THE WRATH OF PONTIUS BUD

"The Anglo-Saxon race is peculiarly subject... to spasms of paroxysmal righteousness... [which result] in trial by passion, by terror, by prejudice, by hate [and above all] by newspaper"-- William Dean Howells 

"All men are Jews"--- Bernard Malamud

211 games, really?  Major League Baseball has sentenced Alex Rodriguez to a suspension that would prevent him from playing until the season he turns forty and that effectively would end his baseball career and MLB claims it has meted out a sentence that is fair, reasonable, and in accordance with the MLB's Collective Bargaining Agreement and the Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program (the "JDPP").   

Has the Commissioner's Office lost complete sight of the principle of equal treatment under the law or the axiom that the punishment should fit the crime?  Did Alan "Bud Selig" completely forget the judiciously calibrated disciplinary regime the JDPP enacted-- 50-games for a first-time violation; 100-games for a second infraction; a life-time suspension for a third offense.   What grievous crime could Rodriguez possibly have committed to warrant such a draconian punishment?  More importantly, on what basis, does the Commissioner's 211-game sanction rest other than punitive whimsy?  Its vaporous authority and arbitrary length indeed reeks of ulterior motive-- the wish-fulfillment of a Commissioner eager to heap all the blame for a drug epidemic on the shoulders of one player and to extenuate his own connivance in over twenty years of hypertrophied statistics that profited him and his former cronies in front-offices throughout the sport.  

Ever since that day in 2000 when Scott Boras inveigled Tom Hicks to sign the slugger for $252 million dollars and to distort forever the marketplace for free agent contracts, Alex Rodriguez has become baseball's eternal bete noire.   For in the Yankees' vain third-baseman--  a wayward fool desperate to please perhaps but hardly an cunning villain-- Alan "Bud" Selig, the Mass Man Par Excellence, nonetheless has found the ideal scapegoat to tar for guilt we all bear-- the game and its fans alike.  Guilt our culture bears collectively, in fact, for willful blindness to its own opportunistic core, for valuing performance over honor, for elevating profits over integrity, for worshiping athletes as gods instead of recognizing them as gifted but eminently mortal men and finally, for our relentless hunger for that extra edge, whether legal, moral, or even prudent.

Perhaps, Pontius Selig is hubristic enough to believe that by crucifying A-Rod-- by subjecting his career to a slow and asphyxiating death-- America's pastime not only can purge itself of its drug-addled past but it can redeem a nation awash in drugs designed to boost productivity, to arrest the aging process, and to improve performance.  Viagra, HGH, and Adderral to Botox, Creatine, and Jacked.   And a man named A-Rod shall arrive among us and shoulder our griefs and carry our sorrows and suffer for our transgressions.  

Don't forget that once upon a time, not long ago, right around the year A-rod made his Major League debut in fact, back when labor strikes and owner greed has prostrated the sport and fans shunned it, performance-enhancing drugs restored America's pastime to life.   Dramatic home run chases, bloated offensive statistics, and the rejuvenation of beloved but aging superstars attracted millions to the ballparks, set new attendance records, garnered lucrative new broadcast contracts, and spurred new revenue sources in advanced media. And overseeing it all sat Milwaukee Bud, the Midwest's favorite Ford dealer, flattering himself for resurrecting the sport and preening for the cameras.  Evidently, what he didn't bargained for was the backlash that would ensue when Jose Canseco constrained the people to see what we suspected all along but dared not to admit.  The Baseball Gods we all revered were simply fallible men no less prone to the quick fix than the rest of society.  For chemical wizardry, new, more potent designer drugs had eclipsed the amphetamines baseball players had feasted on for decades and made them bigger, stronger, faster.   But no one wants to hear that their God is just a little man behind the curtain equipped with the latest ingenuity modern science can supply.  The people clamored for blood.   Remember Caesar, you have a duty to please the people.  Crucify Him.  Congress intervened.  The owners and player's union finally found religion, agreed to the JDPP in 2006 and incorporated it into the League's collective bargaining agreement.

But now Pontius Bud threatens to vitiate the JDPP despite its proven record in identifying drug users, punishing offenders, and stemming the tide of PED use, if not entirely eliminating it.  His office offered all the other players implicated in the Biogenesis scandal a 50-game suspension, with the exception of Ryan Braun who already had tested positive once before for banned substance.  Selig even commuted the sentences of Melky Cabrera and Bartolo Colon to time-served.  Why does Alex Rodriguez deserve a sanction four times as severe?  Because he lied about it?  Well, Melky Cabrera fabricated an entire internet to conceal his drug use.  Because A-Rod didn't roll over when Major League Baseball decided to appoint a director of the Secret Service to spearhead its Starr chamber?  Or rather, he exercised his right to defend himself, like Braun did last year and he only received a 65-game sentence.   No, A-Rod's punishment smacks of some tyrant's edict contrived out of thin air because Pontius Bud has an illusion to protect-- the illusion that home run records compiled across centuries of rules changes, modifications to mound height, variation in the ball's composition, contracted stadium dimensions, racial exclusions, and human evolution still enshrine some kind of timeless, sacrosanct totem of merit.   And for this illusion, A-Rod must pay.  The Commissioner has to foreclose A-Rod's pursuit of Mays', Ruth's, Aaron's, and Bond's home run milestones, so we all can forget the little man behind the curtain.   Admit Alex that you are not the King of Baseball, says Pontius Bud.  Or else suffer the penalty of death. 

Let's hope Frederic Horowitz can restore sanity and justice as MLB's appointed arbitrator for players' grievances has done so often in the past.   Below are four precedents in which an arbitrator has curbed draconian sentences handed down by the Commissioner's office.   Anyone of which would warrant granting A-Rod clemency as well.

1) In 1984, KC Royals' Willie Wilson was convicted for attempt to purchase cocaine.   Kuhn suspended him for one (1) year.  The Arbitrator reduced his suspension to one (1) month. 

2) In 1984, Commissioner Kuhn suspended Pascual Perez for cocaine possession from Opening Day through May 15th.  Arbitrator Richard A. Bloch commuted Perez' suspension to April 29th 

2) In 1986, SD Padre LaMarr Hoyt committed three separate drug charges.  The Padres terminated his contract. Commissioner Ueberroth suspended him for one year.  The Arbitrator reinstated his contract and abridged the suspension to 60 days.

3) In 1991, Vincent banned NYY Steve Howe for life.  Arbitrator George Nicolau reinstated Howe after he'd served about 120 days of the sentence.

4) In 1995, Milwaukee's Bud ousted then SF Giant Daryl Strawberry for 60 days beginning April 25, 1995 (Opening Day in the strike-truncated season).  The SF Giants released him before Strawberry's salary arbitration hearing and maintained accordingly that they owed him nothing.   Arbitrator George Nicolau ordered the SF Giants to pay him $125,000.  The Yankees signed Strawberry on June 19, 1995.

MONEYBALL AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

"[T]hrough baseball I was put in touch with a more humane and tender brand of patriotism, lyrical rather martial or righteous in spirit and without the reek of saintly zeal, a patriotism that could not so easily be sloganized, or contained in a high-sounding formula to which you had to pledge something vague but all-encompassing called your allegiance." -- Philip Roth, "My Baseball Years" (1973)   

We call it “the national pastime”. And for over a century, luminaries ranging in vocation from academia and journalism to politics, literature, and business have all exalted the game as an American archetype and have identified it among the sacred rituals and icons that form our nation's identity. During his tenure as Major League Baseball's Commissioner, Renaissance scholar A. Bartlett Giamatti's pronounced baseball “an important, enduring American institution…[with] a purchase on our national soul”. A sentiment historian Jacques Barzun's conception of the game echoes. Baseball, he wrote, reveals "the heart and mind of America." While a century before them, our bard himself, Walt Whitman, declared the sport as much a part of "our institutions... as our Constitution's laws" and as no less integral to our history. 

