The Chris Moeller Archives

Obstruction of justice

"Professional baseball is on the wane. Salaries must come down or interest of the public must be increased in some way. If one or the other does not happen, bankruptcy faces every team in the face." - Albert G Spalding, owner, Chicago White Stockings, 1881.

Perhaps the most remarkable of Major League Baseball's many never-changing traits is the club owners' ability to convince the men and women-- and mostly men-- who cover them for a living of how dangerously close to the precipice of destruction the league stands at any given time. The failed jocks and mostly bitter, lazy hacks that comprise the North American sports media trip over themselves in appeasement of these owners, the gatekeepers of stadium clubhouses, and when the time comes to call the owners to account for their particular sins, the reporters' lack of experience in speaking truth to power causes them to usually fall flat onto their mustard-stained faces.

Case in point are the two dominate sports stories of the week, the first involving Alex Rodriguez, and the second, Barry Bonds. Rodriguez's powerhouse agent, Scott Boras, a former minor league ballplayer in the Cardinals organization, is again being portrayed as a greedy and arrogant monster of a man, this time because his client made the decision to exercise an escape option in his contract with the Yankees and become a free agent. The decision was announced during the seventh inning of the Fox Television broadcast of Game 4 of the World Series in October, roughly an hour before the Boston Red Sox were crowned the league champions.

After a league executive publicly criticized the timing of Boras' announcement, calling it an "upstaging" of the late post-season proceedings, the media disciples at NewsCorp, Time Warner, and the other four major media conglomerates jumped in to support the charge. After Rodriguez and the Yankees came together on a new 10-year agreement yesterday, as well as another substantial raise for the all-world thirdbaseman, the new angle by the media is that Boras wound up failing in his bid for an even more astronomical pay raise for his client, and that A-Rod was even forced to pull Boras out of the negotiations to get a deal done-- the latter charge I'm sure we'll come to discover quickly is just a blatant falsehood.

Boras represents everything that the post-Curt Flood baseball club owner-- not to mention the American Corporate Socialist at large- has come to fear and loathe-- an advocate who intrinsically knows the value and the credit owed to his client for a successful financial partnership. Bud Selig and the Steinbrenner clan had little defense in proving the lack of worth in a 32-year-old ballplayer who hit 54 home runs and drove in 156 runs last year and is the best player to grace the roster of baseball's richest team in over half a century.

Henry A. Wallace told us that the American fascist's preferred method of combat was the poisoning of the public channels of communication, and normally, Commissioner Selig and the club representatives mislead and lie to us each year with respect to their respective profit/loss statements, but the Barry Bonds debacle, which they created, and which blew up in their faces yesterday with a series of federal indictments being handed down, forced them to unveil some honest numbers in having to prove the financial health of their enterprise. MLB's revenue, it turns out, climbed to $6.075 billion this year, according to Selig. That's billion with a 'b,' and it's up from what they claimed was only $1.2 billion just prior to the players' strike in 1994. Think it's the $9 beer, the Dodger Dogs, or the prospect of seeing Hank Steinbrenner in a skybox with one's binoculars that gets people walking through stadium turnstiles? No, it's Rodriguez and his colleagues on the field that keep the tickets printing.

Every public announcement and media release that generates from Major League Baseball's commissioner's office is made in concert with the effort to hold down free agent prices. This is the first thing that's important to understand, and there's a long documented history to back up the claim. (That's why the league resented the timing of Boras' World Series announcement. It was a positive counter-ploy by Boras in drumming up interest in Rodriguez's free agency, though, in fairness, it may have also detracted from some of the other important elements of the broadcast, such as the endless Fox network programming promotion, camera cutaways to Fox television stars, and crass commercial bullshit like the Taco Bell Million Dollar Pitch.) Think it's a coincidence that a federal indictment of Barry Bonds four years in the making was handed down not during the week of the World Series but instead during the first week of the off-season free agent filing period, and immediately after Bonds himself filed? We know that the Justice Department, when it's not waterboarding prisoners, is working with the club owners and more specifically, the commissioner's "independent" steroid investigator, George Mitchell, in witch-hunting alleged steroid users.

Such as it is with other U.S. drug enforcement efforts, the department's focus is on publicly punishing and shaming accused users and high-profile defendants while turning a blind eye towards the pushers and enablers that created and continue to foster the environment of abuse. This is why Selig and the men who have always set the rules of the game, up to and including the 43rd President of the United States, the former CEO of the Texas Rangers club and a reported one-time cocaine user himself, will get off with full legal immunity and without a hit in public relations with Mitchell's report, while the document can certainly be expected to add to the media "debate" and public castigating of doctor-prescribed and supervised hormone users like ballplayers David Segui, Paul Byrd, and Rick Ankiel. Mitchell's report, not coincidentally, is due to be released in short order.

Today's USA Today headline detailing the Bonds' indictment reads "Steroids, HGH talk overshadow hot stove league," implying that once again the timing of the steroids story is purely coincidental, but as I have stated, this is an entirely disingenuous idea. Media outlets, public watchdogs by establishment and design, simply cannot be so naive as to not recognize the timing of the forces and actions at play here in attempting to hold down player salaries and further demonize the players and their union during this period of record-breaking league profits.

As recently as last week's annual off-season meeting of team general managers, that word "collusion" reared its ugly head once more as, in the wake of Alex Rodriguez's decision to opt out of his Yankee contract, the GM's began a new tradition in which each general manager took the floor at the meeting and stated in front of the entire assembly his team's specific off-season plans, including which players they were going to be pursuing in free agency and which players they would be making available for trade. A week following the gathering, A-Rod is agreeing to another deal with the Yankees for $75 million less than his original asking price, and none of the other 29 teams end up even submitting an offer for the player many believe is the game's best.

Disney Corporation spokesman Gene Wojciechowski, representing subsidiary ESPN, one of MLB's best-financed corporate partners, began his online opinion piece today with the words, "Barry Bonds has played his last game," but his presumption seems rather premature, at least to me, considering the deliberate grind of our nation's judicial system and Bonds' .565 slugging percentage as a member of the San Francisco Giants in 2007. I can think of at least one red-uniformed ballclub in dire need of a clean-up hitter for the '08 season, but if enough legal baggage can be effectively pinned to Bonds than none of the 30 team owners would have to pony up for the talented slugger next year, coerced as they would be into avoiding the risk of publicly justifying their unprincipled thrift.

It's a story as old as the game itself. Major League Baseball, not unlike thousands of other American businesses, is one with an ancient history of labor manipulation by management, while the dessemination of public information remains largely controlled by sycophants acting on behalf of these paymasters. For this unfortunate reason, social, cultural, and political issues connected to the game must always be viewed through that prism of discernment.

posted by CM @ 11:56 AM