-the-ninth heroics.

And in a world ruled more and more by time where in nanoseconds one can earn or lose millions, isn't it still nice to have something important going on that doesn't depend on the rule of time?

Best of all, there are 161 games to go before the playoffs.

March 14, 2014--The Babe

It started innocently enough.

My friend Lee Frissell, knowing my interest in baseball, sent me a link to an article in the New York Times about Babe Ruth's 97-year-old daughter, Julia Ruth Stevens, who recently visited the other "house" that Ruth built, the Yankee's old spring training field in St. Petersburg, Florida.

Lee wrote--

Isn't this a great story? I always thought the Babe was just a hedonist with massive appetites of all sorts. I had no idea he was an anti-racist who was kept from managing a team because he would have brought in black players. And, even if his daughter is wrong about that, it's gratifying to know he was both anti-racisit and anti-fascist. I always figured he had no politics or social views. I know he drank a quart of vodka, a gallon of orange juice, a dozen eggs, and a pound of bacon for breakfast, and preferred his women six at a time . . . but this makes me like him even more.

I wrote back with a story of my own, a true story--

My Uncle Eli owned a meat processing plant where the UN is now located. Paramount Meats it was called. The Secretariat  is built on top of what used to be Manhattan's eastside slaughterhouses and meatpacking district. 

Babe Ruth parked his car in a garage across the street and, Eli told me, when he smelled my uncle smoking pigs' knuckles, a Ruthian favorite, he would stop by to pick up a few which he proceeded to eat on the spot. Even without a quart of vodka to wash them down. 

One Saturday, Uncle Eli took me to work with him and, with the air on 45th Street saturated with the smell of smoking meat, the Babe was lured in. 

I was about ten years old and he was visibly near death. But to me he was not just a legend by a looming presence. Mammoth in size and, though it was not cold, wrapped in a full-length, belted cashmere coat. In addition, he was wearing his signature Babe Ruth tweed cap. 

He tousled my hair (I had a full head of curls then!) and you can imagine what a thrill it was for me, a lonely Yankee fan from far away Brooklyn. 

The next week, Uncle Eli brought me a baseball autographed by Ruth on which he had written, "To my pal." 

Of course I should have saved it. But back then street kids didn't have much sporting equipment and a new baseball was a rarity. All the others were battered and wrapped with friction tape. 

So we used mine until someone belted it a mile into some bushes where we couldn't find it. 

Ah, well. I don't have the ball stashed away in a safety deposit box but the memory is sweet.

Within 15 minutes, breathlessly, Lee wrote back--

This email of yours is going to take some time to reply to! But let me begin with--smoking pigs' knuckles???!!!

What did Lee mean? That he needed "some time to reply"? I knew he was at work. I assumed he was busy and wouldn't be able to get back to me until after his meetings. Or whatever. But then what about the "pigs' knuckles???!!!" business. Very strange.

But it didn't take him long to get back to me. What should I make of this???!!!--

Well, I'm not going to get any work done today until I respond to your original email. 

To meet Babe Ruth was probably the most deeply held dream of every American boy born between 1925 and 1975, and to have your hair tousled by Babe Ruth, and then to have been given a ball autographed by him, "To my pal." 

And you fucking played ball with it and lost it! 

How poor could you have been? You had Uncle Eli's knuckle smokery; your Uncle Schlomo's chittlin' factory, and your Uncle Ralph's Cuban sandwich shop. There must have been enough family money to buy a friggen baseball. Or to have used one of those pigs' knuckles. 

I advise you not to tell that story to your wife, Rona. Despite a subsequent considerable body of evidence to the contrary, that is such an act of monumental stupidity that it's hard to believe you could ever make anything of your life. Maybe if playing with that precious ball had laid the foundation for your getting into the Major Leagues and breaking the Babe's records or approaching your 7th Cy Young Award, it would be excusable. Otherwise, there really is no exculpation for you.

Wow!

I know Lee has quite a sense of humor, but he was sounding serious. No exculpation? I'm not even sure what that means, but it sounds serious. Even biblical. Hey, to me, though I know if I had saved the autographed ball and kept it it would be worth a fortune, at the time, to me, it was just a baseball. And life on the streets was mean. Even though there was enough family money, if I took up a collection, to buy a new ball. No likelihood of that.

And, by the way, Lee made up Uncles Schlomo and Ralph. They don't exist. I did have an Uncle Harry who never had a job and an Uncle Bob who owned a gas station on Myrtle Avenue. And also there was Uncle Jack who was in the clock and watch business, decidedly not in the non-kosher, treif food business. And if he didn't live all the way out on Long Island, if he had known we were using rocks as baseballs, he might have come through with some real sporting equipment. He was that kind of generous guy.

