Posted on 06/06/2003 10:13:28 AM PDT by Chi-townChief
THE WAY I SEE IT
I look at my scorecard from Tuesday night's Cubs game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays and it's almost funny. My blue-pen notations go through the Devil Rays' first four batters--Julio Lugo, Marlon Anderson, Rocco Baldelli, Aubrey Huff--and in my sloppy, semi-disinterested scrawl show that the players got one hit between them in the first inning but did not score.
Then I have the Cubs' Mark Grudzielanek getting hit by a pitch and going to third on Alex Gonzalez's double. Corey Patterson has a ''K'' in his box. And the next batter, Sammy Sosa, has beside his name ''4-3''--second baseman to the first baseman for the out--with a little ''1'' in the lower right corner for the RBI Sammy earned for knocking in Grud from third.
Then I have nothing.
For the rest of the game.
Correct that. Written in the right margin of my scorecard is, ''Run taken back in 1st inning.''
And on the left margin I have scribbled the philosophical and inpenetrable query, ''What?''
But nothing else.
The moment Sosa's corked bat exploded into a pair of historical footnotes, the score of this game became irrelevant.
As I looked down from the press box on the curious twilight scene being played out--umpires intently and thoroughly inspecting a jagged bat shard, Grudzielanek going back to third, Gonzalez going back to second, the run coming off the board, nobody arguing hard, Sammy leaving the game--it dawned on me, as it did on everybody at Wrigley Field that night, that there was something very different going on afield.
And I still feel that.
In the frenzy of venting and moralizing that has come since Sosa's illegal bat was discovered, there has been a lot of hyperventilating, too.
We all need to take a deep breath, perhaps, and a step back from the scene of the crime and figure out what the infraction really means, if anything. Me, too.
The shock of seeing something so unexpected as a corked bat in Sosa's arsenal is only now losing its effect. After all, was there anybody out there even thinking about the almost-comically retro notion of a drilled-up bat being a factor for any slugger these days?
Drugs, yes.
Alcohol issues, yes.
Contract situations, yes.
But cork?
Isn't there something more modern--helium or a mini-solar turbine or maybe low-grade uranium--that would go into a millionaire's bat and produce better results than the old stuff from bulletin boards?
Sosa himself seemed not to fully understand the post-bat situation and on Wednesday even portrayed himself as a baseball martyr, sacrificed on the altar of media gluttony. Why, the media had virtually turned him into ''a criminal,'' he said.
He was hurt badly, he said.
But not because he had used a corked bat. That was an accident.
Like putting on an unmatched sock.
No, he was hurt because he ''screwed up,'' as he put it, made his apologies, and still the damn media wouldn't let it go.
But there's a reason for that.
Sosa expects us all to accept the modern public-relations technique for moving past blunders of admitting (some) wrongdoing, hanging one's head briefly, taking a penalty, then starting back where one left off.
That works, except when the culprit didn't really come clean. Or when something deeper was damaged.
It simply defies logic to believe Sosa picked this loaded bat--and who knows if corked bats even help most batters?--by acccident.
''Look,'' Anaheim Angels right fielder Tim Salmon told the Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, ''you get a supply of bats, save the good ones for games and put the bad ones aside for batting practice. It's the tool of our trade. You should know, and I think everyone does, what you're carrying to the plate.''
Angels manager Mike Scioscia called Sammy's use of a corked bat, under any circumstances, ''mind-boggling.''
''When you get right down to it, it strikes me that someone should check to see if Sosa's head has been corked--or if it is merely bone,'' David M. Carter, who teaches the business of sport at USC, told the Times. ''After all, it seems to me he took or allowed for an enormous and totally unwarranted risk.''
And that is what Sosa, and those blind fans who say, ''What's the big deal?'' are missing.
It's not the bat, per se.
It's the idea of it.
The ready-made, shoulder-shrugging excuse when caught.
The cynical risk.
It implies that there is a moral wasteland in the little banded baseball world that we believe is better than the crappy one we deal with each day.
You do not take your own illegal bat to the plate by mistake.
You cannot.
It is not possible.
That is because the very ownership makes one always culpable, always a participant in whatever happens with it.
''A doctored bat in Sosa's hands seemed to amount to willful defilement of the game's mythology,'' wrote USA Today.
Oh, of course, we'll get over this.
Maybe the 2003 Cubs will even march along and complete the magic season fans have dreamed of for nearly a century.
But Sammy's mistake will come back to haunt us in small, almost trifling ways, perhaps far in the future when we least expect it. Maybe with things that have nothing to do with sport.
Like when we try to figure out what is true.
And what is merely hollowed out.
Contact Rick Telander at rick@ricktelander.com
Gaylord Perry "spit" his way into the Hall of Fame. (He is in the Hall, right?)
And it's soft and spongy.
Darn it, Bob Gibson owned home plate and if you got to close you were going down. Everybody knew it was business. Grrrr.
No, then it still works. Like when Janet Reno "took responsibility for" Waco (meaning, she said the words "take responsibility for".)
It's not the bat, per se. It's the idea of it. The ready-made, shoulder-shrugging excuse when caught. The cynical risk. It implies that there is a moral wasteland in the little banded baseball world that we believe is better than the crappy one we deal with each day.
No, it implies that there is a moral wasteland in Sammy Sosa's head, if anywhere.
Sammy screwed up. For whatever reason he took illegal equipment into the game and got caught. He's been given an eight-game suspension.
There are, I believe, 25 players per roster at this point in the season, of which Sosa is precisely one. The game went on. The stars did not freeze in their courses and the moon is pretty much where it's supposed to be. It's a game. A game I love, to be sure, subtle and complex and many-faceted, but it's just a game. This columnist really needs to get a grip.
As someone who has defended Sosa on here from the easy, cheap cynical tear down of the man, I take exception to calling his excuse "Clintonesque" or any comparison of his character to Bill Clinton. See Joe Morgan's collumn on this.
it's all about phony HR's and selfish, cynical millionaires dishonoring a great team sport No arguement here, but other than impolitely playing his Salsa music in the locker room too loud, you couldn't possibly be crucifying more of a wrong person for this.
Wow. Settle down there, first stone caster.
No one let this guy around a torch of pitch fork.
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