The Tribulations of Tomorrow Derive from the Sins of Today and Sometimes Even Eternal Providence Can’t Right the Wrongs
“Gold teeth and a curse for this town are all in my mouth
Only I don’t know how they got out, dear.
Turn me back into the pet that I was when we met
I was happier then with no mind-set”
– New Slang, The Shins
I looked through the dusty brown-wood-bordered window panes of a strange small-town pub and eight tallboys of Cradle Mountain Double Malt Whisky and saw my future.
The scene was not pretty and caused me to flinch somewhat. I was dressed embarrassment, I was dressed in wine. I was dressed in a cheap white suit, beer-stained and tacky, an old man solemnly lamenting line after line of “Suzanne”. The words slurred and ran together like the hours of a six-day bender and my eyes sought to swallow all hope and beauty, hollow and defeated and resentful of The Fates. But he himself was broken/Long before the sky would open. It was karaoke night but the crowds were sparse and not particularly interested in me or Leonard Cohen or music or life or happiness. It was more about wallowing in self-pity and accepting lots and being alone together and meandering through the alleyways of life without nuisance. For the blurry faces in the crowd and myself, I guess. We had all let the best years of our life slip us by in a blurry haze of drink, smoke, chemicals, men, women, philosophy, immaturity, distraction, inaction, reaction, laziness, friendship, love, lust, hatred, antipathy, apathy, misguided passion, social mores, social expectations, social outings, broken promises, forgotten dreams and the eternal belief that there would always be time. It all seemed the height of fun and in some sense it was but they were not times marked by accomplishment or control. At some point, for nearly all of us, the hopes of a better tomorrow had been replaced by the regrets of a wasted yesterday. None of us, by any real measure, had seized many of the opportunities afforded us and we hadn’t pursued, with any real zeal, most of our dreams. We had gotten caught up in the minutia of existence, beaten into exhaustion by the small things. And now it was too late. The lonely entertainer, clearly past his days of entertaining but continuing with the charade for reasons of ignorance and nostalgia probably not even known to himself, mumbled on with his ode to regret but it was no longer the same. A shell of his former self stood sadly on the stage.
There is no turning back the clock. No eraser. No righting the wrongs or avenging mistakes. Hindsight is nothing more than a cheap hindrance. It was a terrifying premonition, an omnipresent apparition of a future I hoped to avoid. Of course, visions of this nature are necessary. They prevent inertia, ensuring a level of consciousness that allows for the shaping of one’s destiny. An awareness of the cost of sin-lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, envy, pride- will scare anybody into making the right decisions and recognizing opportunity and understanding the limited nature of time. Constant self-evaluation will do no harm, unless undertaken in by obsessive-compulsive types.
If mediocrity is accepted, make no mistake, mediocrity is what you will get. Strange and horrible visions tend to cause you to embrace such do-or-die mantras. The simple truth is opportunity does not have an infinite lifespan and those who don’t seize the moment are liable to be very regretful. You can’t get toothpaste back in the tube. Bob Haldeman said that and back in the day they trusted him with a President who had a taste for vengeance and a tendency to drink.
Had Major League Baseball recognised the inherent truth in Bob Haldeman’s words and had they opted to keep their eyes open to visions of their future rather than buried in the sands of denial, the sport would not be the circus, Freak Show Alley included, it has become.
Baseball once dominated, without rival, the landscape of American sport. The game rested in America’s hearts and minds, defining an increasingly complex nation while reminding it of simpler times. Gerard Early said that “there are only three things that America will be known for 2,000 years from now…the Constitution, jazz music and baseball…they’re the three most beautifully designed things this culture has ever produced.” Baseball is a pastime and it is a central focus of life. It is a celebration of popular ideals while being, in all reality, just a game. Once upon a time, baseball was America.
Yet in recent times, the protectors of the game lost sight of the true essence of baseball and in the process allowed the ideals the game has been built upon to be eroded, changing the meaning and the nature of the sport. Through inaction and insularity, those charged with shielding baseball have allowed a potentially fatal blow to be landed.
Baseball has endured crises before. But is has always survived. As a sport and a public spectacle, it will never die. The legacy and the standing of the sport, however, are sinking in the mire and it is doubtful either will rise again to capture the heart, rather than the sick voyeuristic eyes, of America.
Today, baseball heroes aren’t worshipped and the game is no longer sacred. There are no Babe Ruth’s or Joe Di Maggio’s or Jackie Robinson’s. Rather, the sport is mocked, derided, sneered at, ridiculed and criticised by all and sundry. And for the most part, it is all entirely fair. Today’s central players in this tragedy are Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa, Jose Canseco and Roger Clemens. And most have been cast as main characters for the size of their fall and the damage they have inflicted.
Over the last two decades, Major League Baseball has sat on its hands while performance enhancing drugs and human growth hormones has undermined the legitimacy of the sport to the point that all on-field deeds and records are not considered fairly earned. The heavy hand used by baseball powerbrokers in the Black Sox scandal and in the Pete Rose case was nowhere to be seen when it came to quashing the emerging threat of performance enhancing drugs. Baseball, concerned about short-term perception problems and not grasping the magnitude of the threat, decided the drugs issue was too difficult to deal with and attempted to sweep the issue under the carpet, hoping it would all just go away. Through failing to seize the opportunity to squash the threat of widespread drug use in the sport, Major League Baseball has illegitimized an entire era and maybe longer. The modern era has been tarnished to the point that baseball under the Selig regim will be remembered as the steroid era. Few consider the myriad of records owned by Roger Clemens legitimate. Even fewer regard the Barry Bonds home run records as genuine. The greatest home run chase of all-time, the McGwire-Sosa battle of 1998, once stood tall as one of the great sporting seasons. It is now nothing more than a tainted monument of what went wrong.
Today, rather than hitting streaks or home run chases or full ballparks or historic hurlers, the talk is of steroids and scandal and the papers scream same. Box scores have taken a backseat to Senate testimony. Literary works telling the tales of great baseball feats have been replaced by tell-all tales of drug use and investigatory reports of synthetic performance enhancement. Lists of great achievers have been substituted for lists of users. Fathers no longer speak with reverence of the game and sons no longer understand what it once meant.
And the path that baseball has drawn for itself appears to be one-way and descending at a sharp rate.
Had Major League Baseball attempted to prevent the widespread use of performance enhancing drugs, it would have been revered by history for its attack on the demon. Through its inaction, Major League Baseball has become complicit. Major League Baseball had the opportunity to eradicate the possibility of a widespread culture of drug use in the sport, always concerned more with short-term public relations rather than doing something unpopular yet meaningful. Baseball powerbrokers always believed they had more time, that tomorrow would never arrive, that it would never be too late.
Simply, Major League Baseball never looked through the window pane. They never evaluated the situation or themselves. They never considered that you can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.
And now it may be too late. It certainly is for the players of this generation. And it may be for the players of the next. It doesn’t matter how many Senate hearings and internal investigations take place now. It is all a little belated and appears somewhat tokenistic. No matter how provident the actions of Major League Baseball are now, they will all be viewed through the prism of complicity. If only baseball had looked at the bigger picture, they would not have been so flippant in their behaviour regarding performance enhancing drugs.