If I were San Francisco Giants president Peter Magowan, I’d do something a little unorthodox at the team’s home opener on Thursday. I’d run a clip of President Clinton talking about baseball’s steroid scandal on the screen right before the game. Leave it to Clinton to have perfect pitch when it comes to the moral and human dimensions of the scandal. On CNN’s “Larry King Live” Friday night, the former president called Major League Baseball’s steroids frenzy “hypocritical.” And as he talked, his face darkened with disdain, and you could tell he saw the steroids mess as linked to certain other witch hunts in culture and politics from the not too distant past, and he was disgusted.
Just as Clinton was impeached for lying under oath about his nobody’s-business White House affair, so is San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds most likely to get in serious trouble if he, too, lied under oath about abusing steroids and other questionable substances (before they were banned by baseball), when he testified before a federal grand jury investigating the mysterious Bay Area Lab Co-Operative in December 2003. Clinton never mentioned Bonds’ name, but he went to bat for the embattled superstar nonetheless. Asked about the scandal, Clinton went into a slow burn:
“First of all, keep in mind that as I understand it Major League Baseball did not adopt a clear, unequivocal ban on steroid use with consequences, like the Olympics has had for years, until recently … Well, my experience is in politics and everything else, if you’re in a great contest with high stakes, people will do what it takes to win within the framework of the rules … It’s clear now that there is an overwhelming, perhaps unanimous consensus among the owners and the players and the representatives and the media that steroid use is not only bad for the players, it’s bad for the game and it’s wrong, and it should be banned and there should be consequences for violating the ban … But I think we have to be careful looking back before that was the rule and even before that was the consensus … We need to remember that baseball itself was highly ambivalent about doing anything about this, facing the truth and having strict rules for years and years and years. So now we have the rules. Let’s go forward and enforce them. But I think … looking back and looking down on people and trying to claim that, you know, things that happened five, 10 years ago in their careers weren’t real because they did this — I think that’s a little hypocritical. Where were we then and why didn’t we ban it then if that’s the way we feel?”
Remember what it felt like to have a president so lucid? What would it take to have baseball leadership half as smart?
I don’t expect to see Clinton on the Giants’ Jumbotron Thursday because it would take a kind of courage and character almost nobody seems to have in baseball today. If you’re Peter Magowan, you’d have to be ready to stand up and say, “This is wrong, baseball ostracizing a player after nearly a decade of colluding with the chemistry that brought the game back from its knees after the strike!” You’d have to be ready to say, “If Barry’s guilty, I’m guilty, and Bud Selig is guilty and…!” Remember that great scene in the movie “In and Out,” where to support the banished gay teacher everyone stands up and says, “I’m gay!” Like that. And I don’t expect to see it.
It doesn’t cost me nearly as much as it would cost Magowan, but I can and I will say: It’s wrong for baseball to crack down on Bonds retroactively after nearly a decade of colluding with the chemistry that brought the game back from its knees after the baseball strike. And, oh yeah, if Barry’s guilty, Bud Selig is guilty, Peter Magowan is guilty, and, yes, I’m guilty.
My guilt attack is brought on by finally reading “Game of Shadows: Barry Bonds, BALCO and the Steroids Scandal That Rocked Professional Sports,” as the baseball season opened this past weekend. As the book’s major scoops have trickled out in the San Francisco Chronicle over the last two years I’ve criticized the reporting from Lance Williams and Mark Fainaru-Wada, whose other work I have admired; I worried that, in this case, they’d merely been spoon-fed damning information about Bonds by his enemies. But I owed it to them to look at all their work.
I owed it to myself as well, because I am one of Barry Bonds’ last defenders, outside of his family and people he pays. Like Magowan, I’m guilty of tuning out evidence that Bonds cheated. I’ve simply defended him, thrilling to the sweetest swing in the game, luxuriating in almost 14 years of San Francisco baseball joy, most of it thanks to Bonds. I rationalize my selective hearing by reminding people I was raised a baby New York Mets fan in the 1960s, when the Yankees won every year and the Mets were a joke. Isn’t baseball all about rooting for the unloved, the underdog? I grew up always picking the least well-liked player as my favorite, and since I became a Giants fan, strangely that’s often left me the superstar Bonds. Pre-steroid scandal, I was convinced that many of his popularity problems related to his being black. Post-steroid scandal, well, we’ll get to that.
So I read “Game of Shadows,” and it hurt. It’s a good book, a very well-told story, about way more than Bonds. It’s mostly the tale of BALCO founder Victor Conte, from Tower of Power to prison; with a well-developed subplot about Bonds’ “trainer” and likely steroid-purveyor Greg Anderson, from his boyhood with Bonds on the Bay Area Peninsula to Anderson’s father’s murder, to Anderson’s own sad life as a gym rat and sports groupie. There’s a fascinating Olympics track and field plot in which we learn about the ambition, tangled love lives and alleged doping histories of Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, C.J. Hunter, Michelle Collins, Kelli White and others. It’s a much better book than I expected, and a better book than I wanted it to be. It comes fairly close to nailing Bonds for steroid use, as data from both Conte’s and Anderson’s files show dates, times and places Bonds allegedly used various steroids and performance-enhancing drugs.
