Play Ball!

At long last baseball season is starting. We might be able to set aside scandals and investigations in our collective minds and enjoy some games. Maybe not though. The commissioner has suddenly discovered his soul, or something resembling it. More likely he’s trying to avoid another trip to Capitol Hill where the congressional committee pushed him around like so much fluff last year, while looking into performance enhancing drug use in baseball.

It’s really too late for Selig to do anything meaningful about the Steroid Era. The feeling on this side of the word processor is that he’s trying to clean up his legacy as commissioner. It’s too late for Bud to salvage any personal integrity in the matter. Like trying to withdraw from a war, you can’t ignore the body count.

One theory goes that franchise owners allowed this to happen by design. Baseball is a mild sport. By the mid to late 90’s attendance was falling off. Owners, including Bud Selig, who during the time of his interim appointment as acting commissioner owned the Milwaukee Brewers, made adjustments to the game towards increasing action. They sought to speed up the games, and adjusted the strike zone tolerances (knees to nipples). When a few trainers introduced weight training, everything changed. At first we were led to believe that the balls were juiced and bats were corked, thereby explaining the sudden rise in offence on equipment. Fans loved seeing balls fly completely out of the ballpark and smashing windshields in the expensive preferred parking zones.

There can be very few innocents in this matter. The most innocent are the players that chose not to enhance their physical performance through engineered chemicals. Baseball is not a brute sport. A baseball athlete needs a variety of skills to succeed. It requires thinking and situational reaction as much as fielding skills and batting strength.

There are very few secrets within a team. Owners, managers, and players had to know, so Base suggests that there was organizational collusion in the matter. It’s a don’t ask, don’t tell situation. Selig may be right to try his investigation toward making an ethical correction in the conduct of this sport. He won’t get much cooperation from players, because the union will defend them from any real jeopardy. It will serve as a course correction for the sport, and perhaps a future commissioner will be able to sort this all out in terms of a before and after scenario.

This is a good thing, as left unchained, Barry Bonds would eventually hit a home run out of the (corporate name here) San Francisco ballpark during the 2010 season that would land across the bay on the pitchers mound in Oakland. Alternately, Base predicts that Barry will finish just a bit short of Hank Aaron’s home run record this season, but well beyond Babe Ruth. Argue me at Off.Base@gamail.com .