I'm going to give you a few words. You've heard them all before. Let's call them Group A.
Toolsy. A great athlete. Freak. Stud. Horse. Specimen.
Got those? Here's another list. You've heard these, too. Let's call them Group B.
Hard worker. Student of the game. Crafty. Clever. Grinder. Gamer. Scrapper.
What do these two lists have in common? To the readers of the sports pages, these words are easily recognizable; they are the nomenclature of sports journalism. In point of fact, we, the sports fans, have even affected them for our own conversations about sports. However, it seems that in the minds of most sportswriters, the two groups do not have a damn thing in common. There is a certain group of athletes who fall under group A, and a certain group that falls under group B.
It is the rare case indeed, where a player from group A ever achieves to group B.
Of course, all of this is a bit abstract at this point, so let's begin to unpack these models in terms of actual persons. On August 24, the final day of the Olympic Games, Bob Costas sat down to discuss the games with Jacques Rogge, Chairman of the International Olympic Committee at halftime of the U.S.-Spain Gold Medal basketball matchup. Costas, for once, eschewed the anecdotes and feel-good stories, and became a journalist, hammering Rogge with questions about China's abysmal human rights record, the censoring of foreign journalists' Internet access, and the controversial decision to eliminate softball and baseball from the Olympics, an effort largely spearheaded and overseen by Rogge since 2002. Rogge ably deflected the questions about human rights and censorship, but when it came to the question of why softball and baseball had been eliminated, he suddenly decided to be candid. His answer? Baseball's PED problem. And Barry Bonds. In an extraordinary leap in logic, Rogge reasoned that baseball has a PED problem, many countries cannot differentiate softball from baseball, so softball suffered competitively because many countries did not send teams, because of the negative association of softball with baseball. But Rogge was curiously purposive in putting a face to the PED problem in baseball, in dropping just one name: Barry Bonds. While it stretched the bounds of use-mention distinctions, it was a masterful stroke. If there were medals for politicking, Rogge would mount a serious challenge for the gold, because Rogge quickly recognized that what Americans need most of all is a scapegoat, so he picked the biggest one in the room. And why not? Barry's been blamed for everything from elbow pads to maple bats. Killing two Olympic sports is all in a day's work for Barry Lamar Bonds.
See, remember that rare group I spoke about, the guys from group A that get to be in group B, as well? Well, Barry Bonds was one of those guys. A transcendent talent, yes, but also a smart guy, to boot, but when Barry got a bit too good, he didn't kowtow to the sportswriters. He didn't ask their permission to speak his mind. He wasn't interested in TWIB fluff pieces or sound bites. He just did what he pleased. He was brash, confrontational, and intensely private. They called him “brooding.†A decade or two earlier, they'd have called him “uppity.†Barry had crawfished on the deal, you see, and the sportswriters never forgave him for it. They'd let him into the smart guy club, and he responded by getting mud on the carpet. Never mind that their shoes were just as dirty. Barry Bonds was going to become the face of the steroid problem.
A black face for the black spot on the white man's game.
And because of Jacques Rogge, it's happening all over again.
I'm going digress for a moment to say that this piece, and those forthcoming, should not be construed as referendum on whether or not Bonds used steroids, perjured himself, cheated on his taxes and his wife, or punched Jeff Kent. Those are conversations that, one, lie beyond the scope of this piece, and two, that I'm just not interested in having. In short, strawmannish comments that seek to argue those points will simply be ignored.
The point here is this: Why did Rogge know exactly which name to mention? I'm going to suggest an answer to that question in forthcoming installments, but for the moment, let it suffice to say that perhaps more so than any other sport, baseball carries a legacy of entrenched, institutionalized racism, and that past is reflected in the curious disparity in the coverage of white athletes and the coverage of African American and Hispanic athletes.
Strange Fruit, Pt. II: The Curious Case of Tim Raines
In the grand tradition of the Friday news dump and burying the lead, we learned last week of the MLB's finding of collusion in the case of one Barry Bonds. Of course, as we've been told by others in the blogosphere, and probably will be told by numerous BBWAA members, this is all Barry's fault, and any talk of collusion is some kind of conspiratorial fantasy.
Why?
Because he's Barry Bonds of course, and in the eyes of most of the BBWAA and a troubling majority of baseball fans, Barry represents all that is wrong with baseball nowadays. This despite the fact that, thanks to The Mitchell Report, we now know that a serious steroid problem existed in baseball at least a decade prior to 1998, when Bonds is alleged to have begun his steroid use.
And with the topics of collusion and drug use once again at the fore, perhaps a little historical context is needed. Well, more than a little.
So let's take it back to 1985 and the curious case of Tim Raines.
