Stuff to See!

This one's for Jen, who says I should write more

Say It Ain't So, Sammy

Yesterday, he was the most marketable baseball player in America (according to some poll referenced by ESPN). Until he had his bat shattered and cork went flying almost as fast as his reputation shot high over the left field wall like one of his mammoth moon shots.
The fact that this is Slammin' Sammy Sosa caught with his hand in the drill set just makes it more abhorrent. One of the three men who saved baseball from the '94 strike (Mark McGwire and Cal Ripken were the others), Sammy's position as an ambassador/salesman for the game, his amiable personality, and amazing power made a sure fire recipe for superstardom. Now it may well turn out that it might just have been too good to be true. I don't buy for a second the excuse he made, something along the lines of picking up a BP bat...but until the jury's out on the rest of his lumber set I'll refrain from judgment on the relative (de)merit of his incredible feats at the plate (the only man in Major League history to hit more than 60 home runs in three seasons).
Of course cheating is nothing new in baseball. The most egregious example is that of the 1919 White Sox who threw the World Series (see the film 'Eight Men Out' for more of the story, good movie). Without Babe Ruth on hand to smack the hell out of the ball for the next 15 years, the 'Black Sox' may have killed baseball.
Then there's Gaylord Perry, the master of the spitter, who rode his doctored pitches (and the threat of them, no less a weapon) straight into the Hall of Fame. Say what you want about Pete Rose's ban from baseball, but you have to admit he never cheated on the field. He just played like a maniac, hellbent on winning. And he did.
Here's a pretty good roundup of the more nefarious cheaters in baseball lore. The Belle tale is my personal favorite for sheer insanity.
But what this whole controversy is about is the Integrity of The Game (TM). Sure, little kids (and big kids) may be upset this morning over Sammy's busted bat, seeing that one of their heroes was, for a moment, all too human and flawed. I'm disappointed, of course, but I know that there are plenty of people in the game who will find competitive advantage at any cost (at least McGwire admitted to his use of the perfectly legal supplement androstenedione, stopped taking it, and almost immediately broke down), many with much less talent than Sosa, or even Albert Belle. Steroids, corked bats, humidified baseballs, sandpaper...there's a lot of stuff out there one could use to give his team an edge. How many of them do? Who knows...
Another part of this has to do with our insistence that some of these men who play this silly game are really larger than life. True, they've developed their physical abilities to the point where they can do things most people can't do (see Randy Johnson pitch, and see someone actually get a good hack at him). True, we love the long ball (and I'm not even a chick), and there's nothing like a walk-off grand slam to end a baseball game in style (I still remember Chris Hoiles winning a 14-13 game against Seattle back in mid-May 1996 with such a shot...that was so cool). Men are making millions because they hit their balls the furthest in the land. But they're still men...flawed, and occasionally tempted to stack the deck in their favor to win. And we're shocked every single time a bat explodes, raining cork upon the field. And we're stricken dumb when a pitcher gets caught with foreign objects in his glove, on his fingertip, in his pocket, or anywhere else. Why?
They say cheaters never win, and winners never cheat. How true does this play out in the real world? I guess we'd have to define cheating. Is being a brown noser, or a master of office politics cheating? Or is that just using your natural ability? Many would disagree on the correct answer to that question (and no, I have no idea what the right answer is). Maybe I'm just too jaded to accept such rosy sentiments, because it seems to me that cheaters do win a lot of the time. Maybe they're on to something...