Their grandiloquence only serves to beg to a fundamental question however.  What precise national trait, value, or practice, does the Diamond consecrate or signify?  The traditional totems of American identity conjure a signal and immediately identifiable American idea, attribute, or inheritance: Stars and Stripes, the nation's colonial ancestry and federal union; the bald eagle, our ferocious and prideful independence; Lady Liberty, our revolutionary tradition and immigrant heritage; and our founding documents, the nation's experimental origins and democratic creed. 

Baseball, on the other hand... Sure, its a rigorous craft, a selective profession, a stern discipline, a frequently edifying and theatrical drama and a consistently prodigious display of talent and skill.   But this doesn't change the inglorious facts.  Professional baseball remains, at its best, a diverting entertainment played for hire, and at its worst, a ruthless business that trades men like commodities and discards them like waste.  Rhapsodies notwithstanding, it is ultimately just a game.

How then can it possibly exert a claim on, all of things, the nation's "soul"? What truth about its native land can it possibly embody? 

MR. SMITH GOES TO OAKLAND 

For all its many flaws, last year's Oscar-nominated baseball film, Moneyball suggests a tentative answer.  An inkling of which appears in the film's widespread popularity and unique genre pedigree.

Now, ordinarily, baseball movies like Field of Dreams, Damn Yankees, For The Love of the Game, and The Rookie descend from the same family tree from which the generic sports motion picture hails-- whether set amid the ring, the racetrack, the Diamond, or the gridiron.

From Rudy to Rocky, they tell the story of endearing, mettlesome underdogs as they triumph over hardscrabble origins, debilitating injury, insular bias, and hopeless odds.  And along the way, we get a little romance, a suspenseful big game finale, and above all, a triumphant, uplifting ending. However, in Moneyball, Director Bennett Miller and screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (and Steven Zallian) actually have engineered something of a genetic hybrid-- cross-breeding Hollywood's inspiring tale of athletic triumph with another common Tinsel Town species, the social problem film. The Natural mates Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

As Peter Roffmann describes Hollywood's formula for the social problem film in his eponymous book, "social analysis and dramatic conflict [combine] within a coherent narrative structure... [T]he central dramatic conflict revolves around the interaction of the individual with social institutions," and the motifs of America's populist tradition figure prominently in the story. In fact, the formula hasn't changed much since Capra's day either. Noble, virtuous men do battle with greedy plutocrats, a hostile establishment, or venal institutions.   They suffer dire setbacks.   They endure tragic sacrifice.  But in the final reel, truth, justice, and the American way prevail and crown a hero's victory.

Moneyball not only radiates this populist sensibility, its bears Aaron Sorkin's signature melodramatic stamp besides. The film dramatizes its subject-- the influence of money on teams' fortunes-- with all the intellectual complexity and poetic nuance of a Will McAvoy rant in Newsroom.  As early as the opening montage, in fact, it projects Major League Baseball through the black-and-white lens of populism. The New York Yankees, naturally, epitomize corporate Wall Street gluttony and decadence; while the Oakland Athletic personify rugged California pluck and ingenuity.

The deciding game of the two teams' 2001 American League Divisional Series sets the scene. But just before the Bombers complete a stunning, improbable comeback from an 0-2 game deficit and rally to win Game 5; just before the raucous Yankee Stadium crowd shakes Ruth's House to its foundation and New York stands in unison to applaud its shining light of bravura and resilience just one month after the Twin Towers have fallen; Sorkin qualifies the achievement.  A full frame of portentous text interrupts the game footage. "New York Yankees $114,457,768 vs. $39,722,689 Oakland Athletics," it reads. 

The implication: the best team didn't win; the richest one did. America's game is rigged.¹

"YOU'RE NO MR. SMITH"

Of course, outside Aaron Sorkin's Manichean imagination, the truths of the world are neither so monolithic nor so facile.  Sure, the Oakland Athletics' payroll consistently ranks among the lowest in the league (29th of 30 in 2012).   The Yankees, meanwhile, have owned the top payroll in baseball every year since 1999.  Yet payroll figures, in the absence of revenue totals, mean very little.  How much a team spends, after all, doesn't tell us how much revenue it generates or how much in earnings its ownership pockets.  Indeed, a closer look at the A's balance sheet evokes less Capra's Senator Jefferson Smith than one of Wall Street's TARP recipients. 

The $300 million dollar value of the Athletics alone ill equips it for the part of humble populist hero.  Actually, the Athletics current ownership group has nearly doubled its investment since they bought the team, according to Forbes' annual "Business of Baseball" issue.  From the $172 million dollar they purchased the A's for in 2005, their asset has risen in value to $321 million dollars in 2012.

Sure, the Bay Area media market the A's inhabit is about 40% of New York's size.  It's smaller still for the A's because they have to share it with the San Francisco Giants, their more popular neighbor.  (What's worse, the Giants have opposed the A's plan to move to San Jose.) This inexorably constricts Oakland's available revenue sources and limits their spending capacity accordingly.

However, Moneyball-- and the movie and book both suffer this flaw-- conveniently overlook the approximately $50 million the A's collect annually from MLB's revenue sharing program which compensates them precisely for their geographic limitations.  The subsidy the A's collect from Major League Baseball's revenue sharing program emanates from two separate sources:  (1) a "local revenue" tax assessed on all teams' broadcast dollars and gate proceeds and then redistributed from the large media market "Haves" to the small media market "Have-Nots" and (2) a "central fund" allowance realized from national broadcast contracts, merchandise sales, the MLB cable network, and MLB Internet properties but split evenly among all 30 franchises.

True, the League hasn't published exact figures in seven years.  I nonetheless extrapolated the $50 million dollar allotment, a modest estimate, from the following.  In 2005, records show the A's received  $19 million dollars from "local revenue" transfers-- this sum, no doubt, has risen-- and Baseball America estimates that the "central revenue fund" yielded every team about $30 million as recently as 2009.  This sum probably has grown since then as well.   

So, what exactly have the A's done with the $50 million-dollar-a-year allowance Uncle Bud gives them each year to spend on players?  They certainly haven't spent it on major league free agents; that's for sure.  Since the A's new owners arrived, their payroll actually has fallen.  It totaled $62 million on Opening Day in 2006 and $55 million on April 6, 2012.  And perhaps, for this reason, Forbes' calculates that in 2011, the A's owners netted a $15 million dollar operating profit-- $5 million more than the supposedly rapacious Yankees. 

Not exactly a business model worthy of Capra's exemplar of agrarian virtue, is it?  Actually, with the $15 million dollar operating income the A's showed in 2012 and the $23 million dollars they realized in 2011, Oakland looks more and more like Ronald Reagan's phantom "Welfare Queen" than they do the caricature of small-town thrift and maverick ingenuity Moneyball celebrates.

THE RINGS MONEY CAN'T BUY  

The greater fallacy of Moneyball however lies in the film's simplistic equation of payroll with performance.

Sure, the Yankees spend 3.5 times as much on their major league roster as do the A's on theirs ($197,962,289 vs. $55,372,500 in 2012.)  However, the surplus expenditure does not purchase them either a proportionate advantage in roster talent or yield them an equivalent boost in on-field performance. That this benefits the Yankees, only their most dogmatic fans would dispute.  Among the advantages, the Bomber's $200 million dollar payroll enables them to retain star veterans, to acquire premiere free agents, and to squander resources on boondoggles like Kei Igawa and Carl Pavano without it hamstringing their roster.

However, the Yankees' extravagance avails them far less than most people assume and less still than the linear correlation implied by Moneyball's premise.   According to Ranjit Dighe, an economist at Oswego University, the Yankees actually receive no marginal benefit, at all, from each dollar expended above $150 million. See also. More germane still, in the book Wages of Wins, Stanford economists, David Berri, Martin Schmidt, and Stacey Brook conclude, using a complex regression analysis, that over the eighteen Major League seasons between 1988 and 2005, payroll discrepancy accounted for only 18% of clubs' win variation.  A significant correlation but hardly a determinative one.  The .18 coefficient also doesn't indicate whether spending reaps wins or whether winning spurs teams to spend more or whether some third variable like, number of under-30 free agents signed, subsumes both.  