And yet, with only the Conte and Anderson data, you might be able to convince yourself, as Bonds tried to convince the grand jury, that the superstar really didn’t know what he was putting in and on his body. He famously told the jurors that he was using Conte’s compounds “the cream” and “the clear” for his arthritis, he didn’t know what they contained — and they didn’t even work. Given that Conte and Anderson don’t come off as entirely straight-up fellows, there’s no real integrity penalty for believing Bonds. What makes suspension of disbelief harder is the testimony of Bonds’ supposed girlfriend Kimberly Bell. Williams and Fainaru-Wada didn’t have Bell as a source when I wrote about their story on Bonds’ leaked grand jury testimony, and said they hadn’t landed a knockout punch.
Bell makes Bonds’ aging-athlete laments about “pain” driving him to try anything (but he didn’t know it was steroids!) much more difficult to believe. It’s Bell who ties together the spotty, pseudoscientific note-taking of two shady characters, Conte and Anderson, with other details. It’s Bell who insists Bonds told her he was using steroids; and it’s Bell who supplies the evidence of steroid abuse that almost no one else can: She says he’s got acne on his back, his hair’s falling out, his testicles are shrinking and he suffers frequent sexual dysfunction and irrational rage — all known side effects of juicing. Bell gives the book a ring of truth Conte’s crazy braggadocio and Anderson’s sad self-promoting stories just can’t. While it’s true she could be fabricating certain details of the changes to Bonds’ body, her account is given credibility because she saved notes from Bonds and his financial managers along with check stubs and, maybe most damaging, plenty of voice-mail tapes.
Still, if Kimberly Bell makes the steroid allegations more credible, she makes the whole narrative — the whole investigation really — much more tragic and tawdry. According to Bell, she began dating Bonds while he was still married to his Swedish wife, Sun. They had a great run while he was between wives, but then one day he showed up with one Liz Watson installed at his condo, and soon Barry and Liz were married — because, Bell tells us, Bonds told her he couldn’t marry a white woman again, and Watson was black. Disappointed in Bonds’ decision to get married, Bell nonetheless continued their relationship much the way it was. But, she tells the authors, it was never the same. Bonds promised to buy Bell a home in spring-training heaven Scottsdale, Ariz., allegedly with tax-free proceeds from his autographing sessions at card shows and other venues (tax evasion, not steroid use, could ultimately be what brings Bonds down). After a messy unraveling, he backed out of the deal, while leaving apparently incriminating and sometimes threatening voice mails for Bell. She had a strange and useful habit of simply tossing the voice-mail tapes into a drawer, and not erasing them, when they got full. I never did that, back when I had voice mail tapes, but I’m sure other people did.
If you’re a Bonds fan, especially a female Bonds fan, this is some of the toughest reading in “Game of Shadows.” He’s threatening, abusive, mostly just verbally though at one point Bell says he grabbed her by the neck and scared her. (Apparently he loves asking men and women who don’t immediately do what he asks, “Did I fuckin’ stutter?”) Still, she stayed with him until he dumped her, and she fought back the only way she knew how: She decided to write a book. In early 2005 she enlisted writer Aphrodite Jones and went on Geraldo Rivera’s Fox News show to tell her story (no wonder Clinton felt sympathetic). Sometime after that, she hooked up with the authors of “Game of Shadows.”
But Kimberly Bell isn’t the star of “Game of Shadows.” In many ways that role goes to IRS criminal investigator Jeff Novitzky. We meet Novitzky going through the garbage outside Conte’s BALCO; he began in the fall of 2002, as the Giants were gearing up for the World Series. Novitzky’s got a major league hard-on for Bonds. He just knows Bonds is cheating. Plus, “He’s such an asshole to the press,” he tells another IRS agent. Novitzky joins Bonds’ gym, watches him and Anderson. He finds some incriminating notes about Bonds’ supposed juicing schedule in the garbage.
But Novitzky doesn’t really get lucky until he finds Bell. After Bell’s story went on Fox, she got a call from Novitzky, and the rest is, well, “Game of Shadows.” Without Bell’s insistence that Bonds told her he was using steroids to compete with “the great white hope” Mark McGwire after the St. Louis Cardinals’ star’s record-breaking 1998 season — there might well be no book.
