MLB Thread 105: Braun With The Wind
Aug 1, 2013 1:05:11 GMT -5
Nasty Nate: The Giant Midget and chasermcgrady like this
Post by Dukect on Aug 1, 2013 1:05:11 GMT -5
Hell, I'm a Tribe fan, I loathe the Yankees and everything about them, so A-Rod getting bashed and failing drug tests should make me giddy with joy, but you know what? I totally get it, and in a Snitsky sort of way, it's not his fault.
When did he start juicing? Let's say the Texas contract since he admitted to starting then. So in 2000, at the age of 25, he signs for a quarter of a billion dollars and everyone instantly both hates him for "being greedy" and yet expects him to break every record in the history of ever.
When I was 25 I felt pressured if my boss asked me to work a 50 hour work week since it would cut down on my personal life. If at that time (or now, or tomorrow, or next year) someone said "Hey you can do something you really love, and we'll give you a quarter of a billion dollars over the next decade just do it for us" there's no way in hell I say no to it. I'm not greedy, I'd probably wind up starting about two dozen charitable organizations, but if someone offers me a raise at my job I don't say "hell no, boss, I want less".
So he takes the cash, and produces. The team doesn't win because, well, it was the Rangers and at the time they had f***-all for a supporting cast, more or less. Bonds was juicing and breaking records, and people hated Barry because he's a giant assclown in interviews,and is like a more egotistical Ricky Henderson without the charm and third person references, so they said "Alex, you have to break those records and save baseball!", since, you know, that's totally fair to drop on someone while the guy that he's chasing is juicing like mad along with everyone else and no one cares.
So he roids it up, puts up monster numbers, everyone swoons since maybe he'll break Bonds' records and someone that doesn't have a combative relationship with the media will be the "king", and yet the contract the Rangers offered bankrupts them.
He's now a villain for taking what was offered, and they send him the only place that can afford the contract, and we all know that people are able to just be themselves when playing for the Yankees. Oh, wait...
So he's in NYC, suddenly everyone is beyond mad about steroids that they were totally cool with before Congress pulled a "Hey look over there and be outraged" moment to avoid whatever the hell they were avoiding at the time and there was much harrumphing and pleas to think of the children, and oh yeah, his name came up that he (shock and horror) used them when there wasn't a rule against it, had people demanding he break records to "save baseball", cursed him for "bankrupting a team" by taking what they offered, and then was sent to New York just to have the volume on the rhetoric turned up to 14 billion.
So psychologically what did we expect? Take a kid at 17 or 18, put them in the majors and tell them they have so much talent and will be the greatest ever. Then they start producing but it's in a crap market for a team that, despite some incredible talent, can't get it done. Then he along with the other big names get either traded or allowed free agency because the team can't afford to pay all of them, and someone with more cash than sense turns into JBL the first time he saw Hornswoggle and starts yelling "I want one, I have money" and hands over Scrooge McDuck money, and he puts up numbers, again, but the team is the drizzling craps.
Now you send him the biggest media market, have him change positions, and then say "all the stuff you did down there, do it better because this is New York".
Yeah he chose to take them, and that was stupid from a health sense, and he's become a smug and paranoid man. Not helping that he's become what the media hated about Bonds only with less relish and gusto, but can we really blame him?
Let's remember. Bonds signs with Giants for what was at the time a massive contract. 25 million as I recall, and the media was PISSED. He "sold out the Pirates" was "all about the money" and so on. So he basically said "yep, they pay me and oh yeah I like it here too, so screw off" and he's public enemy number one for over a decade.
I'm no fan, but I totally get it. It was fake outrage over "love of the game" when it was more "I got a raise, woot!" with extra zeros at the end.
Then A-Rod, the "pure" ballplayer who "did it the right way" gets offered big money and has the gall to take it? The hell is HE thinking? Letting a rich jackass pay him with aircraft carriers full of money to play a kids game! Why, back in MY day, Babe Ruth played for FREE! He never made more than a sitting president! Oh...wait, nevermind that last part.
Hell I'd LOVE to see players who are loved by fanbases stay with one team, never take anything stronger than coffee and cigarettes, and play the game solely because they get to make a living doing what they did as kids in sandlots and little league fields. That would be awesome and beautiful and poetic, but you know that's not the case and never has been ever.