Witness, as illustration, the variability among the sport's World Series champions over the last decade.  Since 2000, eight (8) different teams have won baseball's title.   Since 1982, the trophy has gone to eighteen (18) of them.  Consider, too, the payroll ranking of the last eight World Series victors. Diamondbacks (8^th); the Angels (5^th); the Marlins (26^th); Red Sox (2^nd); White Sox (13^th); Cardinals (11^th); Phillies (13^th); Giants (10th)² 

Now, compare, by contrast, this to the NBA and NFL, two leagues where salary caps control salaries and impose a relative spending parity among teams.  Over the last thirty (30) years, only nine (9) different franchises have claimed the NBA title, only fourteen (14) in the NFL.   

FREE AGENCY'S DIMINISHING RETURNS

Among the many reasons why payroll doesn’t impact baseball clubs’ success more directly, a primary one lies in the systemic inefficiency MLB’s collective bargaining rules embed in the sport's salary structure. Or in brief, the period when players perform at their most proficient doesn’t correspond to the time when they earn the most money.  

 In a Baseball Prospectus issue published in 2005, Nate Silver calculated that the average ballplayer’s peak performance spans his twenty-fourth and thirtieth birthdays, cresting for the hitter at age twenty-eight. However, this very same player doesn't reach free agency until 30, on average, the very end of this optimal performance curve. The anomaly originates in the relative advanced age of Major League rookies. In the NFL and NBA, the typical player starts his career at age 21 or 22, following college graduation.  In baseball, however, he first has to serve his time in the minor leagues, and as a consequence, he doesn't reach the Majors, on average, until his 24th birthday, according to AlanSchwarz, author of The Numbers Game.  And once on a Big League roster, he still has to play six more seasons before he can declare free agency and earn a salary worthy of his production.  But by then, his most prolific years already have elapsed. 

Take, for example, Jason Giambi.  In Moneyball, you may recall, Giambi's impending free agency-- along with Johnny Damon's and Jason Isringhausen's-- arouses considerable consternation in Oakland's front-office at the end of the 2001 season.  Billy Beane knows the A's can't afford to pay the players' asking price, and he despairs of replacing Giambi, in particular, with comparable talent.  Instead of griping, though, the A's should consider themselves fortunate.  Because the collective bargaining rules enabled them to renew Giambi's salary in his first three full seasons in the Majors at league minimum and in his next three, to minimize its escalation through the arbitration process, the A's battened on Giambi's most prolific years and paid him next to nothing for the privilege.      Between 1996-2001, Giambi earned, on average, only $1.6 million dollars annually-- a mere fraction of what the 150 wOPS he averaged would have commanded on the open market.³ 

The converse is true for the Yankees, the team, not coincidentally, that signed him to a $120 million dollar contract just shy of his thirty-first birthday.   Between 2002 and 2007 (the next six years of Giambi's career), his average annual salary escalated nine-fold to $15.23 million dollars while his mean wOPS fell to 138.

The inefficiency is emblematic.  And it likely explains why the Yankees have failed to recapture the supremacy their core of young, cheap, prolific and homegrown players conferred for a brief interval in the late 1990s (Jeter, Williams, Rivera, Pettitte, Posada).  The talent available each year on the open market is too sparse, the salaries, too high, the contracts, too burdensome to enable even a team willing to spend $200 million dollars on Major League salaries to assemble a championship caliber team through free agency alone.  Indeed, the Orioles' failure during this period to keep pace with the Yankees through expensive, high profile free-agent acquisitions and the decrepit, calcified roster they accumulated in the process offers both a vivid illustration and cautionary example.     

THE VILLAIN AS HERO

That the Yankees should assume the form of populist bogeyman in any liberal's imagination smacks of irony to begin with.  In Moneyball's casino metaphor, Billy Beane fancies himself the card-counter; the Bombers, the House.   But baseball's Bronx franchise owes more to the Federal Reserve than to Caesar's Palace.  Far from a corporate barony that dominates its industry through lavish spending, talent piracy, and sheer financial might, the Yankees function as the League's fiscal ballast and financial guarantor.

First of all, the Steinbrenner family numbers among the few owners of professional sports franchises who, to their credit, recognize that a sports franchise is as much a public trust and civic institution as it is an individual proprietorship or private corporation.  With this in mind, their business model doesn't aim primarily to augment its shareholders' value or to maximize the company's profits.   No, the Yankees' upper management strives, above all, to win games, to honor the city that inscribes its name, and to hearten the fans invested in its fate.   Too often, baseball's owners regard their title to a sports franchise as a vanity stake or as a license to line their pockets.  Whose spending habits, in the end,  more readily summons the predatory monopolist: George Steinbrenner or Frank McCourt?  Whose behavior more closely approximates the robber barons of yore: the Steinbreners' profligacy or Jeffrey Loria's profiteering.    

Secondly, the Yankees' ample revenue and the proportionate sizable surcharge on it the League's revenue-sharing program assesses actually fortifies the sport's economic structure and competitive parity much in the way the U.S. government's tax receipts underwrite a stable and productive economy: (1) through block and formula grants, which transfer wealth from flourishing states and cities to economically depressed regions; (2) through counter-cyclical deficit spending which reinforce the economic system, as a whole, when individual industries falter and local revenues fall; and (3) through earmarks and appropriations for social services and collective goods the market ordinarily neglects.

Since 2005, the Yankees have paid over a $100 million dollars each year in revenue sharing levies and luxury tax surcharges that MLB has transferred to the League's Have-Nots. $75 million consists of the balance between their local revenue tariff and their central fund receipts.  Another $20 to $25 million dollars comes from the 40% competitive balance penalty (commonly called "the luxury tax") they part with on every payroll dollar expended over a fixed threshold-- $178 million in 2011.  (Again, the League doesn't disclose the exact amount so I provide a conservative estimate based on the full accounting MLB published in 2001 and the balance sheets and revenue-sharing figures leaked to Deadspin last year.) 

As discussed above, the proceeds go to franchises like Pittsburgh, Tampa, Miami, Kansas City, Arizona, Milwaukee, and Oakland where an indifferent fan base or shrinking urban population inadequately supports them.  Money, which enables their management, when so inclined, to sign their star players to long-term contracts or on occasion, to dabble in the free agent market.   And anecdotal evidence would indicate it has succeeded in this very objective.  Consider the teams inhabiting small-market cities who have signed star players to long-term contract within the last five years alone:  Minnesota, Joe Mauer; Milwaukee, Ryan Braun; Miami, Josh Johnson; San Diego, Carlos Quentin; Arizona, Justin Upton; Seattle, King Felix; Cleveland, Travis Hafner; and Kansas City, Joakim Soria.  The middling talent available through free agency during the last few off-seasons further proves the point.   To revise an old GM maxim, "What's good for the Yankees is good for baseball."     

THE DIAMOND REPUBLIC

Yet for all its stock caricature, populist sentimentality, and dramatic simplification, Moneyball nonetheless succeeds in its appeal to the audience's sense of injustice for a significant reason.  Sure, it accomplishes as much through hyperbole, distortion, and sensationalism.  Still Michael Lewis himself subtitled the book from which the film borrows its subtitle as "the art of winning an unfair game."  And whether or not the revenue disparities and payroll imbalances MLB permits actually compromise the outcome on the field perhaps means less in the end, for our purposes, than the general perception that it does.

After all, why does the idea that a revenue-rich baseball team can buy a World Series offend our sense of justice and fair play? Why does this outrage us when every day companies like Microsoft or IBM, despite manufacturing an inferior product, leverage their cash reserves and brand recognition to dominate the international marketplace and to outspend their competition and it elicits no greater reaction from the same public than a collective shrug?  Why on the baseball field do we demand that athletic talent, managerial acumen, or executive discretion alone prevail?  And if only by posing the question, it is, here, perhaps where Moneyball, unwittingly, conveys a fundamental truth about the national pastime and sheds light on the lofty status it occupies in the American imagination.