The fall of 1985 represents one of the darkest periods in baseball history. In September of that year, a series of grand jury testimonies by major league ballplayers, both active and retired, would reveal a rampant cocaine problem in Major League Baseball. Though the most publicized testimony would come from Keith Hernandez, given his previous denials of any drug use, some of the most damning testimony came from Tim Raines, who revealed that he had even done cocaine on the field, during games. 11 players were suspended, 7 of them for an entire season. Those who testified were granted immunity from suspension, but Commissioner Peter Ueberroth requested that voluntary urinalysis testing begin, a request that the MLBPA would eventually reject.
Though the MLB refused the call for voluntary urinalysis, the cocaine problem in baseball would begin to wane, seeing a minor revival in the late 80's, but ultimately dying out. At its height, according to Hernandez, 40% of MLB players were using cocaine. And the forthrightness of Tim Raines, among others, was instrumental in bringing an end to baseball’s cocaine problem.
1985, however, would not be last time Tim Raines would see the inside of a courtroom. In 1986, Raines declared for free agency. Curiously, no baseball team required his five-tool skills. In fact, several free agents encountered this curious disinterest for their services. Eventually, MLB would file a grievance alleging the commissioner and the owners had colluded to drive down player salaries and control free agency. This action would result in several players having their contracts voided and more than $280 million in fines to the owners. Tim Raines was awarded $235,000 dollars. The actions taken against the owners in 1986-87 would open the free agent floodgates for the players of today, and would ensure that the owners could never again act in concert to control salaries and free agency.
And for a second time, Tim Raines had stuck his thumb in the eye of MLB.
Unfortunately, not many people know about Raines' off the field contributions to today's game. In helping to instigate a scandal that ultimately helped to protect the players from owner collusion, Raines played a large role in shaping the contemporary face of today's FA market. When Raines, largely of his own volition, entered drug rehab after his second MLB season, and went on to have one of the most prolific careers in MLB history, he proved that addiction does not always signal an end to a player's career. Taken in concert with Raines excellent numbers, there's just no reason for the man not to be in the HOF.
Sadly, these accomplishments seem to always be glossed when it comes to Raines; all anyone seems to know is that Tim Raines used cocaine. But that doesn't exactly place him in excelusive company. Just ask HOF'ers Fergie Jenkins or Paul Molitor. Or everyone's golden boy, Josh Hamilton.
We all know the story of Josh Hamilton.
Can't-miss prospect.
Five tools.
Won't quit on the field.
A career derailed by drug and alcohol abuse.
A resurrection and rebirth into one of the most exciting and talented players in the game, a perennial All Star and eventual HOF'er, if he keeps up his current pace. Yeah, we all know that story, and the truth is, it's a fantastic story and one of the most incredible things we'll ever see in our lifetimes.
Only, we've already seen it happen, in the person of Tim Raines.
So, why don't we know about Tim Raines and just how important he was to the game?
Why does a man who carried a career .294/.385/.425 line, with a career OPS+ of 123 and who trails only Rickey Henderson, Lou Brock, and Ty Cobb on the all-time steals list (only Ichiro has bested Raines’ career 84.7% success rate) garner only 24% of the vote in his first shot at the HOF?
Why does Raines' career carry the pallor of drug use, while Hamilton's career seems bolstered by his addictions?
Why does Barry Bonds get to be the face of a drug problem he didn't create, while Tim Raines gets almost no credit for helping to eliminate an equally pervasive and serious drug problem?
Raines has almost unimpeachable HOF credentials, and it's striking that his cocaine use should be cited as harming his HOF chances, while admitted cocaine usage seemed to have little, if any impact on those of Paul Molitor. What Josh Hamilton has accomplished is beyond baseball and it’s something to be proud of, not just as baseball fans, but as human beings. But Tim Raines accomplished that, too—and more. Raines took a stand, a stand he didn’t have to take and spoke out against a growing threat to the game. One need look no further than the Josh Hancock incident to see just how secretive MLB clubhouses and front offices are, and how easily things might have been shoved under the carpet had Raines not spoken out. But he did. And when he, along with others, recognized that the owners were engaging in illegal behavior, he took a stand again. Maybe it was about money, maybe it wasn’t, but the fact remains that players today enjoy windfall free agency, at least in part, because of Tim Raines. And what does Raines receive in return?
24% of the vote.
To be sure, the 24-hour news cycle we live in now has helped to shunt the spotlight from Raines' career and his on and off-the-field accomplishments, but that's a trite, easy answer. And, frankly, I'm not interested in trite niceties, or in weak apologetics for the latent racism that underlies much of what comes out of the BBWAA. When one African-American athlete (Bonds) is the face of a problem he did not cause and which predates him by a decade, while a white player who is just as, if not more, linked to the steroid scandals (Clemens) gets to fade into obscurity, something is wrong with the people who are telling the story. When a black athlete who triumphs over both his addictions and the illegal machinations of billionaire owners to have a spectacular career is quietly dismissed, while a still-unproven white player is lauded as Babe Ruth reborn for beating his addiction, something is wrong with those chosen to chronicle the game. The sport of baseball has deep roots in the culture of racism that still exists in this country and it has come time to recognize that fact. When I see it, as I do with Bonds, and with Raines, I will call it out, and you will read it here.