The Blacksox didn't take a payoff the throw the Series because they "hated baseball", they did it because their boss was a giant tool who would skimp on contracts and not pay debts. The players in the 50's, 60's, and 70's weren't taking speed and coke because they wanted to cheat, they did it because, well, they felt like it, they're human, and humans have vices.
Somehow we can be apologists for the Blacksox (2 members of the team that were on the roster are in the Hall of Fame), we can forgive the philandering, boozing, drug binges and frequent racist jackassery of those who played from the end of World War to the early 1980's as being pure or some crazy crap like that, but damn it if people take stuff that is available at GNC!
I don't blame the players for wanting an edge. Everyone since the spitball was banned have looked for one. I don't blame the fans because I remember the mid 90's and watching SportsCenter and loving it. Tape measure jobs, guys throwing breaking balls at 96, and the guys who were the artists like Maddux who would say "it's going to be right there, right in that spot" then put it there, and watch as people couldn't do anything about it. I remember watching Cal break the streak, McGwire and Sosa in 98, my Tribe winning the pennant in 95 (with my father and I both in tears we were so happy) and the agony of 1997.
Yes people juiced, of course they did because it was there and legal. Remember McGwire having Andro in his locker, having a reporter ask, and him saying "yeah, I take it, here's where I get it" and showing the label on camera?
Did we see anybody from the 70's holding up a bag of coke and amphetamines and saying "yep, love this stuff, I get it downtown from a guy name Scooter"?
Hell no. But now those are the guys being held up as bastions of goodness while everyone who played from about 1985 on is looked at as some evil bastard who probably might have maybe taken something that may have even come from a doctor and could have possible helped hit homeruns or prevent someone else from hitting homeruns or in some way had something to do with homeruns or back hair, or shoulder width, or maybe even premature baldness in East African swollows!
It's hyperbole, I totally get it, and as a baseball fan I can say the game has never been without hyperbole for poetic license. It's part of the beauty and yet also the downfall. Growing up hearing Ernie Harwell or Harry Carey swoon over a majestic blast that was really a fly ball that barely cleared the fence made sense to my young ears. It was literary and beautiful and it made me love the game and its history.
The problem is that the same poetic license is used in a negative way. A guy takes something that everyone else is and, if he's batting clean up or striking everyone out, suddenly he's the worst thing since Ty Cobb (who only gets mentioned in the negative almost in gest even though he was a racist jerk who kind of, you know, killed someone). If he's a shmuck who's hitting .240 in double A while struggling to make the starting line up, he's a punch line who no one remembers a week later and he can go on about his life.
It's a game, a game I've loved since I can remember. As I sit at my desk I'm surrounded by momentos from its history, pieces I've collected. Yet if I look at the names I see no saints, no purists. I see men, flawed and human, who would scuff a ball, sharpen spikes, cork a bat, maybe take a few pills to get up for a game after an all night train ride with no sleep. I see men who began their careers as teen agers, sent into the limelight for our entertainment and told "now go be heros" to children who were often not much younger than them.
I see a game I love, with a history that astounds me. I see a game that was segregated for far too long based off what was initially a bunch of Jim Crow BS since there were teams that had and were happy to have black and latino players. Then We saw scandal for and separation, then war, then finally a game that included everyone (though the speed at which everyone was included everywhere varied, right Boston). Yet this joining saw evil rise up, bigotry that had no place anywhere, but it persisted for far too long. Then records began to fall, some then questioned legitimacy of those breaking the records for having an unfair advantage.
Maris was lambasted for getting more games to break a record and for having the audacity to not be Mantle. Ye wound up going bald and damn near having a nervous break down, and no one can prove he didn't take speed or anything else to deal with the pressure.
People want his record restored, because no one dares think he might have maybe done something illicit to deal with the stress like everyone else did.
Aaron breaks the all time home run record amidst death threats and a renewed hatred that no man should endure. Later he admits to taking amphetamines, greenies, to keep going.
Again, people want his record restored because he did it the right way.
Both men took illicit and illegal drugs. I blame neither since if I had to put up with that kind of scrutiny and, often times, hatred that bordered on psychotic, I'd be drunk 24/7 and taking any pill I could find. So we put it in context and we say "well, it was the times, everyone did it" and we waive our hands and dismiss it like a child blurting out an embarrassing secret in front of guests.
Everyone cheats, and everyone does it for different reasons. Some want the fame, some want to get a better contract, some want to prove they are worthy of the contract, and some just want to have a moment in the sun.
I don't say it's right, but I can't say I don't get it.