In his essay, America and Cosmic Man, the Englishmen Wyndham Lewis captured for his compatriots what distinguished their former colony from all other peoples.  The U.S., he wrote, is not a nation in the sense of England or France. "It is a new kind of country... America is much more a psychological something than a territorial something.. [much more] a site for the development of an idea of political and religious freedom than a mystical terre sacrée for its sons, upon the French model."    We, of course, have actualized this 'idea' in a vaunted and time-honored myth commonly called "the American Dream".   It's the social contract the nation implicitly enters with all its citizens, promising to each the opportunity to rise as high and to advance as far as his talent and drive, his savvy and mettle, his industry and initiative will take him.  His racial affiliation, class ancestry, parental upbringing, or nation of origin notwithstanding.

Only the Dream goads our conscience even as it eludes our grasp, receding like the green light at the end of Daisy's dock at the very moment Jay Gatsby came closest to apprehending it.  Still, into our third millennium,  we remain a nation of fluid class lines, swift cataclysmic change, and of democratic aspirations only partially fulfilled-- a land where economic inequality and cultural xenophobia divide us and where a Senator's son, an Ivy League legatee, a trust-fund baby, and celebrity name, among other hereditary privileges, impart professional advantages, financial means, and political clout about which the rest of us can only dream.

Except, that is, on our level-playing field nonpareil.  Where, inside the white lines, to quote Ring Lardner's biographer, "the rules, if observed, guarantee the triumph of merit."  The baseball field stakes a world where objective transparent rules isolate personal excellence.  Where timeless universal statistics quantify it.  Where wealth, fame, honor, and immortality reward it.  Where a man's parentage grants no advantage and individual merit alone carries quarter.

No, it isn't an Arcadia.  If Jose Canseco performed the country any service at all, it was to remind us that fraud, treachery, corruption, and prosaic human vice bedevil Major League Baseball no less than any other business or institution whether it's Wall Street, Hollywood, or Washington.  

It is rather that the "fresh, green breast of [] new world" the Diamond contains and the competition staged within it may project as a real an incarnation of the Dream as America can ever hope to achieve.  

               

       

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1 Evidently, only the Red Sox win because of ingenuity. Sorkin postscript informs us as follows: "Two years later the Red Sox won their first championship since 1918 embracing the philosophy championed in Oakland," Sorkin's postscript informs us. Their $125,000 payroll that year had not the slightest influence.^↩

 

---

2 Both the Red Sox and Cardinals won two titles over this period but ranked 2nd and 11th in payroll, respectively, on both occasions.

______________________________________________________________________________________________

3 OPS+ or Weighted OPS measures a player's total offensive production with 100 signifying the league's average players and each point above or below 100 registering an equivalent percentage in variation.

SAMSON OF THE DIAMOND

"How large is the price, how endless the nagging pain that must be paid for a personal assertion against the familiar ways of the world... that most of us lack the strength to pay."-- Irving Howe

No fan who writes a web log about professional sports does so unless the emotional reward exceeds the compensation money can supply. I include myself in this company. Major League Baseball, the National Football League, and to a lesser extent, the NBA, at their most competitive, arouse in me a visceral passion the world outside of fiction rarely can satisfy. Still, my love for the Game has rarely migrated backstage to embrace any particular sentiment for its players.

This isn't to say that I haven't admired or respected or celebrated a select few for their dedication to their craft; or for the rigor of their discipline; or for the grace and beauty their performances consistently exhibit, or for their capacity-- in moments when the odds, the elements, age or injury, or dwindling talent conspire against them-- nonetheless to muster reservoirs of mettle, desire, ingenuity, and resilience and to defy the clock, to overcome the score, to foil an opponent, to silence the critics and to transcend the seeming limits of the body's strength and the spirit's endurance and to wring victory from defeat by sheer force of will.

Muhammad Ali, Dan Marino, Bernard King, Reggie Jackson, David Cone, Bernie Williams, to name just a few, have inspired me in their triumphs--- and, on occasion, notwithstanding their defeats-- to believe that every once and a while, if only for brief and fleeting moments, that in spite of genetic endowment, ingrained character, adverse conditions and mortal flesh, we actually can guide our destinies and triumph over circumstance.

Yet I wouldn't consider any of these men "heroes" of mine either. I don't idolize professional athletes individually or collectively. Their personal lives don't especially interest me. Their money and celebrity don't infatuate me. My awe, respect, and gratitude for them doesn't differ materially, in fact, from the sentiment awakened by an especially vivid fictional character a gifted and incandescent actor has animated on stage. The performance stirs me, not the actor in costume or the man inside the uniform.

This may explain why the widespread idea that professional athletes should act as role models and uphold some irreproachable standard of rectitude and decorum, few among us actually observe, because little children look up to them always has struck me as rank hypocrisy-- at best, a gross abdication of responsibility, and at worst, a perverse rationalization for it. If children idolize athletes or aspire to emulate them, then the fault, dear Brutus, lies with us.
For we have failed then as adults to propagate moral values more lofty and eternal than fame, wealth, and status and have failed as a country to throw up, for emulation, heroic examples beyond those who embody our religion of success. Power no less than impotence abhors a vacuum. In a void, a child will venerate the idol nearest at hand.

Excellence alone, after all, does not a hero make.

To paraphrase the author Albert Murray, a hero is the representative man who pits himself against the inhuman-- atrocity, injustice, brute nature. Yet half the reason the boxing ring, the gridiron, the parquet, or the Diamond exert their hold on our imagination is because through their concrete color-blind rules, their professional impartial judges, their tangible, quantifiable, and immediate reward of merit they enclose a Platonic arena from which the bugaboos upon which the hero forges his sword have been banished. When men in uniform fan across the field, it evokes in our imagination, to quote Joseph O'Neill in Netherland, an arena of perfect justice.

Along the way, the professional athlete certainly invites failure and defeat; he certainly contends with the elements; and on occasion, he even risks bodily harm. The hero however confronts ostracism, vengeance, infamy and death. This is because he doesn't merely confront danger; the hero seeks it. And he welcomes its mortal antagonism because in the sacrifice he incurs to contest it, he honors a value higher than his financial security, his social status, his personal reputation, or even his life. For by doing so, Murray tells us, he magnifies "the glory of courage, the power of endurance, [and] the splendor of self-sacrifice... [P]romising young men... do not become heroes by simply keeping their police records clean and their grade point averages high enough to qualify them for status jobs and good addresses inside the castle walls" Or, one might add, nor do they merely rack up home run totals high enough to enter Halls of Fame.

No, before any professional baseball player can lay claim to the hero's mantle, he has to have risked and sacrificed for a cause greater than himself and to have suffered the revilement and decimation begotten because of it. He has to have endured the tragic fate of Curt Flood. Indeed, as HBO's documentary "The Curious Case of Curt Flood" portrays him and his sacrificial battle with Major League Baseball-- a portrait that never shrinks from the smoldering pride and stubborn defiance and frequently improvident excess that underwrote its protagonist's reckless courage and flawed nobility-- its creators have identified in Curtis Charles Flood a consummate America hero and man truly deserving of a Hall of Fame.

THE FLOOD & THE RAINBOW
For those of you unacquainted with Flood's biography or his story's significance in baseball history, I summarize.

On October 7, 1969, a mere year removed from the St. Louis Cardinals' second consecutive National League pennant-- honors which owed a great deal to their star center-fielder-- the franchise traded the 31 year old, 3-time all-star outfielder to the Philadelphia Phillies. Rumors of the Cardinals' intent to trade the fleet outfielder had circulated throughout the season. And Flood swore if it came to fruition, he'd defy it and refuse to go. Good to his word, Flood never reported to Phillies' camp. But rather than concede the immutable unfairness of a system that denied a man any say in where he played even after his 11+ years of service to it and merely retire with his reputation and equanimity secure, Flood chose instead to fight City Hall.