Of course the feminist in me is repelled by the Bonds-Bell story, if it turns out to be true. If indeed he threatened her that way, he needs punishment, and she needs help. If he lied and cheated her out of money, she needs lawyers (and she has them). If she’s extorting him, as a feminist I also find that sickening. But there are plenty of womanizing assholes in baseball; plenty of cheaters, plenty of dopers. Let’s face it, Bonds is not being pilloried for treating women badly. What made Barry Bonds special?
And that’s where we pick up Bill Clinton again, who knows a lot about unfairness. Bonds’ extraordinary talent drew attention and resentment, to be sure, but he has other issues. A lot of people just don’t like him, and the book does a decent but not stunning job of explaining why. The authors link Bonds’ troublesome personality to his fairly unhappy childhood as the son of Bobby Bonds, the Giants outfielder who was supposed to be the new Willie Mays but who crouched into alcohol and anger when he predictably couldn’t live up to the job. The senior Bonds could be a jerk, abusing both his sons and his wife. The book does well on that part of the story — and then expresses surprise, and some disdain, when Bonds criticizes his father, sick with cancer, for neglecting his mother. That’s only one of many examples of how Williams and Fainaru-Wada fail to draw the conclusions of the excellent reporting they’ve done. They depict the contradictions of Bonds’ life wealthy, talented, sort of fatherless lonely kid — but can’t reconcile them.
Likewise, and much more damaging to what is otherwise a nuanced, sophisticated book, they can’t get a bead on what it means that Bonds is black. Williams and Fainaru-Wada frequently and dutifully quote Bonds talking about how his relative unpopularity ties to his being African American, and more relevant, an African-American superstar, but often they try to debunk that analysis. There’s a telling section in the prologue about how Bonds was “channeling” racial attitudes from his father and godfather Willie Mays, who played baseball in the Jim Crow-era South. “Bonds himself had never seen anything remotely like that: He had grown up in an affluent white suburb on the San Francisco Peninsula, and his best boyhood friend, his first wife and present girlfriend all were white.” They seem amazingly ignorant, for Bay Area residents, about how a black youth might feel racism as the lone black kid in a wealthy white suburb, even in the late ’70s. They clearly don’t get the possibility that Bonds could have been a privileged, talented son of a superstar and still have been treated badly, at times, because he’s black, even through today.
The authors have a tin ear about race in other ways. They dismiss Bonds’ irritation at the Cardinal star’s being embraced as baseball’s golden boy (and not crucified for his androstenedione transgressions) at least partly because he was white. According to Bell, he used to say, “They’re just letting [McGwire break Maris' record] because he’s white.” The authors pause to mock Bonds — “he didn’t articulate who ‘they’ were” — without even considering whether race played a role in McGwire’s national hero status, or in Bonds’ unpopularity. Williams and Fainaru-Wada also make the former Giant Jeff Kent a hero for standing up to Bonds, but as I wrote in 2001 (“If Jeff Kent Were Black”), Kent was the perfect negative of Bonds — a white, talented, arrogant hothead who was all about himself, but who had the occasional capacity (which Bonds didn’t share) to suck up to reporters. Kent-love only made — and makes — the Bonds-hate feel more racial.
Finally, it has to be acknowledged that agent Novitzky targeted Bonds not because he was the biggest or the most egregious baseball cheat or the most violent, vilest gym rat; it was really because Novitzky just had a bad feeling about Bonds, he knew in his gut he was a cheater. (The agent would even face accusations that he blew certain aspects of the BALCO probe because of his zeal in pursuing Bonds.) When such a subjective take drives a historic investigation, it’s worth pausing to think a minute about what could be behind it. I have never met Novitzky, have never seen him interviewed; I would never accuse him of racism. But given the outsize dislike Bonds inspires, it’s hard not to wonder if such intense personal animus, wherever it springs up, might have a racial component. And then there’s the question of whoever handed the grand jury testimony to Williams and Fainaru-Wada, which happens to be illegal — what is their motivation? Are they driven by Barry-hate? And are we expected to believe, as the two writers clearly do, without knowing the source of the leaks, that race played no role in the way Bonds has been hounded? Sorry, it’s a good book, but it doesn’t prove that. Life is harder for black superstars, from Jackie Robinson to Willie Mays to Curt Flood to, yes, Barry Bonds in 2006. “Game of Shadows” is diminished by not grappling with those issues more honestly.