But not knowing what to say back to Lee and worried that somehow thinking about Babe Ruth and my, I guess, stupidity, had made him crazy, I thought to try to calm things down by dashing off a bland note staying--

I suppose you're right. I guess you had to be there at the time, blah, blah, blah . . .

But this didn't work. There was more fired back from Lee--

Of course I had to tell this story to our orthodox friend Ed G, who agrees that meeting the Bambino was the fondest dream of an American boy. But he's not perturbed by your Uncle Eli's treifish occupation. "You can't eat it," he said. "But no one said you can't touch it. Nu. It's business." 

I know you're no fan of the hassidim [true], but a pig smokehouse is a little too reformed even for a quintessential goy like me.

Concerned about Lee's blood pressure, again I tried the calm approach--

Does this mean Ed G has exculpated me? That's it's OK that I had an uncle who was in the pork business? 

And while we're talking baseball, did I ever tell you my Jackie Robinson story?

I should have known better. Lee wrote--

I shudder to think what the Jackie Robinson story must be.

Caring a little less about upsetting Lee, though still not understanding what had gotten into him when I mentioned "knowing" Babe Ruth, I couldn't contain myself from writing--

When I was again about ten, that would be 1948 or so, a year after Jackie Robinson began to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, he and his wife and baby son moved into an apartment four blocks from where I lived. At the corner of East 52nd Street and Snyder Avenue. 

It was a mainly Jewish neighborhood with a few Italian families sprinkled in. When the Dodgers played at home, at Ebbets Field, at the time they were all day games, each evening Jackie would come out and play baseball with us in the street. Can you believe it, teaching us about fielding and batting. His wife Rachel would sit on the stoop with their young son, Jackie Junior, and we would play until it got dark. 

Then one day, as usual when the Dodgers were at home, we raced over to the Robinson's and . . .

That's as much as I wrote. I haven't yet heard back from Lee, which is fine since the story doesn't end well.

That's an exaggeration--I did hear once more from Lee--

As soon as we're back in New York, he wants to go together to Hawthorne, New Jersey, to visit the Babe's grave. And quintessential goy that he really is, he still knows a lot about treif and Jewish cemetery customs--that when visiting a grave we leave a stone on it to note we were there. In Babe's case, he suggests we leave a baseball.

August 21, 2013--A-Rod

There was a kid in the supermarket wearing an A-Rod shirt. It takes guts to wear an Alex Rodriquez shirt these days, especially up in Maine where pretty much everyone is a rabid Red Sox fan and hates the Yankees.

As a closet Yankee rooter myself--at least while here--I asked him if he thought Rodriquez would win his appeal.

The kid just shrugged.

That's the right answer.

Because of allegedly having used banned human growth substances and lying about it, Major League Baseball has suspended Rodriquez for 211 games. That's considerably longer than a 162-game season and, considering A-Rod's age (he'll be pushing 40 when he would be allowed to play again), it is a version of a professional death sentence.

It may be that, but he is owed about $90 million by the Yankees over the last four years of his contract and he would be entitled to it even if his appeal is denied and he never plays another big-league game. He has that good a contract.

On the other hand, the Yankee owners, who have come to despise him and are attempting to cut the total team payroll to $189 million a year, have an interest in seeing him declared medically disabled and incapable of playing, which would mean that their insurance policy would have to pick up the cost of Rodriquez's remaining contract.

Ah, there may be the rub.

During the past two years A-Rod has had a number of significant medical issues that required at least two hip operations. But he is now healed and rejoined the team about 10 days ago. Since then he has hit a couple of home runs and the Yankees have again begun to win ballgames.

From a Yankee perspective this should be a welcome thing. What team really cares if its players cheat by juicing themselves up with steroids as long as they hit the ball out of the park and fans show up and spend big bucks on tickets and over-priced hot dogs and beer.

To make the game more exciting by making it easier to hit home runs, teams have been moving fences closer to home plate and making the baseball itself livelier. Who cares? We're not talking neurosurgery or rocket science but guys running around in knickers and getting paid millions to play a kid's game.

But, if A-Rod is past his peak (with or without drugs, he is) and is costing his team owners tens of millions, would one be surprised if the Yankee's greedy owners engaged in a little hanky-panky to get rid of him?

Like maybe conspiring with team doctors to claim Rodriquez is ready to play when in fact he is not? To put him out on the field before he is fully healed in the hope that he might become permanently injured and thus could be taken off the payroll and be paid through the team's insurance policy?

Rather than taking his suspension passively like the other suspended players are, A-Rod has hired a new team of kick-ass lawyers to represent him. And he has them claiming that this medical conspiracy in fact occurred.

Before dismissing this assertion too quickly (as I at first did--I don't much like him either), take note of the fact that the doctor who most recently treated Rodriquez and deemed him fit to play has thus far refused to comment about this accusation.

If true, this could qualify as one of the biggest scandal in baseball history. And that includes gamblers fixing the Black Sox 1919 World Series.