Strange Fruit, Pt. III: “Things Don’t Get Challenged In Baseball”
I was struck by something last week, and I’m going to try and lay it out for you. Here’s a game we often play around here:
Athlete A: The best ever at what he did. Brought down by forces outside his sport when no one in his sport could stop him. Unlikeable, on many accounts. A braggart, given over to his vices; womanizer, lecher, and abuser. Lawbreaker.
Athlete B: The best ever at what he did. Brought down by forces outside his sport when no one in his sport could stop him. Unlikeable, on many accounts. A braggart, given over to his vices. A womanizer and a lawbreaker.
Now which of these men is Barry Bonds, and which of them is Jack Johnson? Not that it really matters. Not yet, anyway.
As I sat this week watching PBS’ excellent Unforgivable Blackness, which chronicles Johnson’s life and career, the similarities between his story and Bonds’ fairly leaped out at me. But more than just the likeness in their meteoric rises, and crashing falls, was the things that were written about Jack Johnson, and the things we see written now about Bonds, or, truer still, about many many athletes of non-Caucasian extraction. If you haven’t seen the movie, please do.
But be warned, it is not an easy thing to see.
Then again, neither are today’s sports pages. In Unforgivable Blackness, we hear, time after time, what people were writing about Johnson as he defeated white challenger after white challenger to maintain his title. The deep-seated desire to see Johnson fall, for no more reason than he was black, is palpable in their words. And it was then I realized that I had heard it all before, in 2007.
I’m going to digress for a moment, and say that I can’t chalk Barry’s treatment up to racism on the whole, but I do know this: just like people hid their hatred for Johnson behind their supposed moral outrage for his drinking, gambling, and womanizing, so, too, do many people couch their hatred for Bonds by proclaiming that he cheated the game. But the song remains the same. It’s easy to shrug off the question of prejudice when it’s someone that’s easy to hate. And shrugging off that question, in my opinion, has led us down an unfortunate path. We like to think that we, as a country, have moved on, moved past the days when Jack Johnson can’t get a fair shake. But as I watched the images fly across the screen, and listened to the newspaper writers’ bilious biogtry float behind the flickering images, I realized that we’ve gone a very short distance in a very long time. And as I watched the people at the Jeffries-Johnson fight wave their white flags, I couldn’t help but remember the people who flocked to Marc Ecko’s site and voted for him to brand Bonds’ 756th HR ball with an asterisk.
We have a long way to go. But we need to figure out how we got here in the first place. We need, as Cornel West puts it, a return to Socratic questioning. We need to begin uncover and analyze our hidden assumptions and their logical implications. We need critical thought. We need discourse.
The problem is there is a complete lack of critical thought in 99% of sportswriting today.
I would even argue this paucity of critical thinking is the primary reason that (the disappearance of “n****r” and “ape” as proper adjectives in today’s papers aside) most sports pages carry much the same prejudice they did in Jack Johnson’s day. Jason Whitlock, a man with whom I agree very, very rarely, has put it better this past week than I ever could:
Of our three major sports leagues, the least amount of racial diversity among the journalists/broadcasters covering the games is in baseball. As best I can tell, Joe Morgan is the lone, influential, non-white voice in baseball.
Things don’t get challenged in baseball. There’s a comfy network of peers writing about, talking about, managing and coaching, general-managing, owning and commissioner-ing Major League Baseball.
There’s significant diversity playing the game. But there is virtually no diversity shaping the way the game is viewed.
# That’s why all the steroid hysteria is focused on the players.
# That’s why in the years before Bonds turned to steroids to keep pace with all the “cheaters” we were sold the bogus story that juiced balls powered the home-run explosion.
# That’s why ownership and managers never get adequately questioned and vilified for their role as the No. 1 benefactors and blind-eye proponents of steroids.
# That’s why Tom Hicks, the owner of the Texas Rangers, would have the audacity to claim that A-Rod owes him an apology.
# That’s why ESPN broadcaster and baseball shill Peter Gammons could be celebrated for decades as the gold standard in baseball journalism by his peers in the media.
# That’s why Sports Illustrated’s Selena Roberts has pursued A-Rod like Moby Dick, unveiled her report about his steroid use a week after the Super Bowl and has a book about A-Rod ready to be released in the coming months.