I don’t know entirely what should come next, for baseball or for Bonds. But I don’t have to. Quite honestly, I stopped writing about the sport because 1) I wasn’t that good at it, and 2) I love baseball and I was getting jaded. There’s a lot of racism (in all directions), sexism, cheating, lies, dishonesty — and a lot of love, courage, integrity and passion, but I wasn’t in a position, as an occasional female sportswriter, to see much of the latter. I stay in the stands now, and I nurture my baseball love, and my baseball illusions in as much as they’re necessary to sustain that love. So yes, I finally read “Game of Shadows” and I’m glad I faced it down. I wish Williams and Fainaru-Wada good luck finally getting at the ultimate truth. I believe they’re trying. I hope Major League Baseball listens to Bill Clinton, and focuses its steroids investigation on the future, rather than coming up with ways to take away records won when Selig and his friends were counting their money and ignoring their players’ ever-growing bodies and home-run totals. Me, I’m sadder but wiser. But I’ll still be cheering for Bonds on Thursday, his 14th Giants home opener and maybe his last. They can’t take that away from me.
There’s not much reason to doubt that baseball manager Ozzie Guillen admires Fidel Castro. He said so five years ago in an interview with Men’s Journal. When asked to name the toughest man he knew, Guillen replied, “Fidel Castro. He’s a bull—- dictator and everybody’s against him, and he still survives, has power. Still has a country behind him. Everywhere he goes, they roll out the red carpet. I don’t admire his philosophy; I admire him.’’
No one cared about that macho thought because Guillen was skipper of the Chicago White Sox at the time. As the newly hired manager of the Miami Marlins, Guillen repeated the notion to Time last week–”I respect Fidel Castro,” he said. “You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that [expletive] is still there”–and he found himself on the brink of unemployment.
As Miami’s Cuban-American talk radio hosts whipped up a storm of protest, the Marlins denounced Guillen and suspended him for five games. On Tuesday the chastened manager repudiated his statements, said Castro was a bad man, and apologized “on my knees.” With Guillen’s job hanging in the balance, most sportswriters attributed the controversy to his big mouth: He is known for insulting gays and admitting he likes to get drunk often.
But Guillen’s real problem is Cuban Miami, where enforcing the anti-Castro party line is a more popular pastime than baseball, not the least because the Marlins owners arranged to stick the city’s taxpayers with the bill for their new $640 million ballpark in Little Havana while depriving local residents of legal parking spaces. The combination of Guillen’s candor, Miami politics, and the Marlins’ arrogance is what has brought the Cooperstown-bound skipper to the brink of being fired.
The city has never shown much tolerance for people who say nice things about Castro. In 2000, Jim Mullin, editor of the city’s alternative weekly New Times, compiled a chronology of violent intolerance that has few parallels in modern America. In 1975 a Cuban American man was murdered after advocating closer relations with Castro’s Cuba. In 1978, an anti-Castro talk radio host had his legs blown off by a car bomb because he dared criticize his fellow exiles for resorting to violence. In 1983, the Little Havana branch of a Miami bank was bombed because one of its executives had negotiated with the Castro government for the release of 3,600 political prisoners. In 1998, a bomb threat emptied a concert hall during a performance by Compay Segundo, a 91-year-old musician made famous by the movie “The Buena Vista Social Club.” All told, Mullin found more than 40 instances of bomb threats and explosions directed at people who had somehow offended the anti-Castro orthodoxy.
A 1994 Human Rights Watch report on the sorry state of free speech in Miami concluded, the city is “dominated by fiercely anti-Communist forces who are strongly opposed to contrary viewpoints.” The HRW reports linked these forces to “acts of repression ranging from shunning to violence.” The reports found “significant responsibility” by the government at all levels, including “direct harassment by the government and government support of groups linked to anti-free speech behavior.”
That tradition continued this week when two local politicians injected themselves into the controversy by calling for Guillen’s firing. The call was echoed by a vigilante group known as Vigilia Mambisa, which describes itself as “a hard-line, right wing, Anti-Castro, Anti-Communist group of dedicated Cuban-American demonstrators … known for their rapid response to calls for protest aired on Miami Spanish-language stations.” The group is calling for a boycott of the Marlins until Guillen is fired.
The problem is Miamians are already boycotting the Marlins. The team ranked 28th out of 30 major league teams in attendance last year. Dario Moreno, a professor of political science at Florida International University, said, “I don’t think this is a free speech issue. There’s a lot more tolerance than there was 30 years ago.” Moreno noted that south Florida’s three Cuban-American congressional representatives and the state’s Cuban-American senator have not called for Guillen to be fired.
“This has more to do with the Marlins and a community that invested large sums of money in their stadium over the objections of lots of people,” Moreno said. “The promise was that they would bring the community together and give us something to be proud of. It’s not working out very well.”
Moreno says he thinks Guillen may be able to keep his job if the Marlins muzzle Guillen (good luck with that) and reach out to the community. “The baseball fans are willing to let this one go by if he just promises to not talk politics,” Moreno said.
“As a Christian, I accept his apology,” said Alberto Muller, a former newspaper columnist who spent 15 years in a Cuban prison. “But in Miami, not everybody is a Christian.” Muller thinks Guillen will be fired.
