Baseball
and the Cost of Cream
The
issue of steroids in baseball brings up several philosophical conflicts.
Obviously, drugs are fundamentally stupid, but enhancing one's
career to increase the probability of a contract worth millions
of dollars is smart. Cheapening the accomplishments of a Barry
Bonds or a Mark McGwire hurts the wholesome all-America image of
the game, but attendance increases in the stadiums Bonds visits
would suggest Americans are not terribly offended.
Some
measure of blame for this newest degradation of baseball belongs
with the fans for their misplaced enthusiasm over home runs in the
first place. A bunt hit, a sacrifice, a stolen base and a
well-placed ground out should be just as exciting, and maybe they
are, but they don't offer the immediate relief from tension that
a home run provides. Americans, who probably wanted Bonds and McGwire
to be real, accepted the suspicions they were not for the simple
reason that the men could make fans quickly and profoundly happy
-- however briefly.
The
problem belongs to baseball, but it grows out of the tensions of
modern life. Kurt Vonnegut, author of Slaughterhouse Five
and Mother Night, among others, argued for years that the
funniest joke was about why cream costs so much more than milk.
The answer was that cows hate bending over those tiny cartons.
Vonnegut says the joke works because we take the world too
seriously. He says for a brief moment, we try to answer the
question about relative prices, and when we find out it was just
a joke, we laugh from relief.
In
later writings, Vonnegut made a distinction between the world's
funniest joke and the world's funniest clean joke, but he didn't
back down from the laughter as a release from tension.
Baseball
works because of tension. The philistines who claim baseball
is too slow just don't understand. "Baseball is drama
with an endless run and an ever-changing cast," said Joe Garagiola.
The pace of the game sets up both comedy and tragedy. A home
run goes a long way toward relieving the tension of wanting to win
while running out of innings. It does not, however, require
any more skill than reading a pitcher's move to first.
The
long trend certainly suggests stolen bases are more difficult than
home runs. Major League Baseball has gone from more than twice
as many stolen bases as home runs in the early 20th century to only
about half as many in the early 21st century.
Hank
Aaron knows about home runs and fans. "The triple is
the most exciting play in baseball. Home runs win a lot of
games, but I never understood why fans are so obsessed with them,"
he said.
The
home run covers up a multitude of inadequacies: strike-spending,
slow-running, base-hugging, coach-ignoring, Jeff Suppan-imitating
base runners can quit worrying about those flaws if they just hit
the ball far enough--and when they do, the fans can quit worrying
about the price of cream.
Of
course, the baseball fans, like Bonds, maybe thought the steroids
were just flaxseed oil -- really good flaxseed oil. After
all, this is a nation that bought pet rocks, the first dozen excuses
for Bill Clintonıs philandering, Pace "extra mild" picante
sauce and George W. Bush's tax cuts for the super wealthy.
The
flaxseed dealer (hey, Kid, want some liniment?) claimed "It's
not cheating if everyone does it." This logic certainly suggests
a solution to the plagiarism problems high school and college English
teachers deal with.
Baseball
fans have two choices. We can encourage everyone to copy the
essay, take the steroids, ruin players' health, destroy the game
and die young but relatively happy -- or we can learn how to play
and live the right way.
Jeff
Cox, would-be baseball commissioner
Dec.
10, 2004
