Sheff, Ozzie, Bud go bonkers
Posted: Thursday, June 07, 2007 8:23 AM
It must be something in the clubhouse water, because suddenly everybody in baseball has gone bonkers.
That’s an exaggeration, or, as we writers like to call, it “an outrageous lie,” but it’s for dramatic effect, so it’s all right. In actuality, it’s just three people out of several thousand, but close enough.
First, it was Gary Sheffield and his bizarre conspiracy theory about why the number of African-Americans in the game is in decline. Now, it’s Ozzie Guillen and his complaint that baseball is targeting Latinos in its crackdown on performance-enhancing drugs.
The third guy is Bud Selig, who, after complaining that none of the players want to come clean about steroids is now leaving open the suggestion that Jason Giambi could be hit with unspecified horrible sanctions – What? Revocation of his parking privileges at Yankee Stadium? – for coming somewhat clean about steroids.
What unifies all of three of these philosopher kings is their inability to grasp the obvious.
Let’s start with Sheffield, who was interviewed by GQ, whose editors had apparently run out of interesting people to talk to.
There are many reasons why fewer American blacks are playing baseball. Among them are the lack of ballfields in inner cities and the enormous popularity of basketball and the NFL among black youth. Drive or walk around a city and you’ll see basketball courts everywhere, with kids backed up waiting to play on them. But you won’t see any ballfields. You also won’t see stickball played in the streets – not like it used to be two generations ago.
But Sheffield sees a conspiracy. He says more Latins are coming into the game because baseball finds Latinos to be more submissive than blacks. He complained that baseball has academies in Latin America but not in Detroit or Brooklyn and takes that as proof that the game doesn’t want African-Americans.
A sensible person would see it as a case of the game going to the places where kids are playing it in huge numbers. If you’re fishing, you throw your lure where the fish are, not where they aren’t. In Latin America, everybody plays baseball and the game is seen as the ticket to a better life. In American cities, everybody plays basketball for the same reason.
Anyway, we know that baseball doesn’t prefer Latinos because Guillen says the game is unfairly going after that ethnic group in its drug testing. He knows this because he talked to Selig’s drug detectives, and almost every question they asked him was about what he sees in the off-season in Latin America, and not what he sees in the states. That proves discrimination, the White Sox manager said.
Others would see it as asking people questions about issues with which they may be most familiar. Guillen is a Latino. Makes sense to me to ask him about that part of the world with which he is most familiar. You don’t go to a plumber to get your car fixed, nor do you go to a barbecue contest to sample new vegan fare.
Finally, we have Selig. I’ve said from the beginning that this investigation of his is just dumb. The NFL had a huge steroid problem going back 20 years, and the Olympics have had drug problems for more than 30 years. Both addressed the issue by continually pushing for more testing and tougher penalties for cheats. Neither bothered to spend millions of dollars to compile a report whose purpose is to tell the fans just how disgusted they should be.
When word finally leaked to Selig that players were probably taking steroids, HGH and anything else that might make them hit the ball farther and sign bigger contracts – he was, by the way, the last person in America to hear about it – he vowed to get the whole story.
The problem is he can’t get the story, because his investigators lack subpoena power. So when Giambi told USA Today he was sorry for “doing that stuff,” Selig called him in. It’s pretty clear that Bud wants Giambi to rat out his former teammates and friends. And if he doesn’t – well, does he really want to park his fancy car on the street in the Bronx?
Give it up. The only thing Selig’s investigation can accomplish is to make fans even angrier.
It’s probably too late, but he should have said, “We all dropped the ball on this one, but we’re going to test everyone and guarantee clean competition.”
End of discussion. Move forward, not backward. That’s what the Olympics did. It’s what the NFL did. And both of those enterprises are doing quite well.