A Miami Herald online reader survey found 57 percent of 2,500-plus respondents saying Guillen’s five-game suspension was sufficient punishment. If Guillen only loses his job for expressing admiration for Fidel’s toughness, it will be a sign of civic progress. Not long ago, he might have lost his legs or his life.
A simple and unsettling calculation reveals to me that this year marks the 40th anniversary of my coming to New England and setting up shop as a Red Sox fan. How innocent I was in that distant day: how little I understood the faces etched with pain, the haunted eyes, the lips that writhed in uttering “Yankees.” It did not take long to become afflicted by the same symptoms and, in my time here, certain Yankee-related events have been so traumatic that they are best designated by numerals alone: 1978 and 2003. The ALCS of 2004 (when the Red Sox came from a 0-3 game deficit to vanquish the evil ones) changed the region’s mental landscape — as, of course, did the subsequent World Championship(s). Since then, Yankee hating has become more of a pleasant pastime than a crippling mental and spiritual disorder.
It is in this happier frame of mind that I turn to “Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team,” edited by Rob Fleder. Among the two dozen pieces is the funniest consideration of Yankee hating I have ever read. “Take Me Out to the Oedipal Complex” is illustrator and writer Bruce McCall’s confession that, because his father was a Yankee fan, he himself embraced hating the team, leaving little anti-Yankee pamphlets of his own making around the house for his father to stumble upon. It was his own “unique form of patricide” and constituted his identity: “We Yankee-haters, by God, knew who we were. We were losers. We also knew that the devoted Yankee fan, wallowing in his smug prosperity, betrayed a contemptible character flaw. He was not only a front-runner but also a weakling and a sissy and a stranger to the humiliation and failure that toughens the spirit, readying you for more humiliation and failure.”
All-out Yankee attacks are actually few in this book, Frank Deford’s may be summed up succinctly: Y$a$n$k$e$e$s, and Nathaniel Rich’s more forlornly: Mets fan. Charles Pierce, though a Red Sox supporter from birth, writes sympathetically of the proud ethnic divisions in his native Worcester, which — thanks to Joe DiMaggio — put an island of Italian-American Yankee fans in the middle of Massachusetts. Among the other contributors, who range from Jane Leavy to Colum McCann, are Peter Dexter with a mean-spirited, humblebragging consideration of Chuck Knoblauch, and Dick Telander with an appreciative one of Jim Abbott. Economist James Surowiecki provides an excellent assessment of George Steinbrenner’s contribution (marketing genius). Derek Jeter has two big fans in Roy Blout Jr. and Tom Verducci, while Bill James asks the question that may — or may not — have given you sleepless nights: “Did you ever find yourself wondering which season was the greatest ever by a Yankee catcher?” I will reveal the season (1950) and the player (Yogi Berra) because that is only the beginning. James, a driven man, pushes on, with amusing commentary, to rank the 100 best seasons for Yankee catchers.
The catcher who appears most often in high places on that list is also the costar of Harvey Araton’s “Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift.” Guidry, who had played for the Yankees during Berra’s time as a coach and last tenure as manager, has, for over a decade, picked up the ancient backstop every spring at the Tampa airport to drive him to the Yankee training camp. Around that annual journey are spun a number of tales including the story of Berra’s mighty fourteen-year umbrage at a highhanded George Steinbrenner, which was finally resolved in a July 1999 celebration of Berra’s return to Yankee Stadium. The event was elevated by the perfect game pitched that afternoon by David Cone — triumphantly bringing back the memory of Berra’s own role in Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. We find here too the introduction of frogs’ legs by the Louisianan Guidry into Berra’s diet and a sense of the deep friendship between two great baseball men.
The title of Tim Wendell’s “Summer of ’68: the Season That Changed Baseball, and America, Forever” is one that could be used, mutatis mutandis, as we say around the farm, for any number of seasons. Nonetheless, outside the park, 1968 was a doozy, marked by assassinations, riots, an increasingly unpopular war, and a violent Democratic Convention in Chicago. The effects of this were felt inside the park as racial tensions increased and a number of players had to interrupt their time on the field for military training. As for the game itself: it was a season of phenomenal pitching, with the magnificently fearsome Bob Gibson emerging with a preternatural 1.12 ERA (and 1.67 in the World Series). Alas, the season’s hurling greatness changed the game forever: the next year saw the mound lowered by six inches and the designated hitter appear in the American League. The book includes excellent photographs and is strongest when it concentrates on baseball.
The “gentlemen’s agreement” that banned black players from organized profession baseball was struck behind closed doors toward the end of the nineteenth century. In “Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball,” Chris Lamb shows that the ban was maintained in great part by its existence never being acknowledged. The book is a chronicle of bad faith, on the part of owners and organizational big bugs, and of a press that remained generally silent on the subject. It is also an absorbing account of how that silence was finally broken. Key to this were a few white sports reporters, a few black ones from the black press, and the (Communist) Daily Worker, a paper that, until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was far more influential than most of us can quite take in today. The entrance of the United States into the war against a racist regime made baseball’s own racial hypocrisy increasingly untenable, which fact was increasingly reflected in the formerly circumspect mainstream press. In the largest sense, Lamb shows how pivotal the desegregation of baseball was to that of the nation as a whole.
