Alex Rodriguez, who is the best (as well as the highest-paid) player in Major League Baseball, and who was a sure-fire member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame, has admitted to using performance-enhancing drugs. Remember: Earlier, he denied doing so. Is he still lying when he says he hasn't used any drugs since becoming a New York Yankee? Once a person is caught lying, how can you trust him or her to tell the truth?
I have mixed feelings about this news. The predominant feeling (not far ahead of anger) is sadness. The game I have loved for 41 years—the game that has given me both joy and heartache—has become commercialized, personalized, and ugly. I hate that teams such as the Yankees spend so much more than everyone else. It destroys competitive balance. It boggles my mind that Yankee fans don't protest. Even if the Yankees win a World Series, it will signify little more than that the Yankees outspent everyone. I hate the incessant movement of players from team to team. Loyalty no longer exists, as it did in the days of Al Kaline. I hate agents, drugs, celebrities, and glory-seeking owners such as George Steinbrenner of the Yankees and Tom Hicks of my adoptive team, the Texas Rangers.
As hard as it sometimes is, I have to analytically separate the game itself, which I love, and will always love, from the game as it exists in 2009. Statistics, which are the heart of the game, no longer mean anything. Until the late 1990s, it was possible to compare players of different eras, even though the length of season differed and even though jet travel changed the game. These days, when everyone (seemingly) is juiced, you don't know what to think. Was Mark McGwire a better slugger than Babe Ruth? What would Ruth have done had he used the substances McGwire used? Better: What would McGwire have done had he stayed clean? How long would Roger Clemens have pitched had he stayed clean? Barry Bonds? Rafael Palmeiro? Sammy Sosa? Jose Canseco? The list, sadly, goes on.
If you have a son, sit him down and talk to him about the game. There are moral lessons here—lessons about greed, envy, gluttony, and pride (four of the seven deadly sins). Alex Rodriguez was one of the most talented young men to play the glorious game of baseball. I vividly remember his rookie year, when, as a gangly shortstop, he did everything to perfection. That he felt the need to enhance his performance with questionable substances speaks volumes about the mentality of today's players.
Addendum: Here is a letter that I wrote to a friend:
1 November 1996, 1:27 P.M. Nathan: The annual baseball awards will be announced shortly. In my opinion, having studied the matter thoroughly, the Most Valuable Players are Alex Rodriguez of the Mariners and Ellis Burks of the Rockies. Neither Seattle nor Colorado made the playoffs, but this should be irrelevant to the choice of MVP. The MVP should be the player who made the biggest difference to his team’s performance, even if [it] wasn’t enough to put his team in the playoffs. Rodriguez was first in the AL in batting (.358), eighth in runs batted in (123), fourth in slugging percentage (.631), first in runs scored (141), second in hits (215), first in doubles (54), and first in total bases (379). He also smacked thirty-six home runs. What makes this frightening to other teams is that Rodriguez is only twenty-one years old. Burks was second in the NL in batting (.344), fifth in home runs (40), fifth in runs batted in (128), first in slugging percentage (.639), seventh in on-base percentage (.408), first in runs scored (142), second in hits (211), second in doubles (45), fifth in triples (8), and first in total bases (392). These are *phenomenal* performances even in the Year of the Bat. Yesterday Rodriguez was named Major League Player of the Year by the Associated Press. I hope those who do the MVP voting are just as wise. kbj
Rodriguez finished second in the voting to Juan Gonzalez. He was robbed.