Contesting his trade, in January 1970, Flood filed suit against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Major League Baseball, and all the League's then 24 clubs. In it, the former Cardinal contested the League's then existing "reserve clause" regime -- so-called because every player's contract contained a provision in which his team "reserved" the right to renew their players' contract indefinitely and at whatever salary the club chose-- as an illegal restraint of trade under the Sherman anti-trust Act; an unconstitutional violation of the 13th Amendment's prohibition of involuntary servitude according to the 13th Amendment; and unlawful breach of any number of Civil Rights Acts. Flood v. Kuhn essentially asked the Court to repeal baseball's anti-trust exemption, to annul the reserve clause in every player's contract, and to grant Flood and derivatively, all players, the right to free agency. The player's union financed the suit with this very motive. And its President, Marvin Miller, in fact, warned its lead plaintiff before he initiated the action the grave risk he assumed. At best, he could win a Pyrrhic victory. The Court would award him a right in principle, no team then would choose to exercise in practice. Triumph might introduce free agency to baseball from which fellow and future players could profit. However, Flood, himself, would remain a free-agent forever.

Heads, Major League Baseball wins; tails, Flood loses. Seldom have men risked so much to gain so little.

In March 1970, Flood lost his petition for a preliminary injunction. In August, he lost his claim for a permanent injunction and for damages. Two years later, Flood lost on appeal at the Supreme Court. In between, he lost his physical skills and mental stamina, his capacity to focus and his will to play; as a brief, halfhearted, and abortive attempt at a comeback with the Washington Senators in 1971 ended in anguish.

13 games into the 1971, his career came to an abrupt and fateful ending. At the age of 33, Curt Flood had played his last inning in professional baseball.

NO, MASSAH, I WON'T GO
Now, as any fan of the game knows, teams deal players all the time, uprooting them from their homes and sending them to work half-way across the country. Most of the time, abstract numbers and competitive need propel the transaction. And sure, a baseball player insulated from America's tortured racial history might have perceived his trade as nothing more sordid than business as usual: the Cardinals suffered from lack of power; the Phillies, lack of speed. The Cardinals coveted Phillies' first-baseman Dick Allen's thirty-plus home runs. The Phillies, on the other hand, desired Flood's defensive prowess, plate discipline, and proficiency at generating runs through his speed. However, in this instance, critical elements beyond the players' complementary skills-- indeed beyond the field entirely-- drove the Flood-Allen transaction.

In the essay, "Curt Flood, Gratitude, and the Image of Baseball" collected in his recent book "A Level Playing Field," Professor Gerald Early explains. Both Flood and Allen had developed the reputation of being "problem players". Worse still, at a time when baseball still expected the black athlete to repay his sufferance with grace, humility, and gratitude, both were black "problem players". Richie Allen, a tense, brooding, withdrawn man, had earned the stigma by antagonizing his teammates and alienating Philadelphia's white-working class fan base through fights, unexplained absences, and self-inflicted injury. (The first-baseman, notoriously, cut the tendons in his hand by putting his hand through his car's headlight.) In St. Louis, on the other hand, fans and teammates alike adored and respected the gregarious and urbane Flood. Bob Gibson, in fact, appears in interviews throughout HBO's documentary and exudes the affection and admiration he must have felt for Flood in recalling their time together. [**]

Cardinals' management, it seems, shared Gibson's affection initially. Then, however, the organization's prize center-fielder chose to criticize his team's trade of Orlando Cepeda for a first-baseman named Joe Torre. This also happened to follow a petty and gratuitous speech team owner, August Busch Jr., delivered during Spring Training about thankless ballplayers earning high salaries and incurring no risks. After which, his center-field hand, evidently, compounded his trespasses by committing baseball's cardinal sin. Flood dared to suggest that perhaps owning a monopoly in St. Louis baseball franchises might expose its proprietor to something less than the perilous vulnerability an independent business owner or pioneering entrepreneur risks. And in doing so, he violated, what Early calls, baseball's reigning ethic of gratitude-- the dogma that the game's players (its blacks especially) owe a debt of thanks to its owners and fans, as if professional athletics were a privilege its industry vouchsafes rather than a status the athlete earns.

Early writes,

"The professional baseball industry [this includes all the yahoo sportswriters it co-opts] fosters the expectation of gratitude by mythologizing the game...propagandizing it as a symbol of American democratic values.... thus masterfully and subtly turning the public against any player who does not express that he feels blessed to be playing it."

THE TEMPLE FALLS
In 1976, the odious reserve clause regime did topple however. In the Messersmith-McNally case, a labor arbitrator discerned the fundamental injustice the Supreme Court had allowed sentimentality to obscure and awarded the two players free agency. From there, the marketplace swamped the old regime and Versailles crumbled soon afterward. Approximately one hundred years after its founding, America's pastime finally accepted the principle of free labor.

And so, two years later, writer Richard Reeves decided to interview the man who'd dealt the foundation its first blow. But free agency's lonely standard-bearer had suffered for his cause in the intervening years and had no desire to revisit the battlefield. His joust with the windmills had left him battered, broken, and desolate and had stripped him to a shell of the man he once was. As it turned out, the scaffolding that he'd dislodged eventually had fallen, but in the interim, fragments of debris had landed on top of him.

When Reeves finally caught up to him, Flood had begged him to withdraw. "Please, please...don't bring it all up again. Please. Do you know what I've been through? Do you know what it means to go against the grain of the country? Your neighbors hate you. Do you know what it's like to be called the little black son of a bitch who tried to destroy baseball, the American Pastime?"

Flood's "Battle Royal" had cost him first a career. Then turning him into an outcast and sending him into a European exile, it cost him his home, his moorings and his standing. Then, saddled with rage and resentment, wandering for a decade in search of the solace of anonymity and oblivion, it cost him self-possession and peace of mind. Until finally, home again, robbed of sanity and financial security; choking on the bile that comes of bitterness swallowed and anguish stifled, the injustice that he'd gambled everything to rectify eroded his defenses, deformed his character, cost him his health and claimed his life. The man whose implacable voice Baseball could not throttle, throat cancer silenced. Curtis Charles Flood died a largely forgotten man at age 59.

THE TWILIGHT PATH OF MEN
To its credit, HBO has resurrected Flood's story and brought him the recognition and vindication he has long deserved. Still, it bears asking the question: does the institution responsible for destroying this man honor and revere him for his courage and perseverance or exalt and cherish him his sacrifice? Who grieves the loss of free agency's John the Baptist. The $30 million a year superstar Flood enabled? The membership of the Player's Association he empowered? The $7 billion a year corporate industry known as Baseball Inc. that now reaps titanic profits from the very free agency-- through the Hollywood star system free agency wrought--- Curt Flood once espoused and Major League Baseball, in all its myopic atavism, battled so ruthlessly to defeat?

Where in Cooperstown's stands a monument for the man who spearheaded the end of the indentured servitude to which baseball's owners clung as though not only the game itself but their very livelihoods depended on it? Where shines a bust to the genuine hero who "struck out against injustice... and whose tiny ripple of hope... had swept away a mighty wall of oppression and resistance;" whose act spawned a revolution in a pastime steeped in its own hidebound prejudices and romantic nostalgia and liberated it from its own worst intractable, self-defeating proclivities? In all baseball's vain, self-aggrandizing, and meretricious rhetoric about heroes and legends, where does it hallow the memory of Curtis Charles Flood?

Nowhere. And notwithstanding HBO's arresting and much-needed documentary about him, America's pastime isn't likely to fete him anytime soon. For Curt Flood's biography belongs to the counter-myth of baseball. It is the story of ruthlessness and brutality and greed baseball doesn't like to acknowledge and the nation doesn't wish to hear. It's the story of Josh Gibson, Donnie Moore, Charlie Shoemaker, Doug Ault, Brian Powell, and most recently, Hideki Irabu: these are the men the game used up, discarded, and then disposed of; men it as good as killed or literally left to die. Their tragedies people the real-life grotesque of depression, suicide, alcoholism, failure, and ignominy that is flip side to baseball's certified mythology about heroes, legends, fame, glory and the American Dream.

And here lies Curtis Charles Flood's greatest significance. For as much he may epitomize the doomed innocent in a racial parable or signify the tormented athlete in a sports anti-myth, Curt Flood figures ultimately as the noble martyr and paladin in a grand American Tragedy.