Mitchell Nathanson claims that “A People’s History of Baseball” “is baseball history from an alternative point of view,” and to that end it visits some of organized professional baseball’s most notorious institutions and episodes, among them segregation; the Reserve Clause; the banning of players from the game without due process; the blind eye turned by club owners to “performance-enhancement drugs” and subsequent scapegoating of a few players; and the battle over who owns baseball statistics. Nathanson’s goal is to reclaim baseball and its story from those who have spun a falsely uplifting version, first among the guilty being Henry Chadwick (a.k.a. the Father of Baseball), who promoted ideologically skewed statistics (in Nathanson’s opinion) and offered baseball as an edifying example of individual sacrifice and teamwork (bad). To offer Chadwick as villain is a real stunner to my way of thinking, but in this case even more so as his success in making statistics integral to baseball made possible what Nathanson considers — most eccentrically — to be the means of restoring the game to both players and fans. That is fantasy baseball: the game that takes the actual game out of baseball.
So far the biggest story to come out of baseball’s early off-season isn’t some splashy free agent signing or the abrupt retirement of St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, but that of the logo and uniform redesign of the Florida Marlins. The new look was officially announced on Friday, and if you haven’t seen them already, you might not believe your eyes. In fact, when some of the images of the new logo were leaked there was such shock and disbelief by the baseball world, most people assumed it was a farce, calling the look everything from “Hawaiian Shaved Ice” to “Push-up Pop” to “Rainbow Bright.”
The rebrand was planned as part of the team’s big move to their new stadium, New Marlins Ballpark (which also sports a logo with a rainbow motif), a baseball-only park with a retractable roof to keep the tropical rains away. With a name like New Marlins Ballpark, the powers-that-be decided the team needed a new identity as well. So not only are the uniform colors radically different, but the team will now be called the Miami Marlins.
Gone is the teal, silver and black color scheme the team has worn since its inception in 1993 (and in which it won two World Series), and in its place, as you can see, is a curious combination of oranges, yellows, blues and assorted other bright hues. Gone too is the detailed illustration of the eponymous fish, bursting around and through the logo with furious determination. Instead there is now a whimsical suggestion of a marlin swooshing from some unclear source out of the Aztec-influenced M letterform. Whatever its origin, one thing is sure: The overall effect is anything but intimidating.
In addition to the new logo and color scheme, new uniforms will also be revealed. Again, this look isn’t certain to be the one unveiled on Thursday (and in light of all the backlash, it’s entirely possible the Marlins’ design team has gone back to the drawing board) but this is what has been floating around the ether and seems to make sense based on the logo. White home jerseys with black caps. Away grays with a radically out of place blue cap (that strangely echo the original Tampa Bay Devil Rays uniforms). And some assortment of combinations for Fridays and other games.
Apparently the team’s (and stadium’s) colorful new look is meant to reflect the multicultural heritage of the many diverse ethnic groups living in the area. But you have to wonder if the Marlins’ head honchos learned nothing from the atrocious Houston Astros uniforms of the mid-1970s (known as the “rainbow era”) that made even Nolan Ryan and J.R. Richard, at left (two of the era’s most dominating pitchers), look a tad sheepish.
Not to say orange is a bad choice for a sports team (the Giants, Orioles and Tigers pull it off pretty well), but it does require some tasteful design skill and a healthy grasp of workable color palettes.
Perhaps it’s not the worst logo ever (for some ideas on that front click here); there are always the Chicago White Sox shorts and collared unis from the ’80s to claim that distinction. But if this is indeed the look of the new Miami Marlins, my guess is it won’t be around long.
Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.
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Bill Buckner’s error in the 1986 World Series – 25 years ago today, a day of infamy for Red Sox fans — is one of the two most famous plays in World Series history. (Willie Mays’ catch in the 1954 fall classic is the other.)
Like Mays’ over-the-shoulder catch, Buckner’s booboo is entrenched in American folklore. Jimmy Fallon’s Red Sox fanatic in “Fever Pitch,” distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, watches Buckner’s play over and over on his VCR. During congressional hearings in 2008, U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., called former Treasury Secretary John Snow, then-SEC chief Christopher Cox and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan “three Bill Buckners.” On “Curb Your Enthusiasm” this season, Larry David loses a softball game when a ball rolls between his legs; his coach screams, “You Buckner-ed me!”
Everyone knows that Buckner lost the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox. But what everyone knows is wrong.