# That’s why ESPN suspended Scott Van Pelt for calling Bud Selig a pimp.
# That’s why Mike Lupica ran me off “The Sports Reporters” because I refused to allow him to put a black face (Bonds’) on a drug epidemic that by the 1990s was clearly colorless, pervasive and initially sparked by white athletes trying to keep pace with black athletes.
I’m not suggesting a colossal, racist conspiracy. I’m saying it’s easy for any of us to fall victim to our biases if our thoughts are rarely questioned by people who look, think and experience life different from us.
Ask yourself this question: how many African-American owners are there in MLB? To my knowledge there are none.
How many African American GM’s are there? One; Chicago’s own Kenny Williams.
How many African American baseball writers are in the BBWAA? I couldn’t find the exact number, but only one of national prominence was on the list: Bryan Burwell of the St. Louis Dispatch.
“Things don’t get challenged in baseball.” That’s just the point. When a Hispanic player is painted as a headcase, while a white player exhibiting much the same behavior is called “passionate,” or “fiery,” that’s something that should be questioned.
But it’s not.
There is no discourse, no questioning, because from the owner down to the beat writer, prejudice has become parlance.
Congratulations, Cubs Fans
In today’s Sun Times, Gordon Wittenmeyer pulls the curtains back from the dark underbelly of Wrigley Field: the bleachers, that last bastion of beer-fueled bigotry. We’re often sold a bill of goods about the bleachers, that they are some idyllic sun-drenched playground.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
The truth is that bleachers are the largest beer garden in the city, a place where women are freely groped and insulted, and a place where racist taunts are carried to the players’ ears by the summer winds. And now Wittenmeyer’s told the world:
Milton Bradley says he’s aware of Wrigley Field’s reputation for fans who not only boo their own players, but also have a history of getting racial.
You want to boo, boo. That’s fine. It’s stupid, but it’s harmless, But if you’re going to get on a player, keep it between the lines. There’s no need to get personal or racial. Unfortunately, the fucking simpletons in the Wrigley bleachers can’t even control themselves to that degree:
Cubs outfielder Jacque Jones and pitcher LaTroy Hawkins said they were the targets of racist taunts and fan mail. Jones also said in 2006 that he became the victim of racial slurs and threats on his cell phone when the number got out.
Former Cubs manager Dusty Baker said that same season that he received enough threatening, racist mail in Chicago that his wife and young son no longer would attend games.
I hope you’re happy, Cub fans. I hope you’re happy with the reputation you’ve created for yourselves. A manager’s wife and child so feared for their own safety that they would not attend games. Think about that for minute. This isn’t Selma in 1956; this Wrigley Field in 2006.
Generally considered by players among the roughest crowds in baseball for their habit of booing players on the home team, crowds at Wrigley and Boston’s Fenway Park also are considered among the worst by African-American players for a racist element comprising at least vocal minorities.
Besides Jones’ experiences, another black former Cubs outfielder who declined to be identified said in a private conversation during a recent spring training that the Wrigley crowd might have been the worst he’d experienced for racist taunts.
The worst. How does that feel, Cub fans?
‘‘I’ve heard that from a lot of the players who played there,’’ Cameron said.
Los Angeles Angels center fielder Torii Hunter said that was one of the reasons he had the Cubs on his no-trade list for years while in Minnesota.
So, in addition to being a vile, reprehensible act, your racist taunts may end up costing the Cubs a shot at a big-name FA. You’re actually hurting the team, Cubs fans. I know Hunter would look real nice in between Soriano and Bradley.
Now, I know what you’re probably saying: “It’s only a few neanderthals that fuck it up for everyone.” That’s likely true. Probably 99.9% of the crowd at Wrigley on a given day harbors no racist tendencies. You’re exactly right to point out I may be making a sweeping generalization of the same type that lies at the heart of any form of hatred or bigotry. But the fact that these cretins represent a vocal minority, the fact they they represent such a problem, tells me that the fans around them aren’t doing anything to stop them.
If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
It’s time to take a stand. If you’re sitting next to one of these idiots and s/he starts with the racist shit, tell them to shut the fuck up. If they persist, get an usher. That’s what they are there for. And they are all too happy to take care of shit like this. In his “Letter From a Birmingham Jail,” the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr wrote:
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea
...
I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
Today, baseball will celebrate the integration of the game. It is an ultimate shame that in 62 years of integrated baseball, we still have to deal with this kind of bilious hatred. It’s time to rid the ballpark of this drunken, bigoted detritus. It’s time to stop pretending that it doesn’t happen. It’s time to stop saying “well, I’ve never heard happen when I was there.” Wrigley didn’t get a reputation among the players because of people like me writing things like this. It got this reputation by being home to a vocal minority of racist cretins and a whole host of silent enablers.
Solidarity is not discovered by reflection, but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by thinking, ‘They do not feel as WE would,’ or ‘There must always be suffering, so why not let THEM suffer?’ ~Richard Rorty
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