He personifies the great national tradition of implacable resistance and vehement dissent running from Roger Williams through Patrick Henry and Harriet Tubman to Martin Luther King. The Citizen so exercised by injustice, so intolerant of oppression, so immune to the Bitch Goddess' allure that he will court failure, risking wealth, career, power, prestige, reputation, standing, family, love, and if necessary, life itself in behalf of a cause-- in behalf of, for Americans, the cause. It is the cause for which religious dissidents, venturesome settlers, dissolute colonials and incorrigible revolutionaries defied the power and might of the greatest empire on earth to secure an elementary human principle and from it, to spawn a new kind of a nation-- one without ancestral monarchs, inherited classes, or an established church and where its citizen controlled his fate, above all, through the inviolate right to sell his labor and to own its fruits.

By another name we call it the cause of freedom. And to introduce it into one of the new nation's oldest institutions no less than a hundred years after its organized birth, the St. Louis Cardinals' center-fielder invested and lost everything -- career, livelihood, status, family, equanimity, health and life.

Yet a game which doesn't salute the heroic sacrifice of Curtis Charles Flood accordingly or commemorate his brave struggle or mourn his tragic legacy or establish a place for his daring gallant failure alongside the anodyne successes celebrated in its Hall of Fame isn't deserving of its national mantle: The so-called "American pastime" is just another name.

_________________________

**In fact, anyone who wants to witness an example the fundamental distinction between a champion athlete and a genuine hero need only compare respectively the savvy and artful accommodation Gibson admits he negotiated with the status quo and the self-destructive, bullheaded confrontation with it Gibson ascribes to Flood. Gibson's enigmatic personality and calculated tact seem to mine a survival strategy belonging to a very different tradition in his people's history. One to which Ralph Ellison memorably voiced it in the Invisible Man's father's death-bed confession: "Live with your head in the lion's mouth... overcome 'em with yeses, undermine 'em with grins, and agree 'em to death and destruction, let 'em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open." In this, Gibson acts as Daniel to Curt Flood's Samson.

[1] We saw this expectation resurface recently in the clamor about whether Derek Jeter "owed" it to the fans to appear in the 2011 All-Star game. Expecting as much from Jeter is the equivalent of Anheuser-Busch demanding that its CFO play in the beer industry's (not even the company's, mind you) annual exhibition softball game during his summer's single four-day weekend.

CHASING 3,000

Baseball movies, as a rule, traffic in cheap nostalgia and treacly sentimentality. They don't reproduce the rigorous and humbling game that professionals play or the stifling regimented lifestyle ballplayers lead. They produce a romantic fantasy. They project a Field of Dreams where glorious heroes bestride the Diamond like gods; where hardy, stoic role models play for love and vindication, not money; where tickets sell for a buck, hot dogs, for a quarter; where the crack of the bat, the pop of the ball, the whiff of the mitt, and catch with dad deliver the most unadulterated and gratifying satisfaction life can supply.

"Chasing 3,000," a film released in 2010 with little fanfare, largely adheres the genre's formula in its portrayal of the legendary Roberto Clemente's pursuit of 3,000 hits in the waning days of the 1972 baseball season. Clemente's flirtation with the historic milestone following a late-season flurry forms the backdrop to the story of teenage brothers, Roger and Mickey, two avid Pirates fans transplanted from Pittsburgh to sterile Southern California during the 1972 season and the Odyssean 3,000 mile trek across country they embark upon to witness Clemente's achievement live and among 50,000 like-minded fans at Three Rivers Stadium.

As if two baseball-obsessed teenage brothers' penniless cross-country pilgrimage in the family jalopy to see their beloved hero-- in defiance of their overprotective, solicitous mother-- didn't carry enough prepackaged bathos, the story adds an extra dollop of saccharine by saddling the little with brother muscular dystrophy. Indeed, the family moves to L.A., much to Roger's chagrin, to alleviate the burden on Mickey's disease-ridden lungs. The contrivance of Mickey's frail health serves to complicate the brothers' drive across country and manufactures for the film its principal element of suspense as the brothers race against time to reach Pittsburgh before Mickey's lungs fail, Clemente attains 3,000, and the cops, alerted by their frantic mother, apprehend them.

Lost, meanwhile, is just why 3,000 is such a momentous milestone or why Clemente had gained an iconic status in baseball long before he earned his 3,000th hit and long before he died three month later in a tragic plane crash. Clemente counted among the game's heroes largely for his humanitarian work off the field. What's more, he performed the pioneer role for his group that Jackie Robinson and Hank Greenberg had fulfilled before him, paving the way for the Latino superstars that followed him and functioning as the living symbol of Hispanic immigrants' aspiration for complete acceptance and full integration into American life. And the heroic status Clemente enjoys to this day is a testament to the pastime's function as a solvent of the nation's pluralism almost since the game's inception.

I evoke "Chasing 3,000" here because as Derek Jeter approaches the same milestone all the meretricious hype and hoopla that has accompanied it suffers from a kindred sentimentality that similarly obscures its significance. Of course those susceptible to glib symbolism can read into Jeter's landmark-- coinciding as it does with Barak Obama's Presidency-- some kind of democratic token or monument to an increasingly post-racial society. And despite some superficial parallels in the two men's temperaments and ancestries, I suspect both would resist any interpretation that would serve to minimize the racial prejudice they've had to overcome because of America's obscene legacy of imposing social and legal disabilities on anyone born with "one-drop" of African blood.

Still, those quick to dismiss Jeter's role as a racial symbol, like Robinson or Clemente, should consider the strange fixation TV cameras have exhibited over the years with Jeter's parent. Can you recall another contemporary Yankees whose parents have rivaled the Jeters for the air time cameras shower on them? Did the families of Don Mattingly, Paul O'Neil, Bernie Williams, Mariano Rivera, Jorge Posada, or any other recent iconic Yankees never attend ballgames? Other than Harlan Chamberlain, Joba's handicapped father, the cameras however seem to ignore player's families. Perhaps the voyeurism says more about our tacit prejudices and ingrained reflexes than we realize or care to acknowledge.

Still, what strikes me as the regrettable omission which links "Chasing 3,000" and the media's coverage of Jeter's impending feat is their mutual failure to account for the milestone's significance as an athletic accomplishment or baseball feat. Sure, we've heard time and again that the Captain is about to become only the 28th player in the game's history to number 3,000 hits and the first to amass the total in a Yankee uniform. But there the discussion typically ends. No one seems to address its comparative difficulty or significance. Is the milestone arbitrary? If not, what distinguishes it in distinction or prestige from all the other numbers baseball celebrates-- 600 homeruns or 300 wins or 2,000 RBIs or 700 steals or 54 consecutive games with a hit. Is one monument more prodigious an exploit than the others? Examine the list of the elite 28 players again. Does each conjure in your mind an aura of greatness? And if so, does the player do so because of the milestone or in spite of it?

I don't profess to know the answer to these questions. But presumably, the manifold commentators who hold themselves out as the game's experts and who presume to enforce these milestone's sanctity each year when casting their Hall of Fame ballot, should know the answer or at least, offer an informed opinion. Alas, I haven't heard one.

Instead, the tedious daily narrative recycles endless speculation on which day of the week Jeter is more apt to attain 3,000 or how much pressure he's apt to face as he approaches it or how eager the Yankees and their fans are to see him hit the magic number at home. Worse, it seems to provoke the equally petty and academic discussion about how soon afterward the Yankee franchise can hallow the one player in their history to total 3,000 hits by unceremoniously dropping him in the batting order. In fact, the conjunction of the two subjects-- the dispatch with which the echo chamber clamors to consign Derek to the dustbin moments after his coronation--- only dramatizes just how much these pundits professed regard for Baseball History reeks of the same pious sentimentality and intellectual fraudulence which besets Hollywood's version of it.