At the time, the Red Sox were burdened with 68 years of frustration; their last championship was in 1918. Leading three games to two against the New York Mets, Boston was ahead by a score of 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning. Red Sox pitcher Calvin Schiraldi got two quick outs. In the Sox locker room the champagne was iced, and the scoreboard flashed “Congratulations Red Sox.”
Gary Carter, Kevin Mitchell and Ray Knight all singled, and the score was 5-4 with Mitchell on third. Reliever Bob Stanley came into the game to pitch to Mookie Wilson and threw a wild pitch that brought Mitchell home and tied the score. But it’s the next play that still has Red Sox fans screaming in the middle of the night.
Stanley threw a sinker-ball, designed to produce ground balls to infielders. What was supposed to happen did happen—Mookie Wilson tapped a slow grounder at Buckner at first base. But the ball rolled between Buckner’s legs, and the Mets won in the most incredible finish to a World Series game ever. (See it with commentary by the inimitable Vin Scully.)
Buckner’s career changed in an instant. Up to that moment, he was one of the game’s great unsung hitters. He’d batted better than .300 seven times in his career, winning the 1980 American League batting title. He led the league four times in assists. During that crucial September 1986 playoff run, he carried the team, hitting .340 with eight home runs. All that was soon to be forgotten.
The scholar Stephen Jay Gould (in Natural History magazine) called him “a gallant first baseman and a veteran with a long and distinguished career.”
“For weeks,” wrote Gould, “manager John McNamara had been benching Buckner for defensive purposes during the last few innings of games with substantial Red Sox leads, but after a long and hard season, Buckner’s legs were shot … he could hardly bend down.”
Plagued with chronic ankle soreness—he was the first player to wear high-top baseball cleats to ease the pain— Buckner had been relieved in three previous series games by Dave Stapleton. Why was he still playing when Wilson hit the ground ball? Because McNamara was sentimental; he wanted his regulars on the field when the Red Sox won the series.
But Buckner’s error did not lose the championship for the Red Sox; it didn’t even lose Game 6 for them — the Red Sox had already blown their two-run lead. Two nights later, with another chance at the ring, Boston lost 8-5.
(Buckner, incidentally, had two hits in four at-bats and scored a run in Game 7.)
Red Sox fans cried “Curse of the Bambino”—the punishment Boston supposedly merited for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919—but the focus of the curse that season was Buckner. Yet Buckner did not put the tying runs on base. He didn’t throw the wild pitch that made it 5-5. He did not make the decision to keep his defensive replacement on the bench. Had he made the play, the Red Sox could have lost the game anyway.
When so many others contributed as much or more to the Red Sox defeat, why has history made Buckner the goat? Perhaps Gould said it best when he suggested that in the collective minds of Red Sox fans, “If Buckner fields the ball properly, the Sox win their first World Series since 1918 and eradicate the Curse of the Bambino. In this scenario, Buckner’s miscue marks the unkindest bounce of all, the most improbable trivial little error sustained by a good and admired man. What hath God wrought?”
What God wrought, perhaps, was a curse on both teams. The New York Mets have not won another World Series since; their greatest stars on that 1986 team —pitcher Dwight Gooden and slugging outfielder Darryl Strawberry—saw their careers cut short by drug abuse. In 2007 and 2008, the team crumbled down the stretch and missed the playoffs. And this year, the Red Sox, who seemingly broke the Curse by winning the World Series in 2004 and 2007, suffered the all-time worst collapse in baseball history, losing 20 of their last 27 games.
But that was kid’s play for what God had in mind for Donnie Moore. Red Sox fans were quick to forget that they never would have had a crack at their own little tragedy had it not been for Donnie Moore. Boston made it to the World Series by beating the then-Anaheim Angels in the American League Championship Series. After four games, they were in better shape against the Red Sox than the Red Sox ever were against the Mets.
On Oct. 12, 1986, playing in Anaheim, the Angels were up three games to one with a 5-2 lead going into the top of the ninth. Then, a real curse revealed itself. Don Baylor hit a two-run homer to make it 5-4. Moore had been a fine relief pitcher that season, tallying 21 saves. With two outs and the tying run at second, Moore got two strikes on Dave Henderson, then tried to slip a fastball by the Red Sox outfielder. The pitch changed his life. Henderson slammed it to deep left field for a two-run homer. On TV, Al Michaels screamed, “Unbelievable! Astonishing! With one strike away Anaheim Stadium was one strike away from turning into Fantasyland! You’re looking at one for the ages here!”
Like Buckner, Moore was damned for losing the big one. What was forgotten is that the Angels came back to tie it, and Moore, still in the game, induced Jim Rice to ground into a double play. But in the 11th, the Red Sox scored another run off Moore on a sac fly by – of course – Dave Henderson. The Angels lost 7-6.
