Minimal Standards of Character for Baseball

Unless you’re under nine you gave up long ago on the idea of beholding professional athletes as role models. We shouldn’t confuse being in the public eye and influencing people as a result with being a role model—which is a far higher standard.



Of course any one who is in the public eye can be seen and emulated by a member of that public. It’s just that we’ve given up the idea that professional athletes are worthy of being of emulated. Unfortunately, very few are. In fact, we don’t even expect professional athletes to demonstrate admirable lifestyles or character traits. We’re tired of being disappointed.



However, in order to retain a vestige of integrity in sport, we do expect some minimum standards of character. Not because we want our children to learn from this—we just want people to play fair so it’s worthwhile for us to watch.



Societal expectations have devolved to the point where we expect little from each other. We have become a culture of “men without chests,” to use a phrase C.S. Lewis used to describe the people who lack internal gyroscopes, and are instead controlled by the mind (intellect) or the stomach (desire).



In baseball, we don’t expect much, but we do have expectations. For me, it’s purely selfish. I’ve loved the sport since grade school, when I collected baseball cards and lined them up on my living room floor; played little league baseball (the Yankees, unfortunately); went to the bowling alley to get autographs from Boston Red Sox players (remember Dick Williams); and got season tickets to the Orioles at Camden Yards to follow Cal Ripken’s drive for the ironman record.



I love the nuances of the game and the fact that so many people think it is boring because they don’t understand them.



But I hate what they’ve made of it. I hate free agency and the fact that no one except Cal Ripken, Tony Gwynn, and precious few others stay with one team anymore. I hate that you don’t know who will comprise your home team from year to year. I hate that so few in the major leagues seem to play for the love of the game and that it has become so dominated by a team’s ability to buy the best players.



But the steroid scandal is the very worst of the problems because it shows us that many, many players—among them those who have been at the top of the game—have broken the most basic rules of fair play.



Washington Post sportswriter Thomas Boswell wrote this week on the Jason Giambi news. Giambi stopped doing steroids last year. Boswell says:



For me, the sight of the honest version of Jason Giambi brought home again, in graphic terms, just how enormous an advantage steroid cheaters have in sports. It's not a few pounds. In many cases, it's a whole new body. To Giambi, steroids meant a fake physique that brought him a $120 million contract.



Throughout this season, the sight of Giambi has helped erase the last shreds of sympathy I felt toward baseball's gifted players who aren't satisfied with honest success and wealth, but want to break the rules so they can get more, more, more. My sympathy is now reserved for all those players at the fringes of the big leagues who see the greedy stars and think, "He's better than I am to start with. Now, he's breaking the rules, too. I have no chance unless I endanger my health and do what he does."



Giambi's admission, revealed in grand jury testimony obtained by the San Francisco Chronicle, marks the first time a current star baseball player has acknowledged knowingly using steroids to enhance on-field performance. There were enough ex-players and others surrounding the sport who have spilled the beans that there hasn’t been much question what has been happening. Baseball has failed to protect its players; and to protect us, the fans, from a sham—the idea that the playing field has really been level.



"We need a very tough policy," Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said yesterday. “I am going to be very aggressive in the implementation of that policy. . . . This is no longer an issue that we are going to debate about anymore. This is something for everybody's sake -- the sport, the players, the clubs, the fans, everybody. So we will do something. We will do something."



How about returning to and enforcing the sandlot rules as minimal standards of character: Don’t cheat and don’t fight. Even the 9-year-olds will understand that.

--James Jewell