Pitchers and Catchers Report This Week

Thats the good news. We can all forget about the many ways in which football season let us down, how basketball season is underwhelming us, and about the cold temperatures plaguing most folks not living in Hawaii. Pitchers and catchers in camp means the crisp Thwack of a horsehide ball pounding into a leather mitt. It will mean details of the first aches and pains of the season and first chances to worry about the health of our team. It means that our office pools concerning when AJ Burnett's season will end with an arm injury can officially begin! (I'll take May 3rd)

Donald Hall put it particularly well, "My heart starts to sing like a bird. I feel my wings stretch out and warm air coming. Spring is the hope of the earth. And baseball is that same hope."

Then theres the other news.

Miguel Tejada is being charged with lying to Congress and the expectation is that he will plead guilty.

The perjury trial of Barry Bonds, the all-time home run king, will soon begin.

Alex Rodriguez, the best hitter in baseball and the man we are counting on to wipe Bonds' name off of the top of the record books, told Peter Gammons yesterday that he did in fact use performance enhancing drugs from 2001 until 2003.


There was a great commercial for Upper Deck trading cards when I was a young kid. With this song playing the in the background a narrator speaks nostalgically of Montana finding Clark in the end zone, Gretzky breaking records, Ripken playing forever, and Griffey climbing a wall in centerfield. The commercial ends with something to the effect of "And you thought that maybe, for one moment, you could be that perfect too. Thats why you cheer for him. Thats why you believe in heroes."

Theres no mention anywhere in that commercial the time our heroes had a trainer/teammate stick a large needle filled with a banned substance into their backsides. Or the time they stealthily ordered human growth hormone through the mail.

I like many fans am very disappointed. I stood in line for an hour or two to have Rafael Palmeiro scribble his name in black sharpie on his glossy Donruss baseball card. It went in a protective display case right next to a Mike Mussina autograph on my shelf of prized possesions. I remember feeling an electric rush through my body when i watched Mark McGwire club his 62nd home run of the season in 1998. I remember all action at a large family gathering screeching to a halt because someone uttered the magic words, "McGwire is up!" I watched Barry Bonds swat homer after homer in the summer of 2001. After September 11th of that year, I remember thinking that it was nothing short of wonderful that he was making history at a time when America could use a pick-me-up. I watched Miguel Tejada while playing for a hapless 4th place team get plunked on the hand, shattering several bones, and then make a quick appearance the next day as a farewell to what had become an impressive consecutive games streak. I drove an hour each way on consecutive nights to sit behind the Orioles dugout to watch A-Rod swing for his 500th home run.

I thought McGwire was a one-dimensional player. Bonds a schmuck. Tejada a polarizing figure. And Rodriguez a prima donna. But I couldn't ever deny loving to watch them play.


The talking heads who proliferate America's all-digital television airwaves will have a field day with the A-Rod admission. "The era is tainted," they will proclaim. "Strip all the names from the record books," will cry another. "Hang Barry Bonds from a yardarm," screams one more.

Each player who took so-called performance enhancing drugs is 100% to blame for their actions. It was a choice, freely made, to do something that they knew was less than totally ethical. Bonds is responsible for what Bonds did. Ditto for Tejada and the rest of them.

The blame for the giant scarlet letters which now mar the recent history of our beloved game does not, however, fall on those players. What they did to themselves is tragic. But what the magnates of baseball, I'm looking at you Mr. Allen Selig, did is nothing short of criminal. Fearful that butts would no longer fill the seats of big league ballparks after the devastation of the 1994 players' strike the owners, executives, and administrators of Major League Baseball willfully turned a blind eye towards the nutritional habits of the game's superstars. As homerun balls skyed out of ballparks in unprecidented numbers, fans poured into stadiums as never before. Television revenues skyrocketed. New larger-than-life heroes emerged and pursued long-cherished records. We watched with baited breath and ready wallets.

The powers-that-be in baseball knew something was amiss. They had positive tests for illegal substances to prove it. Baseball maintained a woefully out-of-date list of banned substances which was far less inclusive than the list put out by the much more progressive National Football League. Human Growth Hormone somehow managed to remain legal in baseball, ditto for Andro, well after other pro sports had blacklisted it.

So, like mewling children hoping not to get caught misbehaving, the magnates of baseball tried very hard to wish their collective sins away. Hoping against hope that none of the doping would come to light and that everyone would live happily ever after.

But, quite the opposite has happened. Surely, I feel let down by alot of major leaguers. Its a shame that the game's finest players were not playing by the rules that we would have hoped they would obey. But its not A-Rod, Bonds, Palmeiro, and Tejada with whom I am mad. Its not their faces I want to see on TV right now, its not them that I want to see squirm during all-access interviews. I want to see every person who made a dime off of major league baseball in the last 20 years (General Managers, Owners, part-owners, team executives, and anyone else who had access to info that something was amiss) hauled in front of cameras, congress, and the American public to give a same sort of mea culpa that has had to come out of the mouths of our heroes.

The players did not do justice to themselves. The owners, execs, and the commissioner's office have not done justice to the greatest game ever invented.

Thats the real crime.