Albert Bell(e)wether

I have a well-documented feud with baseball. For years I've dogged the sport like Larry Holmes dogged Trevor Berbick, decrying its general lack of excitement and the less than inspiring physiques of some of its stars. I mean, any sport that lionizes a human chode like Tony Gwynn deserves to be mocked--homey couldn't even pull off five pushups. I know at least five non-Richard Sandrak infants that could do more than that. The fact that someone with the upperbody strength of an eight year old girl can be an all-time great leads me to believe that there is something inherently wrong with baseball.

But this post isn't another one of my profanity-laced diatribes railing against an institution all y'all hold near and dear. No, this is something completely different. If American History X has taught me anything, it's that sometimes you have to sober up and take down the Nazi posters. Like Danny says in the movie, "Life's too short to be pissed off all the time". Though I will always thumb my nose down at the disproportionate level of bitchtits wielded by its players, and the soporific properties of actually watching the game, for the first time I am willing to acknowledge baseball's relevance. This isn't because I now find the game any more entertaining than I have in the past, but rather now I recognize its importance as a bellwether for our society.

For better or worse, baseball is our national pastime

Not because of the ridiculous umpire calls and not because of its bastard child--dizzy bat. No, I can reasonably call baseball the American pastime because its events take on more cultural importance than any other sport, though I'm not exactly sure why this is. I suspect a decent portion of baseball's universality comes from the fact that it's the one major sport that everyone can actually envision themselves playing at a high level. Both basketball and football are populated by genetic freaks of cock--7'7", 300 pound foreigners who look like the chinkified version of the Shawn Bradley MonSTAR...or, in football, Broderick Bunkley. To wit:



Yeah, I can imagine being slow, Chinese and uncoordinated. But slow, Chinese, uncoordinated and playing defense like a renegade windmill? That's just too rich for me.

In contrast, baseball has everyman heroes. This characteristic, which makes me revile the game is the exact reason that so many people can appreciate it. The only differences (Purely superficial) between the 5'7" bulldog at home plate and the spud snorting peanuts in the stands is the increased propensity to grab their junk and a big hankering for snus.

[Now for my whitewashed version of history]
The fact that baseball's demigods so closely resemble the average American gives the game its cultural significance. Some of the most culturally relevant moments in all of sport came from baseball. For example, Jackie Robinson's breaking down of the color line in baseball galvanized the civil rights movement and embodied the gradual softening of American racial attitudes.



(Wait, did I just sneak in two "Five for Fighting" videos in one post? Stttttrrrriiiiiii) And President Bush's first pitch at the first game following 9/11 has become the defining sports moment of the recovery period.



Of course, you guys probably realized this relationship long ago. However, I did not realize the entanglement of baseball's cultural and that of America at large until Manny Ramirez was suspended for juicing up with women's fertility drugs. At first I was in denial. I mean how could the man responsible for a commercial this brilliant be a cheater?

Then it dawned on me: We are all cheaters. Ok, that was a little dramatic. What I really mean is, we are all either cheats, or people too busy reaping the rewards of these shysters to punish their crimes. In this way, the spread of steroids and the public's reluctance to acknowledge the tarnished sanctity of the game mirror the ongoing problems in the American economy.

To illustrate my point, let's go back to baseball's late 90's/early 2000's apex. Baseball, suffering from post '94 strike cynicism and general ennui from the young fan base, was in a bad place. Enter the pine tar Cerberus--the troika of sluggers that electrified the fan base into returning to the nearly comatose game: Sosa, McGwire, and Bonds. Through Sosa and McGwire's home run chase, and Bonds' evisceration of previous slugging records, these guys made baseball relevant again. However, now all three are out of the game, with nothing but tarnished reputations and bacne to show for their troubles.

There were warning signs during their glory days--Sosa's corked bat and the rapid metamorphosis of Barry Bonds into a Ronnie Coleman-esque monster should have tipped us off. Unfortunately, lost amongst all the media clamor was the fact that these titan's feats were simply superhuman, buoyed doctored bats and doctored body chemistries (There are those who say that McGwire was merely using Andro, but I liken his refusal to "talk about the past" to this. By dancing around admission, you're merely proving that something is amiss. The exception proves the rule....or something like that).

It's hard not to look back on that era of baseball and not feel foolish. If someone sat you down fifteen years ago and told you that someone who'd never hit 50 homers in a season would suddenly reinvent themself to bash 73, while looking like a black Joey Kovar, you would have instantly cried foul. But somehow, with all the world watching, the ridiculousness of their deceits was obscured. In retrospect, it was an insult to our intelligence for these men to think that the rapid changes in their body and the mercurial rise in their production wouldn't be questioned. And yet they got away with it, at least for a little bit.

And this problem stretches beyond the aforementioned trio. Now, everyone in baseball is suspect, even the White Knight who everyone thought was above artificial enhancement. Even the dude who we all thought was too busy getting high to worry about 'roids. From here on out, any sudden fluctuation in production or additional striation in the ass will be met by scrutiny under the juice lens (See: David Ortiz).

The economic downturn parallels this pattern of performance and denial. Greedy people buying houses well beyond their means and snakes at investment banks like Bear Stearns making a profit off shitty investments were the McGwire and Bonds of this saga; Mortgage-backed securities and exotic loans their cream and their clear. All the while, we were all too busy reaping the profits of these people's labor to ask the critical questions: What is a mortgage-backed security, exactly? What happens if the housing market stalls? Can I really afford this house? The dollar signs in our eyes made us blind. The crisis even has its own Alex Rodriguez in Bernie Madoff, the man who made so many look foolish for believing in his clockwork-like yearly returns.

The story goes for both baseball and the economy: we should have seen this coming. At this point all we can do is acknowledge our past ignorance, trying to pick up the pieces where we can, and learn from our mistakes. I think it's high time that baseball expunge itself of all these cheatadores, and that the fan's learn to process information more critically, calling out inequities if they see them. I'm only really saying this because I hope Americans can learn to do the same.



[Addendum: This song played at the end of the Cubs game I went to last week. It's really annoying and pretty stupid, but I love it.]