But that still left them with two chances to win their first-ever pennant and trip to the World Series. The Sox blasted the Angels pitching for 19 runs over two games and went on to meet their destiny against the Mets, without the slightest thought that they owed a great big ugly debt to sheer luck – one that would soon be repaid with interest.
Still, to Angels fans, it had all come down to the pitch that Donnie Moore threw to Dave Henderson. All the subsequent chances that they lost were the evil spawn of that one pitch.
For the next two years, Moore couldn’t walk out on the field without being booed, crushed and heckled. When he left the ballpark, fans were lineup to scream insults, even when he won. Moore began to drink heavily and his talents eroded. On July 18, 1989, Moore got into a shouting fight with his wife at their home in Anaheim Hills. He went to his closet, got an automatic pistol and, in front of his children, shot his wife and one of his daughters. The daughter drove herself and her mother to the hospital; they survived. Moore did not. Back in the house, with his son pleading for him to drop the gun, Moore shot and killed himself.
Now that is tragedy. That puts Bill Buckner’s error in perspective. It’s only a game, unless you choose to regard it as something more.
Meanwhile, the infamous Buckner ball, once owned by Charlie Sheen, is up for auction on eBay, asking price $1 million. The bid will close at the exact minute of the 25th anniversary of the play.
Now a successful businessman, Buckner has lived down the error by turning the joke on himself. On “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he won the cheers of a New York crowd by catching a baby dropped from a burning building.
In 2008, he threw out the first pitch of the Red Sox home opener and got a standing ovation from the sell-out crowd. Somewhere, one has to feel, the Bambino himself was applauding.
Despite recent odes to “post-racial” sensibilities, persistent racial wage and unemployment gaps show that prejudice is alive and well in America. Nonetheless, that truism is often angrily denied or willfully ignored in our society, in part, because prejudice is so much more difficult to recognize on a day-to-day basis. As opposed to the Jim Crow era of white hoods and lynch mobs, 21st century American bigotry is now more often an unseen crime of the subtle and the reflexive — and the crime scene tends to be the shadowy nuances of hiring decisions, performance evaluations and plausible deniability.
Thankfully, though, we now have baseball to help shine a light on the problem so that everyone can see it for what it really is.
Today, Major League Baseball games using QuesTec’s computerized pitch-monitoring system are the most statistically quantifiable workplaces in America. Match up QuesTec’s accumulated data with demographic information about who is pitching and who is calling balls and strikes, and you get the indisputable proof of how ethnicity does indeed play a part in discretionary decisions of those in power positions.
This is exactly what Southern Methodist University’s researchers did when they examined more than 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008. Their findings say as much about the enduring relationship between sports and bigotry as they do about the synaptic nature of racism in all of American society.
First and foremost, SMU found that home-plate umpires call disproportionately more strikes for pitchers in their same ethnic group. Because most home-plate umpires are white, this has been a big form of racial privilege for white pitchers, who researchers show are, on average, getting disproportionately more of the benefit of the doubt on close calls.
Second, SMU researchers found that “minority pitchers reacted to umpire bias by playing it safe with the pitches they threw in a way that actually harmed their performance and statistics.” Basically, these hurlers adjusted to the white umpires’ artificially narrower strike zone by throwing pitches down the heart of the plate, where they were easier for batters to hit.
Finally, and perhaps most important, the data suggest that racial bias is probably operating at a subconscious level, where the umpire doesn’t even recognize it.
To document this, SMU compared the percentage of strikes called in QuesTec-equipped ballparks versus non-QuesTec parks. Researchers found that umpires’ racial biases diminished when they knew they were being monitored by the computer.
Same thing for high-profile moments. During those important points in games when umpires knew fans were more carefully watching the calls, the racial bias all but vanished. Likewise, the same-race preference was less pronounced at high-attendance games, where umps knew there would be more crowd scrutiny.
Though gleaned from baseball, these findings transcend athletics by providing a larger lesson about conditioned behavior in an institutionally racist society.
Whether the workplace is a baseball diamond, a factory floor or an office, when authority figures realize they are being scrutinized, they are more cognizant of their own biases — and more likely to try to stop them before they unduly influence their behavior. But in lower-profile interludes, when the workplace isn’t scrutinized and decisions are happening on psychological autopilot, pre-programmed biases can take over.
Thus, the inherent problem of today’s pervasive “post-racial” fallacy. By perpetuating the lie that racism doesn’t exist, pretending that bigotry is not a workplace problem anymore, and resisting governmental efforts to halt such prejudice, we create the environment for our ugly subconscious to rule. In doing so, we consequently reduce the potential for much-needed self-correction.
A contrite Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen gestures at a news conference on Tuesday. (Credit: AP/Lynne Sladky) 
(Credit: AP) 
