The Chris Moeller Archives

Baseball's blackest mark

Jason Giambi is neither hero nor villain. The New York Yankees slugger, linked with the BALCO steroids investigation a couple years ago, has never explicitly admitted using steroids (except perhaps in confidential testimony,) but a week ago, he made a tacit public apology. "What we should have done a long time ago," he said, "was stand up-- players, ownership, everybody-- and said, 'We made a mistake.' We should have apologized back then and made sure we had a rule in place and gone forward. Steroids and all of that was a part of history. But it was a topic everyone wanted to avoid. Nobody wanted to talk about it."

For whatever scandal even exists here, in this relatively small subculture of sport within our larger drug-crazed country, I think Giambi is being particularly unfair to himself and his fellow players, as the responsibility for any mistakes should fall squarely upon the shoulders of the rulemakers-- that is, the club owners, their league commissioner, Bud Selig, and his predecessors. The players, after all, are only employees, very-well-compensated to do everything within the dictated rules to win games, and doing so under a powerful public microscope.

I heard it said once, in reference to the Americans who were coerced to "name names" during the McCarthy witch-hunts of the 1950s, that it was wrong to divide them between "heroes" and "villains," between those who named and those who didn't. They were all "victims." Such as it is with ballplayers like Giambi.

Baseball's leaders know they layed a giant egg in setting guidelines and getting ahead of the science of steroids and their availability. In an attempt to deflect accountability much later, they selected Selig pal and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell to flush out and excoriate the steroid abusers in the league-- those players who broke the rules that didn't exist. The league office set the dogs loose on Giambi this week.

Though the slugger's comments struck most Americans as refreshing, and long-overdue, he dared to pin part of the blame on his employers. Yankees General Manager Brian Cashman responded to the corporate whistleblower in that All-American way-- he told a whopper-- "There's an implication that there was a lot of people that were involved that would know... what was going on, and I can tell you that was false. We've spoken to that in the past, so I do have a problem with that, without a doubt, because I can tell you-- I can speak from being right there, too-- that whatever goes on individually with these guys, is really on them."

Commissioner Selig followed suit by announcing an investigation into whether Major League Baseball had the legal right to punish Giambi for what might be deemed a personal admission, while the Yankees called in their attorneys to once more attempt to void the big firstbaseman's contract. By mid-week, the latest in a long line of front office "leaks" reached the news media-- reports that Giambi had tested positive for amphetamines during the last year, although sportswriter Peter Gammons reports that Giambi has not been asked to take any kind of follow-up test, which would have been the next stage in protocol if a test had indeed been failed.



The feudal lords of baseball have never been profiles in courage. They could dedicate a new building in Cooperstown as a Hypocrisy Hall of Fame, and enshrine their own with about four dozen plaques. Shoeless Joe Jackson won't be made eligible for the Baseball Hall, but Black Sox club owner Charles Comiskey, whose financial treatment of his players left them ripe for the plucking by gamblers, was inducted. One of the game's greatest competitors on the field, Pete Rose, received a lifetime ban for placing bets on his team to win, and Mark McGwire faced rejection in his first year of Hall eligibility in 2007 because of unproven assertions that he used steroids, but baseball's writers, always at the beck and call of the club owners, have forever ignored the most scandalous and long-lasting black mark in history against the competitive integrity of the game.

I speak of the business-related scandal known today simply as "collusion." There is general consensus in 21st century America that Major League Baseball behaved abominably by severely limiting and then completely denying African-Americans a place on their playing fields from the time of origin of the National and American Leagues until Jackie Robinson's Brooklyn debut in 1947, but there's never been movement to remove from the Hall those who instituted and perpetuated that unholy "gentlemen's agreement"-- commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, Comiskey, Cap Anson, William Hulbert, Ban Johnson, Tom Yawkey, Clark Griffith, Will Harridge, Warren Giles, Ed Barrow, Larry McPhail, and many others. Less focused upon, I believe, is how this all-too-common history of not signing the best players available for your baseball team has made such a frequent and tremendous travesty of the competition.

Understand this, gang-- collusion wasn't limited to the exclusion of African-American ballplayers, and it didn't come to an end in 1947. It's reared its ugly head again even since the steroid issue hit front and center in 2003. After the 1918 season, in a sharp run-up to the Black Sox scandal, the owners terminated all non-guaranteed contracts for the purpose of driving down salaries. The move came complete with an agreement not to sign one another's players. Before the 1966 season, as another example, the two star pitchers of the World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, decided to negotiate jointly with their club, and quite curiously, during the 32 days of spring training negotiations, not one single outside offer was made on what was indisputably the best pitching tamden in the game. This means there were no such offers from clubs such as the Chicago Cubs, whose fans by this point, had waited 58 years for a World Championship, or the St. Louis Cardinals, who already claimed Bob Gibson as moundsman and might have been able to boast the greatest pitching rotation in history if able to sign the talented duo.

After the courts were forced into action, and a collective bargaining agreement was in place, collusion still continued, but in a more secretive, insidious manner. The original-- and all subsequent-- agreements with the players' union specifically stated that "players shall not act in concert with other players and clubs shall not act in concert with other clubs" in negotiations, but since the 1968 inception of that deal, only the players have stayed true to those guidelines. In January 1988, in response to grievance, a judge awarded $10.5 million to players that had been frozen out of fair market dealings from 1985 to 1987. Only four players had switched teams in free agency between the '86 and '87 seasons.

In a Sports Illustrated profile of pitcher Jack Morris in 2003, Tom Verducci chronicled a verbal exchange, shared by Morris, that took place between the free agent hurler of 1986 and George Steinbrenner, owner of the Yankees, baseball's then-as-now wealthiest team:

"You're my kind of guy. You're just the kind of guy I need." Steinbrenner began.

(Morris agent Dick) Moss seized the opportunity, and threw out numbers for a three year deal. Suddenly Steinbrenner turned cool, saying that he needed to sign his own free agents, but Moss and Morris knew what was happening. "George," Moss said, "you wouldn't be the kind of person to have anybody tell you what to do, would you?"

Steinbrenner replied, "I swear on my mother's grave nobody's telling me what to do."

Morris looked Steinbrenner square in the eyes and said to him, slowly and firmly, "Do not do that to your mom. She hears what you're saying."

Steinbrenner, Morris says, "lied to his face."

Steinbrenner will one day be voted, without debate or controversy, into the Hall-of-Fame, but it was the Minnesota Twins who took the pennant in 1987 with Morris forced to return to the Detroit Tigers. Morris would bring the Twins another championship as a free agent signing in 1991, capping the World Series with a 10-inning shutout in Game 7. Yankees fans would wait another decade, an 18 year drought in total, before raising another World Championship flag.

The players collected $280 million in owner fines during the 1980s because of collusion, then claimed wrongdoing by the owners again in 2002 and 2003. As part of the new bargaining agreement last year, owners agreed to pay the players $12 million from "luxury tax" revenues, without an admission of guilt for the latest offense.



Major League Baseball's henchmen will attempt to take down Jason Giambi over the coming weeks. Selig and Co. know Americans and their news media love a good villain, and as usual, they know where to go in their sport to dig one up. He's wearing a uniform.

posted by CM @ 12:13 PM