Accordingly, when Cooperstown tabulates the voting next November and the phalanx of Baseball Writers, bloated with sanctimony and intoxicated with indignation-- when these self-appointed Guardian of the Milestones fan across airwaves to exalt the sanctity of the numbers and to deplore "steroid cheats" for defiling its liturgy and to justify rejecting Bonds or excluding Clemens, savor a good sneer. For what the Guardians protect isn't the sanctity of a democratic shibboleth. No, what they jealously guard-- in presuming to anoint one a Heroic Legend and to brand another a Anti-heroic Outlaw-- are the prerogatives of power. Woe unto him who doesn't genuflect before their altar.

So Derek Jeter, be prepared. After the bow, expect to Kneel.

MUDDLING THROUGH

So here it is, sprung a little early perhaps, but offering the season its unavoidable, if equivocal, touchstone nonetheless.

No doubt, their rosters still will evolve, if not undergo major renovation, by the time these two arch rivals next do battle during three days in August. Nonetheless, this the third confrontation in as many months with Primeval Nation should allow the Yankees' front-office a revealing glimpse of its team's flaws, an accurate estimation of its strengths, and a reliable index of its fate.

At present, one can't help but see in the 2011 Yankees a paler incarnation of those mid-decade Torre teams less assembled than improvised-- a haphazard patchwork stitched together with threadbare arms; graying vets; and erratic lineups dependent on the home-run ball but that through their pluck, moxie, canniness and heroics from unlikely sources nonetheless manage to brave the dog's days and to transcend their irremediable flaws to reach October, only to expend themselves in the process and to fall in the first-round when younger, faster, more prolific teams feast on debilitated bodies, withered bats, and creaking arms.

2011's team recalls its doomed predecessors' infirmities perhaps because so much of its success stems from the mystifying eclat of two fallen aces chronic injuries seemingly had reduced to ragged journeymen but to which the Yankees-- through their own improvidence, impatience, myopia, and a chronic ineptitude at cultivating their own-- had to resort to fortify the weakest rotation $50 million could buy.

Call it luck. Call it Mystique and Magic. Call them 2011's version of Aaron Small and Shawn Chacon. But there they are-- straight out of Hollywood Central Casting. Barty and Fred, confounding age, shaking off injury, defying expectations and lifting their team ERA to the rank of 4th in the AL. Freddy, through deceit and guile, evoking the last gasps of Mike Mussina. Bartolo, through renascent velocity and incorrigible heft, inviting comparisons to Roger Clemens in his twilight, on the one hand, and to David Wells at his pugnacious best on the other. (During post-game interviews, you half expect to see Carrie Fisher materialize chained to Colon's waist)

Indeed with their 123 ERA+ and 121 ERA+ respectively, Garcia and Colon, together, account for the Yankees' rotation surpassing even the most optimistic expectations and in large part, for the marginal distance currently separating New York and Boston.

Only the certain knowledge that fortune like this can't last; that wizardry of Garcia's and Colon's kind only casts its spell as long as one declines to peer behind the curtain; that eventually an Aaron Small will reveal himself to be Aaron Small and a Shawn Chacon will return to being Shawn Chacon; and that to expect either Garcia or Colon, let alone both, to continue to perform this well through the summer-- or just to stay healthy for as long-- demands a blindness of faith few Yankee fans can muster.

Indeed, closer scrutiny of the Yankees' and Red Sox' rosters and the uneasiness only mounts. Apart from the Yankees bullpen and their late inning corps of Chamberlain-Robertson-Rivera, the Red Sox are at least the Yankees' equal and subtract Colon's and Garcia's aberrant success and Boston is far and away their superior. Although the runs scored totals roughly mirror each other, the Red Sox own a younger, quicker, more disciplined lineup that excels the Yankees in Runs Created (321 to 291), team batting average (.270 to .251), on-base percentage (.341 to .334), pitches per plate appearance (3.96 to 3.90), RISP with 2 outs (.262. to .242) and the gap between them widening as Adrian Gonzales, Carl Crawford, and Kevin Youklis all shake off their early season doldrums and reach their career averages.

Sure the two most prominent under-performers in the Yankees' lineup Jeter (80 OPS+) and Posada (82 OPS+) could rebound as well but their advanced ages suggest less aberrations than the erosion in skill that in our amphetamine-free game that now bedevils players over 35. And, above all, in comparing the two team's starting rotations, the Yankees' current advantage appears fleeting. Upon which prospect are you more likely to stake your faith: on Buchholz, Lester, and Lackey improving (108, 103, and 54 ERA+ respectively) to match their career averages (121, 127, 111) or on Colon and Garcia continuing to confound theirs.

The Red Sox already have beaten the Yankees in six of their last seven meetings this years. True, the mound pairings have favored Boston but more importantly, on the field, they've demonstrated themselves the superior team.

AGE CAN WITHER HIM

Why can't we allow our superstar athletes simply to age gracefully and exit the stage with their pride and dignity in tact? Why the incessant probing; why the ravenous obsession to pinpoint the game, the season, the year in which the player's skills eroded, his reflexes dulled, his luster faded, he will not again duplicate the mastery his performance once displayed?

Of the 12 scouts or officials contacted, none thought Jeter would approach his old self. – New York Post, May 8, 2011

Of course, through the years, one learns that, from the pack of reporters who cover baseball, not to expect much in the way of independent thought, seasoned wisdom, or imaginative empathy. Perpetual deadlines, exhausting travel schedules, a twenty-four media cycle’s insatiable appetite for content, and a journalistic marketplace so ravaged by competition that the lowest common denominator rules; all conspire to precipitate, night in and night out, the same bumptious questions, the same hackneyed debates, the same one-dimensional narrative. Is the Captain mired in a prolonged slump or is this, at thirty-seven, what age hath wrought?

Perhaps, the question persists because the obvious answer satisfies neither the ambitious reporter nor the anxious fan. A definitive answer, that it, awaits 2011’s conclusion and perhaps, 2012’s as well. Recall the flock of vultures circling David Ortiz after he floundered in 2009 and struggled through the first months of 2010. How many predators had stalked still vital (and lethal) prey? By 2010's conclusion, Ortiz had proved the obituaries premature.

For as often as the scriveners invoke baseball's exalted tradition, history rarely informs their commentary unless they have a moral ax to grind. Which consists, more often than not, of a quibble with some player's deviation from their own provincial narrow code of personal decorum: Player X, that is, dared to breach his time-honored responsibility as a social role model. No, the Pride of the Yankees, says Bill, would never have squired strippers around Toronto. The Yankee Clipper, says Joel, would never have resorted to artificial performance enhancers. No, the Sultan of Swat, says Wally, would never never never have placed his interest above the team by refusing demotion in the lineup. To mine a pearl of wisdom Justice Byron "Whizzer" White, himself a former professional athlete, unearthed many decades ago, "the deeply rooted traditions" of any institution are arguable. More often than not, they reflect less objective fact than the orthodoxy of their arbiter.

Admire the irony though. Only yesterday these self-same arbiters were preoccupied with condemning, reviling, and ostracizing Alex Rodriguez for ingesting magic elixirs designed to prolong his career and to preserve his stellar talent and prolific productivity on into his early 40’s? [1]

Today, the mob pursues the mid-30's superstar once celebrated precisely because he shunned the Wellspring of Youth to which so many of his contemporaries succumbed. Listen carefully enough during the post-game press conference though and you can hear reverberate through the clubhouse an echo of the voyeuristic malice, morbid curiosity, and voracious bloodlust that once pursued A-Rod.

“Joe, we’re now 30 games into the season, when is it time to drop Jeter in the lineup?”

A question the manager deftly skirts for yet the fifteen time this week, “Our priority is winning, Joel. We’ll do anything necessary to help the team accomplish its goal.”

Sure, Girardi's practiced platitude has defused the latest foray, but the manager knows that he can't repel the slavering mob indefinitely. What with the radio jackals baying and the ESPN mouths driveling and the press corps, at long last, tasting blood, the Captain’s Teflon armor won’t hold forever. If the crowd turned on Mantle, the Yankees have to know, Jeter's aura won't save him either. This history the moral scriveners know all too well.

