A Penguin in the Orchard

Stewards of the game

I followed baseball in the summer of 1998 like no other.

A trip to Busch Stadium in St. Louis in mid-July that year brought two moments of delight that describe the mood of the full season. From a first-deck seat along the third base line, I watched Mark McGwire poke home runs number 39 and 40, shots that happened with such effortless ease and grace that I had to watch them over and over again on the replay board to fully realize what I’d witnessed. McGwire was a mountain - huge in physical stature, seemingly devoid of public ego and so practiced at his craft of the long ball that everyone else on the field seemed small, almost amateur, by comparison. It was the summer of “the chase,” with McGwire staying just days, sometimes hours, ahead of Sammy Sosa in pursuit of Roger Maris’s home run record. That he played for my team only bound me tighter to the game I’ve followed for as long as I can remember.

Later in the summer, I watched from my favorite easy chair as ESPN cut to live coverage of yet another McGwire at-bat. That home run was significantly less impressive that many of the others, but it counted. A few minutes later, as McGwire hugged the family of Roger Maris in the stands, I caught myself absently wiping tears from my cheeks. To me, it was the most hallowed record in sports, in the only sport I really care about, broken by a Cardinal.

AP: McGwire may fall short in Hall vote - Yahoo! News

And then came that day on Capitol Hill. Over and over, the big slugger was asked about possible steroid use, and his reputation took hit after hit as he refused to answer, saying he wouldn’t talk about his past.

Now, with Hall ballots in the mail, McGwire’s path to baseball immortality may have hit a huge roadblock.

I watched those hearings with a pit in my stomach that no sentimental memories could fill. Sometimes sentiment, no matter how strong, simply cannot overcome anger. I’d already witnessed lock-outs and a World Series-canceling strike. I’d seen owners subvert the game by colluding to keep salaries artificially low rather than exercising common sense. I’d lived through another gambling scandal, a cocaine scandal, and the infusion into the game of a completely wrongheaded football mentality in the person of George Steinbrenner. I’d come back to baseball in subsequent seasons, despite my own angered and disappointed vows to the contrary, because baseball has always been in my life. I couldn’t imagine a summer without box scores any more than I could imagine living my entire life inside a cage.

But McGwire’s performance on Capitol Hill was different. It was exponentially more personal. Not only had he violated my game, he’d done it on my team. Through the summer of ‘98, I’d extolled his virtues so often that my friends simply refused to talk baseball with me. They knew by my mood alone whether he was on another home run tear or had temporarily gone cold. They glazed over as I repeated yet another story I’d heard or read that seemed to prove how down to earth he really was. Or, when I replayed one more time #39 - a shot hit so hard that, as it left the park, was still climbing. As an adult, I came closer to idolizing one person than I’d ever come as a child. The revelations of steroid use and McGwire’s testimony made that period seem, in many ways, very childish.

It’s not quite so intensely personal, today. Reading the AP article, I found myself hoping that Hall of Fame voters of good conscience will never elect Mark McGwire. Or Sammy Sosa. Or Raphael Palmiero. Or Barry Bonds. Or any other player who’s been implicated in the steroids scandal. None. Ever.

The common line is that we can’t put these players on the ultimate pedestal - the bronze plaque in the National Baseball Hall of Fame - without sending the wrong message to our children. I disagree. If your child looks up to a sports figure more strongly than they look up to a parent, you’ve screwed up. You’ve missed something critical in the child-rearing algorithm: the responsibility of parents to be the strongest influence in their childrens’ lives, in setting values, and in teaching the fundamentals of functioning in a big hard world. If Mark McGwire’s apparent steroid use convinces your kids that steroids are okay, that’s your problem, not McGwire’s, and not that of the sport.

My anger is different. For purely self-seeking reasons, McGwire et al tainted a game that wasn’t theirs to begin with. Baseball has never belonged to the players or, for that matter, the owners. They merely fill a transitory role in a continuum that stretches back to pre-Civil War America. In order to make more money or garner more personal glory, these players ignored their own responsibilities for stewardship of the game. In my book, that’s much like Richard Nixon’s pursuit of a personal agenda with utter disregard for the office of the presidency. The owners of both institutions, citizens and fans, were harmed by those pursuits. As an owner of the game of baseball, I can only hope that that responsibility is never forgotten nor its breach forgiven by the baseball writers.

If I live to 100 years, it’s safe to say that I will have followed baseball for 95. I’ll remember many seasons and sparkling moments. Unconsciously, I’ll juxtapose those moments on the events of my life at the time, because that is the essential broad arc of baseball. I hope never to remember a time in which players who tried to steal the game for their own gain, my game, were acknowledged as the pinnacles of the sport.

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