For in the gloaming they can hear the swans warbling for Mr. November, and in the clubhouse they can spy the Captain’s “bleeding drops of reds.” No voice sings to the gallantry of aging naturally and no Stadium cheers indignities born with grace. The Guardians of the Diamond have come to watch Age make mortals of legends and to administer last rites. They come to bear witness that however many millions earned, however many starlets bed, however many records broken, Jeter suffers like the rest of us.

For one inarguable national tradition does endure. Americans prefer their heroes dead.

[1] Never mind that cheating the aging process antedates even our national pastime as an American tradition. Ponce De Leon went searching for a Fountain of Youth five hundred years ago. What middle-aged man who swallows Viagra; what post-menopausal woman who injects Botox; what college student who pops un-prescribed Ritalin; what aging stage actress or senescent rock star who “get by with a little help from their [Benzedrine] friends”; what American possibly could begrudge McGuire, Bonds, Clemens, and Rodriguez for taking drugs (legal, extralegal, or illegal) to enhance their performance, to lift their team, and to cling to the uniform and the spotlight for as long as their bodies would carry them?

RECKONING BY THE BOOK

Many people I knew... shared a habit of mind usually credited to the very successful. They believed absolutely in their own management skills. They believed absolutely in the power of the [] numbers they had at their fingetips... I had myself for most of my life shared the same core belief in my ability to control events... [Yet] some events in life would remain beyond my ability to manage or to control."-- Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

For this Yankee fan, the end of a season invariably tinges the days that follow with an inconsolable emptiness. For six months the game's daily drama and the team's unfolding fate weaves its narrative into the fabric of life, and then, with the abruptness of death, defeat rends the thread, familiar faces recede, and the vivifying tonic that brightens the evening and crowns the day suddenly evaporates. No mourning rituals, No redemptive meaning, No residual solace. Only an aborted plot -- a deus ex machina ending to an unfinished novel.

But this year I can't but wonder whether defeat, in the end, might not serve a greater good; whether, for some within the Yankee hierarchy, it isn't justly deserved.

No, not the players, of course; their season came to a premature, unceremonious, and ill-favored end. Too many sprouted and flourished this year; too many battled and excelled; too many suffered through injuries and persevered through pain not to achieve a success short of their aspirations. The star arrival of Robinson Cano; the budding efflorescence of Hughes and Gardner; the grizzled marvels of Pettitte and Mo; the steadfast yeoman mettle of Tex and A-Rod; and the redoubtable, 300lb Atlantean pillar holding it all up, the double YES, Si Si: would that they received accolades equal to their pluck, tenacity, and splendor and to my gratitude.

In the franchise's upper reaches, however-- from the manager up to the highest echelons of its business department-- Yankee Pride, recently, has meant something more like Yankee Hubris. And if the financial executives don't account for the team's latest defeat, they certainly could benefit from the chastened reflection and withering self-scrutiny rarely stirred in its absence.

Reevaluation ought begin with the 1.5 billion dollar Colosseum and its unintended yield-- exorbitant ticket prices inflated beyond what many can pay or the market will bear; a permanent supply of vacant seats; lower tiers filled with passionless, fickle dilettantes, a permanent corporate gentility ringing the field whose luxury box amenities and royalty suite perks a Prateorian guard has to protect against the descent of the ardent, demonstrative, raucous Pinstripe faithful now confined to remote bleachers and nosebleed grandstands and treated like an unwelcome hoi polloi.

In the new Stadium, Yankees have erected the modern equivalent of an Elizabethan Theatre or Metropolitan Opera House. Class hierarchy and status symbol abide everywhere and personify the very caricature the Yankees' spiteful rivals ordinarily have to cite a 200 million dollar payroll to portray. Only with a World Series to inaugurate their luxury Palace, none but the churlish could complain. This year, however, no championship trophy will silence the objections. Season ticket-holders will vote with their feet. Fading novelty, grossly inflated prices, and PSL contracts' imminent expiration may deliver a reckoning Randy "Shlayger" Levine and Lonn "them eat" Trost hadn't bargained for-- the law of diminishing returns. And the usual blend of strident defensive broadsides and smug Olympian rationalizations to which they've resorted when the subject has arisen in the past won't save them.

May they reap what they've sown-- a drought followed by the whirlwind.

BASEBALL OPERATIONS
More worrisome however than the financial department's arrogance is the dogma that has gripped the team's baseball operations. Manager and GM, it seems, have turned statistical analysis into a theology, and with it, they've fallen prey to the blindness which afflicts the converted in his zealotry.

In an interview Michael Kay conducted on his New York radio show, he recently asked Brian Cashman, "Do you have a problem with Joe [Girardi] going strictly by the numbers? Would you rather he go by the gut?"

To which Cashman responded, "I definitely don't want people going by gut. I wanted people to make informed decisions. It's about being educated and being informed... If you can set yourself in a position to have a rational process in place, then you'll put yourself in a position to succeed more than fail. And I think gut is just irresponsible."

It must comfort the GM to imagine that he and his skipper can manage events on the field according to a "rational process." Unfortunately, the game no more unfolds according to an empirical formula or yields to collective control than do financial markets, international relations, or population growth. Too much human enigma separates statistical probabilities from scientific certitude.

Now, one hardly expects a GM to know much about history or philosophy but had he read Rousseau or Freud or simply studied late 20th century Russian history, he might have recognized in his worldview what we might call "the fetish of reason". After all, the Marxists, too, thought that they could isolate the laws of history and deduce from them the future.

Likewise has sabermetrics seduced Cashman and Girardi. From them, it seems, they've forged a crutch from what best serve as a tool and in the process, have forgotten that intuition and instinct are at least as integral as reason and logic to sound judgment. One problem with placing too much faith in them is that statistics illuminate what has happened more clearly than they forecast what will. Even inside the Diamond, heart and emotion, desire and will, singularity and contingency, chaos and luck, too often, still prevail. The fastidiously prepared and studiously memorized "match-ups" contained within a black book do not determine the outcome, even if one somehow could choose the metric most applicable to the situation at hand.

With a one-run lead in the 6th inning of Game 4 of the 2010 ALCS, for example, which statistic should the Yankees manager heed? With David Murphy at-bat and Benjie Molina to follow, should Burnett's complete history against Murphy and Molina, respectively, control? Or is it Burnett's performance against them in 2010 that matters? Or is it perhaps his overall performance this year in similar middle-inning predicaments? Or rather, is it how he fares after a 100 pitches; or with 2 outs; or at Yankee Stadium; or in the post-season; or if you walk Murphy, with men in scoring position? Or how does one weigh any of Burnett's figures, moreover, against the corresponding numbers Boone Logan, a reliever limited largely to lefties and one or two innings, has compiled?

Even if Girardi bases his decision on the numbers, he still has rely on an educated guess-- on inductive reasoning-- for the right statistic to choose. A "gut" decision isn't "irresponsible". It's inevitable.

Now, would the Yankees would have won the 2010 ALCS had Joe Girardi discarded his black binder and ignored the statistics and chosen more wisely in the situation described above? Probably not. The numbers may not forecast the future but they don't lie about the past. When his team bats .100 points less than his opponent's over six games and his pitching staff yields, on average, three and half more runs, even the canniest of managers isn't likely to stave off defeat. Still, Girardi's decision-making in the series certainly didn't help. Whether it was intentionally walking Murphy in Game 4-- putting the tying run in scoring position and the go-ahead run at first-base-- or whether it was his folly of repeatedly opting for Logan, Robertson, Mitre in critical situations-- most notably, Robertson, in Game 6, despite batters' .440 average against him -- meanwhile shunning Joba or saving Wood until too late, his discretion eluded him. Instead, much like last year during the postseason, pressure seemed to paralyze the manager so that rather than allowing the game's situation to dictate his decision, he fell back on some preconceived notion the statistics had inscribed.

Which suggests that the manager's fixation with the numbers actually indicates a failing more fundamental and more troublesome-- it implies either an incapacity to learn from mistakes because of a worldview so circumscribed it can't recognize or assimilate error and a character so rigid it cannot adapt or grow. Indeed, because past proficiency does not guarantee future success, on the probability that Girardi lasts another 3 years I wouldn't hazard a bet.